The Nature of Deatheaters: A Harry Potter thread...

[frigidmagi]

I no longer work at the movie theater, while I'll miss many of my coworkers, I won't miss the job. But my last day there I had an interesting conversation which led to this thread.

As you might guess there's alot of Harry Potter fans there (shocking I know) making it a rather safe topic of discussion, even when it's movie fans vs book fans. So it's been chewed over alot, with the consensus being among other things that I overthink it.

What came up was Deatheaters = Nazis and of course Tom (I'm not calling him by his silly made up name. He's Tom and he can damn well deal with it) is Hitler. But when I think about it, it doesn't work. At all.

The Deatheaters are a subversive group of whom many members are part of the wealthy and powerful. They operate in underground cells and launch terrorists attacks on those they disapprove of (pro-muggle wizards, muggle born and halfbloods) marking the scene of their crimes with recognizable mark meant to install fear. They wear masks and robes to hide their identity from a government seeking to destroy them and have segments of the population openly sympathetic to their aims and actions.

The Nazis were a public political party and a government, the deatheaters don't look or act like SA or SS units even before Hitler's election. They capitalized on the weakness of Weimar Germany both political and economical. Promising to return Germany to power after the lose of WWI. The Deatheaters on the other hand don't have this narrative even in Harry's day. Their narrative is Keep The Mudblood Down, Terrorize the Muggle. They embark in illegal rampages through the homes and communities of the people they hate, killing and destroying and daring authority to stop them.

These guys? These guys are KKK. The Pureblood families of the Potterverse have clearly seen better days, there are fewer and fewer of them and they do not hold power. However the signs of them having once held power are there, the wealth many of them have, the irrational demand to be treated as important. This is an elite that is either out or on its way out and knows it. Much like the white land owner class in the antebellum south and the reaction is the same. To seek to return society to a form they prefer through terrorism and rebellion.

[The Minx]

Deatheaters as the KKK makes a lot more sense than Nazis. I think the Nazis loom very large in the British subconscious, but the KKK not so much, and since Rowling is British, she uses that analogy.

[frigidmagi]

That's kinda my point, the Deatheaters fail as an analogy to Nazis. Either Rowlings wasn't willing to go far enough to make them creditable nazis or she didn't grasp enough of the elements of nazism to make it work.

Hell to be honest, Tom is no Hitler. Hitler was able to sway crowds to his side, whip them into frenzies. There are reports that even Jewish listeners found themselves screaming along with the mob. Hitler had a mass following and the adoration of the mob. The only who adores Tom is Bella and she's so fucking crazy that the other Deatheaters think she's off her rocker. For that matter we never see Tom really apply charisma to the masses of the wizardling world only dropping small amounts on his followers, very small. For the most part he led with utter fear and it's easy to see the sheer contempt he has for them. It simply doesn't work.

[Comrade Tortoise]

I have a somewhat different take on it. In many ways, the Wizards in Potterverse have not advanced past say, the 17th century. Their banks dont invest, instead charging a fee for storage. They operate on a gold standard, and noble houses still hold a large amount of power, even if that power is in decline.

Over all of that, you have the House students and thus individuals get sorted in to. I dont know how canon this is, but it seems to me that established wizarding families would groom their children to be sorted into a house. Ravenclaws would naturally raise their children to appreciate books etc. Muggleborns would go to a house the suits their personality, however, to be really good at being a Slytherin (ambitious, scheming etc) you pretty much have to be groomed for it. Few children naturally have the sort of guile that would allow them to be successful in that House, so any that are not members of established noble families (who of course are ambitious, jockey for influence etc by their very nature) would be under-represented, while muggleborns and commoner wizarding families would be over-represented in the other houses.

What I see here is not something like the KKK. What i see here is the sort of dynamic you might see in the period leading up to the french revolution, but with a Nazi flair. You have a group of noble families (over-represented in house Slytherin) trying to maintain their power and influence in the face of commoners, low-born magical peasants etc. Valdemort rises to power by playing upon their fears of losing power, and their hatred for those filthy peasants who are trying to rise above their station, and uses it to form a blood-purist ideology that can unite them, even though they would otherwise be inclined to fight amongst eachother. He controls them by controlling the ideology, and also through fear of horrific reprisals.

[General Havoc]

I sort of agree with CT on this one, and it furthers my theory that the wizarding world badly needs to have the rest of the muggle world take it over for a while.

[The Cleric]

We don't see how Voldemort interacted with people before his first destruction, so it's possible there was some kind of charismatic buildup, descent into madness (or more accurately, revelation of the madness that had been there all along), then the reprieve. The books paint a picture of desperation and near-collapse before the Potter intervention, which does mesh well with the Britain-during-WWII motif. The power distribution does not however, with a much smaller population and people wielding such power on an individual basis that it's hard to draw true parallels to anything.