Requiescat in Pace: Unforgivables

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 174678

Dennis Grant wrote:
> That's the dictionary definition of the word, not the legal or moral
definition of the act; there is a difference.
>
Leah:  
> > Nothing there about the pain having to be prolonged. If I was put
on the rack and gave up everything the torturers wanted to hear after
the first stretch, I would still have been tortured, just as someone 
who was racked for an hour would have been tortured. 
>
Dennis: 
> But in both cases, you're being racked as a form of coersion. The
purpose behind it COUNTS. <snip>

Carol:
The purpose behind it makes it torture or not? I don't think so. If I
were torturing a child to make him or her behave would I be any better
than Osama bin Laden and his henchmen employing the same means of
torture for revenge or information? Torture is torture.

And we cannot discount the etymology of "Crucio," which JKR applied
when she named that curse and invented the incantation:

crucio -are [to torture , torment], according to the University of
Notre Dame's Latin Dictionary and Grammar Aid. 

http://www.archives.nd.edu/cgi-bin/lookup.pl?stem=crucio&ending=

The Cruciatus Curse is the torture curse, not the pain curse. (A lot
of curses cause pain.) The etymology ties it to both "crucify" and
"excruciating."

Harry says in OoP that Voldemort doesn't need any means of torture
besides the Cruciatus Curse. That is its purpose, its sole purpose,
and we see Voldemort, the epitome of evil in the series, using it time
and again, to torture Harry or to punish his own followers. (The
teenage Grindelwald uses it on the even younger Aberforth, removing
the blinders from Albus's eyes regarding GG's dark side.) 

And it is torture from the very first second:

"But before he could finish this jinx, *excruciating* pain hit Harry;
he keeled over in the grass. Someone was screaming. He would surely
die of this *agony*" (HBP Am. ed. 603).

This is the Cruciatus Curse, almost certainly cast by Amycus Carrow
though Harry doesn't know it, from which Snape rescues Harry in "The
Flight of the Prince." The Crucios cast by Voldemort in the graveyard
in GoF would work equally well to show that Harry knows *exactly* what
he's putting Amycus through in DH.

Dennis:
> Harry doesn't torture Carrow; he incapacitates him by inflicting
intense pain on him.
>
Carol:
He incapacitates him by inflicting *excruciating* pain on him. There's
a difference. A stinging hex inflicts intense but momentary pain.
Crucio *by definition* inflicts torture.

Dennis:
> The choice of methods is perhaps a little unusual, and perhaps
Harry's intent included elements of chastisement or poetic justice.
Would some other technique have worked as well? Who can say; <snip>

Carol:
We have a perfect example of a curse that would work equally well. Too
bad the past-all-endurance Snape cast it nonverbally:

"[Snape] slashed at the air; Harry felt a white-hot, whiplike
something hit him across the face and was slammed backward into the
ground. Spots of light burst in front of his eyes and *for a moment*
all the breath seemed to have gone from his body" (604). Perfect,
right? A moment of pain. Harry is chastised, disarmed, and
incapacitated. But he isn't tortured. It isn't "excruciating"; he
doesn't think he's going to die. And even its aftereffect of having
the wind knocked out of him lasts only a moment.

If Harry doesn't know that curse (and, alas, he wasn't paying much
attention to Smnape's lessons throughout HBP), a simple stinging hex
would have sufficed both to cause Amycus momentary pain to "chastise"
and disarm him, followed by a Stunning Spell or Petrificus Totalus to
disable him.

One last request before I drop this frustrating tennis-ball thread in
which no one seems to be convincing anyone else: Can we please examine
the curse within the context of the books using canon support for our
respective positions? I thought that was what this list was all about.

Carol, hoping that she has said her last word on this topic and really
wanting to discuss the symbolism of Harry as "Seeker" instead