Fear Sells: Hammer of Witches

Some time ago a book was published destined to sell more copies over the ensuing two centuries than any book bar the Bible. That time ago was 1486. The book was Malleus Maleficarum (latin: Hammer of Witches), explaining how to identify, capture, torture confessions from – and eventually kill – Satan’s handmaidens.

It was during such time and context that the pope issued an edict known as the "Doctrine of Discovery" (only recently rescinded by the Vatican after 500 years) asserting that European civilization and Western Christianity were superior to all other cultures, races, and religions (Doctrine of Discovery).

Our focus article (The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy) sees that doctrine as the root of the belief this country was divinely ordained to be the promised land for European (and, by extension, all) Christians. It further maintains this matter continues to play out today and will likely be a determining factor in the 2024 elections.

James Baldwin, ranked as one of the top African American writers, may have had that in mind when he labeled “white people as the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing.” History, you see, rather than a series of discrete events, is all part of an overriding narrative, animating our previous MM discussions surrounding Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project.

Let us share how the church, the state and your social environment (may have) played upon your own fears in those formative years to mold your visceral profile – be it inside or outside a “tribe.” I would readily admit to experiencing what might be termed mindshaping from my earliest years, as I recounted my own experience as set forth in the introduction to our very first Member Monday session some seven years ago MM 7/5/16 Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States :

“My own introduction to history in the public schools came in the first grade when we were to commemorate Thanksgiving with our own special drawing. I earned a double gold star for my crayon drawing of the Pilgrims and Indians as they shared a feast at the community table.

My drawing somehow missed this English account of 1610 Jamestown: “Soldiers were sent out ‘to take revenge.’ They fell upon the Indian settlement, killed fifteen or sixteen Indians, burned the houses, cut down the corn growing around the village, took the queen of the tribe and her children into boats, then ended up throwing the children overboard and ‘shoteing owt their Braynes in the water.’ The queen was later taken off and stabbed to death.”

The textbook history of our great nation is the tale told by the victors. Our traditional historical accounts somehow come across as refined, sanitized, packaged for consumption — like so much sausage — to be fed to a credulous public. Missing is any sense of how the sausage was made.

Howard Zinn fills in the blanks with “A People’s History of the United States.” He triangulates on the truth by retelling the historical narrative from the perspective of the actual human dynamics underpinning the signature events."

Back to the article, that is the crux of where we are today i.e. an America “freaking out” over a past, forged out of those God-given papal certainties, up against a future now made uncertain with the knowledge that White Christian America may no longer be able to presume its majority status (from 54% early Obama to 42% today). Fear.

The author again invokes Baldwin with the invitation for America to face its discomfort by doing the work, not to feel bad(ly) over what its ancestors might have done, but rather to achieve a degree of honesty about the past. We’ll see.