NEWS ITEM: Today in history: September 22, 1692 - Martha Corey executed by hanging after being accused of being a witch during the 1692 Salem Witch Trials. She was the las...t person executed in the Salem Witch Trials. Her only ‘crime’ was that she questioned the truth of the witchcraft accusations against others. Her husband Giles Corey was executed three days before her only because he defended her against the charges. The Salem Witch Trials are used as a powerful metaphor for later waves of political repression in the U.S. Corey and her husband are both prominent characters in Arthur Miller’s 1953 play The Crucible, which Miller wrote as an allegory of that era’s wave of McCarthyism, when the U.S. government jailed, repressed and blacklisted accused communists. Miller himself was questioned by the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1956 and convicted of "contempt of Congress" for refusing to identify others present at meetings he had attended.
Giles and Martha Corey are among my illustrious forbearers. Their
great-grand-son, David Corey served with the Continental Army in the War of
Independence. His great-grand-son, Henry Clay Christie, served in the Union
Army, seeing action at Shiloh and Vicksburg. I am intensely proud of these
people, not only because they are my ancestors, but also because I am an
American patriot who loves his country.
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| Harry Gold, atomic spy |
Which hunts are a recurring
phenomenon and people forget two things about them that ALWAYS HAPPEN.
Liberals forget that you
can’t have a witch-hunt without actual witches. In Salem, the first accused,
Tituba, the West Indian slave belonging to Samuel Parris, was an actual witch,
practicing Santería. Similarly, in the 1940’s there were actual atomic spies, Klaus
Fuchs, Allan Nunn May, and Harry Gold foremost among them, as well as many "fellow travelers" in many branches of government. And, as Liberals
never admit that there are witches, so they can never effectively draw the line
and defend the innocent.
Conservatives, on the other
hand, never discount an accusation. They are the ones who see a witch hunt
though; making sure that every accused witch is hammered down to earth.
And so the conservatives always
win. It’s simple.
If the liberals defend the obviously guilty (like Julius
Rosenberg), then they have no credit when they defend the suspicious but
innocent (e.g. Owen Lattimore).
LESSON: Defend the innocent,
but let the actual witches burn.
