History written in textbooks tends to teach the narrative that was sponsored. Modern pop-history tends to teach what will sell the most copies, so history is teaching us all kinds of selective facts about life.
Regarding force - force needs to be applied for anything to move - that's just a fundamental law of physics :) The question is where and how do we apply force and in what quantities?
My stance is that witch hunting did not solve the issue of witches causing droughts, scientists along with engineers and people willing to work today, for a better tomorrow, solved hunger in many places of the world.
Now imagine somebody that does believe that his or her witch hunt of year 1543 did fix drought for a decade in his/her town. What evidence could you possibly provide to convince them otherwise? They know there was no drought for ten years, they know they burned a witch in 1543. Now if there is a drought ten years later, clearly we just didn't burn enough witches!
This is the difficulty in dealing with people who rely on emotion, not cold hearted rationality, to solve problems. Cold hearted rationality has its dangers too and one can argue until the cows come home that we may have been better off never industrializing, never inventing agriculture and sticking with hunter gathering, at one with nature and all. Not me, I like hot showers, anti-biotics and all the other modern amenities too much. I'm in the rationality over emotion camp. The people out there protesting I'm guessing are in the other camp and that's totally fine with me.