[HPforGrownups] Good Slytherin (Was: Re: Thestrals and Slytherins)

[Kathryn Cawte]

No: HPFGUIDX 71191

 
 

bboy_mn:
 
Tom Riddle said that Slytherin was some psychotic mud-blood purging
Nazi, but all Slytherin ever said is that he didn't trust Muggles and
Muggle-borns. Keep in mind that this was a time during which there was
a lot of pursecution of wizards, so he had good reason not to trust
them in general.
 
While Slytherin certainly favored pure-blood, we have no way of
knowing that Tom Riddle and others didn't take Slytherin's basic
philosophy and blow it up way out of proportion relative to what was
originally intended. That wouldn't be the first time in history that a
relatively benevolent philosophy was preverted to suit the wicked ends
of some would be dictator, or radical fundamentalist. 

 Me -

If you're going to argue that (and i have done several times in the past so
I'm not actually disagreeing with you here) then you really should make some
attempt at explaining away the basilisk, because a benevolent philosophy and
a killer snake aren;t exactly concepts which go hand in hand.

So I'm going to address that bit. Personally I don't think the basilisk is
that vicious - after all even when it was being controlled by Tom Riddle it
only managed to kill one person. Really as a weapon of mass destruction the
basilisk has been terribly inefficient up till now. I would argue that it
was left there by Slytherin so that when he was (in his opinion) inevitably
proved right about the danger posed by muggleborn students there would be a
last line of defense for the castle so to speak. I have compared he and
Gryffindor in the past to Xavier and Magneto (for those of you who saw the
XMen movie), partly because it gives me an opportunity to use the quote "I
pity the soul that comes to that school looking for trouble". Gryffindor
believes in the basic goodness of people and thinks that they can hide from
muggle society for ever and that if discovered they will be OK whereas
Salazar believes that muggles would hunt them down if they knew about them
(which looking at human history concerning minorities isn't an unreasonable
viewpoint) and that they need to protect themselves. While the legend says
that only the Heir of Slytherin can open the CoS it appears that actually
anyone who speaks Parseltongue can - which is logical. You wouldn't want it
opened by someone who didn't because they shouldn't be able to talk to the
Basilisk.

I have always said that if Salazar was the murderous psycopath some people
paint him as he' would have done more than talk about muggleborns being bad
and actually gone on to kill them but no one ever says he did - and with the
way Gryffindors feel about Slytherins I'm sure one of them would have
mentioned it. I think the fact that the Hat says he and Goderic were friends
actually supports the view that he wasn't all bad. And after all he can't be
blamed for the fact that his descendent is evil. If the sins of the parent
shouldn't be visited upon the child as many of the anti-Snape people have
pointed out 9and I do agree with that) then the sins of the child certainly
shouldn't be visited upon an ancestor who lived a thousand years ago.

Why is it that Salazar's selection policy is seen as so much worse than
Rowena's or goderic's just because he uses bloodline as a criterion and they
use intelligence and bravery respectively as theirs? I realise that racism
is bad but so is writing a child off (magically speaking) at eleven for not
being perceived as bright enough or courageous enough.

K
*is there an acronym for the rehabilitate Salazar campaign?*