A game that relates to the class activity and witch hunts, is Mafia. Mafia is an accusatory group game in which an imaginary town is being attacked by the mafia. The game consists of two mafia personnel, a cop , a nurse, a narrator and citizens. One important element of the game is that no one knows your identity except the narrator. Basically at the beginning of every round everyone except the narrator closes their eyes. The narrator then wakes the mafia and they select one person to kill. Then the mafia go to sleep. The cop then awakes and selects one person to investigates and goes back to sleep. Next, the nurse is wakes up and chooses one person to save( hopefully the victim of the mafia), and goes back to sleep. Finally, everyone open their eyes. The narrator then announces who is dead, if the cop was investigating the right person, and if the nurse saved the the right person. Everybody( except the narrator) speculates about the identity of the mafia and votes on a person who to send to jail. The person with the most votes go to jail and is out of the game. The game continues until the mafia are put into jail or the cop arrest them.
The game reminded me of how, like in the witch hunts and McCarthy trials, that all that is needed to convict someone is an accusation. This accusation may or may not be backed up by legitimate proof. Also in the game your "enemy" has no identifying features;they look just like you. The final similarity, is that to find the "enemy" you have to ruin innocent peoples lives.
What other real life examples witch hunt concept?
Ashley Hill
5 comments:
I feel that in most situations, outside of the court room, people are presumed guilty until proven innocent. If you think about it, as soon as someone makes an accusation, it is common to build it up in your mind as fact rather than just addressing as a rumor with little evidence.
In my opinion, this is because it is natural for people to be drawn to scandals or any outrageous allegations. They want to believe the appalling stories--as we discussed before with the ego, super ego, and id-- and for that reason they are able to find "evidence" that may not be supportive enough (or even related.)
-Kelsey W
I was just reading a paper on legal cases for history: Rumsfeld v. Padilla and Hamdi v. Rumsfeld. It would seem that these two relate somewhat to the discussion of the witch hunts.
In both cases, the person that has been accused, of being an enemy combatant, is held by the military in indefinite custody and is unable to challenge the basis. They are held and presumed guilty and unable to plead their cases just as the alleged witches were unable to plead their cases. (Perhaps this is a loose comparison)
Anyway, the article goes on to discuss the constitutionality of this. Is it fine to do this during a time of war? Is it America's responsibility to show a "good" example of a society with inalienable rights? Does the constitution apply to people outside the United States when we try them? Etc... These questions are similar to ones that were asked during the time of McCarthyism (i.e. how the constitution should apply to accused communists and whether conventional interrogation should be used.)
Kelsey W
I agree with what Kelsey is saying. An accusation, whether based on evidence or completely without bases, is likely to create a preconceived notion about something that you didn't already know. Therefore it makes you somewhat biased toward the subject matter, if not more. Like in Mafia, the citizens are completely clueless about who the mafias are, especially during the first round, so the first accusation is almost always without reason. But once the finger has been pointed at someone, you can't help but to view him/her with a greater amount of suspicion.
Also I feel like, many times, in order to catch the mafias (or the 'witches' in any situations), innocent lives are ruined not necessarily because it's inevitable but because we think it's better to be careful and eliminate all the suspects than to be wrong and end up sparing a 'witch'.
I also read the same articles for history and noticed that the issue of wartime powers was discussed frequently. To build on what Kelsey said, I think most would agree that its during the times of increased panic amongst the people that these situations are more likely to occur; like during wartime. People search desperately to find and get rid of the source of the problem and when they can't find the source on the outside, people look inside. This chaos exacerbates the situation with accusations, that may or may not be false. The whole issue then became what the government was or wasn't allowed to do in order to try to solve the problem. In both cases, the accused were denied their civil rights to have his designation as an enemy combatant challenged by a non-military court, because the judicary didn't want to "weaken the executive's authority to provide for the common defense in time of war."
In this case, it seems that during the Mafia invasion, people are uncertain of who to trust and what exactly is happening. Each person forms their own oppinion of who the threat really is and accuses them, which as Ashley said is a striking parallel to our class witch hunt.
Not only in America do we have a judicial system but we also have something commonly referred to as "the court of public opinion." This phrase basically means that even though a person can be accused of a crime and acquitted in court, their public reputation is forever tarnished even though they were found innocent. Ill give an example: say a governor is accused of embezzling tax money into his/her own private fund and using that money to pay for personal vacations/bills/luxuries. That governor then is taken to court and in a long drawn out trial and with the help of fancy defense lawyers the governor wins his/her case and is acquitted of the crime. Even though he/she is completely innocent there is no way that person will be reelected because in the people's minds that person was guilty the second they were accused.
I believe this to be attributed to the fact the most people believe claims like this because the public believes that claims like this dont just appear out of thin air and people believe there must be some factual basis behind the claims. Even though in reality most of these accusations stem from a rumor here or there that spreads into a mess. This relates to the witch hunt because there was no factual basis behind the accusations but people still were too quick to believe just because someone was accused.
-Tyler H
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