McCarthyism, seats, power, wrong use, social movement, big companies, witch hunting, government, city of Salem, Massachusetts
I am going to talk about the notion of "Seats and Forms of Power". But before we start, we shall say that power is the capacity to direct or influence the behavior of others or the course of events, some places like the White House can be associated with power. It can be exercised through the army, politics, big companies or social movement. To illustrate this notion, I would like to speak about two similar events in the USA: McCarthyism in the 20th century and witch hunting in the 17th century and attempt to answer the following question: how is the wrong use of power illustrated by those two events?
My plan will fall in two parts: first, we will talk about who was behind those two crises and why did they happen, then we will see how power is exercised.
[...] Seats and forms of power Introduction I am going to talk about the notion of "Seats and Forms of Power". But before we start, we shall say that power is the capacity to direct or influence the behavior of others or the course of events, some places like the White House can be associated with power. It can be exercised through the army, politics, big companies or social movement. To illustrate this notion, I would like to speak about two similar events in the USA: McCarthyism in the 20th century and witch hunting in the 17th century and attempt to answer the following question: how is the wrong use of power illustrated by those two events? [...]
[...] After that hundreds of people were accused of being witches and were judged for that. We also read in class a text about puritanism at that time in New England in which we learn that the puritan community had a lot of power and was the reason of the witch hunting. Indeed, they believed in supernatural events such as witchcraft. These documents show us how people can be accused under no grounds simply as a consequence of fear or ignorance. [...]
[...] As for the 17th century, a text called "the Salem witch hunt" informs us that among all the people that were accused of witchcraft, especially women, many of them were hanged, dunked or simply died in prison. The judges based their accusations on intangible evidence and common beliefs and superstitions. When I read those two texts, I was personally outraged by the fact that so many people were unfairly killed and tortured only because power was put into the wrong hands. And moreover, history repeated itself centuries later, and nobody did anything to stop it. [...]
[...] The wrong people were in charge and responded to a small threat with an extreme reaction. They exercised their power by spreading fear among the population and by wrongfully accusing innocent people. Therefore, they caused far more harm than the threat itself. The sad thing is that these kinds of events didn't only happen in the USA but all over the world (Nazis So we may ask ourselves: How can we prevent those things from happening in the future? And can we be sure that the right people are in charge? [...]
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