Rebirth of the New Salem Witch Trial

by Gene D. Matlock

Announcing Ye Witchly N Word

TRYALS

Of

Don Imus, Dog Chapman, and Mel Gibson

To Be Held in

New Salem, Massachusetts.

Presided Over by

Reverends Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson

Most Americans know about the New Salem, Massachusetts, Witch trials of 1692-1693. They set the tone for a type of cancerous evil that has haunted America ever since -- even implanting a paranoid characteristic in the psychology of Americans. The daughters of Samuel Parris, a township preacher and Reverend Parris' Afro-Caribbean slave, Tituba, decided to entertain themselves with fortune--telling, spell-casting, and the like, Later, they started acting strangely, accusing certain women in the tiny community of witchcraft. The ecclesiastical and legal authorities eagerly became involved. Over 200 people were arrested. Twenty were burned at the stake or mashed to death with stones. Finally, when certain leaders of the town were judged, the trials ended, but too late to free Americans from the basic paranoid psychology which at all times seems to influence our individual and collective mentalities.

Here are some of the basic characteristics of our national paranoia: taking even one's slightest opinion on anything as soul-felt gospel and typing them; collective social pressures forcing people to accept passively the paranoidal opinions of the national and local power structures; shunning dissenters; depriving them of their livelihoods without a trial, and many other injustices.

This is a recurring pattern in American history. One New Salem type witch hunt was the Communist and Russian spy hunt headed by Republican Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy (1908-1957). McCarthy's political career lasted from 1947-1957. McCarthy's assessment of the communist and Russian spy threat in this country was actually understated. He was rightly worried. But his methods of rooting out Communists closely followed the New Salem witchcraft paranoidal line of reasoning. He attacked anyone of whom he was suspicious. First, he tried to purge the State Department. Then, he started tampering with President Truman's administration, the Voice of America, the United States Army, and other governmental organizations. Many entertainers and public servants, from the lowest to the highest, saw their lives go down the drain. However, when the anti-Communist purges started to crucify important leaders, this nation cooled down fast.

Senator McCarthy's spies even pointed their fingers at me! When I was studying in Mexico, an FBI agent entered Dad's office one day, asking whether I was a Communist. He said that one of my acquaintances had accused me of being one. Dad yelled at the FBI agent, ‘Get the hell out of here! Gene is no communist.’ When I came back home on the quarter break, Dad told me what had happened. I almost defecated in my shorts.

In the middle 1950s, in Kansas, the Fundamentalist Christians launched a Salem, Massachusetts campaign to put anyone who didn't believe 'Jesus died on the cross and rose on the third day' into an insane asylum. I really sweated that one out because I went around preaching just that. Thank God that witch hunt didn't appeal to everybody. It fizzled out almost immediately after it was proposed.

In the 1960s, the New Salem witch hunters in our government decided to force all of us to shun Communist China completely as non-existent. Only a brave person would dare read books published in China, such as its traditional folk medicine and the like. I had to order books about acupuncture and China’s traditional medicine from English sources.

When I was doing my practice teaching in in a New Orleans high school in 1962, the master teacher overseeing my internship had just returned from Taiwan. She told me, 'It's hard to believe that China, which occupies a significant part of this world, has literally disappeared from the face of the earth.' She was mistaken. The New Salem American paranoids found it only too easy to believe -- and enforce! We Americans don’t need laws to govern our opinions publicly because we keep dissident mouths closed by over zealous social controls.

This present New Salem 'N--Word' witch hunt is now in vogue. Many people, both high and low, are being accused, judged, and sentenced, such as film producer Mel Gibson, who mumbled an anti-Semitic statement while stone-cold drunk; Don Imus who called the Black female members of the Rutgers basketball team Ho's; the bounty hunter, Dog Chapman, whose son sold Enquirer Magazine a cell phone conversation between him and his father, in which Dog used N words; Ann Coulter, a female author who said Jews would be better Jews if they were Christians, and even the Black leaders themselves. A White liberal friend of mine one day complained to me that the new 'N' word is White Liberal. I told him not to fret because White ultra-Conservative is also another 'N' word. Sooner or later, the New Salem witch hunters will condemn and punish us all, even the hunters!

I heard recently on TV that two of the villains in this mess, the New Salem judges Reverends Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, are hesitant to take on Dog Chapman because this witch hunt doesn’t make sense any more. Even they have been judged as 'reverse racists.' All the accused 'witches,' after being thoroughly punished, come back greater than before, and the Sharpton-Jackson ecclesiastical judges, the original witch hunters and New Salem judges in this coliseum-type circus, may become total losers, even tearing down all that Martin Luther King worked for.

  

Our communications media will not let us know that most Israelis are Anti--Zionists (See Viewzone's article about this). Yet we are brainwashed to think that most Israelis are fanatical supporters of Zionism.

The Anti-Zionist Orthodox rabbis shown in the Viewzone article are even being being judged as Anti-Semitic. How can a secular Jew be more holy and virtuous than one who is sectarian? This doesn’t make any sense at all, but the New Salem fish are biting this lie, hook, line, and sinker.

Americans are becoming increasingly claustrophobic about having thought control forced on them. Americans especially dislike having to keep their mouths closed while Blacks express their hate for Whites and Jews openly and with impunity. The worm seems to be turning. Already, increasing numbers of people are saying the 'N' word and repeating other 'forbidden' epithets with impunity. Violence may even become a possibility. Can the tide be turned?

Why is it that no matter how tightly the vises of thought control are clasped on our minds, humans cannot be kept from generalizing? Ancient man used generalizing in order to survive. If he went into a jungle filled with lions, he had to assume that all of them would chew on his butt if they got the chance. He did not have the luxury of being 'scientifically specific' and saying, 'Not all these lions want to have me for dinner.' Neither can he say, 'Not all the Blacks in Watts will attack me if I walk there after the sun goes down.' He assumes that all of them will. Not even the Black residents of Watts are foolish enough to judge all Watts residents so objectively. I used to give speeches there. I noticed that if I was still speaking after 5:00 in the afternoon, I lost most of my listeners almost immediately! If the Blacks don't want us to generalize about the frightful violence, crime, and insecurity in Watts, there's no law preventing them from getting tough with their criminals.

Most of the time, when people become critical with certain groups and people, they get frustrated and complain about them. As an American, I often had to bear the brunt of Mexicans' frustration about being too close to the United States and too far from God, as the pre--revolutionary Mexican dictator, Porfirio Diaz, often said.

Having lived among Mexicans most of my life, I make no secret of my admiration for them. This is their traditional way of dealing with Americans: 'Dislike them as a group, but love them as individuals.' We'd be better off doing this ourselves. We should intervene only when we see the possibility of impending violence. The way we do things, by nailing people's mouths shut when they want to voice an opinion, or forcing everyone to smile cold, fixed pepsodent smiles while thinking the opposite, true or not, has never worked and never will. There is no law or social pressure on earth that can make us love people. Love comes only from the heart.

Do you remember the comedy series, All in the Family? It lasted from 1971 to 1979. Movie Star Carrol O'Connor played the part of a racist but 'lovable' Archie Bunker. All in the Family provided a way for people to express their innermost thoughts without letting the world know what they were really thinking. Since Mexicans aren't generally politically correct, they couldn't understand why the show was so popular. I couldn't either. But the people fighting hard within themselves not to express their inner thoughts could relax with Archie Bunker. They could say inwardly, 'Hey, I'm human, too. So I must be a nice guy like Archie.'

Which is better? To admit our humanity honestly? Or should we all express it indirectly by identifying ourselves secretly with lovable villains like Archie Bunker?


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