Snape and Harry again.

[Nora Renka]

No: HPFGUIDX 113241

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "pippin_999" <foxmoth at q...> 
wrote:

<snippity>

> Having read Nora's 113106, I agree with it all. I'd only add that  
> I think  there's something, um, wrong, with being so indifferent to 
> the harm you're doing with your persistent humiliation that you 
> keep it up to the point of lasting damage. That applies to James 
> and Sirius in  their treatment of Snape, as it does to Sirius in is 
> treatment  of Kreacher. But Snape and Kreacher are just racist, 
> dark arts loving toerags, so why should we care   about their 
> feelings?

Thank you for the kind words--although I don't think (or at least I 
didn't intend to suggest) that there's NOT something wrong with James 
and Sirius' treatment of Snape.  I just think we ought to ponder 
whether there's something more behind it--just as I am willing to 
admit the eminent possibility that there's something more behind 
Snape's treatment of Harry et. al. than sheer nastiness.  I also 
think it does have to be taken into account that teacher abusing 
student is not quite the same thing as student abusing other student 
or master abusing hateful yet warped house-elf.

[It's a fine and tricky thing to balance contextual/local concerns 
and the demands of a universal moral code.  So far as I know, no 
one's theories do that perfectly...]

> But isn't it their feelings, not their philosophies, that's behind 
> their actions? You can know an awful lot about Dark Arts and not 
> use them. You can be a racist and deplore violence--I don't think 
> Regulus quit the Death Eaters because he started feeling that 
> Muggles and Mudbloods were his equals. 

I have the as-of-yet unvalidated concept that when it comes to the 
elder Potter and Snape, it's an uncomfortable blend of the two.  I 
have no doubt that there were intensely negative feelings, on both 
sides, and as to date, taken out in an excruciatingly difficult to 
read way on Snape by James.  Regarding feelings, there are often  
reasons behind them, even if they are often not the thing that 
appears most obviously on the surface.  I will not 
say 'subconscious', because then I'd have to smack myself hard ala a 
naughty House Elf.  In other words, I suspect that an intellectual 
hatred of the Dark Arts *combined* with a personal loathing to create 
the particular animosity we have seen on exhibit.

I also think one of the points that may be coming up in the 
Potterverse is, perhaps, the moral guilt borne by the at least one-
time Voldemort supporters who nonetheless were not directly violent 
(mere et pere Black, for example) bear in the warping of their 
society.  Mrs. Black's defense seems to me to go something 
like: "Well, I just told my children from birth that these Mudblood 
creatures were inherently inferior and our society would be much 
better off without all of them--who would have thought one of them 
would have DONE something about it?"

> I stand by what I said about James. Harry says to himself that he 
> knows what it's like to be humiliated in a circle of onlookers. The 
> use of the word circle is deliberate--it's the Death Eaters who 
> stood in a circle to humiliate him, no one else.

I agree that there is strong parallelism--very strong.  But...I want 
to be careful, perhaps overly so, in drawing a sign of direct 
equivalency between the two things.  Partially because there is 
something profoundly different in the differential power relations 
between a circle of DEs and a circle of nasty bullying schoolkids.

You'll all excuse me now; I'm going to do like my favorite animated 
character of all time...

-Nora says: vive le weekend, and pass the bottle