Certain events lately make me think of the Swedish word
"häxjakt", which means
"witch-hunt", so I looked it up on
Wikipedia. Here are a few excerpts from the long article.
Although I am sure this will alienate a few I cannot refrain myself from posting this. I have often thought about how I might react in situations like this. I find, I am learning more about myself as I go along.
I have always found it strange, this need in us humans to externalize the responsibility for our own failures and shortcomings as humans, as businessmen or as avatars - whatever.
Well now that I have at least called out what I see, I am awaiting the reactions.
.......
"A witch-hunt is a search for witches (...), often involving moral panic, mass hysteria and lynching, but in historical instances also legally sanctioned and involving official witchcraft trials.
The classical period of witchhunts in Europe and North America falls into the Early Modern period or about 1480 to 1700, spanning the upheavals of the Reformation and the Thirty Years' War, resulting in an estimated 40,000 to 100,000 executions.
In modern terminology 'witch-hunt' has acquired usage referring to the act of seeking and persecuting any perceived enemy, particularly when the search is conducted using extreme measures and with little regard to actual guilt or innocence. It is used whether or not it is sanctioned by the government, or merely occurs within the "court of public opinion".
The first such use reported by the Oxford English Dictionary dates to 1932. Another early instance is George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia (1938). The term is used by Orwell to describe how, in the Spanish Civil War, political persecutions became a regular occurrence.
The term is used when a hunt for wrongdoers becomes abused, and a defendant can be convicted merely on an accusation.
Use of the term was popularized in the United States in the context of the McCarthyist search for communists during the Cold War, which was discredited partly through being compared to the Salem witch trials.
From the 1960s, the term was in wide use and could also be applied to isolated incidents or scandals, specifically public smear-campaigns against individuals. The McMartin preschool trial of 1984 to 1990 is another iconic example of a moral panic which saw day care providers accused of what was dubbed "satanic ritual abuse", i.e. the charge of physical and sexual child abuse out of an alleged Satanist motivation. The case and the associated media coverage was frequently termed a witch-hunt by commentators."
