"Despiadado" Crouch and HumanRightsMartyr!Wilkes (WAS: Rosier and Wilkes are Dea

[ssk7882]

No: HPFGUIDX 43010

In Message #40967, Eileen (after having been left a choice canon by the ghost of Evan Rosier), wrote:

> She looks down at the canon Rosier has left her. It reads (in 
> translation from my Spanish edition, as well as I can make it):

> "Crouch used violence against violence, and authorized the use of 
> the unforgivable curses on suspects. I say he became as cruel and 
> "despiadado" as those on the dark side."

> But, it's always bugged listies, hasn't it, that the aurors didn't 
> have the authorization to use "Avada Kedavra" in the first place. 

It's never particularly bugged me.  As discussions of Harry and Sirius in the Shrieking Shack show, there are plenty of other ways to kill people, and I suspect that the aurors were always authorized to use them in self-defense, or to protect the innocent.  


> How is killing someone in a magical shoot-out evil? 

It isn't, very.  Or at least it's a highly justifiable evil.  

But I don't really think that authorizing the Aurors to kill in self-defense was what Crouch did, and I don't think that Avada Kedavra was really the Unforgiveable Curse that Sirius was talking about, either.

A long long time ago, in a galaxy far far away (well...okay, it was actually just in April, in message #37476), Eileen posted a rousing series of Crouch Sr. apologetics in her attempt to coax us all into trying a bite of her CRAB CUSTARD ("Classy, Rich, Ambitious, Bold: Crouch's Unsung Sexiness Tempts All Raunchy Damsels").  

In the course of the ensuing discussion, this pernicious notion -- that Crouch's measures consituted nothing more dire than authorizing the aurors to kill in self-defense -- came up more than a few times, and I wanted very badly to address it even back then.  Sadly, however, I never got the chance.  Now that I've been handed a second opportunity, though, I will happily help Eileen to man this canon, 
in the hopes of blasting that nasty crab-flavored herring out of the water for once and for all.


Here is the full passage (written in English) to which Eileen referred:

"The Aurors were given new powers -- powers to kill rather than capture, for instance.  And I wasn't the only one who was handed straight to the dementors without trial.  Crouch fought violence with violence, and authorized the use of the Unforgivable Curses against suspects.  I would say he became as ruthless and cruel as many on the Dark Side."


Okay.  Two things here.

First thing. Sirius does *not* say "The Aurors were given new powers -- powers to kill, for instance."

What he does say is: "powers to kill _rather than capture._"  [emphasis mine]

In other words, what Crouch authorized his aurors to do was not to kill in self-defense.  It was not to kill in bloody magical shoot-outs.  It was not to use lethal force when such was necessary to provide immediate protection to the innocent.  And it was not to kill when capture was impossible. 

What Crouch authorized his aurors to do was to kill *rather* than to capture.

In other words, they were authorized to kill people who could instead have been apprehended.  

That's serious.  The Aurors are not judges, but investigators; their job is not to convict, but to investigate and to apprehend.  As shoddy and as corrupt as the Wizarding World's justice system may be, it nonetheless does exist.  There are courts, and there are trials, and people are sometimes acquitted of the charges against them.  We are told that a good number of the DEs stood trial and were 
acquitted after Voldemort's fall.  Presumably at least one or two genuinely innocent people have managed this as well. 

So what Crouch authorized his aurors to do was to kill *suspects,* people against whom absolutely nothing had yet been proven in a court of law.  He authorized them to kill on the basis of nothing more than suspicion -- or even their whim.  

In short, he authorized them to kill anyone they damn well felt like, with little or no accountability to anyone for their actions.

Very reassuring.


The second thing I would like to point out here is that Sirius lists the aurors' license to kill as a *separate* issue from that of their license to use the Unforgivables.  

First he mentions that the aurors were granted license to kill rather than to capture.  Then he mentions that many people (other than he himself) were sent to prison without trial.  And *then* he states that Crouch authorized the use of the Unforgiveables.  Finally, he concludes that Crouch had become "as ruthless and cruel as many on the Dark Side."

I have never assumed that the AK was the Unforgivable Curse to which Sirius was alluding here.  He'd already covered that base when he cited the license to kill.  No, I have always assumed that the Cruciatus -- and to a lesser extent, the Imperius -- were the relevant Unforgivables here.


Eileen:

> I'm beginning to suspect that Crouch authorized the use of the 
> unforgiveable curses on people already taken into custody. 

Yes.  Or, for that matter, even on people who in the end were *never* taken into custody.  That, at any rate, was my instinctive understanding of what that passage meant when I first read it.

Now, I freely admit that my reading of this scene may have been biased by the fact that not only have I spent some time working for Amnesty International, but that I also knew full well while reading GoF that its author had as well.  Nonetheless, that was *precisely* how I interpreted Sirius' words in "Padfoot Returns."  Crouch authorized his aurors to use torture and mind-control, and he authorized them to use these techniques even against people who had never been convicted (or even necessarily accused) of any crime.  

Hence, "descended to the level of the Death Eaters."

Again, very reassuring.


No.  I did not like that Crouch Sr.  I did not like him at all.


And I am *very* suspicious of that "very popular" martyr-auror Frank 
Longbottom, too.  


Eileen asked:

> Where in canon do we see the aurors overstepping their bounds?

An excellent questiom.  Sirius is clearly no fan of the aurors, but even he acknowledges that Moody was all right.  Moody was the Good Auror.  Didn't kill if he could avoid it.  Never descended to the level of the Death Eaters.  So who *were* those other aurors?  Who were those guys who were running around killing suspects rather than bothering to arrest them, practicing their Unforgivables on people who had never even stood trial?

Could their zeal have made them "very popular?"

It does rather beg the question, doesn't it?  


> What about Wilkes?

Yes.  What *about* Wilkes?

It's about time that poor old Wilkes got some speculative attention, don't you think?  I mean, the poor man!  (Or woman.  After all, the possibility still *does* exist that Wilkes might have been a girl named Florence who used to snog Snape behind the greenhouses...)  A member of Snape's old gang, killed by aurors in the year before Voldemort's fall, and yet half the time s/he gets left *out* when people try to draw up a DE roll call.  (Witness message #42806, for example.)  No first name, no backstory, not even a *gender!*  

And Karkaroff didn't even bother to try ratting him-or-her out to the Minstry.

Yes, Wilkes is the Forgotten Death Eater, to be sure.  S/he's even more neglected than dear old Nott, or than my boy Avery.  

> Was Wilkes killed after he was apprehended? 

Well, it's certainly a truism that once you start letting your police do things like practicing torture on suspects and killing without having to stand inquiry for it, then an inordinate number of people generally *do* start mysteriously dying in custody.

Funny how that works, isn't it?

> We've already speculated that much of Snape's bitterness stems from 
> the fact that he was forced to betray his friends. If Wilkes was 
> killed this way, that could have been a hard blow. 

> And if Frank Longbottom was involved...

<happy smile>

As Eileen knows full well, I have been plugging for "Wilkes dead at Frank Longbottom's hands" ever since my delurk.

It would explain much.

It would go a long way towards explaining the particularly excessive (and strangely impractical) savagery of the Lestranges' treatment of the Longbottoms.  They were after information, yes.  But they could also have been after payback.

It would also go a long way towards explaining Snape's difficulties in dealing calmly and rationally with Neville.  In message #41873, Porphyria makes a strong case for the idea (which I support wholeheartedly) that Snape reacts so badly to Neville in part because he views Neville as a representative of his own weakness.  Others have pointed out that Neville is an irritant because he is disruptive to Snape's potions class, and because his dangerous incompetence places other students at physical risk.  That Snape simply doesn't suffer fools gladly is certainly a factor here.  So is the
fact that Snape enjoys bullying -- and Neville is prime bully-bait.  A few people like to argue that Snape responds to Neville with guilt because he failed to protect the Longbottoms.  I myself have more than once defended the notion that it is a manifestation of Snape's survivor guilt: every time he looks at Neville, he is forcibly reminded that two of his old school friends are still gibbering their sanity away in Azkaban.  

But it does occur to me that there might be something even more immediate going on there.  Snape responds to Neville with uncharacteristic temper -- and uncharacteristic crudity, as well -- at his *very first potions class.*  His verbal abuse of Harry
and Hermione is calm, cold, deliberate, quite sophisticated.  With Neville, all that he can manage is a snarl of pure rage.  It is a rather striking loss of control for Snape, I've always thought, and it happens before he has really had much opportunity to observe Neville's behavior.  It's only the first day of class.  He has not in fact yet had much opportunity to learn what a chronic bungler Neville is, nor how timid, nor how weak.  And yet he shows a striking lack of self-control when it comes to the boy.

It does make you wonder, doesn't it?  Sons in the Potterverse do have this strange tendency to take after their fathers physically.  Who is Snape *really* seeing, every time that he looks at Neville in potions class?  While Snape did eventually turn on his old Hogwarts classmates, there is some evidence to suggest that he's still not altogether comfortable dealing with the people who actually *killed* them.  He is afraid of Moody.

Finally, if Eileen is correct in her suspicion that there was something untoward about Wilkes' death, then that would finally provide us with a canonical illustration of the excesses of those rotten aurors.  I do think that we may well be handed harder evidence
of that one of these days.  The series is becoming more morally complex as it progresses, after all.  

And JKR *did* once work for Amnesty International.  


-- Elkins (who was highly disappointed that when OTC hosted that "who is more evil?" poll a few months back, Crouch Sr. wasn't even listed among the *options*)