A Modern Witch Hunt

I heard a rumour the other day concerning the identity of a celebrity who has allegedly been questioned by police in the wake of the Jimmy Savile business.  I'm not going to repeat it here because, quite obviously, it would be libellous and also because I don't trust the source.  Suffice to say, the celebrity named was someone who was very big in the 1970s, has connections with BBC children's TV programmes and was still active in TV until a few years ago.  When I first heard the rumour my initial reaction was that it sounded like the name had been deliberately selected for shock value - whilst a large proportion of us always found Jimmy Savile creepy and consequently weren't really surprised to hear of his crimes, the celebrity in this latest rumour was always much loved, with no scandal at all ever attached to them.  Apart from the shock value, I was left suspecting that perhaps the source of the rumour simply didn't like the celebrity they were defaming and this was an extreme way of discrediting them by destroying their reputation.

The longer the fall-out from the Savile affair rumbles on, the more accusations which are made, the more questionings by police which occur and the more rumours which fly around, the more it all reminds me of the witch hunting crazes in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  These too saw accusations of wrong doing being bandied about left, right and centre, usually to discredit rivals rather than being the result of any actual belief that the accused might have been practising the Black Arts.  Back then, if you didn't like one of the village elders, or you thought that the local inn keeper had short changed you, then you accused them of witchcraft.  Nowadays, you accuse them of being a nonce.  In both cases, the most circumstantial of evidence would be enough to start an investigation: an allegation that a local school teacher spent too much time watching kids in a playground, or that your prize marrow had been blighted after that old crone who had refused to lend you her horse gave you the evil eye, for instance.  Make up your own mind which era each example belongs to.  I remember a few years ago, when this country seemed to be in the grip of 'peado-mania', when what looked scarily like lynch mobs roamed around housing estates accusing people of being 'peados' on the basis of mysterious lists of names they'd allegedly got from the internet.  (Presumably the from the same site Philip Schofield got his list).  It all looked scarily like a scene from Witchfinder General.   All it lacked was Vincent Price in a puritan hat riding around pointing at people and shouting: 'He is a peado!'

At least now it isn't just any poor bugger considered 'weird' on the basis that they're a bit of a loner, read books or wear glasses, being accused.  We've moved on to pointing the finger at any celebrity or public figure we don't like, instead.  At the end of the day, the only real difference between the witch hunting crazes and the more contemporary peadophile scares, (I do remember there was an attempt to combine them some years ago with 'Satanic Child Abuse' narrative),  is that whilst witches don't actually exist, peadophiles do.  Actually, it isn't that simple, is it?  There are people who claim to be witches, but they're simply slightly barmy eccentrics who dance around naked at sabbats or claim to be able to cure warts, rather than being the evil consorts of Satan depicted by seventeenth century witch hunters.  Likewise, the real peadophiles aren't the monsters depicted by the press. so much as rather pathetic individuals who, more than anything else, need some kind of psychiatric treatment to help them curb their unacceptable sexual urges.