Witch Hunt In The Crucible

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There have been many different "witch hunts" that have happened since 1692, that have shaped our world. One of the most known is The Holocaust that happened during WWII. This is important because a large mass of innocent people were killed due to their race. Some may say it was just a part of war; however, it's much more than that. It’s the fact that one person didn’t like a certain group of people besides their own so; they felt like they had the right to take away their lives. In The Crucible, by Arthur Miller, he shows us four ingredients that create a mass hysteria. Those include fear, personal motives, unfair treatment of the accused, and accusers. These can all be related back to The Crucible, in the way in which each character experienced …show more content…

It is easy to point out when he explains in act one how Parris does not want anyone to "speak nothing of unnatural causes" (miller 9). As the play goes on we see why he wants no one to even bring up unnatural causes because he is afraid they will kick him out of Salem, for his daughter's involvement. During WWII a man by the name of Adolf Hitler, a German politician who was the leader of the Nazi Party held power in Germany. He thought there should only be one race in the world, a "superior" race, which was the Germanic race. The Nazi's started capturing Jewish people and others to take them to Death camps. At these camps the captured would sometimes sit up to two days, they didn’t want to keep them alive for long. The Germans were always coming up with new ideas to do a mass slaughtering quickly. An idea they came up with was the gas chambers. Many of the Jewish watched as friends and family were walked to the chambers, "people who were ill or crippled, old, and pregnant women, as well as children"(Gottfried 47) feared more because they knew they would be first. This relates back to the Crucible because Abigail and the girls pointed the finger at everyone else to take the blame off of them so they would not be hanged. Both have the same fear in common, death. Victims who are “living today [are] [in] constant fear of a new war or even a series of wars” (Roosevelt 1). Even though racial persecution is still happening today it is much less, however people still suffer and fear something similar will happen again. Surely the fear we see presented in Arthur Miller’s play models the fear we see in todays “witch

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