Shades of Grey/Good Slytherins/Draco

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 131516

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Geoff Bannister"
<gbannister10 at a...> wrote:

> 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
..

Pippin:
Wonder no more.
-----
http://www.quick-quote-quill.org/articles/2000/fal
l00-bbc-newsround.html

(Lizo:)Voldemort's a half-blood too


(JKR:)Like Hitler! See! I think it's the case that the biggest bully
takes their own defects and they put them on someone else, 
and they try to destroy them. And that's what he -- Voldemort 
-- does. That was very conscious -- I wanted to create a villain 
where you could understand the workings of his mind, not just 
have a 2-D baddie, dressed up in black, and I wanted to explore 
that and see where that came from. Harry in Book Four is starting 
to come to terms with what makes a person turn that way. Because 
they took wrong choices and he Voldemort took wrong choices 
from an early age.
---
Even if JKR intends Slytherin to be emblematic of the wrong choices 
children make, it does not follow that Slytherins are people who 
*always* make wrong choices. Some of the anti-Slytherin rhetoric 
around here comes perilously close, IMO, to "the only good Slytherin 
is a dead Slytherin". I have a feeling JKR is consciously
leading people to make these kinds of over-simplifications as a
kind of object lesson.  I think in her mind the source of much
prejudice is not hate  but mental laziness, again making the easy 
choice instead of the right one.

Pippin