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Christchurch Citizen
May 3 2002
Surely we are not in for a further period of witch-hunting?
by Nick Lindo
Ellis re-visited? Can it
really be true that yet another charge of "child abuse" is about to
be brought against Peter Ellis, this one from a now 20-year-old who appears
to feel he missed out on the orgy of hysteria and false accusation, rampant
in Christchurch
during those disgraceful days of 1992/3?
And repeated since.
Surely we are not in for a further period of witch-hunting when
"experts" display their "expertise" and victims have to
be found to justify their mastery of a subject beyond the understanding of
even the most gifted of the rest of us.
Is there to be generated a new environment of hate, distortion and cruel
manipulation again designed to showcase the intellectual superiority of those
"in the know" who can recognise, categorise and compartmentalise
down to the last detail the behaviour of the tiny infant through to the
cheerful five year-old?
Are we once more about to be asked to believe that the everyday responses of
those very, very young are, almost without question, to be interpreted as
undoubted indicators of the sexually abused?
Will it be Salem
re-visited? That primitive settlement in Massachusetts of the 1690s where
accusations of witchcraft and "consorting with the devil" were
levelled, willy-nilly, against even the most respectable of society, but
usually the most vulnerable, until the point was reached where vengeance
stalked the streets and old scores were settled.
Anyone lucky enough to see The Court's wonderful production, a few years ago,
of Arthur Miller's riveting play, The Crucible, will know what I'm talking
about. He was, of course, concerned primarily with the anti-communist
hysteria of his day, being fomented by Senator McCarthy, particularly as it
affected those in the entertainment industry.
If anyone could be proven to be guilty of "un-American activities"
their career was almost certainly over and they became an outcast, however
unlikely that may have seemed to those who had known that person for years.
But then hysteria is not renowned for its ability to make what we would now
call "value judgments" so if the atmosphere can be created within
which it is accepted without question that "out there" there are
witches, and/or closet communists or, in our case, rampant sex-abusers,
particularly if they are known homosexuals and therefore a bit "different",
no one should be in any doubt but that they are guilty as charged.
Of course they are, for on hand are the experts to prove them so. In Salem there was just
such an "expert", the Reverend John Hale, by name, who had the
supreme gift of being able, unerringly, to detect witchcraft whenever it
reared its monstrous head.
If the Rev. Hale diagnosed witchcraft the fate of the accused was sealed.Hale
was "...an eager-eyed intellectual who, on being called to ascertain
witchcraft, felt the pride of the specialist whose unique knowledge has at
last been publicly called for." Unfortunately for Hale, after he had
consigned, in his portentously knowledgeable way, many hundreds of the locals
to death by hanging, it began to dawn on him that there might be a flaw in his
"God-given" reasoning. And what's more, the people, after their
community had been torn to pieces by the Rev. Hale's "expertise",
came to the same, angry conclusion, which in turn persuaded Hale to make a
"strategic withdrawal" before he, too, found himself on the wrong
end of a rope.
Senator McCarthy, also, if in a less dramatic though equally self-deflating,
manner, discovered, in the end, that he had over-reached himself and fallen
on the other side. "Vaulting ambition" had done for him. You see,
if you feel compelled to initiate an environment, whatever its immediate
focus, it stands to reason there must be people out there who, according to
the precepts of this new culture, are certainly being disadvantaged and
probably abused. Thus the proof, as well as the success of your new
philosophy, is dependent on your being able to identify those victims whom
your doctrine is designed to assist. Without them, you're an expert without a
cause, a situation of considerable wretchedness, which is why the Rev. Hale,
senator McCarthy, and one or two others down the years we might name, so
needed their witches and their "red Americans".
And if there seems to be some similarity between those glimpses from the past
and what happened here about 10 years ago then I'm sure you'll agree, we do
not want a repeat of it. Many supposedly sane and rational people in various
high places, and people who should have known better, allowed themselves to
swallow the "party line" of the day and accept as gospel a flawed
and self-serving doctrine, which had the added advantage of being
unchallengeable.
You see both the Rev. Hale, senator McCarthy and others of their ilk, before,
between and since have an answer for any apparent inconsistency in their
theology. A denial, an obvious variation in an accused's behaviour from the
definitions laid down in their text can always be explained away as
"typical" of the guilty or of a "victim" who is turning
out to be difficult to get to conform to the desired pattern. Thus, it is a
fail-safe system which once having ascended to the moral high ground can
sweep all before it.
That it is why it is so invidious and so hard to discredit and why, never
again, do we want it here. Even when a "victim" wishes to retract
his or her original allegation that, too, is "typical" and to be
ignored unless, of course, by then, - as with Rev. Hale - it suits the
architects of the dogma concerned.
Lynley Hood, in her admirable analysis of the notorious crèche case, A City
Possessed, makes blindingly clear the errors of those dark days.
Not only was Peter Ellis's life ruined but also those of four wholly innocent
and devoted female child care workers, all the victims of a modern hysteria
and a carefully orchestrated witch hunt. I understand Phil Goff has so far
refused to read Hood's book. He should do so forthwith. Justice is still
justice, however long it takes.
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