Incidental discrimination of witch-trials (not what you think)

[Yinko]

I used to listen to Lore, a horror and history podcast that got picked up by Amazon. I dropped it because I recognized a pattern I found to be irritating, it is not an at all unusual one in society however. This pattern follows two statements of faith and goes like this:

1. The witch trials were completely invalid, no witches were killed, or if they were then it was by chance.
2. Minority cultural and religious experiences are valid.

This creates a contradiction. Observe:
In S1E18 "Hunger Pains" they talk about a Cree Wendigo hunter that tortured and killed his relative under suspicion of being a Wendigo. The fact that the Canadian government had him imprisoned and he committed suicide is lamented by the narrator as removing the final defense of the tribe against Wendigos. The Wikipedia article on the shaman in question (Jack Fiddler) provides a great deal more nuance, but that isn't the point in question.
In S1E41 "Hole in the Wall" they talk about the Paisley Witches from Scotland. Unlike the case of a Native American holy-man killing his tribes members for being possessed by evil, here European holy-men killing community members for being possessed by evil is considered utterly illegitimate. Basically, it's a racist comparison, "their experiences are valid, ours are not".

I also have problems with the further argument that women were targeted as witches due to being intimidating.

One argument that I've heard for the origin of the witch's hat is that old women used to brew beer at home as a cottage industry and would wear tall pointy hats so that they could be picked out in crowds, then when men took over the beer making industry and started mass producing it they targeted their competition. This begs the question, why weren't cottage industries a competitive threat to economies of scale in any other industry over the past 5-600 years? Why is it that micro-brews only became viable again once communication and transportation allowed for smaller breweries to disseminate information and product more easily, and even then at a much larger scale than the old women were at that era?

One also has to consider that even within the witch-craze period, witches were not on the top of the pile. The chief witch was not thought to be a woman. At the time, it was said that sorcerers was 1/1000 as common as witches, but 1000/1 as powerful as well.

As for why women tended to be targeted? In Indo-European historical societies priestly and magical rites tend to be segregated based on sex. Seidhr being entirely feminine while poetry (and later on runes as well) were considered masculine. You have the Vestals and male only religious figures in Rome, similar setups in Greece, etc. When Christianity came in the masculine side of the Indo-European religious equation got taken over, but the feminine didn't really. Ironic since one of the reasons Christianity was so successful in Rome was because the religious life of Roman women was rather sparse. I am not saying that witches were pagan, far from it, rather that practices continue and mutate even if beliefs have changed. The Inch, the Foot, the Yard, the Mile, the Second, Minute, Hour, these measurements all originate from the Bronze Age at the latest. Concepts like the Evil Eye and Ghosts go back largely unchanged to the earliest writing on Earth.

TLDR: People have these two ideas that come together to say something really dumb and I really wish they would be more critical of their own thoughts and come to a more nuanced conclusion.

 

[Cherico]

What is cancel culture but one giant witch hunt?

 

[Simonbob]

What is cancel culture but one giant witch hunt?

Run by witches, no less.


Getting back to the subject of the Thread, I've run into similar issues. The Australian Aborigines were a stone age culture, with all the rough culture that comes with that, and people who don't already know, don't want to hear.

"Somehow, the colonists coming in could have been beaten by people who's highest weapon tech is a bent stick, if they hadn't been outnumbered!" I've heard people say that. I've also heard people say "We learned medical tech from the Aborigines." "They had a richer culture than what we have."


What always gets me, is that we did learn some things from the Aborigines. Their understanding of local fauna and flora was really useful for farming and forestry management, with remarkably little adaption, but, somehow, nobody wants to hear that.



Their culture was, by todays standards, or even a few hundred years ago standards, terrible. Slavery was common, punishments terrible, and starvation common, and sometimes deliberate. Horrible. But we're still expected to look up to them.

 

[Lord Sovereign]

The Aborigines tamed a harsh land. They’d essentially wiped out Australian megafauna long before the first stones of Uruk were laid down.

Weak people do not exterminate Komodo dragons on steroids. And I’m even convinced they had scraps with the occasional adventurous Polynesian raiding party. They are worthy of respect.

Indeed, it is insulting to idealise these proud people as a bunch of tree hugging hippies frolicking through the wilderness before evil whitey came.

 

[Scottty]

Don't expect intellectual honesty or consistency from the modern-day Left. Their whole thing is "White people bad!" and they will hop back and forth on anything else, depending on how it suits their malice.

Contradiction after contradiction, and they don't care.

Consider:
Were people in medieval Europe right or wrong in believing that demons and magic were real, and in killing anyone that they believed to be making pacts with dark powers?
Were people in primitive societies outside of Europe right or wrong in believing that demons and magic were real, and in killing anyone that they believed to be making pacts with dark powers?

To a sane mind, those are both the same question. And a lot of modern people might say that all those people, white or otherwise, were wrong in that belief. But not evil, just sincerely mistaken.

But the rabid Left cannot be sane on this. They can't accept that anyone can be in sincere error, no, in their minds if you believe things that they don't, and act on those beliefs, then you are evil and stupid and bigoted and and and. Reeee!
But they are terrified of being considered Racist. So they can't say that black people who believe in witches and spells and whatnot are evil and stupid and so on. No, they must try to find some way to blame white people for all of it.

 

[Cherico]

Don't expect intellectual honesty or consistency from the modern-day Left. Their whole thing is "White people bad!" and they will hop back and forth on anything else, depending on how it suits their malice.

Contradiction after contradiction, and they don't care.

Consider:
Were people in medieval Europe right or wrong in believing that demons and magic were real, and in killing anyone that they believed to be making pacts with dark powers?
Were people in primitive societies outside of Europe right or wrong in believing that demons and magic were real, and in killing anyone that they believed to be making pacts with dark powers?

To a sane mind, those are both the same question. And a lot of modern people might say that all those people, white or otherwise, were wrong in that belief. But not evil, just sincerely mistaken.

But the rabid Left cannot be sane on this. They can't accept that anyone can be in sincere error, no, in their minds if you believe things that they don't, and act on those beliefs, then you are evil and stupid and bigoted and and and. Reeee!
But they are terrified of being considered Racist. So they can't say that black people who believe in witches and spells and whatnot are evil and stupid and so on. No, they must try to find some way to blame white people for all of it.

That's because they come from a very different starting point.


The right's starting point is that all human beings are inheriently self interested and flawed. While that is pessimistic when you belive every one is inherently kind of a fuck up its easier to forgive people and be more reasonable.

The left belives that people are born inherently good and are corrupted by society and circumstance which while it sounds idealistic and nice on the surface will lead you to tyranny and purity spirals that go out of control.

 

[Yinko]

Don't expect intellectual honesty or consistency from the modern-day Left. Their whole thing is "White people bad!" and they will hop back and forth on anything else, depending on how it suits their malice.

Contradiction after contradiction, and they don't care.

Consider:
Were people in medieval Europe right or wrong in believing that demons and magic were real, and in killing anyone that they believed to be making pacts with dark powers?
Were people in primitive societies outside of Europe right or wrong in believing that demons and magic were real, and in killing anyone that they believed to be making pacts with dark powers?

To a sane mind, those are both the same question. And a lot of modern people might say that all those people, white or otherwise, were wrong in that belief. But not evil, just sincerely mistaken.

But the rabid Left cannot be sane on this. They can't accept that anyone can be in sincere error, no, in their minds if you believe things that they don't, and act on those beliefs, then you are evil and stupid and bigoted and and and. Reeee!
But they are terrified of being considered Racist. So they can't say that black people who believe in witches and spells and whatnot are evil and stupid and so on. No, they must try to find some way to blame white people for all of it.

What I also find interesting about the Witch Trials is that I've never heard them associated with Jewish persecution. I've never heard of a Jewish witch in antiquity. If the Witch Trials were all about these intimidating, educated, strange, women then surely the most literate population of women in Europe, who were already hated, would have been prime candidates for witchery.

What also pisses me off a bit is that Wiccans and other magical people are right at the forefront of this behavior (possibly because they tend to be Leftists). I mean, I could walk into any of these people's houses today and tell you if they practiced magic, there are certain practices that are easy to pick up on. Then there's the whole "Herbalist" argument. "They were just innocent educated herbalists and folk healers" completely ignoring the fact that until the Napoleonic Wars official medicine was occupied by placebo effect, magic and astrology. So any herbalist or folk healer, let alone actual licensed doctor, would have been fully culpable of witchcraft, so long as they engaged in malicious activities.

 

[ParadiseLost]

Personally I think it has more to do with religion and target demographic than race.

Suggesting the Witch Trials were legitimate doesn't just say something about the witches, but about the Priests and Christian religious leaders involved as well. Hard to avoid that.

On the opposite end, I doubt the target demographic of the podcast wants to hear anything positive about Christianity. They want to hear supernatural experiences be legitimized (at least, it sounds like that from what you are saying), but not Christian supernatural experiences.

 

[Yinko]

Suggesting the Witch Trials were legitimate doesn't just say something about the witches, but about the Priests and Christian religious leaders involved as well. Hard to avoid that.

A lot of these people view witches as being pagans, so from a religious perspective it's actually against their best interests to deny the witch trials potential validity. Similarly, they turn a blind eye to Christian Africans targeting Pagan Africans in current times.

They want to hear supernatural experiences be legitimized (at least, it sounds like that from what you are saying), but not Christian supernatural experiences.

Broadly speaking, the main target audiences are looking towards: supernatural, religious or social experiences. For instance, you might have some audiences that view the same events with the same biased view but instead base that of a social and anthropological perspective. Something like "Native cultures must be protected, developed culture is degenerate".