...About Snape - Edgar Bones was killed, with his wife and children...

[houyhnhnm102]

No: HPFGUIDX 171350

I (vmonte) wrote:

> > > JKR said that the Death Eaters are like 
> > > how the Nazis were.

random832 responded:

> > But my point was, we don't know Snape realized 
> > that at that point. And, to take the Nazi Germany
> > analogy at the risk of going off-topic - the 
> > average German on the street (or even in the army) 
> > didn't see, or at least didn't want to see, what 
> > was happening.

vmonte again:

> Snape wasn't the average wizard on the street. 
> Snape was working in close proximity to Voldemort. 
> He knew what was happening to the community around him.

> According to JKR, the second Reign of Terror started 
> in 1970s. Snape did not graduate from Hogwarts until 
> 1976. The prophecy was heard in sometime between late 
> 1979 and early 1980.

> Edgar Bones was killed, with his wife and children, 
> during the 1970s.

houyhnhnm:

First of all I have to say I don't understand why 
it is necessary to keep harking back to Nazi Germany 
for an example of people willingly closing their eyes 
to evil and their hearts to suffering when there are 
so many more recent examples (even as we speak), 
but that is beside the point.

The point is that it is willful.  The answer to the 
question of how Snape (or Regulus Black or any other 
initial supporter of Voldemort) could not know 
Voldemort was dealing in murder is the same as the 
answer to the question on another thread of how a
movement of pure-blood supremacists could not know 
their leader was the son of a Muggle.  They didn't want to know.

A tyrant like Lord Voldemort speaks only to the 
reptilian brain-ritual behavior, fear, hunger, 
attack or run.  Complex emotions and abstract thought 
are not so much shut down completely as disconnected.  
A Death Eater could "know" that Voldemort's father 
was a Muggle but not experience the inconsistancy 
because no connection is ever made.  A follower of 
the Dark Lord could "know" that Voldemort was carrying 
out murder, but not experience the revulsion with which 
a normal person would react to killing because the 
emotions are disconnected.  It isn't real.

That is what I think happened with Snape.  Even though 
we have no canon that speaks to Snape's actual role 
among the Death Eaters during the first Voldemort war, 
common sense tells us that he had to have known what 
Voldemort was up to.  As Rowling said, he saw things.  
But it wasn't real because there was a massive disconnect.

Just as killing had no meaning for Draco until he was 
face to face with Dumbledore, I think killing had no 
meaning for Snape until it was the Potters' death he 
had to contemplate, not because he was fond of them- 
he wasn't-but because they were real to him in a way 
Voldemort's other victims had not been. Something about 
their projected murders flipped the switch in his brain 
that had been turned off, back on.