What do Witchcraft, Communism, and Terrorism have in common?

What do Witchcraft, Communism, and Terrorism have in common?
  At first glance, nothing, other than that they are all bad things (or at least considered to be). Yet, all three of these things have had an impact on our nation's history, and if we look closely (actually, we don't even have to look closely) at those impacts, we see some striking similarities. Each one of these things sparked mass fear and paranoia that led to the false accusation, imprisonment, and even execution of innocent people.  Let's think about it.
   First, witchcraft. I'm sure most of us have at least heard of the Salem Witch Trials, and a lot of us have probably read Arthur Miller's The Crucible, which is written about those events.  Just to review, though, in 1690's colonial America, most people were firm believers in God, and also in the Devil, and that belief entailed believing that devils and evil spirits were at work across the land. Whenever anything bad happened, it was blamed on devils. Because of this, people also believed in witches, or people who  wrought evil upon others by associating with and borrowing the powers of the devils and evil spirits. Witches were a common cause of fear, both in America and in Europe.
   During the early 1690s, most notably in the town of Salem, MA, but in other nearby towns as well, this fear of witches basically went way out of control. To be brief, some girls exploited this excessive fear by accusing some people they didn't like of being witches, even going so far as to pretend to have seizures and fits when these people were around them, and attributing it to their "witchcraft".  It seems outright silly to us today to think that people actually believed them, but the people were so afraid of witchcraft that they did. The town held trials against these "witches", eventually convicting dozens of people of having committed witchcraft, and about twenty of these "witches" were hanged. This mass hysteria and paranoia of witchcraft was responsible for a lapse in due process of law and the false accusations of many people.

Senator Joseph McCarthy

  We something very similar happening in the 20th century during the cold war, only this time, it was fear of communism that was responsible. During the cold war, there was an understandable paranoia of Russian spies and Communist sympathizers in the US. There was enough paranoia that one man, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, was able to exploit it and cause a remarkably large and long-lasting uproar. He accused many people, particularly government officials who were democrats (McCarthy was a republican) of being communist sympathizers. Fortunately, no one was hanged or executed like in the witch trials, but thousands of people were falsely accused, and despite the lack of any conclusive evidence that they were indeed communists, many of them lost their jobs/careers, their reputations, and many of them were even thrown in jail . There were people who attacked McCarthy for all of his finger-pointing and accusations, but interestingly enough, he simply turned and pointed the finger at them, often accusing his opponents of being "unamerican", and being communist sympathizers themselves. Eventually, though, McCarthy lost credibility and support when he accused members of the US Army of being communist sympathizers, and was censured by the US Senate, which put an end to the issue.
   It's fascinating, though, how McCarthy was able to create such a huge uproar. He had little or no evidence of anyone being a communist sympathizer, and yet, because people were so afraid of communists, he was able to destroy the reputations and careers of thousands of people, and imprison many of them as well.

  In our times, we have another new cause of mass fear and paranoia:  Terrorism. While it's true that the threat of terrorism is real, are we allowing that fear to get out of hand?  What has terrorism motivated us to do? We've already created a whole new branch of our government, Homeland Security, and spent billions of dollars to improve our security and defense. We've even invaded another country (Iraq) to counter the terrorist threat housed there. Also, how many changes to our laws have been caused by our fear of terrorism? And what kind of changes?
  Terrorism is a frightful thing. But what will we let that fear make us do? We have two experiences from the past to learn from. Hopefully we've learned our lesson. We have too many other problems to deal with in our times to waste more time, money, and worry than we have to on this issue. We'll see what happens, I guess.