I Would Sell Out the Nation
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?
It was something never quite consistently stated such that we, or the wizarding public, were ever certain of all the details. But enough of the fundamentals were clear by 1980, after Voldemort somehow ‘revealed his true goals,’ that Crouch felt the need to act decisively against his followers too (so this wasn’t just Voldie’s personal desire to live forever by any means necessary). To, it seems, initiate overt violence.
For as terri points out: during the first wave of DE violence back then, we have named deaths OF Death Eaters, including by Aurors, BEFORE we have named deaths -- or indeed any known instance of explicit political violence against fellow wizards -- BY Death Eaters.
So what was it? What did the Death Eaters automatically do or at the least conspire to do, simply by joining the organization itself, that was the legal basis for their detention, torture, and/or execution, and the reason for the paranoid, almost superstitious fear with they were generally viewed by any right-thinking wizards?
Well, obviously they failed to turn in their leader, a wanted fugitive for previous acts of violence he committed alone, and which it was rumored and then confirmed he continued to commit alone after establishing the DEs, before they took up violence themselves. But that’s not quite enough to explain the public’s lingering terror and Crouch’s escalation to Unforgivables.
So what, EXACTLY, was it about the -- always-vaguely-defined -- full goals of the organization under Voldemort that, on the one hand, attracted young people ranging from the poor halfblood Severus to the rich pureblood Bellatrix, and that on the other hand, once publicly known, so spooked adults across the political spectrum that Dumbledore was able to form his own vigilante group against the DEs; Orion Black layered every conceivable protection on his family house around the time his son turned first to, then against Voldemort; and Barty Crouch Sr. could authorize the extra-judicial torture and execution of mere suspected Death Eaters without losing public support? When we don't even have concrete evidence that the Death Eaters themselves had erupted into any public violence first, but we know that several of them were children of politically-influential families?
Families, moreover, who more or less openly spouted purebloodist prejudice similar in kind to that expressed by the DEs and Voldemort himself, and who quietly but legally practiced some forms of dark magic while Voldemort and company made claims to being skilled in such magic too. Who may have, like perhaps the Blacks (with that very, very curious family tree tapestry dating precisely back to formal Secrecy), originally ‘thought he had the right idea’ about wizards being inherently superior than Muggles and the desire to have this openly acceptable to say politically, rather than hypocritically closing their eyes to the way anti-Muggle violence is inherent to the wizarding world, but who -- when they realized something else was part of his goal, immediately and violently rejected him. That is, the adults did when they found out from their children what he meant to do.
Because as a general though not strict rule, the Death Eaters who were actually recruited, rather than imperiused or manipulated, seem to have been brought in fairly young, as jodel and others have noted. As teens or young adults. A very few remained loyal to Voldemort and the DE cause as mature adults, but by far the majority of them deserted him and the full Death Eater cause after he fell, and returned only out of terror of Voldemort himself.
Without, however, in general discarding their blood-based prejudice or their willingness to implement it via more straightforward and legalistic ways. Both unrepentant Death Eaters and those who successfully claimed the imperius continued to hold and act more or less openly on prejudiced views against wizards and witches based on the number and distance of their non-magical ancestors, as well as against squibs. Some of the more extreme tolerate or quietly advocate for the right to use violence against certain of these categories; squib children rarely survive to adulthood, for example. Politically controversial views to hold depending on what circles one moves in, but neither generally illegal to hold or express, nor regarded with the sort of profound and superstitious horror that the mention of Death Eaters evokes.
And, as both Death Eaters and supposed ex-Death Eaters, they also advocated fairly openly for the inherent superiority of wizards to Muggles, and for the right of wizards to do violence to Muggles as needed or at will. That’s one of the clearest and most stable elements of the descriptions of their program that we get, in fact -- something it seems to share with the explicit program of that other dark lord fellow, the last one, the one Albus Dumbledore first conspired with, then became famous and venerated for defeating when he tried to rule the Muggles by force. Seems to be a pattern with dark lords, violent anti-Muggle sentiment.
Except: that’s standard to the wizarding world as a whole, both in practice and in general political acceptance, though some factions soft-pedal it and disavow in theory all but the most limited violence necessary. For in particular contexts, violence against Muggles is of course even required by law. Those memory charms that maintain wizarding Secrecy. EVERYONE agrees on the acceptability and necessity of that violence. The only example we have of a figure of open protest against it comes from a few lines from JKR’s website back in 2005, as recorded by the hp-lexicon: Carlotta Pinkstone, born 1922. “Famous for campaigning to lift the Statute of Secrecy, revealing the wizarding world to Muggles. She has been imprisoned multiple times for defying the Statute.”
Other than Carlotta, it seems, what we see of the wizarding world was and still is virtually united in their approval of this particular form of violence against Muggles, and of the implicit claim inherent in it that wizards had and have the inalienable right to it.
*
Well. It’s understandable where this view comes from, of course, given the history of persecution of witches and wizards that led to the wizarding world’s initial separation. But it’s really morally quite problematic, on a level with and feeding into the anti-Muggleborn sentiment that’s at issue between the various political factions of the European wizarding world during the Voldemort era. Just shades of the same thing.
At least, though, we have Carlotta -- lone Carlotta in her singular campaign of (apparently non-violent) protest -- to look to for recognition of the human equality of wizards and Muggles, and of the inherent wrongness of violently manipulating Muggles’ very minds without consent in order to produce and exploit the very ignorance wizards then disdain them for…
What do you mean, that’s not what it says about Carlotta?
Well. Ok.
We don’t know for sure what Carlotta’s actual motivations were; only that she received, ah, public notice for openly advocated for the lifting of legislatively-imposed wizarding secrecy. That is, for the full revelation of the wizarding world’s existence to Muggles. And that she was repeatedly imprisoned for violating the Statute herself in some way.
Er, I have to wonder, in precisely what way?
Might that set of two sentences in our official description of Carlotta be, not reflective of two separate but related facts, but of a logical implication? The second sentence but a logical continuation and elaboration of what was stated in the first? That is, that dear Carlotta’s violations of the Statute of Secrecy were not additions to her campaigning, but simply its logical consequence? No actual Muggles necessarily involved.
Precisely how legal is it to publicly -- and especially repeatedly -- call even just in theory for the revocation of the International Statute of Secrecy? The single most widely and strictly enforced example of wizarding law we can see, including against children; the thing the various European Ministries seem to spend the bulk of their time and resources dealing with in one way or another. The single most fundamental legal principle shaping the very existence of the European wizarding world, marking the traumatic birth of that very concept and reality, as well as giving rise to all of the major political and cultural tensions still playing out within it, at times violently.
And possibly quasi-religious tensions as well. For all that the European WW is culturally Christian by its calendar and cultural references, it’s a very starkly secularized world in terms of actual religious presence in the public sphere. The closest thing to any sort of spiritual or religious questions or veneration we get from anyone plays out in the realm of magic: questions about the moral dimensions of certain types of magic, and veneration of magical power as indicative of leadership qualities and wisdom. Magic is very nearly the religion of the European wizarding world. And, indeed, it’s precisely these sorts of questions that are brought into play in the Dark-Lord-wars phenomenon through the conflict over that nebulous thing called “dark magic.”
This shift of religiously-inflected questions into the common arena of magic makes sense when one reflects that the paroxysm of persecutory violence that birthed the European WW and the International Statute of Secrecy was the product of a massive religious as well as political conflict: the legacy of the Protestant Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, playing out the final breakdown of the ancient Roman Empire in its most long-surviving form, the religiously- and politically-unifying structure of the Roman Catholic Church over and above the various warring European kingdoms.
And the process of breakdown that produced this long paroxysm of political-religious violence eventually forged, also, the political-legal form of the modern secular nation-state and its supra-national -- international -- counterparts. Confederations, unions, and the like. Which historically have found their fullest and longest-lasting expression in their birthplace on the European subcontinent, and in those areas of the world in which the subsequent process of European colonization and political domination was (is) most complete.
*
I think that, for all that the EWW makes a point of deliberately looking back to and adopting ancient modes of dress, writing, and the like, the thoroughly modern and legalistic, bureaucratic character of it is no accident, nor a recent development. The concept of a separate wizarding world developed and was implemented during the same time period, and out of the same root causes, of the development of the modern Muggle nation-state. The wizarding world exists legally and politically within the framework of Muggle states, in the form of the various local Ministries, as well as the supra-national ICW. The latter’s extent, I suspect (I have lots of notes on this), corresponds at maximum with the general extent of historically long-lasting or politically successful European colonization efforts; the Americas and Oceania may be part of the ICW, or may have their own closely-linked but relatively autonomous equivalents in dialog with the ICW. (Meanwhile I suspect that other areas of the world, such as East Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Arabian peninsula, and possibly parts of West Asia (region of the former Ottoman Empire), have developed their own institutional ways of managing the relationship between magical and non-magical humans. Some lip-service may be paid to or some partial adoption of the principle of secrecy is probably in force around the world, but in different forms in different major areas. Indeed too, one of the common characteristics of failed or failing nation-states is outbreaks of various sorts of more or less literal witch-hunts and the like.)
But for the European wizarding world and its closest relations, the fundamental form of the legalistic nation-state is integral to the creation and structure of that world. Indeed, the EWW exists politically only as a legal reality, both sub-nationally (secret Ministries within national governments) and supra-nationally (the Confederation). The European wizarding world is in fact something like a nation without a state. It has no sovereign geographic territory of its own; its legal citizens necessarily live dispersed within the borders of various Muggle nation-states, and are united politically -- and made citizens of that nation -- only via their shared traditions and laws.
All of which look back and are built on the first, fundamental, comprehensive international legal statute that gave the EWW its birth and distinguishes it from -- and justifies, indeed demands, its acts against -- the various Muggle powers.
The International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy, created and imposed by the International Confederation of Wizards. An authority overreaching that of any national Ministries, which however are apparently responsible for enforcing and adjudicating the ICW’s laws within their own territories, as well as any local laws. Which must, of course, look to and fit within the confines of the Statute and the ICW’s other laws, over and above -- indeed, ignoring -- any integration with Muggle legal structures.
To call for the overturning of the Statute of Secrecy is effectively to demand the dismantling of the entire legal and political foundation of the wizarding ‘state,’ as well as removing one of its most long-lasting and fundamental cultural and covertly-religious shaping forces.
It’s both near-blasphemy and a fundamental rejection of the very idea of an explicit wizarding ‘world.’ A world created for the sake of the very survival of European magical people, at great cost, and maintained in a continued state of traumatized, paranoid fear since that time. And the Muggle world against which it has hidden itself has only become exponentially bigger and more powerful since then, and the wizarding world more economically and culturally parasitic upon it.
Whatever her motives, to the average thinking adult wizard on the street with a basic grasp of the present realities of the situation (though perhaps not angry teenagers), Carlotta Pinkstone was essentially calling for the destruction of their entire world, way of life, and probable ability to survive.
Which would explain why merely publicly repeatedly campaigning against the law might potentially be considered a violation of the Statute itself. Something so emotionally and culturally as well as legally and politically fundamental to the wizarding world is likely to be both conceived and enforced to the furthest practical degree. Whether original to the Statute at the time of imposition, or added in later, some form of legal language to the effect that serious attempts to call into question or undermine the Statute’s power, even individually, are considered a violation of it would be rather likely, I expect.
And of course, as with any law, using or attempting to use force to violate, undermine, or overturn it would be prohibited. As would, quite naturally, conspiring with others to violate, undermine, or overturn it.
*
Which takes us back to Gellert Grindelwald, and the “great wizard” Albus Dumbledore who defeated him, and who later set himself against Voldemort’s Death Eaters -- acting outside of the British Ministry, but sharing a fundamental goal with it. The protection of the British wizarding world, as part of the protection of the European wizarding world, threatened by a Britain-based but internationally-reaching force.
Gellert Grindelwald’s great crime was to make his anti-Muggle war in the hopes of what, again?
Overt magical rule over Muggles. Accomplished necessarily by bringing the wizarding world out of its self-imposed hiding. European wizards can already legally do whatever they need, and most of what they like, to Muggles as long as they don’t expose the existence of magic to them and then neglect to oblivate them afterwards.
It’s the overt part there that’s the great wizarding crime -- legal, political, religious, moral -- of Gellert’s program. What Albus eventually became famous for standing up against and preventing and punishing. Acting outside any framework of the official magical state, true, but in declared recognition and defense of the need to preserve it, against the external enemy. Muggle powers; the Muggle world.
Gellert and his followers’ great combined cultural-religious and legal-political crime was to attempt to overturn the International Statute of Secrecy, by force.
Think blaspheming heresy combined with literal open treason.
A federal-international, not local, crime. The same one Albus considered, then later recanted and publicly rejected in facing him. Bowing at last, if not quite to British Ministerial authority, at least to the most fundamental expression of international wizarding authority. And just that far.
As he did again in the two Voldemort Wars, when he established his (violent) extra-legal vigilante group the Order of the Phoenix to counter the Death Eaters. It spied within the British Ministry, but toed the line of its authority and acted toward an ultimately common goal with it in seeking to defeat Tom and his merry men.
And whatever his or its attitude toward or relationship with the British Ministry, and whatever extra-legal violence they inflicted in the name of fighting the Death Eaters, never did Dumbledore or his Order ever suggest anything effectively counter to the continued maintenance of formal Secrecy.
And thus, whatever the suspicions or tensions between the Order and the various Ministry regimes it dealt with, it was never itself targeted by the (non-Voldemort-controlled) Ministry.
Rather, they more or less agreed that they shared a common enemy. Voldemort. And his Death Eaters.
Who -- aside from the vague mish-mash of something-something-dark magic and some form of blood prejudice -- were apparently most clearly committed to what cause, again?
Well, what did the naïve teenaged Regulus Black think that he, like his fellow naïve teenage peers both pureblood and halfblood, was joining back in the 70s, only to recant it when he got inside and understood more? While his father was busy turning their home into a fortress?
According to his loyal Kreacher: “[Master Regulus] talked of the Dark Lord, who was going to bring the wizards out of hiding to rule the Muggles and the Muggle-borns…”
Oops.
We got distracted by the blood issue and focused on the wrong part of that description of the Death Eaters’ ostensible cause.
*
The widespread outrage and fear that prompted Crouch’s policy to authorize Unforgiveables instead of arrest and interrogation of suspected Death Eaters wasn’t due to some otherwise wizarding-politically-bizarre horror at the idea of anti-Muggle or anti-Muggleborn violence or repression. Nor was it in response to some hypothetical but never described previous instance of appallingly horrific public wizard-on-wizard violence by the Death Eaters -- even Voldemort’s own continuing violent acts at that time were mostly done quietly, behind the scenes, and linked to him mostly by rumor.
It was the belated public recognition that (so soon after Grindelwald even!) their children, including the scions of their most prominent families, were being coopted again by an inherently heretical and treasonous organization aimed at destroying the very foundations of international wizarding society and security!
That their children, bearers of the wizarding world’s future, were being led in the name of that very future into literally conspiring to destroy their own world. A danger that would continue until the Death Eaters were stopped -- preferably as quickly and thoroughly as possible, before they and Voldemort took too many more into their criminal fold.
Neither the British Ministry nor any other European magical legal institution had to go through the messy, drawn-out process of debating and drafting an entirely new set of laws to deal with a never-before-encountered threat when the Death Eaters appeared on their radar. They only had to realize that the Death Eaters were there, what they were, and that they were potentially effective enough to require swift removal. They had already long had all the legal framework they needed in place to be able to declare the organization inherently criminal, once its true goals were known to the people in power.
And also, very likely, the framework for Crouch to find or quickly cobble together legal justification for his policy change on Unforgiveables without too much difficulty or rewriting of things. When it seemed somehow like Voldemort was ‘winning’ -- perhaps because he had successfully suborned some shockingly prominent wizarding scions and managed to get a claw or two into some aspect of the Ministry itself, the ultimate guardian of wizarding Secrecy and safety? In order to push his inherently anti-Secrecy agenda into the heart of the British WW’s bulwark against the Muggles.
An inherently international crime against an international statute, but necessarily investigated, tried, and punished by the local machinery of the Ministry in whose jurisdiction the crime was committed; thus no need to worry about extraditing Karkaroff anywhere. He joined a primarily British organization, and acted criminally within British jurisidiction, so he was Britain’s problem and responsibility. And the Ministry responsible for Durmstrang accepted him back readily enough once Britain had cleared him to safely return to public life, in recognition of his official and practical recantation and rejection of Voldemort and his goals.
Once Karkaroff recommitted himself to upholding wizarding Secrecy, and so renounced his previous treasonous ways.
*
The key inherent legal, as well as cultural-moral, crime in becoming a Death Eater was conspiring to commit heretically-inflected treason.
Treason against the international ‘nation’ every recognized witch and wizard was and is automatically assumed into citizenship of, by virtue of being recognized as a witch or wizard. Partially at birth or upon official notice from the magical authorities in the form of one of its educational institutions, and fully upon becoming minimally qualified in magic. (Though different classes of this citizenship did and do exist.) Their default, compulsory, near-religously understood ‘side’ in this conflict.
The appalling crime we Muggles first see in the commitment of one’s life to the Death Eater cause is, of course, the commitment -- we assume completely knowingly -- to both a prejudiced worldview and to the violent repression of people like ourselves. To a program of anti-Muggle violence and domination.
But that’s not what terrified and outraged the wizarding public. Repressive anti-Muggle violence? That’s normal, boring even, unless you want to debate the exact extent to which it is or ought to be required vs. permitted. The question of how far and how best to integrate or deal with those needing and needed, but potential fifth-columnist, Muggleborns is a little more hot, but is discussable.
But directly re-exposing the wizarding world to potential Muggle violence and domination?
In my comment to mary I called the question of ending Secrecy “the ultimate political hotwire NO MATTER the rationale.” But I was wrong. It’s more than that. To most adult witches and wizards who have realized that Wendelin the Weird is essentially a fantasy to distract the children from the adults’ own paranoid, traumatized terror, and that in wizards’ absence from overt history the Muggle world has become massively more knowledgeable, powerful, and self-confident, ending Secrecy isn’t a mere political hotwire. It’s suicidal apostasy writ large.
But to just the right sort of angry, dissatisfied, rebellious and ambitious teenager? If you catch them at the moment and serve them the right mix of lies, half-truths, and distracting fantasies, it’s just attractive enough of a radical gesture and emotionally-charged possibility that, before they fully wake up to the actual realities of the world they live in, they might let you hook them with it and stitch them up well enough to then be able to find more sturdy strings with which to manipulate, terrify, and use them for your own ends.
The appalling crime that the teenaged Severus Snape necessarily committed in wizarding eyes the moment he swore himself lifelong to the Death Eaters was to declare himself a willing heretic and traitor, unto death. As well as an arrogant and fatally stupid one; unthinking, dangerous, and now with nothing left to lose.
To even, quite literally, let himself be irrevocably branded as such, as it turns out. Though the public doesn’t seem to have known that little detail then.
*
And so, when he woke up and repented and committed himself body and soul to the cause of destroying the Dark Lord and his Death Eaters, Severus need not have been ‘returning’ to Albus’ fold, after being purposefully but unwittingly guided into joining the DEs as a seedling double agent, in order for Dumbledore to speak of him “rejoining our side.”
He was just returning to the original side he had by default been part of by virtue of becoming an adult citizen of the wizarding world via his birth and successful completion of Hogwarts. He’d already more or less chosen the wizarding world over the Muggle one when he went to and finished Hogwarts. A world whose authority he had previously apparently at least passively recognized, that he had it seems been raised to recognize as legitimate and desireable, even inherently good and morally superior. Much like the birth citizen of any country, or religion.
Think less the rise of Nazi Germany for VoldWar I, and more a combination of the Cold War and the War on Terror, with a dash of quasi-spiritual moral fervor mixed in at the roots. Cells of foreign-influenced domestic agents, threatening the WW from inside -- themselves born to the wizarding ‘nation’ but choosing a camp that would see the destruction of that ‘nation’ at the hands of a by-definition external foreign power: the Muggles. Non-‘state’ actors, but acting ultimately (and ironically) in the interest of the wizarding world’s opposing foreign ‘state’ power, the real states of the outside world. Not, as was and is long feared and suspected of the Muggleborns, out of sympathy toward the Muggles, but out of heedless antipathy and blind arrogance that they thought they could take on the Muggle world and win.
Whereas Draco -- who as terri points out Dumbledore spoke to on the tower in terms of “coming over” to the right side -- 1) was known by Dumbledore to be a second-generation DE, born to and raised by necessity with some expectation of loyalty to the Dark Lord and his cause, and 2) had not yet finished his schooling or therefore completed all of the qualifications necessary for an expected first-class citizen of the wizarding world.
Severus’ default ‘side’ was not the same as Draco’s. Draco had nothing quite to rejoin; only (theoretically) to join. Whereas Severus did.
No manipulation by Albus necessarily required this time. That’s optional.
Not that I have any dislike for manipulative Albus theories, you understand! But it just doesn’t need to be quite so complicated this time, is all.
The word treason is all we need to explain some things. With a dose of quasi-religious fervor to add that superstitious tinge to everything.
*
There are three further points of interest that this theory may cast a new light on, that I’ll leave for your consideration and further exploration.
One: what precisely Umbridge may have been hoping to accomplish against Harry with her dementor gambit in OotP, and what Hermione -- as our resident bookworm, magical contracts/law specialist, and Muggleborn in the Trio -- may have understood about all that that Harry didn’t. And just what might have initially spurred her into making such a stark trajectory away from the Muggle world. Like, perhaps, another Muggleborn girl before her did, like so many of her fellows. Drifting away? Or swimming hard?
Two: what Severus may have been hoping to accomplish, did accomplish, and was understood by Dumbledore as having actually accomplished with the revelation of his Mark to Fudge, and whether or not that was planned with Dumbledore or on his own initiative. And in whose ultimate interest the bulk of the fallout of that move was, intent aside.
Three: the curious, ironic similarity in fundamental position vis-à-vis the wizarding world that both the Death Eaters and their Muggleborns targets were in, which would go some way toward explaining Hagrid’s assumption that Voldemort would want to recruit Lily and James Potter, the fact that he did try tossing a ‘join me’ at the eleven-year-old Harry Potter at a strategic moment, and the fact that he did recruit Severus.
Consider: if the DEs are domestic agents going over to the enemy, then Muggleborns are potentially enemy aliens, comparable to the Japanese-Americans in WWII (as well as, in JKR’s chosen historical metaphor for her surface story, to the Jews). And so it makes sense strategically, as well as according to the logic of their blood prejudice, to target the Muggleborns when they gain the Ministry. And why the wizarding world flip-flopped so pathetically to our eyes into supporting the DE regime. Voldemort and the Death Eaters were using the Muggleborns as a distraction, a cover, a red flag for the bull of the wizarding public’s longstanding, confused and paranoid terror of the Muggle world: no, WE want to, ah, “uphold the finest wizarding values and traditions,” as the supposedly-faithful Death Eater Headmaster of Hogwarts put it to the Daily Prophet, when interviewed as to his vision for his new regime. Those faithless, untrustworthy, magic-stealing Muggleborns are the real threat to Secrecy here, the ones who want to turn your children into helpless squibs and to hand the wizarding world over to Muggle domination! WE know that Magic is Might. Don’t worry though, we’re registering them, so we know who they are and can just take away their wands and keep everyone safe….
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
I think pogrebin managed to beautifully and chillingly draw out aspects of this situation in hir AU fic, “ unsticking the shadow.” It’s short and well worth reading; I recommend it.
*
One final note. The idea of a ‘nation without a state’ is, of course, somewhat reflective of the centuries-long historical situation of a particular group of people, mostly but not only in Europe. Bound together by heritage and religion, but dispersed in exile for centuries after the loss of their own country. Language and cultural and religious laws vital maintainers of their sense of solidarity and identity in the face of struggle. Targeted alongside witches and heretics by the historical Inquisition.
The Jews.
The people the real Nazis -- like so many others before them, including the Church -- primarily focused on in their persecutory murderousness, and who they attempted to completely wipe out.
And the people JKR just keeps happening to implicitly compare her bad Nazi parodies to, in either looks and/or emphasis on heritage and tradition and sense of chosenness.
Her bad Nazi parodies that she then has defeated by a bad parody of a Christ figure, sacrificing himself to the combined violent occupier of the land and lord of the false, dead way.
I mean, I didn’t go into untangling all of the threads picked out by my realization about the nature of the DEs’ inherent legal crime, and thus the wizarding world’s political and quasi-spiritual structure, with some sort of expectation of finding cloaked anti-semitic implications everywhere I looked.
It just kind of emerged. Like one of those magic eye pictures that pop out when you stare at them long enough.
Tell me I’m misreading it. Please. Because otherwise…ugh.
(This is actually my own maternal heritage I’m talking about too, though neither she nor I was raised Jewish. So it kind of hits close to home, and I’m trying to work out if I’m reading something external into all this or something. Thoughts? Am I going too far with the shape of the implications?)
*(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.)
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?
It was something never quite consistently stated such that we, or the wizarding public, were ever certain of all the details. But enough of the fundamentals were clear by 1980, after Voldemort somehow ‘revealed his true goals,’ that Crouch felt the need to act decisively against his followers too (so this wasn’t just Voldie’s personal desire to live forever by any means necessary). To, it seems, initiate overt violence.
For as terri points out: during the first wave of DE violence back then, we have named deaths OF Death Eaters, including by Aurors, BEFORE we have named deaths -- or indeed any known instance of explicit political violence against fellow wizards -- BY Death Eaters.
So what was it? What did the Death Eaters automatically do or at the least conspire to do, simply by joining the organization itself, that was the legal basis for their detention, torture, and/or execution, and the reason for the paranoid, almost superstitious fear with they were generally viewed by any right-thinking wizards?
Well, obviously they failed to turn in their leader, a wanted fugitive for previous acts of violence he committed alone, and which it was rumored and then confirmed he continued to commit alone after establishing the DEs, before they took up violence themselves. But that’s not quite enough to explain the public’s lingering terror and Crouch’s escalation to Unforgivables.
So what, EXACTLY, was it about the -- always-vaguely-defined -- full goals of the organization under Voldemort that, on the one hand, attracted young people ranging from the poor halfblood Severus to the rich pureblood Bellatrix, and that on the other hand, once publicly known, so spooked adults across the political spectrum that Dumbledore was able to form his own vigilante group against the DEs; Orion Black layered every conceivable protection on his family house around the time his son turned first to, then against Voldemort; and Barty Crouch Sr. could authorize the extra-judicial torture and execution of mere suspected Death Eaters without losing public support? When we don't even have concrete evidence that the Death Eaters themselves had erupted into any public violence first, but we know that several of them were children of politically-influential families?
Families, moreover, who more or less openly spouted purebloodist prejudice similar in kind to that expressed by the DEs and Voldemort himself, and who quietly but legally practiced some forms of dark magic while Voldemort and company made claims to being skilled in such magic too. Who may have, like perhaps the Blacks (with that very, very curious family tree tapestry dating precisely back to formal Secrecy), originally ‘thought he had the right idea’ about wizards being inherently superior than Muggles and the desire to have this openly acceptable to say politically, rather than hypocritically closing their eyes to the way anti-Muggle violence is inherent to the wizarding world, but who -- when they realized something else was part of his goal, immediately and violently rejected him. That is, the adults did when they found out from their children what he meant to do.
Because as a general though not strict rule, the Death Eaters who were actually recruited, rather than imperiused or manipulated, seem to have been brought in fairly young, as jodel and others have noted. As teens or young adults. A very few remained loyal to Voldemort and the DE cause as mature adults, but by far the majority of them deserted him and the full Death Eater cause after he fell, and returned only out of terror of Voldemort himself.
Without, however, in general discarding their blood-based prejudice or their willingness to implement it via more straightforward and legalistic ways. Both unrepentant Death Eaters and those who successfully claimed the imperius continued to hold and act more or less openly on prejudiced views against wizards and witches based on the number and distance of their non-magical ancestors, as well as against squibs. Some of the more extreme tolerate or quietly advocate for the right to use violence against certain of these categories; squib children rarely survive to adulthood, for example. Politically controversial views to hold depending on what circles one moves in, but neither generally illegal to hold or express, nor regarded with the sort of profound and superstitious horror that the mention of Death Eaters evokes.
And, as both Death Eaters and supposed ex-Death Eaters, they also advocated fairly openly for the inherent superiority of wizards to Muggles, and for the right of wizards to do violence to Muggles as needed or at will. That’s one of the clearest and most stable elements of the descriptions of their program that we get, in fact -- something it seems to share with the explicit program of that other dark lord fellow, the last one, the one Albus Dumbledore first conspired with, then became famous and venerated for defeating when he tried to rule the Muggles by force. Seems to be a pattern with dark lords, violent anti-Muggle sentiment.
Except: that’s standard to the wizarding world as a whole, both in practice and in general political acceptance, though some factions soft-pedal it and disavow in theory all but the most limited violence necessary. For in particular contexts, violence against Muggles is of course even required by law. Those memory charms that maintain wizarding Secrecy. EVERYONE agrees on the acceptability and necessity of that violence. The only example we have of a figure of open protest against it comes from a few lines from JKR’s website back in 2005, as recorded by the hp-lexicon: Carlotta Pinkstone, born 1922. “Famous for campaigning to lift the Statute of Secrecy, revealing the wizarding world to Muggles. She has been imprisoned multiple times for defying the Statute.”
Other than Carlotta, it seems, what we see of the wizarding world was and still is virtually united in their approval of this particular form of violence against Muggles, and of the implicit claim inherent in it that wizards had and have the inalienable right to it.
*
Well. It’s understandable where this view comes from, of course, given the history of persecution of witches and wizards that led to the wizarding world’s initial separation. But it’s really morally quite problematic, on a level with and feeding into the anti-Muggleborn sentiment that’s at issue between the various political factions of the European wizarding world during the Voldemort era. Just shades of the same thing.
At least, though, we have Carlotta -- lone Carlotta in her singular campaign of (apparently non-violent) protest -- to look to for recognition of the human equality of wizards and Muggles, and of the inherent wrongness of violently manipulating Muggles’ very minds without consent in order to produce and exploit the very ignorance wizards then disdain them for…
What do you mean, that’s not what it says about Carlotta?
Well. Ok.
We don’t know for sure what Carlotta’s actual motivations were; only that she received, ah, public notice for openly advocated for the lifting of legislatively-imposed wizarding secrecy. That is, for the full revelation of the wizarding world’s existence to Muggles. And that she was repeatedly imprisoned for violating the Statute herself in some way.
Er, I have to wonder, in precisely what way?
Might that set of two sentences in our official description of Carlotta be, not reflective of two separate but related facts, but of a logical implication? The second sentence but a logical continuation and elaboration of what was stated in the first? That is, that dear Carlotta’s violations of the Statute of Secrecy were not additions to her campaigning, but simply its logical consequence? No actual Muggles necessarily involved.
Precisely how legal is it to publicly -- and especially repeatedly -- call even just in theory for the revocation of the International Statute of Secrecy? The single most widely and strictly enforced example of wizarding law we can see, including against children; the thing the various European Ministries seem to spend the bulk of their time and resources dealing with in one way or another. The single most fundamental legal principle shaping the very existence of the European wizarding world, marking the traumatic birth of that very concept and reality, as well as giving rise to all of the major political and cultural tensions still playing out within it, at times violently.
And possibly quasi-religious tensions as well. For all that the European WW is culturally Christian by its calendar and cultural references, it’s a very starkly secularized world in terms of actual religious presence in the public sphere. The closest thing to any sort of spiritual or religious questions or veneration we get from anyone plays out in the realm of magic: questions about the moral dimensions of certain types of magic, and veneration of magical power as indicative of leadership qualities and wisdom. Magic is very nearly the religion of the European wizarding world. And, indeed, it’s precisely these sorts of questions that are brought into play in the Dark-Lord-wars phenomenon through the conflict over that nebulous thing called “dark magic.”
This shift of religiously-inflected questions into the common arena of magic makes sense when one reflects that the paroxysm of persecutory violence that birthed the European WW and the International Statute of Secrecy was the product of a massive religious as well as political conflict: the legacy of the Protestant Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, playing out the final breakdown of the ancient Roman Empire in its most long-surviving form, the religiously- and politically-unifying structure of the Roman Catholic Church over and above the various warring European kingdoms.
And the process of breakdown that produced this long paroxysm of political-religious violence eventually forged, also, the political-legal form of the modern secular nation-state and its supra-national -- international -- counterparts. Confederations, unions, and the like. Which historically have found their fullest and longest-lasting expression in their birthplace on the European subcontinent, and in those areas of the world in which the subsequent process of European colonization and political domination was (is) most complete.
*
I think that, for all that the EWW makes a point of deliberately looking back to and adopting ancient modes of dress, writing, and the like, the thoroughly modern and legalistic, bureaucratic character of it is no accident, nor a recent development. The concept of a separate wizarding world developed and was implemented during the same time period, and out of the same root causes, of the development of the modern Muggle nation-state. The wizarding world exists legally and politically within the framework of Muggle states, in the form of the various local Ministries, as well as the supra-national ICW. The latter’s extent, I suspect (I have lots of notes on this), corresponds at maximum with the general extent of historically long-lasting or politically successful European colonization efforts; the Americas and Oceania may be part of the ICW, or may have their own closely-linked but relatively autonomous equivalents in dialog with the ICW. (Meanwhile I suspect that other areas of the world, such as East Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Arabian peninsula, and possibly parts of West Asia (region of the former Ottoman Empire), have developed their own institutional ways of managing the relationship between magical and non-magical humans. Some lip-service may be paid to or some partial adoption of the principle of secrecy is probably in force around the world, but in different forms in different major areas. Indeed too, one of the common characteristics of failed or failing nation-states is outbreaks of various sorts of more or less literal witch-hunts and the like.)
But for the European wizarding world and its closest relations, the fundamental form of the legalistic nation-state is integral to the creation and structure of that world. Indeed, the EWW exists politically only as a legal reality, both sub-nationally (secret Ministries within national governments) and supra-nationally (the Confederation). The European wizarding world is in fact something like a nation without a state. It has no sovereign geographic territory of its own; its legal citizens necessarily live dispersed within the borders of various Muggle nation-states, and are united politically -- and made citizens of that nation -- only via their shared traditions and laws.
All of which look back and are built on the first, fundamental, comprehensive international legal statute that gave the EWW its birth and distinguishes it from -- and justifies, indeed demands, its acts against -- the various Muggle powers.
The International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy, created and imposed by the International Confederation of Wizards. An authority overreaching that of any national Ministries, which however are apparently responsible for enforcing and adjudicating the ICW’s laws within their own territories, as well as any local laws. Which must, of course, look to and fit within the confines of the Statute and the ICW’s other laws, over and above -- indeed, ignoring -- any integration with Muggle legal structures.
To call for the overturning of the Statute of Secrecy is effectively to demand the dismantling of the entire legal and political foundation of the wizarding ‘state,’ as well as removing one of its most long-lasting and fundamental cultural and covertly-religious shaping forces.
It’s both near-blasphemy and a fundamental rejection of the very idea of an explicit wizarding ‘world.’ A world created for the sake of the very survival of European magical people, at great cost, and maintained in a continued state of traumatized, paranoid fear since that time. And the Muggle world against which it has hidden itself has only become exponentially bigger and more powerful since then, and the wizarding world more economically and culturally parasitic upon it.
Whatever her motives, to the average thinking adult wizard on the street with a basic grasp of the present realities of the situation (though perhaps not angry teenagers), Carlotta Pinkstone was essentially calling for the destruction of their entire world, way of life, and probable ability to survive.
Which would explain why merely publicly repeatedly campaigning against the law might potentially be considered a violation of the Statute itself. Something so emotionally and culturally as well as legally and politically fundamental to the wizarding world is likely to be both conceived and enforced to the furthest practical degree. Whether original to the Statute at the time of imposition, or added in later, some form of legal language to the effect that serious attempts to call into question or undermine the Statute’s power, even individually, are considered a violation of it would be rather likely, I expect.
And of course, as with any law, using or attempting to use force to violate, undermine, or overturn it would be prohibited. As would, quite naturally, conspiring with others to violate, undermine, or overturn it.
*
Which takes us back to Gellert Grindelwald, and the “great wizard” Albus Dumbledore who defeated him, and who later set himself against Voldemort’s Death Eaters -- acting outside of the British Ministry, but sharing a fundamental goal with it. The protection of the British wizarding world, as part of the protection of the European wizarding world, threatened by a Britain-based but internationally-reaching force.
Gellert Grindelwald’s great crime was to make his anti-Muggle war in the hopes of what, again?
Overt magical rule over Muggles. Accomplished necessarily by bringing the wizarding world out of its self-imposed hiding. European wizards can already legally do whatever they need, and most of what they like, to Muggles as long as they don’t expose the existence of magic to them and then neglect to oblivate them afterwards.
It’s the overt part there that’s the great wizarding crime -- legal, political, religious, moral -- of Gellert’s program. What Albus eventually became famous for standing up against and preventing and punishing. Acting outside any framework of the official magical state, true, but in declared recognition and defense of the need to preserve it, against the external enemy. Muggle powers; the Muggle world.
Gellert and his followers’ great combined cultural-religious and legal-political crime was to attempt to overturn the International Statute of Secrecy, by force.
Think blaspheming heresy combined with literal open treason.
A federal-international, not local, crime. The same one Albus considered, then later recanted and publicly rejected in facing him. Bowing at last, if not quite to British Ministerial authority, at least to the most fundamental expression of international wizarding authority. And just that far.
As he did again in the two Voldemort Wars, when he established his (violent) extra-legal vigilante group the Order of the Phoenix to counter the Death Eaters. It spied within the British Ministry, but toed the line of its authority and acted toward an ultimately common goal with it in seeking to defeat Tom and his merry men.
And whatever his or its attitude toward or relationship with the British Ministry, and whatever extra-legal violence they inflicted in the name of fighting the Death Eaters, never did Dumbledore or his Order ever suggest anything effectively counter to the continued maintenance of formal Secrecy.
And thus, whatever the suspicions or tensions between the Order and the various Ministry regimes it dealt with, it was never itself targeted by the (non-Voldemort-controlled) Ministry.
Rather, they more or less agreed that they shared a common enemy. Voldemort. And his Death Eaters.
Who -- aside from the vague mish-mash of something-something-dark magic and some form of blood prejudice -- were apparently most clearly committed to what cause, again?
Well, what did the naïve teenaged Regulus Black think that he, like his fellow naïve teenage peers both pureblood and halfblood, was joining back in the 70s, only to recant it when he got inside and understood more? While his father was busy turning their home into a fortress?
According to his loyal Kreacher: “[Master Regulus] talked of the Dark Lord, who was going to bring the wizards out of hiding to rule the Muggles and the Muggle-borns…”
Oops.
We got distracted by the blood issue and focused on the wrong part of that description of the Death Eaters’ ostensible cause.
*
The widespread outrage and fear that prompted Crouch’s policy to authorize Unforgiveables instead of arrest and interrogation of suspected Death Eaters wasn’t due to some otherwise wizarding-politically-bizarre horror at the idea of anti-Muggle or anti-Muggleborn violence or repression. Nor was it in response to some hypothetical but never described previous instance of appallingly horrific public wizard-on-wizard violence by the Death Eaters -- even Voldemort’s own continuing violent acts at that time were mostly done quietly, behind the scenes, and linked to him mostly by rumor.
It was the belated public recognition that (so soon after Grindelwald even!) their children, including the scions of their most prominent families, were being coopted again by an inherently heretical and treasonous organization aimed at destroying the very foundations of international wizarding society and security!
That their children, bearers of the wizarding world’s future, were being led in the name of that very future into literally conspiring to destroy their own world. A danger that would continue until the Death Eaters were stopped -- preferably as quickly and thoroughly as possible, before they and Voldemort took too many more into their criminal fold.
Neither the British Ministry nor any other European magical legal institution had to go through the messy, drawn-out process of debating and drafting an entirely new set of laws to deal with a never-before-encountered threat when the Death Eaters appeared on their radar. They only had to realize that the Death Eaters were there, what they were, and that they were potentially effective enough to require swift removal. They had already long had all the legal framework they needed in place to be able to declare the organization inherently criminal, once its true goals were known to the people in power.
And also, very likely, the framework for Crouch to find or quickly cobble together legal justification for his policy change on Unforgiveables without too much difficulty or rewriting of things. When it seemed somehow like Voldemort was ‘winning’ -- perhaps because he had successfully suborned some shockingly prominent wizarding scions and managed to get a claw or two into some aspect of the Ministry itself, the ultimate guardian of wizarding Secrecy and safety? In order to push his inherently anti-Secrecy agenda into the heart of the British WW’s bulwark against the Muggles.
An inherently international crime against an international statute, but necessarily investigated, tried, and punished by the local machinery of the Ministry in whose jurisdiction the crime was committed; thus no need to worry about extraditing Karkaroff anywhere. He joined a primarily British organization, and acted criminally within British jurisidiction, so he was Britain’s problem and responsibility. And the Ministry responsible for Durmstrang accepted him back readily enough once Britain had cleared him to safely return to public life, in recognition of his official and practical recantation and rejection of Voldemort and his goals.
Once Karkaroff recommitted himself to upholding wizarding Secrecy, and so renounced his previous treasonous ways.
*
The key inherent legal, as well as cultural-moral, crime in becoming a Death Eater was conspiring to commit heretically-inflected treason.
Treason against the international ‘nation’ every recognized witch and wizard was and is automatically assumed into citizenship of, by virtue of being recognized as a witch or wizard. Partially at birth or upon official notice from the magical authorities in the form of one of its educational institutions, and fully upon becoming minimally qualified in magic. (Though different classes of this citizenship did and do exist.) Their default, compulsory, near-religously understood ‘side’ in this conflict.
The appalling crime we Muggles first see in the commitment of one’s life to the Death Eater cause is, of course, the commitment -- we assume completely knowingly -- to both a prejudiced worldview and to the violent repression of people like ourselves. To a program of anti-Muggle violence and domination.
But that’s not what terrified and outraged the wizarding public. Repressive anti-Muggle violence? That’s normal, boring even, unless you want to debate the exact extent to which it is or ought to be required vs. permitted. The question of how far and how best to integrate or deal with those needing and needed, but potential fifth-columnist, Muggleborns is a little more hot, but is discussable.
But directly re-exposing the wizarding world to potential Muggle violence and domination?
In my comment to mary I called the question of ending Secrecy “the ultimate political hotwire NO MATTER the rationale.” But I was wrong. It’s more than that. To most adult witches and wizards who have realized that Wendelin the Weird is essentially a fantasy to distract the children from the adults’ own paranoid, traumatized terror, and that in wizards’ absence from overt history the Muggle world has become massively more knowledgeable, powerful, and self-confident, ending Secrecy isn’t a mere political hotwire. It’s suicidal apostasy writ large.
But to just the right sort of angry, dissatisfied, rebellious and ambitious teenager? If you catch them at the moment and serve them the right mix of lies, half-truths, and distracting fantasies, it’s just attractive enough of a radical gesture and emotionally-charged possibility that, before they fully wake up to the actual realities of the world they live in, they might let you hook them with it and stitch them up well enough to then be able to find more sturdy strings with which to manipulate, terrify, and use them for your own ends.
The appalling crime that the teenaged Severus Snape necessarily committed in wizarding eyes the moment he swore himself lifelong to the Death Eaters was to declare himself a willing heretic and traitor, unto death. As well as an arrogant and fatally stupid one; unthinking, dangerous, and now with nothing left to lose.
To even, quite literally, let himself be irrevocably branded as such, as it turns out. Though the public doesn’t seem to have known that little detail then.
*
And so, when he woke up and repented and committed himself body and soul to the cause of destroying the Dark Lord and his Death Eaters, Severus need not have been ‘returning’ to Albus’ fold, after being purposefully but unwittingly guided into joining the DEs as a seedling double agent, in order for Dumbledore to speak of him “rejoining our side.”
He was just returning to the original side he had by default been part of by virtue of becoming an adult citizen of the wizarding world via his birth and successful completion of Hogwarts. He’d already more or less chosen the wizarding world over the Muggle one when he went to and finished Hogwarts. A world whose authority he had previously apparently at least passively recognized, that he had it seems been raised to recognize as legitimate and desireable, even inherently good and morally superior. Much like the birth citizen of any country, or religion.
Think less the rise of Nazi Germany for VoldWar I, and more a combination of the Cold War and the War on Terror, with a dash of quasi-spiritual moral fervor mixed in at the roots. Cells of foreign-influenced domestic agents, threatening the WW from inside -- themselves born to the wizarding ‘nation’ but choosing a camp that would see the destruction of that ‘nation’ at the hands of a by-definition external foreign power: the Muggles. Non-‘state’ actors, but acting ultimately (and ironically) in the interest of the wizarding world’s opposing foreign ‘state’ power, the real states of the outside world. Not, as was and is long feared and suspected of the Muggleborns, out of sympathy toward the Muggles, but out of heedless antipathy and blind arrogance that they thought they could take on the Muggle world and win.
Whereas Draco -- who as terri points out Dumbledore spoke to on the tower in terms of “coming over” to the right side -- 1) was known by Dumbledore to be a second-generation DE, born to and raised by necessity with some expectation of loyalty to the Dark Lord and his cause, and 2) had not yet finished his schooling or therefore completed all of the qualifications necessary for an expected first-class citizen of the wizarding world.
Severus’ default ‘side’ was not the same as Draco’s. Draco had nothing quite to rejoin; only (theoretically) to join. Whereas Severus did.
No manipulation by Albus necessarily required this time. That’s optional.
Not that I have any dislike for manipulative Albus theories, you understand! But it just doesn’t need to be quite so complicated this time, is all.
The word treason is all we need to explain some things. With a dose of quasi-religious fervor to add that superstitious tinge to everything.
*
There are three further points of interest that this theory may cast a new light on, that I’ll leave for your consideration and further exploration.
One: what precisely Umbridge may have been hoping to accomplish against Harry with her dementor gambit in OotP, and what Hermione -- as our resident bookworm, magical contracts/law specialist, and Muggleborn in the Trio -- may have understood about all that that Harry didn’t. And just what might have initially spurred her into making such a stark trajectory away from the Muggle world. Like, perhaps, another Muggleborn girl before her did, like so many of her fellows. Drifting away? Or swimming hard?
Two: what Severus may have been hoping to accomplish, did accomplish, and was understood by Dumbledore as having actually accomplished with the revelation of his Mark to Fudge, and whether or not that was planned with Dumbledore or on his own initiative. And in whose ultimate interest the bulk of the fallout of that move was, intent aside.
Three: the curious, ironic similarity in fundamental position vis-à-vis the wizarding world that both the Death Eaters and their Muggleborns targets were in, which would go some way toward explaining Hagrid’s assumption that Voldemort would want to recruit Lily and James Potter, the fact that he did try tossing a ‘join me’ at the eleven-year-old Harry Potter at a strategic moment, and the fact that he did recruit Severus.
Consider: if the DEs are domestic agents going over to the enemy, then Muggleborns are potentially enemy aliens, comparable to the Japanese-Americans in WWII (as well as, in JKR’s chosen historical metaphor for her surface story, to the Jews). And so it makes sense strategically, as well as according to the logic of their blood prejudice, to target the Muggleborns when they gain the Ministry. And why the wizarding world flip-flopped so pathetically to our eyes into supporting the DE regime. Voldemort and the Death Eaters were using the Muggleborns as a distraction, a cover, a red flag for the bull of the wizarding public’s longstanding, confused and paranoid terror of the Muggle world: no, WE want to, ah, “uphold the finest wizarding values and traditions,” as the supposedly-faithful Death Eater Headmaster of Hogwarts put it to the Daily Prophet, when interviewed as to his vision for his new regime. Those faithless, untrustworthy, magic-stealing Muggleborns are the real threat to Secrecy here, the ones who want to turn your children into helpless squibs and to hand the wizarding world over to Muggle domination! WE know that Magic is Might. Don’t worry though, we’re registering them, so we know who they are and can just take away their wands and keep everyone safe….
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
I think pogrebin managed to beautifully and chillingly draw out aspects of this situation in hir AU fic, “ unsticking the shadow.” It’s short and well worth reading; I recommend it.
*
One final note. The idea of a ‘nation without a state’ is, of course, somewhat reflective of the centuries-long historical situation of a particular group of people, mostly but not only in Europe. Bound together by heritage and religion, but dispersed in exile for centuries after the loss of their own country. Language and cultural and religious laws vital maintainers of their sense of solidarity and identity in the face of struggle. Targeted alongside witches and heretics by the historical Inquisition.
The Jews.
The people the real Nazis -- like so many others before them, including the Church -- primarily focused on in their persecutory murderousness, and who they attempted to completely wipe out.
And the people JKR just keeps happening to implicitly compare her bad Nazi parodies to, in either looks and/or emphasis on heritage and tradition and sense of chosenness.
Her bad Nazi parodies that she then has defeated by a bad parody of a Christ figure, sacrificing himself to the combined violent occupier of the land and lord of the false, dead way.
I mean, I didn’t go into untangling all of the threads picked out by my realization about the nature of the DEs’ inherent legal crime, and thus the wizarding world’s political and quasi-spiritual structure, with some sort of expectation of finding cloaked anti-semitic implications everywhere I looked.
It just kind of emerged. Like one of those magic eye pictures that pop out when you stare at them long enough.
Tell me I’m misreading it. Please. Because otherwise…ugh.
(This is actually my own maternal heritage I’m talking about too, though neither she nor I was raised Jewish. So it kind of hits close to home, and I’m trying to work out if I’m reading something external into all this or something. Thoughts? Am I going too far with the shape of the implications?)
*(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.)