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deathtocapslock2015-05-12 06:35 pm
sweettalkeress.livejournal.com) wrote in deathtocapslock2015-05-12 06:35 pm
Rant about Voldemort and Rowling's failed Nazi comparison
By popular demand!
You know, the more Rowling’s conflation of Voldemort and the DeathDealers Eaters with the Nazis processes, the more anger-inducing it seems. At first I thought it was merely annoying but I’ve become more and more convinced that the way it plays out is actually quite offensive. There’s just so, SO much that’s wrong with the way it plays out, which betrays a near total ignorance of who the Nazis actually were and what they did, and just generally the entire state of affairs, has the heroes acting in ways the Nazis probably would have approved of, and the entire thing is just so transparently a ploy on Rowling’s part to reinforce how “evil” Voldemort is and gain kudos for addressing “real” issues in her frivolous little fantasy series!
I will say upfront that I just can’t help but find it a teensy little bit problematic that people are praising a Christian woman whose idea of pleasing her Jewish fans is to introduce a single Jewish Ravenclaw student who never says or does anything (ever) for invoking the guys who perpetrated the Holocaust, a concerted effort to eliminate Jews, in the construction of her villains. It’s the kind of thing I’d be okay with (to insist that you MUST have a personal connection to an issue before you can write about it I think creates more problems than it solves) if it were not for everything else she screws up, here. However, in light of all the other problems I’m not feeling quite so charitable.
First there’s the comparisons made between Voldemort and Hitler. This is problematic for a number of reasons. Before I go any further, I’d just like to say that it bothers me in general that people seem to think Hitler (a real person with a specific agenda and vision) is an acceptable shorthand for “super duper evil demon bad guy.” The “Hitler ate sugar” fallacy is one of the more absurd examples. What people who do that seem to miss is that Hitler was but a man. A really, really evil, sick man, but a man nonetheless (there actually IS at least one villain I’ve seen who DOES seem somewhat similar to Hitler, and Nazis in general, albeit without the racism. But that’s slightly off-topic). This is an important point to make, because if you accept that Hitler was an evil demon of evilness, it both minimizes the suffering of those who faced injustice and torment from bad guys other than Hitler, and it also fails to take into account the fact that other people exist who share some of his views. I’ll be coming back to this point in a little bit.
However, the fact is Voldemort just doesn’t act like Hitler at all. Yes it’s true that he’s a racist, like Hitler, and it’s true that he did come from a family that was not exactly ruling the roost, as did Hitler; but otherwise he seems to share none of Hitler’s personality traits, history, or ambitions. He doesn’t seem to be kind to animals (other than Nagini), as Hitler was; he seems to have no charm or charisma, as Hitler did; and while he (like Hitler) seems to be good at playing to pre-existing prejudices (of which more anon), the difference is that Hitler did all that because he genuinely believed that his plan was in his country’s best interest (it wasn’t, of course, but that’s what he believed). By contrast, Voldemort, so far as we can tell, is only ever interested in self-aggrandizement and immortality for himself, treating his subordinates (who, remember, are mostly purebloods) as slaves and, when he takes over the Ministry, seeming to use his newfound power to do nothing except extend the circle of his victims a little bit and expand his search for magical artifacts and Harry Potter. And then there’s Rowling’s repeated insistence that Voldemort has always been an evil dick for his entire life, which I’d sincerely doubt is true of Hitler because that’s scarcely true of anyone who actually lived. Voldemort is not a well-rounded character, he’s a pathetic caricature, and any attempt to link him to any real person, good, evil, or otherwise, living or dead, is misjudged from the outset for this reason alone.
And that’s just scratching the surface of this thing.
Now, people on the Internet At Large talk about racism and other forms of prejudice a lot, and when it comes to anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, I’ve seen a few points be made again and again by Jewish bloggers. One is that most people who were not a member of the actual persecuted races actually have little to no clue who the fuck the Nazis were or what they did or intended, since they’re not taught about it, which is already fairly obvious (the fact that people actually say things like “grammar Nazi” with a straight face is all the evidence you need of this point). Another major point is that the Holocaust narratives that do exist tend to be very much distorted in various ways—and in particular, most popular fiction about the Holocaust stars non-Jews. It’s distressingly common for a story ostensibly about how awful the Holocaust was to involve whatever Jewish characters there are getting screwed over or victimized so a non-Jew can learn a valuable lesson about the perils of racism and prejudice—and needless to say, most completely handwave the fact that for everyone who did try to help Jews, many more ordinary citizens were perfectly content to either kill them or let them be killed because they already hated Jews to begin with. Even the Allies didn’t do anything about the Holocaust until the Nazis posed a threat to them specifically. One final trend that Jews on the internet and in real life (including some of my personal friends) find worrying is that everyone seems to be okay with Jews being victims but nobody wants to allow Jews to defend themselves or fight their own battles on their own terms. This comes up a lot in discussions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—while there is a lot to criticize about the way Israel handles itself, in practice a lot of people criticize it using traditionally anti-Semitic stereotypes, or even refuse to recognize instances of anti-Semitism directed at Jews who are unwilling to denounce Israel. The overarching point is, while anti-Semitism was a major component of the Holocaust at pretty much every level, it neither began nor ended with the Holocaust, but this is something that frequently gets forgotten by society at large.
The last Harry Potter book, as it happens, suffers from the same problems that these bloggers are complaining about. It plays out like an intensely-distorted Holocaust narrative that is accepted by the Western world but deviates so much from the facts as to do more harm than good in trying to make sense of it. In Harry Potter we see people lacking in magical ability discriminated against in all and sundry ways—and there is some evidence that killing people for a lack of magical ability is tolerated at best and expected at worst (I know terri_testing has a great essay on the subject). We also see that some children who have magic are born to non-magic parents. These children are swiftly assimilated but still face discrimination. So far, this actually does work as a metaphor for Judaism in the pre- (and, in some cases, post-) Holocaust world: Jews were killed in Europe (and, to a somewhat lesser extent, in the Middle East) long before the Holocaust happened, and Jews began assimilating into the wider cultures in which they lived largely as a form of self-protection (the “muggleborns,” in this scenario). However, what we see in the Wizarding World is that the conflict quickly becomes about whether muggleborns have the right to their magic, rather than whether people without magic ought to be treated with respect. Translated to a Holocaust context, this is basically the equivalent of implying that only those Jews who assimilate deserve protection from the Nazis, and the rest don't deserve even basic respect or care. People who routinely discuss anti-Semitism call this a distinction between “good Jews” and “bad Jews.”
This grievous error is only compounded by the fact that every time we DO see writing and behavior that mirrors the forms anti-Semitism often takes, it’s being committed by a “good guy,” and directed at a character we’re not meant to like. The goblins and Snape both embody certain anti-Semitic stereotypes. It is the case that both Snape and the goblins, while unpleasant, are (mostly) harmless. However, the way Rowling’s world works, arousing Harry’s ire while remaining comparatively harmless is a worse offense and will get you more contempt and more ill treatment than being an outright villain. Rowling at one point has tried to argue that Voldemort, her Hitler-analogue, deserves more sympathy than Snape, because Voldemort was never Given a Chance at Love!
But it’s worse than that, if you think about it. Consider the way the Slytherins are treated. They’re considered the black sheep of the school, and although we meet only a small proportion of them, we see all those we do meet behave badly. We are taught to hate Slytherins for multiple, contradictory reasons; for instance, their ambition makes them evil, but most of the ones we meet are from wealthy families and so are spoiled and get to be lazy while everyone else does real work. We are taught to cheer when they fail and set themselves up for disappointment, and we are taught to applaud characters who treat them harshly, even if it’s for no reason at all (remember Fred and George harassing that Slytherin first-year?). We see that many of them are racist. Crucially, they are not alone in their racism—Gryffindors can be and are just as racist and cowardly and contemptible as any major Slytherin who is not a Death Eater or Death Eater-wannabe, if not more so. This I find extremely interesting because it calls to mind an article I found on the topic of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and why so many people seem to think hating Israel is a progressive act. I’m not going to get into the morality of that conflict here, but the point the article makes, in a nutshell, is that many progressives living in the western world are deeply guilty about their own racist histories, and try to escape from the guilt by projecting it onto Israel, a country which cannot fight back and is ruled by a people who are dominant only within Israel’s borders and oppressed everywhere else. Now compare that to the way racial politics in the Potterverse play out—Dumbledore knows perfectly well that nonhuman magicals and nonmagicals are treated with loathing and contempt, but he and the narrative at large instruct Harry to hate Slytherins because they’re “racist,” while simultaneously brushing over anything similar Harry might say or do. I’m going to change the wording of just a few choice quotes from the article so you can see what I mean:
“There is amongst [the wider wizarding community] a deep desire for absolution from a history of racist sins…. This desire is genuine, but it is also typically ‘cheap’…we [in this case, wizarding society at large and Gryffindors who are the story’s main focus in particular] want the absolution, but don’t want to pay the penance.
…
Opposing [Slytherin] offers psychological guilt-release. It is a scapegoat in the literal sense-we can place our sins upon it and, through sacrifice, gain absolution (the goat, of course, actually pays the penalty).… The [wizarding world] isn’t going anywhere, and if it did it would entail severe costs on the people seeking absolution. [Slytherin] could plausibly be thrown down, and if it did it would entail virtually no costs on those ‘repenting.’ [shades of Rowling making a throwaway joke about shooting all the Slytherins here…]
…
[Slytherin] stands in for our own misdeeds—it is the platonic ideal of our own wrongs. We are not intrinsically bad, we’re only bad insofar as we’re ‘[Slytherin].’ Our absolution comes when we’re no longer [Slytherin]. It offers a way to maintain a sense of moral growth and possibility by externalizing the source of the sins onto another body deemed irredeemably corrupt.”
In the real world (so the argument goes), this “body” is Israel and by extension the entire Jewish community. In the Potterverse, it is Slytherin.
Puts a new spin on Dumbledore’s “Sometimes we sort too soon line,” doesn’t it?
“Wow Snape, you’re so loyal and brave and honorable! You act more like a Christian than those disgusting Jews you came from!”
By the way, even if you do accept that the Gryffindors are morally-righteous heroes and the Slytherins are racist, evil barbarians, where does that leave Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw? In the book, they’re treated as innocent bystanders, but there is no such thing as an “innocent bystander” when people are being slaughtered wholesale. In fact, as I previously stated, one thing Jews have been trying to impress upon people learning about the Holocaust for some time is that the bystanders were not innocent—most of them knew that Jews were being murdered but did nothing. If the Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws know that Slytherins are evil racists (and it would be difficult to not know, considering they all attend the same school and the same classes, and Draco, at least, is perfectly content to spew racist slurs in public), then they should confront the Slytherins about their own racism, or they’re just as guilty. This is even a long-standing tradition in Jewish law—the Jewish texts say outright that there is no neutrality in cases of moral dilemmas and that to feign neutrality is just another kind of affirmation of whatever’s going on.
To make matters worse, the thoughts and feelings of the other group that’s “supposed” to be a stand-in for the Jews in this Holocaust comparison, muggleborns, seem to be curiously left out of the narrative. It’s true that Hermione’s a major character, but if you look closely, we never really get her side of the story; just Harry’s assumptions about what she’s doing and thinking and feeling. Harry, for his part, DOES have a muggleborn mother, which, were Voldemort a real Nazi, would actually arouse his suspicion and make him a target—except that Voldemort never targeted Harry because his mother was a dirty muggleborn; he targeted Harry because there was a prophecy telling him he was meant to. We also see that both Lily and Hermione were their world’s equivalent of “good Jews,” who renounced all claims to the world from whence they came and cheerfully and completely assimilated (into Gryffindor, no less). Note that this did nothing to keep wizards from hurting their non-magical relatives—in Hermione’s case, she herself was the one who mind-raped her parents.
In summary, Rowling is Doin it Rong when it comes to discussing the Nazis, racism, prejudice, and basically anything socially-relevant whatsoever and she needs to just stop and get her facts checked.
You know, the more Rowling’s conflation of Voldemort and the Death
I will say upfront that I just can’t help but find it a teensy little bit problematic that people are praising a Christian woman whose idea of pleasing her Jewish fans is to introduce a single Jewish Ravenclaw student who never says or does anything (ever) for invoking the guys who perpetrated the Holocaust, a concerted effort to eliminate Jews, in the construction of her villains. It’s the kind of thing I’d be okay with (to insist that you MUST have a personal connection to an issue before you can write about it I think creates more problems than it solves) if it were not for everything else she screws up, here. However, in light of all the other problems I’m not feeling quite so charitable.
First there’s the comparisons made between Voldemort and Hitler. This is problematic for a number of reasons. Before I go any further, I’d just like to say that it bothers me in general that people seem to think Hitler (a real person with a specific agenda and vision) is an acceptable shorthand for “super duper evil demon bad guy.” The “Hitler ate sugar” fallacy is one of the more absurd examples. What people who do that seem to miss is that Hitler was but a man. A really, really evil, sick man, but a man nonetheless (there actually IS at least one villain I’ve seen who DOES seem somewhat similar to Hitler, and Nazis in general, albeit without the racism. But that’s slightly off-topic). This is an important point to make, because if you accept that Hitler was an evil demon of evilness, it both minimizes the suffering of those who faced injustice and torment from bad guys other than Hitler, and it also fails to take into account the fact that other people exist who share some of his views. I’ll be coming back to this point in a little bit.
However, the fact is Voldemort just doesn’t act like Hitler at all. Yes it’s true that he’s a racist, like Hitler, and it’s true that he did come from a family that was not exactly ruling the roost, as did Hitler; but otherwise he seems to share none of Hitler’s personality traits, history, or ambitions. He doesn’t seem to be kind to animals (other than Nagini), as Hitler was; he seems to have no charm or charisma, as Hitler did; and while he (like Hitler) seems to be good at playing to pre-existing prejudices (of which more anon), the difference is that Hitler did all that because he genuinely believed that his plan was in his country’s best interest (it wasn’t, of course, but that’s what he believed). By contrast, Voldemort, so far as we can tell, is only ever interested in self-aggrandizement and immortality for himself, treating his subordinates (who, remember, are mostly purebloods) as slaves and, when he takes over the Ministry, seeming to use his newfound power to do nothing except extend the circle of his victims a little bit and expand his search for magical artifacts and Harry Potter. And then there’s Rowling’s repeated insistence that Voldemort has always been an evil dick for his entire life, which I’d sincerely doubt is true of Hitler because that’s scarcely true of anyone who actually lived. Voldemort is not a well-rounded character, he’s a pathetic caricature, and any attempt to link him to any real person, good, evil, or otherwise, living or dead, is misjudged from the outset for this reason alone.
And that’s just scratching the surface of this thing.
Now, people on the Internet At Large talk about racism and other forms of prejudice a lot, and when it comes to anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, I’ve seen a few points be made again and again by Jewish bloggers. One is that most people who were not a member of the actual persecuted races actually have little to no clue who the fuck the Nazis were or what they did or intended, since they’re not taught about it, which is already fairly obvious (the fact that people actually say things like “grammar Nazi” with a straight face is all the evidence you need of this point). Another major point is that the Holocaust narratives that do exist tend to be very much distorted in various ways—and in particular, most popular fiction about the Holocaust stars non-Jews. It’s distressingly common for a story ostensibly about how awful the Holocaust was to involve whatever Jewish characters there are getting screwed over or victimized so a non-Jew can learn a valuable lesson about the perils of racism and prejudice—and needless to say, most completely handwave the fact that for everyone who did try to help Jews, many more ordinary citizens were perfectly content to either kill them or let them be killed because they already hated Jews to begin with. Even the Allies didn’t do anything about the Holocaust until the Nazis posed a threat to them specifically. One final trend that Jews on the internet and in real life (including some of my personal friends) find worrying is that everyone seems to be okay with Jews being victims but nobody wants to allow Jews to defend themselves or fight their own battles on their own terms. This comes up a lot in discussions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—while there is a lot to criticize about the way Israel handles itself, in practice a lot of people criticize it using traditionally anti-Semitic stereotypes, or even refuse to recognize instances of anti-Semitism directed at Jews who are unwilling to denounce Israel. The overarching point is, while anti-Semitism was a major component of the Holocaust at pretty much every level, it neither began nor ended with the Holocaust, but this is something that frequently gets forgotten by society at large.
The last Harry Potter book, as it happens, suffers from the same problems that these bloggers are complaining about. It plays out like an intensely-distorted Holocaust narrative that is accepted by the Western world but deviates so much from the facts as to do more harm than good in trying to make sense of it. In Harry Potter we see people lacking in magical ability discriminated against in all and sundry ways—and there is some evidence that killing people for a lack of magical ability is tolerated at best and expected at worst (I know terri_testing has a great essay on the subject). We also see that some children who have magic are born to non-magic parents. These children are swiftly assimilated but still face discrimination. So far, this actually does work as a metaphor for Judaism in the pre- (and, in some cases, post-) Holocaust world: Jews were killed in Europe (and, to a somewhat lesser extent, in the Middle East) long before the Holocaust happened, and Jews began assimilating into the wider cultures in which they lived largely as a form of self-protection (the “muggleborns,” in this scenario). However, what we see in the Wizarding World is that the conflict quickly becomes about whether muggleborns have the right to their magic, rather than whether people without magic ought to be treated with respect. Translated to a Holocaust context, this is basically the equivalent of implying that only those Jews who assimilate deserve protection from the Nazis, and the rest don't deserve even basic respect or care. People who routinely discuss anti-Semitism call this a distinction between “good Jews” and “bad Jews.”
This grievous error is only compounded by the fact that every time we DO see writing and behavior that mirrors the forms anti-Semitism often takes, it’s being committed by a “good guy,” and directed at a character we’re not meant to like. The goblins and Snape both embody certain anti-Semitic stereotypes. It is the case that both Snape and the goblins, while unpleasant, are (mostly) harmless. However, the way Rowling’s world works, arousing Harry’s ire while remaining comparatively harmless is a worse offense and will get you more contempt and more ill treatment than being an outright villain. Rowling at one point has tried to argue that Voldemort, her Hitler-analogue, deserves more sympathy than Snape, because Voldemort was never Given a Chance at Love!
But it’s worse than that, if you think about it. Consider the way the Slytherins are treated. They’re considered the black sheep of the school, and although we meet only a small proportion of them, we see all those we do meet behave badly. We are taught to hate Slytherins for multiple, contradictory reasons; for instance, their ambition makes them evil, but most of the ones we meet are from wealthy families and so are spoiled and get to be lazy while everyone else does real work. We are taught to cheer when they fail and set themselves up for disappointment, and we are taught to applaud characters who treat them harshly, even if it’s for no reason at all (remember Fred and George harassing that Slytherin first-year?). We see that many of them are racist. Crucially, they are not alone in their racism—Gryffindors can be and are just as racist and cowardly and contemptible as any major Slytherin who is not a Death Eater or Death Eater-wannabe, if not more so. This I find extremely interesting because it calls to mind an article I found on the topic of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and why so many people seem to think hating Israel is a progressive act. I’m not going to get into the morality of that conflict here, but the point the article makes, in a nutshell, is that many progressives living in the western world are deeply guilty about their own racist histories, and try to escape from the guilt by projecting it onto Israel, a country which cannot fight back and is ruled by a people who are dominant only within Israel’s borders and oppressed everywhere else. Now compare that to the way racial politics in the Potterverse play out—Dumbledore knows perfectly well that nonhuman magicals and nonmagicals are treated with loathing and contempt, but he and the narrative at large instruct Harry to hate Slytherins because they’re “racist,” while simultaneously brushing over anything similar Harry might say or do. I’m going to change the wording of just a few choice quotes from the article so you can see what I mean:
“There is amongst [the wider wizarding community] a deep desire for absolution from a history of racist sins…. This desire is genuine, but it is also typically ‘cheap’…we [in this case, wizarding society at large and Gryffindors who are the story’s main focus in particular] want the absolution, but don’t want to pay the penance.
…
Opposing [Slytherin] offers psychological guilt-release. It is a scapegoat in the literal sense-we can place our sins upon it and, through sacrifice, gain absolution (the goat, of course, actually pays the penalty).… The [wizarding world] isn’t going anywhere, and if it did it would entail severe costs on the people seeking absolution. [Slytherin] could plausibly be thrown down, and if it did it would entail virtually no costs on those ‘repenting.’ [shades of Rowling making a throwaway joke about shooting all the Slytherins here…]
…
[Slytherin] stands in for our own misdeeds—it is the platonic ideal of our own wrongs. We are not intrinsically bad, we’re only bad insofar as we’re ‘[Slytherin].’ Our absolution comes when we’re no longer [Slytherin]. It offers a way to maintain a sense of moral growth and possibility by externalizing the source of the sins onto another body deemed irredeemably corrupt.”
In the real world (so the argument goes), this “body” is Israel and by extension the entire Jewish community. In the Potterverse, it is Slytherin.
Puts a new spin on Dumbledore’s “Sometimes we sort too soon line,” doesn’t it?
“Wow Snape, you’re so loyal and brave and honorable! You act more like a Christian than those disgusting Jews you came from!”
By the way, even if you do accept that the Gryffindors are morally-righteous heroes and the Slytherins are racist, evil barbarians, where does that leave Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw? In the book, they’re treated as innocent bystanders, but there is no such thing as an “innocent bystander” when people are being slaughtered wholesale. In fact, as I previously stated, one thing Jews have been trying to impress upon people learning about the Holocaust for some time is that the bystanders were not innocent—most of them knew that Jews were being murdered but did nothing. If the Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws know that Slytherins are evil racists (and it would be difficult to not know, considering they all attend the same school and the same classes, and Draco, at least, is perfectly content to spew racist slurs in public), then they should confront the Slytherins about their own racism, or they’re just as guilty. This is even a long-standing tradition in Jewish law—the Jewish texts say outright that there is no neutrality in cases of moral dilemmas and that to feign neutrality is just another kind of affirmation of whatever’s going on.
To make matters worse, the thoughts and feelings of the other group that’s “supposed” to be a stand-in for the Jews in this Holocaust comparison, muggleborns, seem to be curiously left out of the narrative. It’s true that Hermione’s a major character, but if you look closely, we never really get her side of the story; just Harry’s assumptions about what she’s doing and thinking and feeling. Harry, for his part, DOES have a muggleborn mother, which, were Voldemort a real Nazi, would actually arouse his suspicion and make him a target—except that Voldemort never targeted Harry because his mother was a dirty muggleborn; he targeted Harry because there was a prophecy telling him he was meant to. We also see that both Lily and Hermione were their world’s equivalent of “good Jews,” who renounced all claims to the world from whence they came and cheerfully and completely assimilated (into Gryffindor, no less). Note that this did nothing to keep wizards from hurting their non-magical relatives—in Hermione’s case, she herself was the one who mind-raped her parents.
In summary, Rowling is Doin it Rong when it comes to discussing the Nazis, racism, prejudice, and basically anything socially-relevant whatsoever and she needs to just stop and get her facts checked.
no subject
A thing, sadly, that Rowling seems to have been less willing to do the more she wrote ...
(Stupid, yet relative rant here...)
Re: (Stupid, yet relative rant here...)
For more information about faulty Holocaust representations in the media, google "The end of the Holocaust book" sometime.
Re: (Stupid, yet relative rant here...)
no subject
I know that some posters here have negatively characterized the war as a “turf war” or a “gang battle,” but that’s because the scale of the conflict is so much smaller than WWII. If anything, Gellert Grindelwald is a closer example to Hitler, because he *did* try to take over Europe.
/he seems to have no charm or charisma, as Hitler did/
He did when he was Tom Riddle. But for some reason, he lost that part of his personality once he was reborn.
/By contrast, Voldemort, so far as we can tell, is only ever interested in self-aggrandizement and immortality for himself/
And that’s another point: what does hating Muggles and Muggle-borns have to do with those goals? At least Hitler believed that the Jews were a threat to Germany. What does racism have to do with achieving immortality?
no subject
One thing that always bothers me with the Hitler pop culture reference is the "he is the ultimate evil". Everyone, including people who write about him in history books, downplay the abuse he suffered as a child. They try to sugar coat his father's alcoholism even though the man started his day with a pint at the pub and drank while letting his family starve. One of his sisters referred in her testimony (of course, she just couldn't believe that her kind, gentle brother knew about the genocide of the Jews, because before the schizophrenia set in he was a completely different person) that he got his "daily lashings" (http://www.amazon.com/For-Your-Own-Good-Child-Rearing/dp/0374522693) for being strong willed, even though as a kid he was the son every parent dreams of. Even though he was starved and beaten daily as a child, he got a scholarship to a private school, worked hard, and studied hard.
Yet, at the same time, everyone is in perfect agreement that child abuse is the ultimate evil. But because Hitler's father's abusive ways caused his son to do more harm he gets his reputation wiped clean. What? Fuck that. And what happened to him as child should be discussed along with what he became as adult (which to my knowledge isn't. I didn't learn about it in school). It should be one of the many lessons we learn from the war. Not just really bad government policies (which we learned all about at school), and racism is bad (though apparently we still have trouble understanding this one) but also this is why it matters what happens to children when noone is looking, this is why we have services to get children out of abusive homes, this is why getting help for mental illnesses is so important, this is why you don't blame the child for their abuse or call it “character development”.
JK Rowling does this same thing with Voldemort, but she blames it on him being conceived through rape and that's the reason he doesn't understand love. In actuality, children have to learn love the same way they learn everything - from the world. Tom Riddle could have grown up never knowing love and therefore been much how she had him. Not because he was born evil, but because he was emotionally and mentally stunted from his abusive childhood; Hitler was not born evil - he did eventually succumb to the family mental illness of schizophrenia (his aunt had the same thing and lived with him when he was a child, which is theorized why he hated mental illness so much later in life, because she also abused him.)
One of the parts I hated so much was when Harry saw the small crying child (that was Voldemort’s soul), and Dumbledore said there was no help for that. I could not concentrate on anything else in that scene, because I couldn’t stop thinking about a small, crying child they were ignoring . . . they learned nothing from everything that had happened.
That Voldemort doesn't act like Hitler at all is one of my major grievances with this comparison and how much everyone is like: it fits perfectly. We cannot learn from history if we refuse to put ourselves in "bad" people's shoes. Or rather let them be anything like us for fear we might relate to them on some level.
no subject
Which brings me to: for instance, their ambition makes them evil, but most of the ones we meet are from wealthy families and so are spoiled and get to be lazy while everyone else does real work
and
The goblins and Snape both embody certain anti-Semitic stereotypes.
It’s just that “those lazy, rich, ambitious people are evil” kind of fits what the Nazi were trying to destory more than “we are the chosen purebloods and everyone below us must serve us or die” does. Now, yes, Hitler did want to create an ideal race. I get that, but that is NOT what the goal of the political party was.
The overarching point is, while anti-Semitism was a major component of the Holocaust at pretty much every level, it neither began nor ended with the Holocaust, but this is something that frequently gets forgotten by society at large.
This drives me up the wall. Especially when it turns into a "the Jews aren't discriminated against like other minorities in America and besides their rich". <.< Um, yeah, first, yes they are; second, them being seen as the rich and powerful was kind of a major part of the Holocaust. It's like everyone learned about Kristallnacht, but no one got the meaning behind it.
Puts a new spin on Dumbledore’s “Sometimes we sort too soon line,” doesn’t it?
To add to this - though it might not really fit. In Christianity there is a bit of conversation about being old enough to really understand and accept Christ as your Saviour. Some Christians Baptize babies and then later when they are “old enough to understand” (at 13) are Confirmed into the faith (we also take classes for this). Others don’t Baptized until they feel the children or adults are old enough to really make that decision for themselves.
I don’t know a lot about the Jewish faith other than you do celebrate a type of becoming an adult at 12 (?), and that you have a lot you have to learn to earn this.
But when you were talking about the Slytherin’s being Jewish (I’ve seen a good article about the Slytherin’s possibly supposed to be representing Catholics, but I don’t remember where) and then this line; it made me think about the idea of choosing your religion.
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It's not necessarily that I think the Slytherins "are" Jews per se, as that, for all the talk of how evil Voldemort is supposed to be because he's "Just Like Hitler"(TM), what we've actually got is the heroes treating the Slytherins the way modern antisemites treat Jews (some of the time)--and that's apparently supposed to be okay!
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Non-Orthodox forms of Judaism (which are the larger communities these days) are less hung up on the actual practice, they view it more as a collection of traditions than something God really commanded.
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From what I know, racism was a part of the Nazi ideology, but far from the most important part. They were blaming the Jews (and the Communists, and many more) for Germany's problems and especially the WWI defeat. The more spectacular defeat they had for WWII was very important in killing a lot of the "enthusiasm" for that kind of political BS.
My earlier comment was about how I was upset about a highly negative review I saw for Schindler's List (It was very callous and harsh with lines such as "Schindler rode a horse up a hill, saw that the Jewish people in the ghetto were being shot, and then miraculously changed his heart."). That film and the book it was based off of (originally titled "Schindler's Ark") has the German protagonist's PoV, but did not in any way ignore the Jewish people and their horrible plight. The film is just over three hours long, and about half of Schindler's screentime was devoted to his interacting with the "friends" he made in the German army and the NSDAP, which is important because he started off as a struggling businessman with just the money in his coat, and within a year he was making enough money to fill entire suitcases. A review I read of book called him a conman who made his fortune thru dubious means but ended up more than redeeming himself by conning the Nazi regime and saving 1,100 Jews from Auschwitz. The emotional climax of the film was when the people gathered in the factory to see him off (Germany has just surrendered, and if the Soviets caught him he'd be shot without a trial, since he was still a bone fide party member), and Liam Neeson broke down sobbing because he felt he couldn't save more people.
(ETA:
tl;dr Check out the film when you have the time. Kleenex would be required :( but the heartache would be worth it)
I belabored so much on Schindler because I see a lot of similarities between him and Snape. Had he survived the war it would be more than likely that he'd either flee the country (Canada would be a good place to go...) or killed himseld because he'd have no reason to go on.
Oh, and someone wrote a fic (complete with illustrations) called "Platform 9.99999..." You might want to Google it out (I don't remember how many 9s are in it, nor the author's name, sorry) and give it a look. It concerns baby!Tom under the bench.
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Joseph Stalin also had an abusive and alcoholic father and their troubled relationship was, tragically, echoed in Stalin’s relationship with his own son, Yakov.
/Not because he was born evil, but because he was emotionally and mentally stunted from his abusive childhood/
There’s another element here as well. It doesn’t exactly correspond to anything in Hitler’s childhood (or maybe it does – I’m not sure), but there’s another problem. Whether Tom was unloved or abused is up to fan interpretation, because it never directly says in HBP that he was, only that everyone in the orphanage feared him. But the reason why they feared him was because of the other element that was clear in HBP. Not abuse, but negligence.
As we’ve all discussed in previous posts, Dumbledore heard of all the things that Tom had done with his magic, both from Tom and from Ms. Cole. Yet, instead of appointing a wizarding guardian who would be able to properly discipline Tom, he does nothing. He allows Tom to stay with people who don’t understand him, who don’t know about his magic, and, as such, do not have the knowledge or power to discipline him. And the same thing happens when Tom is at Hogwarts. Dumbledore never tells the other teachers about him, so they are as in the dark as the Muggles are, if not more so, because at least the Muggles at the orphanage are aware of Tom’s true nature. Tom’s abuse of his magic is allowed to flourish because nobody ever teaches him to restrain his behavior.
And, as has been also discussed in previous comments, the entire system of how children are raised and introduced to the wizarding world is also partly responsible. Because the wizarding world may rant and rave about how important it is to keep the Muggles ignorant about wizards and how Muggle-borns “don’t know our ways,” but they don’t lift a finger to help wizarding children who are born and raised in the Muggle world until they’re old enough to go to Hogwarts. How exactly are Tom and other Muggle-raised wizarding children supposed to learn to control their magic and hide it from Muggles if they don’t have any wizarding mentors to teach them or look after them?
Yes, Hermione didn’t have any mentors to teach her about her magic before she went to Hogwarts and she started out okay, but then again, she had loving and understanding parents. Tom didn’t.
So, I suppose that this element would relate to WWII not through Hitler’s childhood, but, as was said in the post, through the people who looked the other way as the Jews were being rounded up.
/One of the parts I hated so much was when Harry saw the small crying child (that was Voldemort’s soul), and Dumbledore said there was no help for that./
And then they proceeded to have a long conversation, all the while the baby is still wailing and crying in the background.
Yes, I know that JKR probably intended to say that some things were beyond help, but the problem is that there *could* have been help for Tom long before he got to that point. He could have been helped back at the orphanage or back at school. But nobody tried. And now, after so many wasted opportunities, Dumbledore says that there’s no use trying to help him now. And then proceeds to praise Harry, again while the baby is still crying in the background.
/they learned nothing from everything that had happened./
If you want to be cynical, Harry did learn something. In HBP, he’s indignant on Voldemort’s behalf when Dumbledore says that Merope wouldn’t even lift her wand to save her own son. And Dumbledore’s response is to raise his eyebrows and say, “Could you possibly be feeling sorry for Lord Voldemort?” So, Harry learned to squash that impulse and obey Dumbledore’s word.
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Re: part 1
So was there even any place for young Tom to go? Or was he left alone stranded in war torn London?
Re: part 1
Re: marionro's original comments
If there was anything that could've shaken the WW out of their f*£king smug superiority, it was WWII. To borrow Superman's line from The Dark Knight Returns: "You laugh at them. The people can do stuff like this and you *laugh* at them?!" (Minor Spoiler: Superman was half-dead after diverting a megaton Soviet nulcear missle)
Re: part 1
If Grindlewald time as Dark Lord overlapped the war, any Wizarding death would be blamed on him. (Because of course it wasn't those silly muggle bombs, that just something we let them believe. We wizards know the real reason.)
Re: part 1
You know if 19th or 20th century Real World crossovered with, say, Middle-earth, the denizens over there would not be blind to the creative ways of killing people and blasting castles that we Muggles have concocted, especially after they'd seen what damage *one* bomb could do to Helm's Deep.
The Blitz
One wonders why the orphanage wasn’t evacuated, but maybe it was, and in the confusion of the time, Tom fell through the cracks. Imagine some newly-inducted clerk with a checklist, making sure all the orphans were sent to safe places in the country, asking, “Now, Tom Riddle, where is he?” And Mrs Cole (or perhaps Mrs Cole’s assistant), busy and harried, says, “Tom? He’s in Scotland.” The clerk checks off that Tom has already been evacuated to Scotland, and the mistake is never discovered.
In June the oblivious wizards pop Tom onto the Hogwarts Express and he returns to an orphanage that’s in shambles, or one that’s been turned over to the War Department for some bureaucratic purpose. Tommy ends up living rough for his remaining summers as a student, though a wizard living rough can have it pretty cushy even during a war, as Horace Slughorn demonstrates. Just one more reason for Tom to hate wizards and muggles both.
Re: part 2
There is no indication in HP that she recognizes the underlying problems that would lead to the rise of a Dark Lord.
In the post script we are shown nothing really change, so they haven't learned their lesson.
Re: part 3
Well, it's Dippet who was the headmaster who kept sending Tom back to wartorn London (and how come Diagon and the Ministry weren't affected by the Blitz?). If course, it's clear Albus had some influence over Armando and some of the school policies--we don't know how much or how he exercised it.
But probably most of the worst of Albus's innovations came after his elevation, and hence after Tom's time.
Re: part 3
Re: part 3
JKR and History
What can we figure about her view of history by looking at Binns?
It is dead dull
Binns was so boring he died and never even noticed the difference. His classes are boring. He drones on and on about the Goblin Wars ...
So we end up with a series with no sense of history. Showing the understanding of someone who paid no attention, remembering the only vague information.
Re: JKR and History
P.S. Happy Norwegian Constitution Day! The parade starts at four just down the block, complete with accordians.
Re: JKR and History
Re: JKR and History
The WW really sucks in comparison. The people in charge of Oceania busted their brains trying to manipulate history, while the wizards just didn't care.
Re: JKR and History
Re: JKR and History
I am not myself Norwegian. I’m part English and part Scottish (my Scottish family is from Aberdeenshire, so there’s probably Norwegian in there if you go back far enough), but anyone who lives in Ballard is an honorary Norwegian on May 17. The parade really does go past one block from my home.
I really dislike the fact that the British wizarding world seems to consider itself an independent nation, separate from the rest of Britain, completely ignoring British history, celebrations, and government. Technically the Ministry of Magic appears to be an unusually independent subdivision of the British government. The “Prime Minister of Muggles” is actually Prime Minister of the entire UK, including its magical citizens, and the Minister of Magic is one of his many subordinate ministers, making the Ministry of Magic a bureaucratic subdivision that has broken loose from its moorings. The wizarding world would benefit from having it brought back under responsible control.
Sticking a toe (very cautiously) into murky waters-
What the Nazis emphasized to their rank and file was "Blut und Boden". This literally translates as "blood and soil". The meaning is not that the ground should become blood-soaked (though it certainly did), but that a nation should be defined as follows: a group of people united by genetics (common blood, if you like) and by their historical ties to the land. This idea is far from dead. It explains why neo-Nazis, everywhere, are so hostile to immigrants. BTW, there is a famous (rather bad) work of art exemplifying this ideal. It quite literally shows a German hausfrau, barefoot, in the kitchen, surrounded by a lot of barefoot blond children.
And the awful thing about the Nazis and this ideal, as Tolkien pointed out, is that they quite deliberately assumed and perverted a lot of good and natural ideas. It's natural to love the land where one is born. It's good to revere the countryside and have respect for farmers. It's good to love one's culture and one's national literature, language and so on. But Nazism took those ideas and bound them to (1) a rigid conservatism concerning women, children, etc. (2) Racism and social Darwinism, and (3) fascism. Now, here comes another definition, and this is where things get tricky. As I said, I'm not a political scientist. But this is how I understand fascism. Nazism was specifically German, a form of fascism. In fascism, as I understand it:
1. The individual exists to serve the state, not the other way around.
2. The state is personified by a strong leader, who is revered almost like a demigod.
3. The state is militaristic. Serving the state by joining the military and fighting its foes is the highest ideal of youth.
How much of this is truly alien to us? Not much, I'd guess. A major mistake we make today is to claim that we defeated fascism in WWII and made the world safe for democracy. Not so. And this is where the waters get really deep and murky.
So - splashing back into the shallow pool that is HP - how do the Death Eaters compare to real fascists? I don't think they match up at all well, unless Rowling actually means us to take a hard look at the Gryffindor/Slytherin divide and recognize there are at least as many fascists among the Gryffindors. As to the persecution of the Jews by the Nazis, I've said all along that it doesn't compute. The only reasonable comparison to the Death Eaters is the inquisition (and I say this as a Catholic), and the Jews and Muslims are the MUGGLES. The Muggleborns are Conversos.
Hope this isn't too controversial.
Re: Sticking a toe (very cautiously) into murky waters-
ETA
A lot of the ideals of Nazism was already seeded during the 1871-1918 empire if not earlier, such as the militaristic bit. Part of the national-scale "bad mood" that helped the NSDAP gain support was that many felt that they were doing just fine in WWI and wasn't supposed to surrender at all, it's the Communists and the weak government that were to blame (for the "back-stabbing" on Nov. 1918). Their more spectacular defeat in WWII (with nearly all of the troops dead or captured, and the entirety of the land conquered and the northeastern part even made to convert to Soviet Socialism) finally knocked sense into even the most stubborn skulls.
/ETA
For further reading I'm recommending Richard Evans' 3rd Reich trilogy (The Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power and The Third Reich at War).
Re: Sticking a toe (very cautiously) into murky waters-
I don't really want to say more, at least, not here and now.
Thanks for your response!
Re: Sticking a toe (very cautiously) into murky waters-