Woke Witch Hunts of the 21st Century — Trial by Social Fire
The will to purge humanity of some form of ghastly unsightliness has always been with us. Those doing the purging are confronted with a challenge to their worldview and core beliefs that is at once horrifying to behold and impossible to permit.
In a great many cases, only death will suffice to rid the world of the cancerous growth festering within the poor infected creature: the persecution of early Christians at the hands of Romans and Jews, the persecution of Jews and heretics at the hands of Christians, the Jacobin Reign of Terror, the Stalinist Purges, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and the Indonesian mass killings of 1965–1966 which involved some level of US complicity, to name but a few.
Then we have purges where the price was not a person’s mortal coil but rather their professional, political and social existence. Here we see McCarthyism and countless other red scares, and the Lavender Scare, where thousands of Americans were persecuted for their sexuality and forced to resign from the US federal workforce. It is a sign of civilisational progress that we are no longer talking about a purge to the death across the Western World for the most part, but rather professional purgatory and social excommunication.
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