What comes of pitting neighbor against neighbor?
By Christine Adams / Special To The Washington Post
While urging Virginians to “love your neighbor,” Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin also established a phone line where parents could leave “tips and observations” if teachers bring up offensive material in the classroom; specifically, teaching about race in ways that might make students uncomfortable.
But this effort to enlist parents in an anonymous campaign against teachers is fraught with peril. For centuries secret denunciations by neighbors, friends and even family have been the tools of dictatorships, used to sow fear and enforce conformity.
The European witchcraft trials of the 16th and 17th centuries exposed the power and peril of such secret accusations. Trials for witchcraft peaked as early modern states, in collaboration with church authorities, extended and increased their power over their subjects. While difficult to estimate, most scholars agree that somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 individuals (the majority of them women) were tried for witchcraft during those years. Of those, between 40,000 and 60,000 were executed.
A number of factors fueled the effort to ferret out witches during these years. The political and psychological tensions that resulted from the Protestant Reformation and subsequent wars of religion certainly played a role. So too did demographic changes that led to increasing numbers of unmarried women, the most common victim of witchcraft accusations. Witches were a convenient scapegoat for any number of social ills.
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