Couldn’t make it. Scottish witches get pardon.

[MrsMadderRose]

we’re so sorry we targeted women as witches

While right now women are being arrested and having “witch” screamed at them for thinking biological thoughts and not pretending to believe in magic

I’m not sure past wrongs can always be righted, but yes they should be understood, remembered and learned from, and in some cases reparations and apologies are important.

But there are so many past wrongs towards women, and current wrongs, and it’s getting worse. Again, I know this is not the SNP’s campaign but they are using it to look good and show off their “feminism” in an easy way that doesn’t require actually addressing ongoing sex-based oppression. Why were women persecuted as witches, why was that a thing? Because it’s always been societally easier to blame and punish women because of ingrained sexism and because of women being generally weaker and having less power. These issues are blatantly relevant NOW when protections for women are being taken away and women are being blamed for making reasonable objections. Women are being harassed and singled out for legal persecution in scotland for things that men aren’t. The Scottish government are on the side of men who are threatening and harming women. They should be stopping that and to use this campaign to get cool points is just egregious hypocrisy. That is what I mind, not the campaign itself. I don’t disagree with the campaign, but I do think it’s more important to defend women’s rights now.

www.edinburghlive.co.uk/news/edinburgh-news/furious-edinburgh-local-screams-witch-21487432

Remembering Sturgeon's deafening silence as women campaigning for their rights outside the Scottish Parliament are screamed at, 'witch, witch, witch'.

They should be stopping that and to use this campaign to get cool points is just egregious hypocrisy

Who is using it to get cool points? Are you saying your hatred of the SNP's sex and gender policies should deny an historic wrong to be righted. You are politicising this. The support of women now and recognising the wrongs done to women in the past is not mutually exclusive. Its not a good look from feminists tbh and I have seen it a lot recently. This campaign can't do anything for womens rights now because that's not its point. Nor should it have to be.

I do take your point that we can do both or either Decline and they aren't mutually exclusive. But I think it's the Scottish government using this politically, not me politicising it (as you'd expect them to do to be fair, being a political party). Just in a very hypocritical way.

I've made my point a few times now like a stuck record and feel like I'm repeatedly being misinterpreted, but again this is not to say I think the campaign is bad. Just a) not as important as helping women now and b) hypocritical of the SNP to endorse it.

It's like, I don't know, the Duke of Wellington apologising for the Enclosures.

@ArabellaScott

www.edinburghlive.co.uk/news/edinburgh-news/furious-edinburgh-local-screams-witch-21487432

Remembering Sturgeon's deafening silence as women campaigning for their rights outside the Scottish Parliament are screamed at, 'witch, witch, witch'.

Well ain't that just the point of the thread in a nutshell?

@DeclineandFall

They should be stopping that and to use this campaign to get cool points is just egregious hypocrisy

Who is using it to get cool points? Are you saying your hatred of the SNP's sex and gender policies should deny an historic wrong to be righted. You are politicising this. The support of women now and recognising the wrongs done to women in the past is not mutually exclusive. Its not a good look from feminists tbh and I have seen it a lot recently. This campaign can't do anything for womens rights now because that's not its point. Nor should it have to be.

Not a good look from feminists?

You can get to fuck with that shit.

kimikos I think I may be being dim/overtired but can you expand? I’m not sure which post made you say that! I think all of us who posted the last few posts are in agreement overall.

@MrsMadderRose

kimikos I think I may be being dim/overtired but can you expand? I’m not sure which post made you say that! I think all of us who posted the last few posts are in agreement overall.

Sorry, wrong thread. Meant for the Archers

sorry, Kimiko, but that is hilarious.

@DeclineandFall

This is nothing to do with the SNP, there are two women who run this campaign and it has cross party support. The idea that past wrongs shouldn't be righted or acknowledged because of whataboutery is a very strange attitude. I have a PhD in early modern Scottish history, and know a fair bit about this subject. I also live on a farm where one of the witches lived 400 years ago. I know how from primary sources she was a young woman who was tortured, strangled and burned. It's horrific really. There is also evidence that even at the time local people didn't think this was right or just or even holy. It was a crime where 84% of cases were women. I'm really surprised that modern day feminists can't get behind this because they hate the SNP's attitude to gender and sex so much. I say that as a GC woman.

I don't think it's about the SNP.

It's about identity politics and it's approach to the past, which you see in all kinds of areas.

It's absolutely not the same as real historical study, teaching, or understanding of events. It may include those things though very often not very well, because of the demands of fitting them into the type of narrative required.

I mean - we all know about this already. Almost anyone who isn't absolutely uninterested in historical information knows about it. The information is readily available, it comes up in school history courses, it's even featured in popular television shows.

It also has zero to do with anyone in the modern government and the state at the time functioned quite differently in a number of ways.

There are lots of individuals and groups out there that run some kind of page or historical group dedicated to their personal historical interests, and they can be very well done and useful for those who want to find out more. It's this sense that there is something that needs to be done now to "make up" for what happened during these events, that some apology or something will be of benefit, that is very typical of identity politics, which plenty of feminists have little time for.

Oh! :o

@ArabellaScott

sorry, Kimiko, but that is hilarious.

Could have been a major diplomatic incident.

We need the ability to play the Archers music on a thread when it reaches a pitch of dramatic tension.

@ArabellaScott

We need the ability to play the Archers music on a thread when it reaches a pitch of dramatic tension.

Or just when someone's plan for casting a panto proves tricky to pull off.

Grabbing land, triggered a memory.
Researching my family history back in the 1700s I came across the Scottish branch that had a plantation in the Caribbean, one of them married a black woman. He died and she inherited the plantation, decided to sell up and move back to Scotland (Edinburgh ?) with the money, where she married again. In those days a woman’s property became her husbands and he spent the lot.
The family are prominent today, unfortunately I come from the poor side of the family.

Anyway, this is on my Christmas reading pile

www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/57310655-the-lighthouse-witches

Merry Christmas.

I know The Weem Witch is one of my Christmas gifts and I'm really looking forward to reading it.

@GoGoGretaDoll

If a woman feels that she has suffered trauma due to the murder of her ancestor on spurious, made-up charges, who am I to deny that? I'm not in charge of how and when trauma shows up.

If a woman in 2021 "feels that she has suffered trauma due to the murder of her ancestor on spurious, made-up charges" (an ancestor who died sometime between 1563 and 1736) - that woman is unwell and needs psychological help.

www.independent.co.uk/news/scotland-pardon-women-executed-witches-b1979365.html

On one and possibly both sides of my family it would appear that I am descended from the sole survivors of families where both parents and all siblings died within months of each other. As far as I can make out the deaths were as a result of the Clearances.

(Thanks to a relative who was a Family History fanatic for sharing his meticulous, rigorous research with me.)

There are many reasons that I am lucky to be alive today but the fact that I was lucky to be born, because it was my ancestors who miraculously survived in times past, is for me a cause for celebration.

Should I discover that any of my ancestors was one of those witches, I would be very interested - and rather annoyed, to be honest.

But "traumatised"???

To seriously suggest that "suffering trauma" in such circumstances is anything remotely approaching a rational reaction is top-notch, snowflake bullshittery!

Anyone genuinely suffering in that way deserves sympathy - and needs help.

It is abhorrent that the unhealthy, self-destructive reactions of people who might suffer (might genuinely suffer trauma) are appropriated, politicised and validated by this sort of sick, virtue-signalling #bekind parasitism.

Yeah, trauma isn't just some sort of little virus floating in the air, that will traumatize people who happen to "catch" it. I have ancestors who were slaves under the Saxons and the Normans, as well as Norman ancestors who were slave owners, learning this does not cause trauma.

Now, I have a more recent ancestor who was a real bastard, a drunk, who abused his wife and children and was eventually run over by a train. His legacy in my family dis seem to involve an ongoing passing on of trauma concretely through addiction, in particular, united to economic struggle. He himself escaped to the colonies from the slums of Glasgow so no doubt inherited it himself similarly.

Claims that learning that bad things happened to people in the past, even people you have some connection with, amounts to trauma, are taking the piss.

I know this is an old thread but was looking to see if the issue had been a thread before.

Found this one, and was astonished at the tone of posters. It was a bit like because Tories support women's sex based rights so we are dismissing sex based rights.

And for all those sneering you will be please to know it never happened. https://www.scottishlegal.com/articles/plans-to-pardon-witches-dropped

However such is the (non) value of women's history that was has survived is a now registered Tartan called Witches of Scotland.

Presumably giving women a bit of material is about as much as the grudging posters on this thread think false statements that lead to women being killed merit.

(NB getting a pardon means that officially you no longer have a criminal record because the accusations were false - and nowadays would mean compensation)