Okay. We’re going to do this now because I will probably not rest at ease until I’ve corrected the unholy mess that is this post. It’s long, I get angry, I’m sorry. So here goes:
1) A bigot is a bigot is a bigot.
If a person is using the language of “threat” and “risk” to deny children - ELEVEN YEAR OLDS - an education because of the apparent risk they pose to adults in the community, then yes, they are a bigot. It’s no different from white parents being antsy because there’s one muslim kid in their child’s class. It’s the same principle.
2) The witch hunts did not start in earnest till the 15th century.
Please; even Wikipedia has extensively sourced material on how the witch hunts really only started in the fifteenth century, in the Early Modern period in Europe. The general entry on Witch-hunts (and I mean come on, all this shite is right here on Wikipedia for you to read for yourselves, rather than relying on some ludicrously false idea of what the medieval period was like) on Wikipedia has this under its medieval period section:
Early secular laws against witchcraft include those promulgated by King Athelstan (924–939 AD):
“And we have ordained respecting witch-crafts, and lybacs [read lyblac “sorcery”], and morthdaeds [“murder, mortal sin”]: if any one should be thereby killed, and he could not deny it, that he be liable in his life. But if he will deny it, and at threefold ordeal shall be guilty; that he be 120 days in prison: and after that let kindred take him out, and give to the king 120 shillings, and pay the wer to his kindred, and enter into borh for him, that he evermore desist from the like.”
(You can read the full text of Athelstan’s laws over here)
Roughly this translates to:
“We have decided, regarding witchcrafts, sorcery, and murder, if anyone should thus be killed and it cannot be denied, they must pay with their life. However, if they deny it, and at a threehold ordeal (three innocence-tests e.g. drowning, fire, blessed-cake) be proven guilty they must pay for it with 120 days in prison, and their family must, after this time, pay to the king/government/tax collector 120 shillings, and the individual must pay wereguild (blood-reparation) to the kin of the deceased and enter into a pledge with them that he evermore desists from doing so again” (shoutout to essayofthoughts for converting the language)
Which in sum follows a pretty common cultural rule concerning magic in all cultures, throughout the ages – you hurt someone and it is “proved” that this hurt is the result of witchcraft, then you pay for it. I think it’s a fairly reasonable kind of statement to make, given that it’s not all that different from our laws against murder. I’m not sure why “magic”, especially in the context of HPverse where magic does exist, is supposed to somehow preserve people from bearing the weight of any crimes exerted against non-magic neighbours… And given the way wix treat muggles in the books – obliviating them at will (hello yes, Goblet of Fire World Cup anyone?) down to torturing them for sport (also, Goblet of Fire World Cup when the Death Eaters make an appearance) and someone once proposing to make muggle-hunting legal – it’s not an unreasonable sort of fear to have imo.
(Keep in mind here, witches and wizards do have power that muggles don’t have access to and this, even though wix are a “minority” community does place wix higher on the power scale than muggles. Muggles can retaliate only with weapons against a force which they know nothing about. Think about it. You’re living in a community with a bunch of people who have a kind of power you don’t know the extent of, besides that they can kill without even touching you, and you have to trust them to be good to you, even if they think you’re dirt and inferior to them. So yeah, this is a case where I’d argue that a minority community actually has more power than the majority community especially in the context of the medieval period. Unless you want to argue that all minority communities ever are persecuted, in which case CONGRATULATIONS! Rich people who control the vast majority of the world’s resources are now a persecuted minority!)
If you want more scholarly resources on the witch hunts, there’s Kors & Peter’s Witchcraft in Europe, 400 – 1700: A Documentary History, J B Russell’s Witchcraft in the Middle Ages and Dissent & Order in the Middle Ages: The Search For Legitimate Authority, this paper on the Medieval Origins of the Witch Hunts from Cambridge Quarterly, this sociology paper on the European witch hunt craze of the 14th -17th century from the American Journal of Sociology and this paper from The Journal of Interdisciplinary History on the Historiography of the European Witchcraft. This isn’t even like, 1/100th of the sources out there on the origins of the witch-hunts/a survey of the scholarship on the matter. The consensus of all of them is that the witch hunts didn’t begin in earnest till the 15th century, though there might have been persecutions here and there. In fact till the 14th century, belief in the very idea of witchcraft and that witches had the powers to do what some people claimed they did was banned. To believe in the possibility of someone practicing witchcraft was as much of a heresy as to practice witchcraft. It wasn’t until the 14th century that the Inquisitions were authorized to prosecute for witchcraft and even then it seems to have only been investigated incidentally during investigations for heterodoxy.
TL;DR: You were more likely to get hauled up for heretical beliefs and getting your theology wrong than you were for practicing witchcraft in the medieval period.
3) The destruction of texts on magic =/= persecution on the basis of witchcraft.
The post mentions that a lot of the texts dealing with native magic practices were destroyed during the spread of Christianity through Europe and while that’s certainly true of Norse magic (I know, because trying to find non-apocryphal information on historical practices of Seidr is impossibly hard) I don’t think it necessarily holds true across all of Europe, or hell, Britain. There’s a fair bit of Irish and Welsh lore which survived, as well as Roman records on the magical practice of druids (how much of it is true, we don’t know, but given that the druids themselves passed their lore down mostly verbally this kind of is a moot point imo) and a decent chunk of folklore magic survived and passed down quite intact…
There’s a few points worth making here:
A lot of texts were being destroyed and counter-destroyed as parts of various agendas during the medieval and early modern period. But I don’t think that it necessarily means that all secular texts were destroyed and abandoned during this period. Iirc, Latin was introduced into the nobleman’s curriculum via both the Bible as well as the Justinian Laws and the Latin classics – similarly so with Greek - circa the reign of Charlemagne (~748 - 814 AD), during the Carolingian Renaissance. Here is a paper from the journal of The History Of Ideas on the concept of the Carolingian Renaissance. This overflowed into the development of curricula at the European universities in the early medieval period. Sure, not everyone could go to University to be educated, but these texts were definitely being studied at the Universities of the times and given that the Arthurania (and its various variations) became popular again in the 14th century or so, along with the rise of the codes of chivalry, and that the Canterbury Tales are definitely a thing which existed; it’s safe to say that the medieval period wasn’t just a bunch of people who suffered from some kind of religious mania and never read/wrote anything else ever. That’s how they’ve been construed in our popular imagination but it’s not necessarily an accurate image.
Given that in the course of my own research on necromancy during the medieval period (because I needed information for fic purposes, of course) I found several medieval codexes scanned on to online archives on how to summon demons and other necromantic practices, I think it’s safe to say that not even writing on magic was entirely stamped out or completely destroyed irl, let alone in HPverse.
A lot of folklore on magic & mythology was incorporated into the church “lore” and survived albeit in syncretic form. I think that’s true of most things tbh, I don’t think you can for a minute pretend that any kind of belief/culture/cultural practice which exists today exists in precisely the same form as it has always existed since the founding of cultures. Cultures and societies are fluid and ever-changing, beliefs are assimilated and discarded. In this case, a fair bit of folklore made its way into shaping how the “commoners” practiced the formally introduced religion. Honestly all you have to do is watch a few episodes of Horrible Histories to figure this out on your own.
4) JKR on Salazar Slytherin and Pureblood Mania:
Now that we’ve debunked the history parts of this post, let’s move on to what JKR herself has written at various point in her books and Pottermore, about the matter of witch hunts and pureblood mania.
In the Pottermore article on Purebloods and to some extent, the article on the Malfoys, we’re explicitly told that prejudice against muggleborns and muggles rose drastically after the institution of the Statute of Secrecy (pretty much expected given that places most likely to vote in favour of fascist & anti-immigration parties are also the places least in contact with people from other races, ethnicities & cultures) and the idea that muggleborns posed a threat because of the Statute only really came into its own there. I think I’ll let JKR’s own writing do the talking here.
Historically, the Malfoys drew a sharp distinction between poor Muggles and those with wealth and authority. Until the imposition of the Statute of Secrecy in 1692, the Malfoy family was active within high-born Muggle circles, and it is said that their fervent opposition to the imposition of the Statute was due, in part, to the fact that they would have to withdraw from this enjoyable sphere of social life. Though hotly denied by subsequent generations, there is ample evidence to suggest that the first Lucius Malfoy was an unsuccessful aspirant to the hand of Elizabeth I, and some wizarding historians allege that the Queen’s subsequent opposition to marriage was due to a jinx placed upon her by the thwarted Malfoy.
With that healthy degree of self-preservation that has characterised most of their actions over the centuries, once the Statute of Secrecy had passed into law the Malfoys ceased fraternising with Muggles, however well-born, and accepted that further opposition and protests could only distance them from the new heart of power: the newly created Ministry of Magic. They performed an abrupt volte-face, and became as vocally supportive of the Statute as any of those who had championed it from the beginning, hastening to deny that they had ever been on speaking (or marrying) terms with Muggles.
- From The Malfoy Family on the Pottermore Wiki
Magical opinion underwent something of a shift after the International Statute of Secrecy became effective in 1692, when the magical community went into voluntary hiding following persecution by Muggles. This was a traumatic time for witches and wizards, and marriages with Muggles dropped to their lowest level ever known, mainly because of fears that intermarriage would lead inevitably to discovery, and, consequently, to a serious infraction of wizarding law.
Under such conditions of uncertainty, fear and resentment, the pure-blood doctrine began to gain followers. As a general rule, those who adopted it were also those who had most strenuously opposed the International Statute of Secrecy, advocating instead outright war on the Muggles. Increasing numbers of wizards now preached that marriage with a Muggle did not merely risk a possible breach of the new Statute, but that it was shameful, unnatural and would lead to ‘contamination’ of magical blood.
As Muggle/wizard marriage had been common for centuries, those now self-describing as pure-bloods were unlikely to have any higher proportion of wizarding ancestors than those who did not. To call oneself a pure-blood was more accurately a declaration of political or social intent (‘I will not marry a Muggle and I consider Muggle/wizard marriage reprehensible’) than a statement of biological fact.
- From the Purebloods page on the Pottermore Wiki
JKR furthermore completely debunks the idea that muggleborns were viewed with anything approaching suspicion during the 10th century with this statement from the entry on Purebloods on Pottermore:
Slytherin’s discrimination on the basis of parentage was considered an unusual and misguided view by the majority of wizards at the time. Contemporary literature suggests that Muggle-borns were not only accepted, but often considered to be particularly gifted. They went by the affectionate name of 'Magbobs’ (there has been much debate about the origin of the term, but it seems most likely to be that in such a case, magic 'bobbed up’ out of nowhere).
So let’s be very clear here. Slytherin’s views were considered outliers at the time which certainly suggests that muggles were not thought of as posing anything approaching a significant threat to the magical community at all - which I think my write-up on the history of the witch-hunts + JKR’s own writing on the witch hunts amply explains. Muggleborns were considered unusually gifted because of their ability to perform magic instead, so it’s more likely that Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw and Gryffindor represented the mainstream views of their time and weren’t necessarily fighting for some kind of airy ideology of bravery/acceptance/collecting knowledge that they’d attached themselves to.
Speaking of which JKR is pretty damn clear that the founders quarrelled over Slytherin’s views on muggleborns. Like, it’s not subtext or in-text propaganda. JKR’s outright written it as part of HPverse history.
Where Slytherin’s views gain traction is after the institution of the Statute of Secrecy following what I think was a particularly bad spate of persecution at the hands of James II – under whom the witch hunt craze reached its zenith. William of Orange took over in 1688, but I’m guessing that by then the damage had been done to the wizarding community and presumably also, William would have had other struggles in consolidating his power before he could get to dealing with the witch hunt business. It’s under this condition of fear and resentment followed by separation from the muggles that the ideology of pureblood supremacy really comes into its own and muggles go from being just odd and harmless weirdoes into the image of a villainous and dangerous Other. This is in 1692. That’s nearly 700 years after the founding of Hogwarts. That’s when muggles really started to be viewed as a threat to the wizarding world. Not during the early medieval period. Not even under the rule of Queen Elizabeth the First. In 1692 during the reign of William of Orange.
5) JKR on the witch-hunts:
The irony of this whole post is that you’re citing a lecture that Cuthbert Binns gave in the kids’ second year, but in their third year he asks them to write an essay on the topic: Witch Burning in the Fourteenth Century was completely pointless – discuss.
In the essay Harry mentions Wendelin the Weird, who actually enjoyed being burnt at the stake so much, she allowed herself to be captured in disguise forty-seven times and escaped each time using flame-freezing charms. The Fat Friar was executed because church members grew suspicious of his ability to cure the plague by poking people with a stick and because he pulled rabbits out of a wine cup so it’s not exactly like the dude was exercising caution over here or even trying to be circumspect. Nearly Headless Nick enjoyed what seemed to have been a pleasant life until he somehow cocked up fixing Lady Grieve’s (lady-in-waiting to Henry VII) teeth and made her grow a tusk (like holy shitballs how bad do you have to be at magic to do that) instead, after which he was imprisoned and executed the next morning in an obvious parody of Tudor justice.
(The Tudors were a whimsical bunch to live under.)
There’s a few lessons/inferences we can make here:
The probability that actual wix were affected by the witch-hunts is probably much less than we imagine they are or indeed, the magical community imagines they are. Wix had a whole variety of charms to keep their neighbours from ever really getting on to them – muggle repelling charms, which we know is a thing given that Hogwarts was concealed by them all the way back in the 10th century (besides being Unplottable and therefore, not-findable by wizards as well, so please don’t trot out their muggle repelling charms as incontrovertible proof that they were afraid of muggle persecution; in all likelihood they wanted to keep the castle out of any conflicts and to keep the children in an environment where they could safely practice their magic without accidentally hurting some random wanderers), anti-flame freezing charms to save them from being burnt, Obliviates to make sure your neighbour never remembers what happened to them and so on and so forth. You would probably have to have been really daft (Sir Nick) or really obvious and careless (the Fat Friar) or some kind of weirdo (Wendelin) to get caught for actually doing magic on muggles. I mean ffs, the magical world can cover up a huge war during the seventies in Britain where muggles are being killed in addition to magical folk and you want to talk about how they were terrified of exposing the Statute? Hon, that’s your answer right there.
The community probably most at risk for being persecuted for magic is DING DING DING YOU GUESSED IT: MUGGLEBORNS. Guess why? Because the kids actually live with muggles and are less able to control their magic in their childhood and are actually at risk of exposing their magic (and probably putting their families in danger from society) to people at large. notyourexrotic expresses this much better over here in this post. Hogwarts would have been protection for these people, but no, what we’re doing here is what literally every anti-immigration politician fuck has done in the past few years and talked about how muggleborns would pose a “threat” to the stability of magical society because of the risk they posed in exposing their society to the muggle world. Yeah, maybe if you gave them the support they needed they wouldn’t be at risk of doing so.
Leading off from this, it’s also likely that a high proportion of muggles were impacted by this as well, especially if they had muggleborn kids.
Where I imagine the witch hunts really would have an impact on pureblood wix/wix communities proper is when whole villages were being investigated for witchcraft which honestly was something which only really started happening in the 16th-17th century (especially under James II).
Also spies, really? An eleven year old is going to want to be a spy on people who do magic because??? ????? ????????? I can think of scenarios where a seventeen year old might agree to do something like that but the only scenario where I can imagine such a thing happening is when the seventeen year old has been isolated and injured and hurt by magical society enough that they think it’s worth betraying them to find some kind of home for themselves among a society which has promised to reward it, in this case, muggle society. Like. In which case, the people clearly at fault here would be MAGICAL SOCIETY. For injuring a muggleborn on the principle that they were a muggleborn.
Salazar Slytherin has nothing to stand on concerning his prejudice. Nothing to legitimate it at all.
Now that we’ve covered the historical accuracy of witch hunts, who they would have been most likely to have affected and how this fear of muggles is directly connected to the institution of the Statute of Secrecy, I think it’s safe to say that we can make this inference about wizarding history: it’s not objective.
I mean, history in general is not objective. What you have is multiple perspectives about a series of events. In this instance, we get Cuthbert Binns’ version of history which as we’ve seen over here, has little to no basis in history – either in real life, or in the context of HPverse. We know that the curriculum at Hogwarts is overseen by the Board of Governors, who consist of men like Lucius Malfoy, as well as the Ministry of Magic – which happens to be in the pockets of men like Lucius Malfoy. We also know that Cuthbert Binns has been around for a long long time, so it’s safe to say that he hasn’t really acquired any new perspectives on history or on muggles or muggle-wizard history/relationships for a long long time.
In which case, it all begs the question: just how accurate is Binns’ narrative of witch burnings? Is he simply reproducing a version of history which has been produced and reproduced over and over again since the institution of the Statute of Secrecy, to justify the actions of wix and moreover, to justify their hatred of muggles? Is he a reliable narrator here, or is JKR employing an unreliable narrator to tell us how wizards think of their history – supplying ample information on the side to show us just how imbued with propaganda and pureblood ideology this version of history is?
I think that this is very much what JKR is doing here and to pretend otherwise is disingenuous. If Cuthbert Binns is a reliable mouthpiece, then so too is Severus Snape, Barty Crouch as Mad Eye, Dolores Umbridge, Gilderoy Lockhart, Quirinius Quirrell – any teacher, for that matter, at Hogwarts. But I think the books spent enough time showing us just why this is not so for us to not fall into the same trap here!
7) The Chamber of Secrets.
A few things. JKR has told us explicitly that Salazar put a basilisk in there. JKR has also told us explicitly on Pottermore and in the books as well, that Slytherin and the others quarrelled over the matter of letting in students of different blood purity. We’ve also seen JKR’s own writing on the prevalent views on Muggleborns at the time, so it’s clear that Slytherin was a statistical outlier.
Look at the structure of the Chamber of Secrets and tell me what about it suggests that it is a “panic” room. Here are quotes from Chapter 17, Slytherin’s Heir, from The Chamber of Secrets:
And then, at last, as he crept around yet another bend, he saw a solid wall ahead on which two entwined serpents were carved, their eyes set with great, glinting emeralds.
He was standing at the end of a very long, dimly lit chamber. Towering stone pillars entwined with more carved serpents rose to support a ceiling lost in darkness, casting long,black shadows through the odd, greenish gloom that filled the place.
He pulled out his wand and moved forward between the serpentine columns. Every careful footstep echoed loudly off the shadowy walls. He kept his eyes narrowed, ready to clamp them shut at the smallest sign of movement. The hollow eye sockets of the stone snakes seemed to be following him. More than once, with a jolt of the stomach, he thought he saw one stir.
Then, as he drew level with the last pair of pillars, a statue high as the Chamber itself loomed into view, standing against the back wall.
Harry had to crane his neck to look up into the giant face above: It was ancient and monkeyish, with a long, thin beard that fell almost to the bottom of the wizard’s sweeping stone robes, where two enormous gray feet stood on the smooth Chamber floor.
… watched Riddle stop between the high pillars and look up into the stone face of Slytherin, high above him in the half-darkness. Riddle opened his mouth wide and hissed — but Harry understood what he was saying… . “Speak to me, Slytherin, greatest of the Hogwarts Four.”
Harry wheeled around to look up at the statue, Fawkes swaying on his shoulder. Slytherin’s gigantic stone face was moving. Horrorstruck, Harry saw his mouth opening, wider and wider, to make a huge black hole. And something was stirring inside the statue’s mouth. Something was slithering up from its depths.
Something huge hit the stone floor of the Chamber. Harry felt it shudder — he knew what was happening, he could sense it, could almost see the giant serpent uncoiling itself from Slytherin’s mouth.
Everything about the structure, from the snakes twined around the pillars and the doors with emeralds, mind you, in the snakes eyes, to the giant statute of Salazar Slytherin, suggests less place to retreat to in time of emergency and more “shrine to Salzar Slytherin”.
Here’s an excerpt from another meta I wrote a little while ago:
The Chamber of Secrets itself is such an interesting room because like. If ever there was a room as steeped in pure ideology, it’s the chamber? The whole structure revolves around Salazar Slytherin; it’s a self-glorificatory room and tbh that’s always what I’ve wondered a little about Slytherin and its obsession with blood purity – if it was not a kind of narcissistic self-worship that became reified into this idea that blood really was the source of magical power and virtue in the wizarding world. The flip side to murdering people for their supposed inferiority is the glorification of the self – which is something you see a lot in fascist art and propaganda; all based around either a single glorious figure, or an idealized figure that people are meant to aspire to. I think that’s very much something that’s going on in the Chamber of Secrets and the entrance being situated in the girl’s toilet is something which amused me no end because again, JKR strikes with a visual pun, but also again we get the “submerged in ideology” image, because descending down this path gives you people willing to murder children for being ‘inferior’ and having the wrong kind of blood and posing a ‘threat’ to the superiority of pureblood society.
… the Chamber of Secrets is pure fascist ideology embodied, it is not a panic room. Everything about its architecture is reminiscent of the kind of architecture you’d get in a totalitarian fascist state and it has a fucking living declaration of war and genocide (the basilisk) living inside it, put over there by the man who created the room.
I think the description of the room speaks for itself and the fact that JKR has independently confirmed that Slytherin did put the basilisk in there, it’s safe to assume that Slytherin also set the code that would make his statue release the basilisk from within its depths – which imo, I think is pretty telling about the kind of person Salazar Slytherin was. I don’t think he really cared about the wizarding world at all, I think he care more for his idea of it and for him, it was important to preserve that idea and that ideal which he had conceived of – a typical tenet of fascist ideology – and to do so, he actually hid a goddamn weapon of war inside a school full of children with the intent that some day one of his heirs would continue his genocide on his behalf.
WHICH BRINGS ME TO MY LAST POINT
8) All of this reminds me disturbingly of the kind of rhetoric used to defend fascists, racists and people who have committed genocide and large scale ethnic cleansings.
Sure, Salazar could have killed muggleborns in any number of different ways if he wanted to. But the thing about ethnic cleansings and genocides is that the violence is rarely clinical or efficient. There is a huge symbolic element to violence. Arjun Appadurai more or less expresses this idea in his paper Dead Certainty: Ethnic Violence in the Era of Globalization. The gist of his analysis, based on the ethnic cleansing of Tutsis during the Rwandan Genocide of 1995, states that the violence enacted on the bodies of those being killed was never just about killing them, but was performed in such a way as to symbolize their “different-ness” from Hutu bodies – even though it is nearly impossible to distinguish between who is and who isn’t. The form of violence enacted on their bodies serves as a marker and a distinguisher. I think it’s a point worth bringing into the discussion here because it’s exactly what Bellatrix does when she carves the word mudblood into Hermione’s arm. There is no difference, magically, between her and Hermione – carving that word there makes all the difference.
I just want this quote here to illustrate why this kind of violence is never satisfying and why it continues and moreover, why it continues to justify itself as “rational” and “acceptable”:
“Of course the violent epistemology of bodily violence, the `theatre of the body’ on which this violence is performed, is never truly cathartic, satisfying, or terminal. It only leads to a deepening of social wounds, an epidemic of shame, a collusion of silence, and a violent need for forgetting. All these [acts] add fresh underground fuel for new episodes of violence. This is also partly a matter of the pre-emptive quality of such violence: let me kill you before you kill me. Uncertainty about identification and violence can lead to actions, reactions, complicities, and anticipations that multiply the pre-existing uncertainty about labels. Together, these forms of uncertainty call for the worst kind of certainty: dead certainty.”
Everything about the Chamber of Secrets and the basilisk being placed there to kill muggleborns is symbolic. Salazar is the one who cares about protecting blood purity, it is his face that the wizarding world must look to when the time comes to rid themselves of “the threat within”. He chooses a serpent to symbolize himself – and tbh, if I wanted to there’s probably a whole level of Freudian analysis we can make here, but lbr, the Chamber of Secrets is pretty much a kind of hypermasculine fantasy without even getting into talking about how Salazar chooses a snake; a symbol not only of cunning, but of fertility, luck and protection – and to enact violence upon muggleborns & muggles. It’s almost too obvious in its symbolism, but here we are with a very clear message being sent out: that muggles and muggleborns do not deserve protection, they are not the kind of population that is to be protected and they will be murdered by this symbol of all of these things because they are less than human and the “evil within”.
Speaking of which, so much of the rhetoric in this post focuses around muggleborns as the “evil within” or the “threat within”. I’m genuinely curious here, does no one see the parallels between this kind of language and the language used to justify the persecution of immigrants, minorities and for fuck’s sake, used to justify the Holocaust? I think tumblr user brotheralyosha puts it best here in this reblog of a post I made:
The idea that “foreigners” in a community are really spies for outside powers who might destroy the community from the inside, and that therefore need to be kept separate and defended against, is a fundamental ideological component of fascism and white supremacy.
Here’s a poster, by the way, from the films which more or less centre around the whole crux of this post – muggleborns posing a threat to wizarding society from inside. It’s Death Eater propaganda, for the record:
The reason I’ve sat down to write a 5k word rant about this post, with links to sources and stuff, is because I am genuinely disturbed that these are things we can say and endorse unironically in fandom because they form the crux of real world ideologies that have been used to murder people on the basis of race, religion, ethnicity and sexuality. This is exactly the kind of defence that has been used to bolster their arguments.
You know what I find invariably when people mention a “threat” to their societies?
It’s the powerful majority speaking about a minority they have been made aware of, which pose a threat to the social norms and structures they have imposed on themselves to govern their lives. There is almost never any actual threat, beyond a hysterically exaggerated one – remember what I said earlier about the places most willing to vote in right wing fascists being the ones with the least diverse populations, repeat that again over and over again to yourself – which focuses on the idea of a “pure” society which must be preserved. Societies are not pure, cultures are not pure; they have always been syncretic, they have always been changing, they have always been fluid and dynamic and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying.
I’m sorry but J K Rowling did not write seven books of what amounts to a war against this kind of ideological defence – Salzar Slytherin actually had the right idea, he was the only founder who cared about the wizarding world but history pilloried him as “paranoid” and “evil” because he chose to take “precautions” against the “danger within” (honestly, do you think there aren’t actual Nazis and Neo-Nazis and Anti-Semitists and racists and fascists who are spouting this shit in defence of Hitler right now? Let me tell you, there probably are!) – to have fandom spout it back in defence of a character in the name of redeeming Slytherin house from its tarnished and “false” image in the books. She deconstructed the whole mythos of muggleborns being a threat, both historically and in the present day to show just how wrong Salazar Slytherin, Voldemort and the Death Eaters were in their beliefs. Congratulations! You have missed a crucial point of the Harry Potter books in favour of redeeming a character because you want to give kids who are sorted into Slytherin “representation”.
Redeem Slytherin house as much as you want. But don’t you dare use the defensive language of racists, fascists and neo-nazis in your posts in an effort to “redeem” a character in a bid for whatever twisted-ass idea of “representation” you’ve conjured up for kids who are scared of being sorted into Slytherin on Pottermore. There is a line and that line has been fucking crossed here and I am furious, but even more I am frightened because this is the sort of language that has been employed to tell me, an Indian immigrant living abroad, that I am a threat to all that is good and noble about UK society and here we are, with fandom using it unironically in defence of a character that JKR left no ambiguity whatsoever over concerning their bigotry.
Please please be critical of the ways in which you choose to headcanon and defend characters who are clearly portrayed as bigots in the text!
It’s shit like this which makes me want to leave fandom.
Feel free to reblog this.
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