The memorial to the 20 or more women, children and men who were hanged or died in jail in the early 1690s in Salem just outside Boston is simple and unusual.

It comprises a low stone wall on three sides of a rectangle about 50 metres by 30 metres. Evenly spaced stone seats – one for each victim – are embedded into the wall.

I say “20 or more” because there is some contention about the precise figure.

But compared to the vast number of people burnt at the stake, hanged or imprisoned in Europe in the 16 th and 17 th century, the number is quite small.

Nonetheless, the events in Massachusetts in 1692 are so well and contemporaneously documented and the timeline so tight that they have provided one of the best examples of how hysteria, religious fervour and political manipulation can accrete, resulting in ghastly suffering.

I visited Salem in the same week that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump had snarled a poisonous attack on Mexicans from beneath his cantilevered coiffure of combed-over hair. He called the illegal migrants from Mexico “drug dealers” and “rapists”, based on one incident of the killing of a US woman by an illegal immigrant.

Trump was pounced upon in the media, but also received some public support and probably any amount of unexpressed support. So have the US and the rule-of-law countries generally defeated the Salem syndrome?

On one hand, virtually instantaneous worldwide communication enables the expression of contrary opinion to help prevent localised hysteria from doing the sort of damage done in Salem. On the other hand, that same technology enables small connected groups of individuals dotted all over the place to feed off their own prejudice and paranoia.

One of the horrors of Salem was the way in which one group of villagers used the children “afflicted by witchcraft” to pick off their political and economic enemies. Initially, fits by a few children were described by a doctor as being supernatural.

It was easy to get the children to accuse a couple of annoying beggar women of witchcraft. Magistrates quickly jailed them for further inquiry. That gave the claims credibility. They were followed by claims against anyone who tried to suggest the “afflicted children” were spouting nonsense.

That enabled a dominant group in Salem to get the children to accuse their enemies and have them jailed and eventually hanged.

The initial investigations and examinations and the later trials were a farce. Accused were not represented. Rules of evidence and normal procedural fairness were cast aside.

Everyone went along with it. Anyone who called for a bit of rationality faced condemnation, accusation, jail and hanging. Any empathy for those accused of witchcraft was at best condemned as misguided or, worse, dangerous consequences followed.

Arthur Miller in his 1953 play The Crucible invited audiences by implication to draw a comparison between the events at Salem and the events being played out in his own time in America. It was the time of McCarthyism. Senator Joseph McCarthy used congressional powers to unfairly accuse people of being communists or associating with communists resulting in them losing their jobs or being jailed.

So, 320 years after Salem and 60 years after McCarthyism, of what possible moment is this in Australia today?

We would never dream of jailing innocent children. We would never dream of demonising a group of human beings, ostracising them and casting them into jail. We would never let ourselves overstate a danger that is not there. 

We would never let allow a politically or economically dominant group in our society to exploit and manipulate those fears for political advantage.

We would never allow a group to be denied access to proper legal representation or access to people who might give them a wider voice.

We would never people to inflame religious prejudice for political gain.

Oh no. We are much better than that.

When, oh when, will the major political parties in Australia realise that they are no better than the magistrates and judges of Salem and that history will condemn them equally.

Of course, we must stop people smuggling. Of course, we must control the number of people who come into Australia and who they are.

But as at 31 May there were 634 asylum seekers (including 81 children) in indefinite detention in Nauru and 943 adult asylum seekers in indefinite detention on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea.

We must strike a sensible arrangement with Indonesia to allow us to end this cruelty and allow these people – yes people – to be freed. The arrangement would allow for every refugee picked up to be returned to Indonesia, and an equal number to be taken from Indonesian refugee camps to be brought to Australia formally.

The “business model” of smugglers would be destroyed. Those returned to Indonesia would be no worse off – other than the money they wasted paying a smuggler. And Indonesia would see Australia helping to solve its refugee problem.

To the extent this resulted in more people coming to Australia, other immigration could be cut by an equivalent amount. It should be cut right back anyway on economic and environmental grounds, but that’s another story.

Before Washington and Boston we did a bit of a drive in the Deep South -- through Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee.

In Memphis, we went from the ridiculous to the sublime and back to the ridiculous. Graceland – Elvis Presley’s home – is graceless and garish. Well, what would you expect? Except some of his notes and letters displayed a disarming, self-deprecating humility and shyness – and charitable generosity. And film clips showed a charming sense of fun and a man who did not take himself too seriously.

Then on to the National Museum of Civil Rights in the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King was assassinated. The motel exterior and the utterly memorable motel street sign have been preserved. The museum documents the harrowing history of the treatment of African Americans in the United States. A lot of it we already know, but you can always learn something new.

The north benefited immensely from slavery, profiteering from cotton and sugar. Further, fighting legal battles is only useful, not conclusive. Every Supreme Court victory for rights and desegregation was circumvented, counter-acted or just plain ignored by white racists.

You have to win hearts and minds. The museum goes a long way towards that.

And then there was lunch. Only in America do they serve ribs that seem to have been cut from a stegosaurus, and servings so large that you can watch people eat a third of their already substantial body weight and still take away a doggie bag that would feed the Hound of the Baskervilles.

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