Five women were paraded naked, beaten and forced to eat human excrement by villagers after being branded as witches in India's Jharkhand state.The power of video overtakes the power of superstition.
Correspondents say the abuse of women who are branded as witches is common, but rare footage of the incident has caused outrage across India.
October 20, 2009
Witches punished.
In India.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
46 comments:
Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
I wonder what making the witches eat sh!t is supposed to accomplish?
I mean, if they're so dangerous, why piss them off?
Shades of Shirley Jackson.
Witches. What a primitive superstition...NOT.
I just spoke with my Indian/British husband about this.
That area of India is very poor.
He said so poor that they don't know where they are going to get their food for the day.
I told him we had poor areas like the Mississippi Delta and shit like that but many of our poors are fat. Indian poors are not fat.
Sounds like the village people were influenced by the real witches.
My Indian/British husband lived in India until he was 15.
His family had an in house servant which he said is very common for the upper class.
He likes to say "Take Your Dick Out" when we talk on the phone. Isn't that romantic?
He likes to say "Take Your Dick Out" when we talk on the phone. Isn't that romantic?
I guess that depends on who your dick was in at the time.
Should we want to see video come out of Guinea?
I suppose, if it'll help. Especially among their own population, where it needs to be stopped, which reassuringly seems to be the case here in India.
But it's difficult to be enthusiastic.
wv-"adslide" = bending the media's revenue curve down
Did they float?
Titus said...
My Indian/British husband lived in India until he was 15.
His family had an in house servant which he said is very common for the upper class.
He likes to say "Take Your Dick Out" when we talk on the phone. Isn't that romantic?
You're a fag. That isn't very romantic at all. Besides, you should be empathizing with these witches, after all, they get to eat the dukies by force. You get to make them and push them out by force. You are probably wondering who got the better trade off. Besides, if he's asking you to take your junk out while you are on the phone, you might want to beware that he isn't doing a comparative while he's on the phone.
Hey, you should wear shorts. That'll learn ya.
OMG, I just saw the Levi Johston pistachio nut video.
I am totally screaming in ectasy like those girls when the Beatles came on the stage.
CROWD: A witch! A witch! A witch! We've got a witch! A witch!
VILLAGER #1: We have found a witch, might we burn her?
CROWD: Burn her! Burn!
BEDEMIR: How do you know she is a witch?
VILLAGER #2: She looks like one.
BEDEMIR: Bring her forward.
WITCH: I'm not a witch. I'm not a witch.
BEDEMIR: But you are dressed as one.
WITCH: They dressed me up like this.
CROWD: No, we didn't... no.
WITCH: And this isn't my nose, it's a false one.
BEDEMIR: Well?
VILLAGER #1: Well, we did do the nose.
BEDEMIR: The nose?
VILLAGER #1: And the hat -- but she is a witch!
CROWD: Burn her! Witch! Witch! Burn her!
BEDEMIR: Did you dress her up like this?
CROWD: No, no... no ... yes. Yes, yes, a bit, a bit.
VILLAGER #1: She has got a wart.
BEDEMIR: What makes you think she is a witch?
VILLAGER #3: Well, she turned me into a newt.
BEDEMIR: A newt?
VILLAGER #3: I got better.
VILLAGER #2: Burn her anyway!
CROWD: Burn! Burn her!
BEDEMIR: Quiet, quiet. Quiet! There are ways of telling whether she is a witch.
CROWD: Are there? What are they?
BEDEMIR: Tell me, what do you do with witches?
VILLAGER #2: Burn!
CROWD: Burn, burn them up!
BEDEMIR: And what do you burn apart from witches?
VILLAGER #1: More witches!
VILLAGER #2: Wood!
BEDEMIR: So, why do witches burn? [pause]
VILLAGER #3: B--... 'cause they're made of wood...?
BEDEMIR: Good!
CROWD: Oh yeah, yeah...
BEDEMIR: So, how do we tell whether she is made of wood?
VILLAGER #1: Build a bridge out of her.
BEDEMIR: Aah, but can you not also build bridges out of stone?
VILLAGER #2: Oh, yeah.
BEDEMIR: Does wood sink in water?
VILLAGER #1: No, no.
VILLAGER #2: It floats! It floats!
VILLAGER #1: Throw her into the pond!
CROWD: The pond!
BEDEMIR: What also floats in water?
VILLAGER #1: Bread!
VILLAGER #2: Apples!
VILLAGER #3: Very small rocks!
VILLAGER #1: Cider!
VILLAGER #2: Great gravy!
VILLAGER #1: Cherries!
VILLAGER #2: Mud!
VILLAGER #3: Churches -- churches!
VILLAGER #2: Lead -- lead!
ARTHUR: A duck.
CROWD: Oooh.
BEDEMIR: Exactly! So, logically...,
VILLAGER #1: If... she.. weighs the same as a duck, she's made of wood.
BEDEMIR: And therefore--?
VILLAGER #1: A witch!
CROWD: A witch! B
EDEMIR: We shall use my larger scales! [yelling]
BEDEMIR: Right, remove the supports! [whop] [creak]
CROWD: A witch! A witch!
WITCH: It's a fair cop.
CROWD: Burn her! Burn! [yelling]
BEDEMIR: Who are you who are so wise in the ways of science?
ARTHUR: I am Arthur, King of the Britons.
BEDEMIR: My liege!
ARTHUR: Good Sir knight, will you come with me to Camelot, and join us at the Round Table?
BEDEMIR: My liege! I would be honored.
ARTHUR: What is your name?
BEDEMIR: Bedemir, my leige.
ARTHUR: Then I dub you Sir Bedemir, Knight of the Round Table.
Titus said...
OMG, I just saw the Levi Johston pistachio nut video.
I am totally screaming in ectasy like those girls when the Beatles came on the stage.
Don't you ever get tired of being bottom? Oh wait. Bah, I'm just using you to bait ZPS to come in her like a little girl and squeal about homophobia. Well, just like your about to do.
Man, now I know how Rush feels about trying to by a football team. Everyone wants in on the action. Like the gays. hehehe...
Folks, what do you expect from an unexpectional country that wallows in it's own 8th world destitution? These people haven't progressed, they are still living in their little primitive hovels kicking around women that they point the finger at and claim to be witches. As if such a thing existed to begin with. At this point, these human turds are no different than that waste of continent known as Africa.
How did a story about "witches" in India turn into a thread about gays? Traditionalguy even brings up the Village People.
Turn out the lights, the party's over on this thread.
President Carter's appointment to the CAB, Elizabeth Bailey, got in some hour-long smoking area tiff with an Eastern Airlines stewardess on the ground at Newark; the stewardess later defended herself by saying it was a misunderstanding: she had called Bailey a witch, not a bitch.
Are you sure?
I heard they were Conservatives that were beaten by Trig Truther gays in Provincetown, MA. And the group was led by Andrew Sullivan.
I must have got my stories mixed up.
Surprised that the White House hasn't tried the same thing with the Fox News correspondent.....
I wonder what making the witches eat sh!t is supposed to accomplish?
The villagers were inspired by 2 Girl 1 Cup.
Peter
I wonder what making the witches eat sh!t is supposed to accomplish?
Some of the villagers were inspired by 2 Girls 1 Cup.
Peter
I wonder what making the witches eat sh!t is supposed to accomplish?
Some of the villagers were inspired by 2 Girls 1 Cup.
Peter
Peter, Peter, Peter. Sigh.
Get used to scenes like this. I've traveled extensively in India and this isn't unusual.
What is interesting, however is what Althouse chose to leave out of her post:
BBC: "... the victims were Muslim widows who had been labeled as witches by a local cleric."
What you have here is Muslim Sharia in action. This is quite common in the poorest parts of the world where the local cleric has the force of God himself.
Here's how it happens: The local cleric demands sex from local widows who haven't any family to protect them.
Some, of course, decline.
They're branded by the cleric as a witch. Everyone is gathered into the local soccer field to watch the witches get punished.
Thus endeth the lesson.
Islam is the last bastion of the abusive priest.
ironrailsironweights said...
I wonder what making the witches eat sh!t is supposed to accomplish?
The villagers were inspired by 2 Girl 1 Cup.
Peter
I've heard of 2 girls 1 cup, but I absolutely refuse to see it. Afterall, we have the Japanese.
Those villagers need some comp tickets to Wicked pronto.
I hope I'm not the only one who laughed at the sublime understatement of the "unfair sentence" tag.
Those villagers must also consider themselves as witches because they have been wicked with what they have done!
bedroom dresser
They turned me into a newt.
I got better.
Looks to me like the superstition is still plenty powerful. Call me when this "overtaking" commences so I'll be sure not to miss it.
So here we've got modern "burning the witches at the stake" monkey business going on in an Eastern country, and all liberals want to do is talk about the Salem witch trials from the 1670s. Are liberals just mentally ill?
Er... who's talking about Salem?
19-year-old girl chops off her tongue to please the god Shiva.
The Times of India: "She did so to invoke the god's blessings to marry the person she desired instead of the match fixed by her parents. The temple priest found her lying in the temple with blood on her face on Tuesday morning. She told the priest about the incident."
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bhubaneswar/Girl-chops-off-tongue-to-get-the-right-groom-/articleshow/5125050.cms
There's no doubt this is straight out of Salem, where widows were in fact accused of witchcraft, so others could take their property.
Thing is, this is 400 years ago in our history, and present day reality for Muslim widows.
Muslim. Widows.
Muslim. Women. Bred out. Without male protection.
Thought experiment: The world, run by Muslims.
I wonder if video might help the people of Kinston, NC who, the DOJ has ruled, will not vote for black candidates in non-partisan elections, because they won't know who the Democrats are.
So let's not act so superior to these Indians!
Story:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/oct/20/justice-dept-blocks-ncs-nonpartisan-vote/?source=newsletter_must-read-stories-today_photo_feature
....who had been labelled as witches by a local cleric.
Oy.
India has some 21st century catching up to do.
Bearbee said: "India has some 21st century catching up to do."
I'd remind you of what the BBC reported: "... the victims were Muslim widows who had been labeled as witches by a local cleric."
Muslim cleric.
India, I would submit to you, isn't the institution requiring some 21st Century education.
As long as Muslim clerics have power (and they will as long as Islam is a religion) such abuses will be unstoppable. Such abuses are part and parcel of Islam - submission.
I suppose this is a step up from public executions in a football stadium (ordered by Afghan Muslim clerics) prior to the routing of the Taliban.
This story has noting whatsoever to do with witchcraft. If claims of "witch" proved ineffective owing to 21st Century educations, the Muslim cleric would accuse the widows of some other religious crime (apostasy or unchasteness).
It doesn't really matter what the stated "crime" is ... because this story really isn't about crime or craft, it's about how Muslim clerics wield power over those subjected to their deprivations.
India today. Britian tomorrow. America the day after tomorrow (they said a Hussein could never be elected President here, and they were wrong).
I say we take all the Wiccans and send them to India - who's with me?
The Macho Response
Florida: Can you point me to the place in the article that identified the 'cleric' as a 'Muslim cleric', please?
As far as what's contained in the article, it might have been a Hindu cleric, or even a Protestant one.
WV: reaer... one who reads too quickly, particularly between the lines.
The Crack Emcee said...
I say we take all the Wiccans and send them to India - who's with me?
That's a lot of fat chicks going to India at once. Might put up a red flag going through customs.
That part of India is Alabama times ten, if Alabama were still inhabited by Native Americans practicing and living as such.
It's heavily forested and has one of the highest concentrations of un-assimilated non-Hindu tribal people: Santal and Adavasi mainly - 32 different clans actually. It's a much higher number than in other parts of India, and they're not a bunch of neo-tribal hipsters with stupid Starbucks tattoos. They practice an anamistic, tree-based religion in sacred jungle-groves and the language the speak is entirely different than other Indian languages, it's not Indo-Aryan or even Dravidian, it's Proto-Australoid.
Hippies have nothing on them.
In the area also are a bunch of ass-backwards Maoist rebels called Naxalites who kill around 300-people a year, for one Maoist reason or another.
Yeh, they got witches there, and more. It's not too far north from where I grew-up - and we had a few servants too, it's called providing employment.
hey--its their fucking culture--who are we to judge?
John Burgess: it seems to me that the sentence implied that the cleric was also Muslim. It is badly written, though, and thus up to other interpretations.
In Hinduism you have priests and sadhus, gurus and swamis - it's not liturgical like Islam that necessarily requires and has its own schools for clerics. In India you are born into that category.
I doubt Santals or Adivasis have clerics, and the Christians in India have pastors - in fact there are a lot of tribals who have converted to Christianity rather than to Hinduism because the Hindus have always treated them very badly since they are considered unclean and untouchables.
Roger J. said...
hey--its their fucking culture--who are we to judge?
So we can't judge a culture by how it conducts itself wherever it occurs? Granted, the people we label witches now in this country end up really being witches and going to Ren Faires. But I digress. :D
Post a Comment