YAHYA JAMMEH’S WITCH HUNTS ARE “NORMAL”
 
BY THE WATCHMAN
 
There will be a lot of outrage at this claim but before our esteemed readers start calling for my head on a platter, please hear me out. The APRC and its illegal actions against Gambian citizens always elicit an emotional response from supporters and opponents alike. However, once in a while, it behooves us to analyze and compare their actions using an international yardstick. The following interesting excerpts of a review of 2 books by Johann Hari will prove an interesting, albeit morally unjustifiable, point. The books are John Demos' The Enemy Within and Thomas Robisheaux's The Last Witch of Langenburg. Here we go.
 
 1. "One afternoon in 1672, a woman called Anna Schmeig baked some cakes and wandered around her neighbors' homes in her German village, handing them out. One of them, Anna Fessler, thought the cake tasted foul and couldn't eat much. She threw it away after only a few bites—but she died soon after. The villagers—already traumatized by the failure of crops and mass hunger across Europe caused by the Little Ice Age—concluded she must be a witch. Anna was arrested and tortured. Her daughter eventually "admitted," under the pressure of fists and torture implements, that her mother was a witch. So Anna was strangled and then burned.”
 
2.     “You might think the spread of science would cure the plague. But literal witch hunting still recurs in the most backward and fundamentalist parts of even the Western world. Sarah Palin has boasted about being blessed by a Kenyan preacher called Thomas Muthee, who called on Jesus to protect Palin from "the spirit of witchcraft." It turned out Muthee took this very literally—he boasted of driving elderly "witches" out of their communities back in Africa. The Republican governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal, drives out "evil spirits" himself. In the Catholic journal New Oxford Review in 1994, he claimed that a "demon" possessed his "intimate friend" Susan—and that he personally cast it out through a process of prayer and exorcism. He even wondered whether, in the process, he cured Susan's cancer.”
 

3.     “We know that witch hunts break out most ferociously at times of trauma and stress. There was no concept of child witchcraft in Congo until the war began and 6 million people were killed. Now a broken and terrorized population has turned on its own children in a desperate, futile attempt to find some way to regain control. The first great witch hunt in Europe came after the Black Death killed one-third of the population. The second came between 1580 and 1650, when the climate cooled and crops failed. Similarly, witch hunting erupted in America—on the dirt-tracks of Salem, Mass.—at a time when 10 percent of the colonists were being killed and all lived in constant fear of the American Indians who were trying to defend their civilization from extinction.”
 
4.     “Why, during times of horror, do humans inflict this further cruelty on their neighbors and themselves? Why do we so often choose witch hunting over solidarity? In those African villages, it always seemed to me that a belief in witches is—at the most basic level—a rebellion against the cold randomness of death. If you live in the Tanzanian bush—or in a German village in 1672—almost anything can kill you, and it probably will: a mosquito bite, a mouthful of water filled with invisible bacteria, a cut knee that becomes infected. Death is everywhere, random and sudden and final. In these circumstances, it is more reassuring to believe there is an evil out there that you can personify and hunt down and kill than to acknowledge the truth: that you are powerless.”
 

5.     “Why, in particular, is it almost always targeted at women? In 1486, a witch-killer called Heinrich Kramer wrote Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches), a staggeringly popular guide on how to identify, torture, and kill the female fiends. Every page drips with misogyny. It says a woman has a "slippery tongue" and is "a liar by nature." Her "carnal lust … is insatiable and she will indulge it with Satan eagerly.”
 
6.     “Demos believes there is a primal reason for this. "A mother—a woman—is the primal Other, the nonself from which the self is progressively distinguished; further, she disposes a kind of absolute power to meet, or reject, infantile need," he writes. "As such, she retains forever afterward an aura of what a discerning psychologist has called 'magically formidable' qualities." So when we begin to suspect all-powerful dark forces, we suspect women first—because our mothers once held all-encompassing powers over us.”
 
7.     “The psychological template of witch hunting lies deep in our brains—and recurs in our own societies, generation after generation. Demos offers a potted history of American witch hunts, from the panic about Freemasons in the early republic to McCarthyism to the hysteria about Satanic ritual abuse that crested in the 1990s. It is this last case that shows how vulnerable we are to working ourselves into these hysterias, here, now.”
 
To conclude, at least, in the most artificial and facetious sense of the term, Jammeh is not an alien brute doing fantastically brutal and exotic things that mankind has never seen before. This does not absolve him of the crimes committed by his witch hunters against law abiding citizens in the name of his madness. As we speak, I am putting together a group of friends and acquaintances to embark on our own version of a “witch hunt” against the APRC regime and their killer abettors.
 
Gambiaswatchman@gmail.com