Shades of Grey/Good Slytherins/Draco

[Geoff Bannister]

No: HPFGUIDX 131509

I thought it might be useful to take a slightly wider view of these 
discussions and stand back to get a better view.

One of the dangers into which we all fall from time to time is to 
draw generalisations and try to make them apply to individual cases. 
I have to admit that I am not fond of the USA as a country and, like 
many of my UK compatriots, often think of the country as pushy, 
arrogant and rather full of itself. This has not been helped recently 
by the very mixed feelings in the UK about our involvement in the war 
against Iraq.

However, since I came onto HPFGU about two years ago, I have had 
occasion to exchange emails off-group with several other members – 
many of them living in the US and have found them to be pleasant, 
friendly and sociable. So I have to remind myself that we are not all 
identical copies of each other.

I think that there are parallels which can be drawn between Slytherin 
house and Germany during the Hitler years. I am just old enough to 
remember the end of the Second World War, having started going to 
school at Easter that year. Obviously, my views as a child were 
shaped by my home and friends and things I heard said. For many years 
in the UK, there was no such thing as a good German whereas the 
Allies were perfect. For years, war films were produced depicting the 
Nazis as evil, brutish thugs and the Allies were always winning, 
usually led by somebody such as John Wayne who did everything on his 
own. :-)

As time went on, we began to see that one of our allies had been as 
brutal a tyrant as Hitler and the Cold War soon shattered our 
illusions about our relationships. We also began to see that our side 
of the story was flawed. I, for one, have always deplored the bombing 
of Dresden as but one example of questionable motives. There were 
also folk in Germany who worked on the side of good – Dietrich 
Bonhoeffer, one of the leading figures of the Confessing Church comes 
to mind – and others who tried to bring down the Hitler regime 
because they saw that it was destroying anything worthy and 
honourable in the country.

Here we can see the points which have been made by those who want to  
show that labelling all Slytherins as evil is a generalisation which 
is as wrong as the real world cases mentioned above. The comparison 
is not quite as direct as with the two sides in World War Two because 
Voldemort is not the unchallenged leader of the Wizarding World but 
he has polarised opinions into those who support the good and those 
who lean towards evil.

As a side thought, I often wonder if JKR consciously paralleled 
Voldemort with Hitler because we have here two dictators who espouse 
ideals which they themselves do not fit – Hitler with his Aryan 
obsession and Voldemort aiming for pureblood dominance when Hitler 
wasn't tall, blond and blue-eyed and Voldemort isn't a pureblood
..

In a recent discussion on the question of being sorted into 
Slytherin. I wrote as part of a reply in message 130929:
"We need to remember that they didn't /choose/ the house, the Sorting 
Hat placed them there. They may have accepted this because, at the 
age of 11, they thought that this was what Hogwarts wanted and 
couldn't be altered; so I wonder how many incoming pupils over the 
years have challenged the Sorting Hat's thinking as Harry did?"

I suspect that there are many families with pupils in the house who 
are not in favour of Voldemort, his Death Eaters and their pureblood 
policy but are happy to leave their offspring there because they see 
that, among other things, Slytherin is a house which encourages 
cunning, ambition self-reliance and perhaps business acumen which, 
used properly, are not in themselves wrong aims.

Finally, Draco. I have said on a number of occasions that I have a 
sneaking sympathy for him. With eleven years of having no other view 
than Voldemort's racism and his father's class snobbery poured into 
his ears, it's surprising he's still sane. I have said also that, as 
a Christian, I believe that no one is irredeemable unless they put 
themselves into that position by their attitude and behaviour. After 
all, Saul of Tarsus set out to crush the early Christian church but, 
after he had the famous meeting with the risen Christ on the Damascus 
road, he performed a complete volte-face and became one of the most 
powerful advocates of the then-new Christian faith. I'm not 
suggesting that Draco might have a Hogsmeade road experience – 
although it could happen in real life – but he's sharp enough to see 
which way the wind is blowing and might yet decide that being a Death 
Eater isn't worth the hassle.

We are often reminded that were are seeing things from Harry's point 
of view and he hasn't had a huge amount of interaction with folk from 
all the other houses. We only see a small number of pupils named in 
other houses. When I was at school in my teens, I didn't know 
everyone in my year because I had a circle of close friends and I 
knew a few other folk in the year because, maybe, they belonged to 
the same school society, we got the same bus home or whatever. So any 
analysis of Slytherin tendencies is drawn from too small and too 
biased a sample for us to draw accurate conclusions. Time will tell.