muggle baiting vs. muggle torture

[sistermagpie]

No: HPFGUIDX 155200

> 
> Tinktonks
> I think that Fred and George's defence of themselves wraps this up,
> they were not baiting Dudley because he was a muggle, merely because
> he was a bully. The Death Eaters bait muggles purely because they
> are muggles, without knowing or caring about the individual muggle.
> The twins were dealing out their own form of retribution for Dudley's
> ways. I'm not saying this justifies theire actions but it definitely
> puts them in a totally different area to torturing innocent muggles.

Magpie:
Fred and George's explanation doesn't wrap it up for Arthur and as a 
Muggle myself it doesn't wrap it up for me.  

There is a difference between the characters, obviously, but if I were 
living in their universe the distinction I would make was just that 
Lucius et al. were DEs 24/7 while with Fred and George were okay as 
long as they decided you had earned it, but if you put a foot out of 
line out come the wands.  I'm not sure how exactly we're supposed to 
view this in canon (after all Arthur is furious with the twins, so 
it's not clear we ought to take their view as the author's or our 
own), but if I was comparing it to real life the twins wouldn't come 
out too well.  They avoid the strictly bigoted motivation, but their 
actions suggest, imo, that it's lurking beneath the surface, imo.  
It's like when people will say, "Well there are [insert respectful 
name of minority] and then there are [insert racial epithet]" and 
think this proves how non-prejudiced they are, because they're not 
judging the person based only on their race.  The danger of the DEs to 
other wizards may be, among other things, that by being so bad other 
people don't examine their own prejudices.  It's like as long as 
they're not a DE they can't have any bigotry--and sometimes that 
defense is used for them.

-m