Mythes et heros

Hello ! I'm going to talk about myths and hereos. First of all, I would like to give a definition of this notion : this notion is composed of two words. A myth is a story that may or may not be true. Some myths may have started as ‘true’ stories but as people re-told them some parts may have been changed by mistake, or to make them more interesting. All cultures have myths. These stories have great symbolic power.And a hero is a person who is admired for their courage, outstanding achievements, or noble qualities. It can be the main character in a book or a film or a person with superhuman qualities. It can also be a modern-day hero, or also a witche.

We are going to talk about the witches by asking whether witches are a myth of the past or not, by focusing specially in america. First, witch is a person who practices magic, evil most of the time, and witch hunting is the act of unfairly looking for and punishing people who are accused of having opinions that are believed to be dangerous or evil.

First, we studied two texts that present us puritanism in the 17th century and witches of Salem is a town in Massachusetts in the United States. The moral values of the witches are strict, they had to wear dark clothes with no accessories, they live in a denial of social and physical pleasure because pleasure is a sin, and they punish adultery by death. They were also supersticious and believe in predestination. In 1692, witch trials took place in Salem, 200 people were accused of witchcraft and 20 people were hanged. This witch hunting was justified to protect the community from the devil.

We also studied this notion in the 20th century.

Indeed, after listening to an audio called «  what is a witch hunt ? » , we have seen that the 20th century was marked by important dates concerning the witches (pearl harbor, or the mccarthysim during the Cold War). In fact, during the 50s, US  are not in a good atmosphere because anyone showing a communist behavior will be noted on a list called blacklist, and will lose all their activities and their work, we call this period the red square, that happenned in 2 periods, the first world war and the cold war.

At this time, each person who does not want to be in the black list will denounce the names of the communists that they knew.

So there's a similarity between this two periods : the with hunt in Salem, and the Red Square, because both were triggered by fear and paranoia, the charges against people were groundless, innocent people were accused without concrete evidence,  and have the same goal wich is the fight aigainst enemies of the US.

Despite the desire of the US to protect their territory from enemies, USA was scapegoating. Indeed, during the Second World War, the country Scapegoats Japanese living there. Many Japanese were sent to camps, in prisons, for the simple reason that they were Japanese. There was even talk of racism.

To conclude, witches and witch hunting, may be lost over time, but other events will follow one another. Indeed, the time of the RED SQUARE during which every Communist was dismissed or the time when all Japanese were imprisoned, recalls the period of the witch-hunt that knew the USA. Today scapegoating continues, with several examples that we find in our life, such as racism, or people who are strangely searched at airports, or the fact that the black male incarceration rate is six times higher than for white males.

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