Is the war on terror

The delight in examine the historical accuracy of Arthur M bedriders play to the real events of the capital of Oregon crone Trials and the redness Scare of the 1940s and 1950s comes from both the c volute at which the play was published and the historical parallels between the two gene blabberion in American history. Further more than, the play holds value as an attempt to relieve unexplainable behavior and to teach lessons from the history in the hopes that they will non be repeated. It is a sad lament that the lesson remains unlearned and fifty days later we are faced with an some other American witch trial, this succession under the name War on Terror.In condensed summation, The Crucible is a play ostensibly about the Salem transport trials. In it, a preachers missy falls ill after dancing in the woods with a break ones back and most of the other village teen agers. Her father calls in assistance from more world church investigators to find the root of the witchcra ft that has left his daughter ill. After he threatens to whip the slave to death, she confesses to witchcraft and seeks to take nibble away from herself by pointing the figure at other Salem citizens.Eventually, the finger is pointed at a married woman, Elizabeth watch over, by her former maid Abigail who had been having an office with the womans husband privy. Her accusations are at first doubted because John admits to the battle and shows that Abigail is attempting to tarnish his wifes reputation or so mess up his life, merely Elizabeth, thinking she is protecting her husband, refuses to admit to cognise about the affair. She is eventually found guilty of witchcraft and spared the gallows because she is pregnant, exactly in the same misguided desire to spare herself more torment, accuses under quizzical that her husband is also a witch. At the end of the play, John Proctor is being led to the gallows for his crime.Is any of this real? Yes. Elizabeth Proctor was given a stay of execution because she was pregnant and most of her family was executed during the Salem Witch Trials (Burns, 1). The pastors slave, a Caribbean Indian woman named Tituba was among the first impeach and pointed the finger at her accepters daughter and others in the community, tho there is no historical evidence that John Proctor had an affair and the real Abigail was an 11 year old girl at the time of the trials (Burns, 1). So why did Arthur milling machine chose to make it all up? perhaps to give reason to the unreasonable. Though the witch hunts in Salem lasted a relatively short period of time, they left an indelible mark on American history, a time when man turned against his wife and children and neighbors to evacuate being killed.Miller, a victim of Joseph McCarthys Red Scare, dumb the premise all too well. The origins of the Red scare are some(prenominal) easier to trace than the origin of the Salem Witch Hunts, but Miller clearly could see the parallels betwee n the two. In a speech in Wheeling, double-u Virginia, in February, 1950, McCarthy made clear where his venom and hatred came from. Five years after a world war has been won, mens wagon should anticipate a long peaceand mens minds should be free from the heavy weight that comes with war. But this is not such a periodfor this is not a period of peace. This is a time of the chilliness war. This is a time when all the world is split into two vast, progressively hostile armed campsa time of a great armament race. (Enemies from indoors, 1).There is a term used in sociology to reflect the behavior, called identifying the other. The other is a person unlike ourselves who has some characteristic that makes them a threat to society as we know it. In the witch trials, it was witches. During the Red Scare, it was Communists. Today, it is anyone who appears Arabic or studies Islam and can therefore be deemed likely to be a terrorist. Not having learned the lessons of history or of literat ure, after family line 11, 2001, Americans were terrified and they turned to a new witch hunt, this time with the witches semi-identifiable by race.Too bad that you can tell an Arab-American who has lived her forever, or an Afghani refugee, or scarce a hard-working Middle Easterner who has never considered the way of Al Qaida scarcely by looking at them. Instead, we demonize a race and lock people up in Cuba at Guantanamo Naval Base on the suspicion that they might have knowledge about someone or something that might want to hurt us. The Patriot Act makes it an offense that to know people who might be associated with terrorism and encourages people to rat out their friends, with the same kind of threats that the preacher used on his slave Tituba.But this is not the first witch hunt since McCarthyism and is probably not the last. In fact, in many ways, Miller whitethorn have contributed to one of his own in the writing of The Crucible. In 1950s northern America, Communists were t he enemy, but in the South, it was the uppity African-American wanting rights that he had been granted but not given after the Civil War. By making Tituba a Negro slave and implying that she practiced some form of voodoo, Miller may have contributed to this anti-African-American attitude (Hansen, 3). By the 1970s, the witch hunt was against the American legions and specifically those who had served in Vietnam, in the 1980s Reagan-era it was those darned Communists again.The 1990s brought on a witch hunt in the Catholic Church, where suddenly both priest was assumed to be a pedophile and in 2001, Al Qaida made themselves into the witches of the new millennia. At Guantanamo Bay, McCarthys famous collection, Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party? (Popkin, 139) has been revised. The quest now is to find the next threat to Americans and the next unidentified witch.Works CitedBurns, Margo. Arthur Millers The Crucible Fact & Fiction (Or Picky, Picky, Pic ky) October 24, 2003. <http//www.17thc.us/docs/fact-fiction.shtml>, November 17, 2007.McCarthy, Joseph R. Enemies from Within, February 9, 1950. < http//historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6456>, November 17, 2007.Popkin, Henry. Arthur Millers The Crucible.College English > Vol. 26, No. 2 (Nov., 1964), pp. 139-146 Stable URL http//www.jstor.org/stable/373665?seq=1page_scan_tab_contents, November 17, 2007.