Danger Of Bad Analogies Essay

The interrogator would also ask the tortured witch to declare other people witches, often reading a list of names and possibly forcing them to say that suspected people were witches (Gibbons, Stage #7). After the confession the court would sentence the witch. The witches were not always executed; sometimes the inquisition’s courts would only punish a witch with banishment or imprisonment. However, the secular courts were much more likely to execute witches that they found guilty. The level of punishment varied a lot depending on the location and who was believed to have been bewitched by the witch. For example, a witch in England accused of bewitching the queen was punished by being dragged to the execution site before getting the private parts cut off and intestines taken out and burnt, only to then have the head removed and body split into four pieces. and it was a very rare occurrence except for in Italy and Spain. The executions also often occurred publicly and could attract large crowds of people. These executions were meant to be used to show what the witches did wrong and to deter witches, but they led to an increased hysteria of the witch hunts (Gibbons, Stage #9). Comparatively, the
punishment for McCarthyism is pretty light. People during McCarthyism seemed to get off much lighter sentence. One example of this stems from is shown by the composer, Aaron Copland, who had his orchestral piece Lincoln’s Portrait pulled from Eisenhower’s inauguration (Gentry). because he was a suspected communist. In my opinion, these two punishments are on totally different scales and McCarthyism’s punishment is not that bad. The trial could then end with some money schemes. Witch hunters profited from every witch they successfully convicted. Town’s would have to pay them with wealth from their savings or the convicted witches property. Jenny Gibbons shows an example in her article where, “The sheriff ‘came to their house and seized all the goods, provision and cattle that he could come at, and sold some of the cattle at half price and killed others and put them up for the West Indies; threw out the beer out of the barrel and carried away the barrel, emptied a pot of broth and took away the pot and left nothing for the support of the children.’” This shows that the witch hunters could take everything from the convicted witches without giving their dependents any support. And, in some areas the witch trials focused more on the money aspect. Such as the French King Philip who accused a wealthy bishop of witchcraft so that he could earn some money (Gibbons, Stage #11). This aspect relates to the defense of capitalism in the McCarthy period. As, capitalism is well known to allow the rich to keep their wealth, while capitalism would take their wealth away.
Differences
The Leadership of the Events. The frontrunner of McCarthyism is the namesake, Joseph McCarthy. He was a Roman Catholic from Wisconsin. After a law degree and a bit of work he joined the military. After his military service, he became a politician and used dirty politics to become a Wisconsin Senator. Towards the end his first term he said that he had a list of people within the government that he knew where communist members. This caused the American public to go crazy, and it stated that “ the panic arising from the witch-hunts and fear of communism became know [sic] as McCarthyism.” McCarthy also had several faults, such as gambling and drinking and experienced a downfall that led to him being removed from the senate a bit before he died. Today, McCarthy is considered to be one of the most corrupt and unqualified politicians of the time period (Oh, Joyce). This shows that McCarthy has a really bad reputation today. While the witch hunts did not really have a set leader. While christianity did have influence on the witch hunts, the church was not uniform enough across the lands to control the hunts. While many of the churches would involve themselves in witch hunts, the secular courts largely determined the outcome. But, the churches did have a lot of influence in the huts (Pavlac). This aspect of the witch hunts is almost nothing like McCarthyism. Especially as the church did not suffer much damage to it’s reputation.
The Existence of the Accused Party. A major problem stemming from the witch hunts is the fact that the witches that were getting hunted could have possibly never existed. This is because we currently have no convincing proof that witchcraft is actually real. This could possibly be because the occult does not coexist with scientific thought, but scientific research is what we use to determine what is real today (Pavlac). If witches did not exist according to science, then science states that the victims of the witch hunts could not have been witches, and therefore all the victims had been innocent.
On the contrary, it is well known that communist exist, as McCarthyism was more based on secular thought, compared to the religious thinking (Withers James). Furthermore, in 1995 the Venona documents revealed how much the USSR had integrated into the American government. The documents were coded, but some of decoded names match up with people that McCarthy had accused (Klehr, Harvey). This shows a major contrast to the witch hunts, as witch hunts are still viewed today as being totally made by paranoia, but the communist paranoia in the United States at least had communists involved.
Reasons to avoid the analogy
A major reason that McCarthyism should not be related to the past witch hunts is because they did not solely occur in the past, and there are still witch hunts that occur today. People can still be attacked for witchcraft, and it occurs around the world, and even in some places in the Western world. People that are suspected of being witches still have to fear the people. Thousands of supposed witches are murdered every year. According to an official of the United Nations, Jeff Crisp, witch hunts have become “... an international problem, -- it is a form of persecution and violence that is spreading around the world.” In modern times, people will mob together to attack the people suspected of witchcraft. Surprisingly, the violence of these acts has increased since the year 2000. These witch hunts are even still sometimes endorsed by the state that they occur within (Horowitz, Mitch). This shows that the modern thinking of witch hunts should be attributed to these occurrences, instead of being used as political attacks on an event of the past that does not match up with actual witch hunts. Moreover, the use of analogies like this manipulates the public opinion of events.
An article titled “The Danger of Bad analogies” declares that analogies are used to create a fear factor of the events. This is especially prevalent with politics. The article also claims that it is best to assume that a poor analogy is made because the speaker does not know better. But, when it is involved in education. Furthermore, it claims that poor analogies are created from making comparisons with complex issues. This is definitely the case when comparing the witch hunts and McCarthyism, as they both consist of multiple aspects (Pippenger). This shows that the analogy was used as an attack against McCarthyism and the Republicans, but after a while it stuck as what we know of the
events.
Conclusion
I looked at how much the events of the witch hunts and McCarthyism resembled each other, to show that they do not make a good analogy. A commonly used analogy is not always a good analogy. They can make an event appear to be worst when it really was and distort societies views of history. This is caused from the oversimplification of the complicated events that occurs when they are compared to the other events.