The Lessons of Salem
19th May 2007


As a child I was taught not to tell lies: “a lie will always catch you out,” my parents told me. I taught the same message to my children.

Lies, of course, do not always catch you out. Some lies remain watertight. Some even become enshrined as truths.

Fifty years ago Arthur Miller wrote about lies in his play The Crucible, which was brilliantly staged at Trott’s Garden this week by Ashburton College drama students. Miller explored how a lie can take root within a community and spread its branches to ensnare the good, the bad and the indifferent.

The Crucible tells the story of the witch trials of Salem, Massachusetts, three hundred years ago. A group of young girls, caught dancing in the forest in breach of the puritanical strictures of their community, lie to protect themselves by laying accusations of witch-craft. At first the accused are the powerless and outcast in the community. As the lie gathers strength, nurtured by religious hysteria, it is used to settle old scores and remove rivals.

As the community devours itself confession becomes the only lifeline. If you confess to being in thrall to the devil, declare the priests and judges, you are on the path to redemption. Your salvation will be assured if you help identify the perpetrators of evil.

Eventually hundreds of Salem’s citizens were accused of witch-craft and demonology. Seventy-two were sentenced to death and half of these were hanged.

Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible not simply to retell an old tale. He wrote it at the height of the Cold War, when America was swept by a wave of anti-communist hysteria. Senator Joe McCarthy conducted an inquisition to uproot communist infiltration of American society and business. ‘McCarthyism’ became a synonym for witch-hunt.

The Crucible reminds us that however civilised we may believe ourselves to be we remain vulnerable to our imaginations. When imagined fears are manipulated into collective hysteria we are no more civilised than the puritans of Salem.

Recent history is thick with witch-hunts. Technology and the instruments of power have enabled many of these to be enacted on a scale unimaginable in seventeenth century Salem.

In the most successful cases an entire nation can be subdued through a regime of terror and lies, where the only safety is to become an informant. Stalin did it brilliantly in the Soviet Union. Hitler, Mussolini and Mao Tse Tung were masters of the craft. The catalogue unfolds - apartheid South Africa, North Korea, Rwanda, Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan and poor Zimbabwe today.

Even in New Zealand – a relatively level-headed society - we are not immune to witch-hunts. At moments we are as vulnerable as any other community to evil portent, bubbling conspiracy, cloak-and-dagger intrigue and the ever-present threats of our neighbours.

For evidence we need look no further than this week’s press. Sandwiched between David Bain and the budget was yet another story about sexual deviancy and corruption in the police. This time it centred on the viewing of a pornographic video 25 years ago.

At one level the story seems a scurrilous attempt to malign the police commissioner, Howard Broad, who was present at the event. Broad took his cue from Salem, owned up to his part in the incident and re-directed the media’s attention to the real culprits.

The story then focussed on two former Dunedin police officers trading accusations to settle old scores. Then, like all witch-hunts, it grew rapidly into a story of widespread corruption among Dunedin police in the 1980s and 1990s, with harassment and violation of women police officers, stand-over tactics at local brothels and a culture of machismo and bullying.

By day two it was drawing in the Exclusive Brethren, David Bain and suggestions of a cover-up in the recently completed enquiry into police conduct.

Watching this story unfold I was reminded of the atmosphere in Christchurch during the trial of Peter Ellis in the early 1990s. The city was enthralled by the story of sexual abuse of children at the Civic Creche. There were allegations of satanic cults, of secret rooms in the Cranmer Centre where children were detained and abused by leading members of the community. It was rubbish but it poisoned life for a group of innocent people and made many others edgy for years.

The media often plays a mischievous role in these stories. Once a story gathers momentum few journalists pull their punches or stop to consider the veracity of what they are about to print or broadcast.

In Salem it took extraordinary courage to restore sanity. A few leading citizens, accused of witch-craft, refused to lie in order to save themselves. Their executions, patently unjust, jolted the community to its senses.

When faced with a witch-hunt of any sort we must refuse to buy into it. We must not blindly believe the last thing we heard on the news. And we must not tell lies – even to ourselves.