| To rid the world of its pernicious and evil influences during Europe’s Medieval Age, Catholic countries proposed a solution to find and eliminate witches. Known as the Witches’ Hammer, what was required was a means to identify witches and to get them to confess to heresy, and then destroy them. The mechanism for witch identification and destruction was simple and direct: find out through spies who among the population were witches, test their rebellious natures by getting confessions using various torture techniques, and kill those who failed the test. [1] Given that that the Senate Intelligence Committee is also dominated by men, just as the Church and State was during medieval times, it’s no wonder they’ve decided to launch an investigation against Jill Stein and her Green Party campaign. Known as Russiagate, an alleged Russian plot to sabotage American democracy in the last general election, this psychotic conspiracy is now suspicious of when Jill Stein attended a gala in Russia two years ago, and happened to have sat at the same table as Michael Flynn and President Vladimir Putin. They’ve consequently ordered her to turn over all campaign documents. Killing Off Those Witches Who Fail the Test Although Jill Stein has complied, she issued this chilling statement: “This smacks of the dangerous underbelly of these investigations. The extent to which they exercise overreach, politicizing, and sensationalism is a danger to democracy, especially in the current climate of all-out war on our First Amendment rights. This is not a time to be attacking the rights of political speech and political association.” And while others say it sets a “dangerous precedent", some think the male dominated Political Establishment is on a Witch Hunt to destroy both Third Parties and “rebellious” female candidates. Indeed, Third Parties have to run a presidential candidate every election to secure party viability. And though the existence of third parties are a perfectly legitimate and legally sanctioned part of the American electoral process, they’ve been heavily criticized by both Republican and Democratic Establishments for siphoning votes and money or throwing the presidential election. Even the Clinton campaign and mainstream news is propagating the investigation and a possible Russian collusion-and lies. They’ve falsely reported that Vladimir Putin paid for Jill Stein’s Russia trip when she, in fact, paid her own way. Creative Cruelty Designed to Break Witch’s Will As absurd as this sounds, it’s even more so dangerous. To be sure, there’s nothing new about patriarchal societies applying the Witches Hammer, or going on a Witch Hunt to silence women or assassinate their character. Women and Third Parties, or those who step forward with sexual misconduct allegations, are often portrayed as intermediaries of the Devil’s evil bidding. They’re also seen as a threat, an indirect link to others they would tempt and corrupt. Otherwise, how else can “evil” and “mischief,” or “political rebellion,” continue to exist in a world governed by all-good, all-powerful male rulers? For now, it appears as if the Power Establishment is using Russiagate to not only cover up last year’s revelations about the rigged Democratic primary process, but to manufacture public support for a new Cold War. Considering that power systems exert pervasive top-down dominance, it also appears Jill Stein is the latest “witch” to be brought before the Inquisition, a political Inquisition which is composed of men whose positions enable them to transcend the ordinary environments of ordinary men and women, and to make decisions on behalf of millions with major consequences. [2] The Witch As Archetype Is Alive and Well In the meantime, the pervasive top-down male dominance, the Witches Hammer, will never allow for someone like Jill Stein to become mainstream. Not only was her trip to Moscow as part of a peace offensive in the Middle East censored in the American mainstream press, but she was denounced for telling Russia and the U.S. to stop bombing Syria-and other parts of the world-and quit killing innocent civilians. They then her outspokenness over income inequality, a broken healthcare system, and her stances against environmental pollution and release of chemical toxins. They also condemned her democratic actions, when she and three others were arrested during a sit-in at a Philadelphia bank to protest housing foreclosures on behalf of city residents struggling to keep their homes; or when she was arrested after trying to enter the site of the presidential debate at Hofstra University while protesting the exclusion of small political parties. And then there’s the time when she was arrested for criminal trespassing, after trying to deliver food and supplies to environmental activists of the Tar Sands Blockade. In a male-dominated society, the Witch as archetype is alive and well. Hostile Imagination Towards Witches Deeply Embedded Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), the committee chairman, just announced the Senate Intelligence Committee will investigate two other Third Political Party campaigns. To be sure, the Green Party’s potential to have received enough contributions to qualify for primary season federal matching funds, making it only the second Third Party to do so, and Jill Stein’s repeated reminders that the Republican and Democratic Parties were only serving the top 1 percent and had been bought by corporate lobbyists, surely had something to do with the Russian collusion investigation. In “The Passionate State of Mind,” Eric Hoffer warned: “It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable.“ As interests of these establishments and diverse power brokers coalesce, they come to not only define our reality in ways that Europe’s Catholic countries did, but how George Orwell prophesied in 1984. Bringing down the Witches’ Hammer on Jill Stein and Third Parties sets another dangerous precedent in an already undemocratic and male dominated society. It also sets the stage to either silence, imprison, torture, and possibly kill thousands of other innocent people, as witches were. Dallas Darling is the author of Politics 501: An A-Z Reading on Conscientious Political Thought and Action, Some Nations Above God: 52 Weekly Reflections On Modern-Day Imperialism, Militarism, And Consumerism in the Context of John’s Apocalyptic Vision, and The Other Side Of Christianity: Reflections on Faith, Politics, Spirituality, History, and Peace. He is a correspondent for www.WN.com. You can read more of Dallas’ writings at www.beverlydarling.com and www.WN.com//dallasdarling.) (1) Zimbardo, Philip. The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. New York, New York: Random House Publishers, 2007., p. 9. (2) Ibid., p. 10. |