The Trauma from Fear and Betrayal

In unit five we read three stories from the past or inspired by it. McCarthyism was when a senator named Joseph McCarthy was accusing everyone in the government of being a communist spy. The Crucible was about a girl named Abigail who accused everyone in her town of being a witch for her own personal gain. Japanese internment camps were a problem because everyone thought that there was a snitch in their group. Fear and betraying someone are one of the most harmful things on the planet.

We see this in the Salem witch trials, McCarthyism, and the Japanese-American internment camps. McCarthyism is the more recent one of the three so I think it’s best to talk about that one first.

Because of McCarthyism, everyone was afraid of communism. Actually they made a whole law for it, “The Hatch Act of 1939 made it illegal for the government to hire communists and found communists living with false identities”. They absolutely didn’t want to have anyone associated with communism anywhere near anything political because it could let the enemy know their plans.

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You know what the worst part was, while everyone else in the government was being persecuted, McCarthy was praised until people found out the truth. The good news is that in 1954, McCarthy was accused by the U.S. army and he was censured of senator. Hey you know what, there’s actually an entire play based off of McCarthyism.

In the Crucible, Abigail got a bunch of people in her town killed because she lied.

She did this by accusing people of being witches and working for the devil. She did this because she was too afraid to take the blame for her own actions. She also drags all the other girls into her situation to make her look more convincing. In the Crucible, Abigail is the flat negative character because she changes the world around her for the worse. Both Abigail and McCarthy are guilty of throwing people under the bus but I wanna see what happens to those people getting run over.

In the 1940s, people like George Takei were one of the many Japanese Americans taken into the internment camps. In fact during World WarⅡ, about 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry were forced to relocate to concentration camps. The American people were afraid because they thought any of the Japanese Americans could be spies so they threw them away into abandoned bunkers. But then things changed. In 1988, President Reagan created the Civil Liberties Act which was basically an apology to all the Japanese Americans and paid $1.6 billion in reparations. The American public realised their mistake and tried to make up for it. Of course it didn’t make up for it but at least they tried. But if something good came from the internment camps, it might not be the only case.

Sometimes fear can help the character overcome the lie someone else has made about the story. At the end of the Crucible, John Proctor was able to accept his death in order to get the last word with Abigail. The fear in the Crucible was the death penalty that Abigail orchestrated and once Proctor already knew he was dying. Abigail couldn’t do anything to him anymore. We see this same thing play out in another story. The author in Farewell to Manzanar grew up in fear so she was able to relate to her father and what he went through. As an adult, she understood how her father felt and how people treated him at his time at the internment camp. So even though fear has a negative connotation, it ultimately depends on the outcome after the fact.

This is a valid argument but it doesn’t change anything. In either a big or small way, fear is also something that will cripple humanity. Either way you look at it. John Proctor died at the end of the Crucible. Him coming to terms with his death still didn’t save him at all. Also the fear that the author of Farewell to Manzanar was of her dad and her understanding of him when she was already an adult doesn’t change anything. about that fact. Even though at the end the both got over that fear, in the moment they had no control over their situation.

So once again, I think one of the worst things you can do to someone is betray them out of fear. This kind of thing happens in McCarthyism, the Salem witch trials, and the Japanese-American internment camps. McCarthy threw other governmental officials under the bus by calling them communist; Almost everyday Abigail told the church about new “witches” she saw, leading to their deaths; and the entire U.S government basically shoved the Japanese Americans into concentration camps. Think about the last time you betrayed someone, was it because you were afraid? It’s very possible that it was.