Dumbledore the General

[xcpublishing]

No: HPFGUIDX 124266


Phoenixgod2000 writes:

>You could be right that in the first war the Order was what was 
>standing between Voldemort and total victory against the Ministry 
>but in the current conflict he is doing very little IMO.  The fact 
>that he is not affiliated with the government gives them greater 
>power to act, not less.  

Phoenix, I'm a Gemini and I'm beginning to think you're my long lost 
twin.  Dumbledore lost all credibility in OoP for me with his mind-
numbingly stupid decision not to tell Harry anything about the 
prophecy.  (I didn't want you to be upset that you'd probably have to 
kill the evil-snakey beast creature that murdered your parents and 
tried to kill you four or five times already) AND to do nothing 
proactive to trap Voldemort, even though he knew LV was desperate to 
get his hands on the thing - when you have something the enemy wants, 
the ball is in your court.  DD had Harry and the prophecy both and he 
did nothing.

>Name me a single thing that DD did that was proactive. Guarding 
>Harry wasn't. It was a passive preparation against an assassination 
>attempt.  DD could have gone after the DEs or dark creatures most 
>likely to go after Harry, but he didn't.

And the "guarding Harry" thing worked out really well, didn't it?  
They even knew that Harry was dreaming of the Department of Mysteries 
because he asked Oh-So-Trustworthy-Snape what was there, but they had 
NO IDEA that Harry would show up there one day.  Just tell the kid 
there is a prophecy there that concerns him and Voldemort.  How 
difficult would that have been?

>He didn't get Harry magical training to teach him how to use all 
>that raw talent of his. Instead he left Harry to languish alone for 
>two months. And Harry is the most important person on the side of 
>light in this particlar war!

Well, they couldn't have taught him anything over the summer because 
they were already on the outs with the Ministry and Harry couldn't do 
any magic.  I think they were hoping for that very thing and when it 
didn't happen, they sent the Dementors to force him to do magic.  
However, once he was back in school, they taught him NOTHING except 
some training with Snape that he was utterly adverse to.  They had to 
teach themselves how to fight.  How hard would it have been to 
smuggle in Moody to give them some real training? 

>He didn't use Sirius, a skilled animagus, to do anything for the 
>order. Even if Sirius had to stay in #12, wouldn't a teacher skilled 
>enough to teach Wormtail of all people, be good enough to teach 
>Molly the she-bear how to become a she-bear in truth?

Incredibly good point.  It only took the Marauders what... three 
months? to become Animagi?  Sirius was twiddling his thumbs a lot 
longer than that.  Keeping him locked up in 12GP was extremely 
stupid - they surely could have found something for him to do, even 
out of the country, I'm sure.  DD's philosophy seems to be "let's 
keep everyone safe by locking them in little dark boxes and maybe LV 
will leave them alone".

My chief irritation with DD is that he had FIFTEEN years to plan for 
LV's return.  Couldn't he have spent a couple hours of that fifteen 
years making a few plans?  Hmmm, let's say Voldemort returns to full 
strength one day.  What shall we do?  I know, let's wait around and 
hope that little Harry grows up to be a big strong wizard that can 
take him out - oh wait, we already know that happens because the 
prophecy says so.  Great!  We'll just sit here and eat some candies.  
In my opinion, DD likes nothing better than to be the headmaster of 
Hogwarts and he'd really rather not be bothered with anything else.  
DD spent the summer getting the Order of the Phoenix gathered up.  
Great job.  Then school starts and it's all back to business as 
usual, except for the pesky Ministry getting involved.  Was DD doing 
anything at all in the time leading up to his ousting?  Didn't seem 
like it.  Did they make any sort of plans for using the prophecy as a 
Voldemort trap?  Didn't look like it.  In fact, they all seemed 
pretty astonished when the DEs actually showed up at the Ministry to 
take it.  And why in the name of Godric Gryffindor did he even keep 
the darned prophecy around?  I would have smashed it to smithereens 
and let one of the DEs know it was smashed.  DD had the prophecy the 
whole time, so it wasn't like he was keeping it safe for Harry.  LV 
would have had to find something else to do.

My second irritation was that as soon as Umbridge was made 
Headmistress, my first thought was, "Yay!  Now DD is free to go out 
and make some plans without the school taking up all of his time."  
Did he go out and make any plans?  Did he do anything at all?  I hope 
so.  I hope the next book unveils a huge lovely pile of DD plans all 
coming to fruition.  But after the whole OoP fiasco, I'm thinking 
it's not going to happen. 

Debbie writes:
>I think Dumbledore and the Order, however, have a 
>different role, which includes the quiet pursuit of social change.  
>And to champion that goal, they have to be a moral force, not simply 
>a military force. 

I think that's exactly what DD plans to do.  Sit back with his high 
morals hoping for social change while coaching Harry and handing him 
the tools to get rid of the bad guys for him.  Does the fact that he 
doesn't want to get his hands dirty make him a better person?  The 
fact that the prophecy says Harry is the only one with the power to 
take out Voldemort doesn't mean that they should all just wait around 
for Harry to do it.  They should at least be making some plans to 
take out the DEs, because there is no prophecy that says Bellatrix 
will not take out Harry five minutes before his final duel with 
Voldemort.

Nicky Joe