Arthur Miller’s classic play about the 17^th century witchcraft trials in colonial Salem, Massachusetts has long been seen as a barely disguised parable of the contemporary hysteria surrounding the House Un-American Activities Committee.

It was an historical moment of post-war panic in which Communists were seen as infiltrating every corner of American society. Courtroom oaths of loyalty were weighed against denunciation, rumour, and false evidence in a Red Scare that famously destroyed the livelihood of artists and intellectuals, including whole swathes of the film industry who were blacklisted.   But, as Miller reminds us, there was an earlier, even more dangerous, set of events which made him realize that the Puritan mass frenzy was not an anomaly in history.  The poisonous flowers of Fascist and National Socialist ideology had found fertile soil in the mass hysteria of crowds led by charismatic leaders.   …

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