Why the Wicked Witch Isn’t Dead - The timeless allure of witch hunting.
Excerpt:
Every time, I am struck by the sense I have seen this movie before. The African witch hunts—a hidden war on women—seem to be a direct rerun of the European and American witch hunts of our forebears. So how did societies so different become infected with the same psychosis? For answers, I turned to two excellent new books studying the witch-crazes of our past—John Demos’ The Enemy Within and Thomas Robisheaux’s The Last Witch of Langenburg. As I pored through them, it became clear that this desire to project all our fears and hatreds and panics onto a specific person—so that we can wipe her from the earth and imagine we are free—is embedded deep in our DNA as a species. It is part of who we are.