death to capslock

I promise I'm still chipping away at Indestructible.

But after I responded to mary's comment on my latest essay, discussing Severus' motivation for joining the DEs, I had another small revelation that snapped some massive realizations about the WW and the HP books into focus for me.* Enough strands for another essay series if I try to follow them all out. I may do that later; I have notes. But I want to finish Indestructible first.

So for now I'll just sketch out the inital revelation I had, because it relates directly to Severus, and to a question terri tackled here a little while ago: why did Dumbledore speak of "Snape's rejoining our side" when he turned his coat?

Now, terri did a masterful job outlining a convincing expansion of the manipulative!Dumbledore theory to explain that wording. And it works - it still works an additional gloss over top of what I'm going to propose here, if you want to keep it. I just don't think it's strictly necessary in order to explain Dumbledore's wording.

I think the most likely explanation is actually quite simple. Indeed, it's one of those things that is so simple and obvious it easily goes unspoken, and so gets competely overlooked. But it goes to the heart of a number of puzzling questions and apparent inconsistencies about the Death Eaters, their goals, and their - narrative and WW-political - treatment, some of which terri herself noted long ago in her look at the DEs in the 70s.

By which I mean: what crime do we know, with absolute certainty, that Severus actually did commit as a Death Eater before his conversion? Leaving aside the moral questions for a moment to focus on the judicial. What legal transgression or transgressions was Severus guilty of, that we're certain both Dumbledore and the Ministry knew of at that point, that established him as having definitively been on 'the other side' previously?

Before he handed over that prophecy. Whatever the exact legal issues at play there were, and whatever the Ministry officially knew about that matter at the time of his hearing, it was a one-time chance occurrence -- he was already Death Eater before the incident.

Right. He was a Death Eater. Voluntarily oathed and branded as one; he had formally committed himself to their cause. He was by definition on the ‘other side.’ And thus inherently a criminal, whatever other illegal acts he might or might not have committed or been alleged to have committed then. (And we don't hear of much, do we?)

Being a Death Eater alone was illegal.

And not only illegal, but itself a crime so severe that, barring any plea deals, it could earn one life in Azkaban; and so inherently frightening that, even before we have evidence of any overt violence by Death Eaters themselves (leaving aside Voldemort himself), a canny man with Ministerial ambitions could and did authorize, to broad public support, the extra-judicial torture or execution of anyone merely suspected of this crime. Terrible enough more than a decade later that a convicted Death Eater who escaped could be given the Kiss -- before Voldemort himself returned.

To be known as a voluntary Death Eater was to establish oneself as the most dangerous and untrustworthy sort of person. Potentially capable of any atrocity. Merely because of the nature of the cause one was willing to commit one’s life to. A cause less acceptable to the public, note, than allowing demons to consume people’s souls or slowly torture them into insanity as punishment for crimes against wizarding political-legal institutions. Naturally the reason for the Death Eaters’ illegality was this avowed cause.

It was…what again? Remind me.

The Death Eater organization was outlawed why? What, specifically, was the most horrific crime inherent to their stated program?

What appalling crime do we know that Severus therefore must unavoidably have advocated for and conspired to commit the moment he vowed himself one of them?

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*(And I do mean massive: everything from the fundamental political structure of the European WW; to why Dark Lords have been a repeated problem for it from the beginning and will continue to be so; to just how fully the metaphor of being conquered by Death by trying to outrun it is embedded in the structure of the Potterverse; to how the combination of JKR's bad Christ and Nazi parodies produce an appallingly deep structural anti-semitism to the Potterverse narrative. -- I'll just note: it's all to do with secrecy. Every strange beam that we keep bumping our heads against and weird gap we keep putting our feet through ultimately relates back to the single most essential fact shaping the European Wizarding World: the imposition of the International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy by the International Confederation of Wizards.)