Witch Hunt In Salem

In Rosalyn Schanzerś “Witches! The Absolutely True Tale of Disaster in Salem”, a Puritan religion filled Salem takes the Bible literally. The town starts to find witches which causes hysteria to spread across town causing people to accuse friends of witchcraft. Communism’s Red Scare, internment camps, and the Holocaust are just like these witch hunts because they all caused histeria and actions by people that should not have been taken.
McCarthyism is one of the most recent witch-hunts. This witch-hunt was from 1950 to 1956 lead by Joseph McCarthy. Evidence that this was a witch-hunt can be found in the article “The Cold War Museum” where it says “These people on the list were in fact not all communists; some had proven merely to be alcoholics and sexual deviants.” The reason why Mccarthy blamed these innocent people was because he “searched for ways to insure his political success, resorting even to corruption” stated the The Cold War website. These hunts happened mostly

for Mccarthy's own personal gain. Further evidence on the same site supports this claim stating “ As the re-election began to loom closer, Mccarthy, whose first term was unimpressive, searched for ways to insure his political success.” which proves the witch-hunt claim.
During World War II Japanese internment was the American witch-hunt of the day.

This happened from 1942 to 1946. Some of the evidence of this being a witch-hunt is America falsely accusing the Japanese American ethnic group of being traitors. Evidence of this can be found in the article “Japanese-American Internment” where it states that “ Despite the lack of any concrete evidence, Japanese Americans were suspected of remaining loyal to their ancestral land.” According this document the reason why they were sent to internment camps was because “Anti-Japanese paranoia increased because of a large Japanese presence on the West Coast. In the event of a Japanese invasion of the American mainland, Japanese Americans were feared as a security risk.” The same site states that this happened when “President Roosevelt signed an executive order in February 1942 ordering the relocation of all Americans of Japanese ancestry to concentration camps in the interior of the United

States.”
During World War II the Nazis were making a witch-hunt, the Holocaust. The Holocaust was when the Nazis put Jewish people, disabled individuals, gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Slavic people, Polish people, and their children in concentration camps to work or if unable to work they put them to death. The document “The History Place- Genocide in the 20th Century: The Nazi Holocaust 1938-1945” suggests that “The death camp at Majdanek operated on the Auschwitz model and served both as a slave labor camp and extermination center.” The reason why this happened was because Hitler thought that only “ an Aryan was a European not Jewish, Romany or Slavic. They also thought Germany was a more important country than its neighbors.” states a document from BBC News. The way this happened was when “centuries of ingrained theological anti-Judaism led to racial antisemitism, which resulted in the desire to eliminate the Jews from within Christian lands” (“How Did the Holocaust Start?”).
These were horrible times that took away lives, jobs, and families. However, they taught us what not to do in the future. All together modern day witch-hunts destroy lives. The main significance of this is to learn from our mistakes of destroying lives to prevent it in the future.