Rant about Voldemort and Rowling's failed Nazi comparison
By popular demand!
You know, the more Rowling’s conflation of Voldemort and the Death Dealers 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 Dealers 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.