Whom did Dumbledore torture and killed? WAS: Re: re:Scrimgeour/WerewolfBites

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 179781

Mus wrote:
> 
> By the same token, are we allowed to assume that Snape did not kill,
on the grounds that when he said "Only those I could not save", he
meant that he had been able to save all the potential victims.  In
that case, the only death that can be attributed to him is DD's
subsequent assisted dying.
> 
> No, that doesn't work either, does it?
>
Carol responds:

I'm not following your logic here. DD asks snape how many people he
has watched die, not how many he has killed. And he responds that,
lately, he has only watched those whom he could not save, which
implies that perhaps he could have saved someone and didn't at some
earlier point. Nowhere is it implied that he *killed* the people he
watched die;, indeed, Snape's concern for his soul when DD asks Snape
to kill him indicates otherwise. Whatever he has done, and that
includes watching at least one person die that he could have saved, he
has not, in my reading, killed anyone.

As for Dumbledore, I thought the whole "never killed anyone if you
could help it" scene was confusing and misleading, especially since
Harry know of no one that Dumbledore definitively killed. DD *may*
have accidentally killed Ariana, and, certainly, Order members have
been killed in the line of duty (I think snape qualifies as an Order
member here, or at least as DD's man), but he has not actually killed
them or sent them to certain death. (Harry's self-sacrifice doesn't
count, either, since he knew that Harry has a good chance of
surviving, and obviously Harry knows that DD didn't *kill* him.) The
phrase was used in GoF to refer to Mad-Eye Moody, an Auror authorized
to use the Killing Curse who nevertheless never killed if he could
help it. (We know that he killed Evan Rosier and perhaps Wilkes,
another DE who was killed in VW1, as well.) Could JKR have
misremembered applying the phrase to DD rather than Moody? Could
*Harry* have had it in mind when he phrased his question? Dumbledore
had the chance to kill the two Darkest wizards of the age, Grindelwald
and Voldemort (or, at least, to hit Voldie with an AK and vaporize him
again), and he chose not to do so. If he "could help" killing those
two, surely he could have avoided killing anyone else. Look how neatly
he defeated Fudge, Umbridge, and Dawlish in OoP. 

We also know that DD never used the Elder Wand to kill anyone, as he
tells Harry in King's Cross. Why, then, would Harry think that DD had
killed someone that he couldn't help killing, unless that someonw was
Ariana? (I am emphatically *not* including Hokey, an ancient House-Elf
left without a home or mistress and, probably, deeply depressed from
grief and guilt, or Morfin, sent to Azkaban, where most prisoners go
mad and die within a year, as Dumbledore's victims. Finding a true
memory beneath an altered one and undoing an extra-strong Memory Charm
[which causes Oblivion rather than substituting a false memory for the
true one] is not the same thing, and Dumbledore assuredly didn't want
either of them to die. He needed their testimony to convict Tom Riddle.)

Carol, who thinks that DD never killed anyone, including Ariana, and
that Snape killed only one person, Dumbledore, on DD's orders