A Dark Glamour - Voldemort's Appeal - DDs Complicity

[a_svirn]

No: HPFGUIDX 179057

> Pippin:
> Lucius's character was easy for me to understand (hmmm...should I 
> admit that? <g> ) He thinks his blood status entitles him to the 
best of 
> everything (peacocks!) , and anyone so presumptuous as to stand 
> between Lucius and the best of everthing needs to be...removed. 
> He feels threatened by the growing power of Muggleborns and it 
> feels good to strike back with a bit of Muggle torture. 
> 
> He flattered Voldemort's pretensions just as he flattered Fudge's, 
for
> the same reason. He needed them  for the messy job of removing 
> people who didn't respond to threats and were too well-protected 
> for poison or curses (his favored weapons per CoS.) 

a_svirn:
Yes, but unlike Fudge, Voldemort had very real power, not just 
pretentious. He was quite simply too dangerous to trifle with. More 
importantly, it was *Lucius's* job, not Voldemort's to weed out the 
undesirables. I don't see how Lucius could have been delusional 
enough to believe that Voldemort would do the dirty work for him, 
when it was exactly the other way round. Lucius doesn't come across 
as a brilliant mind, but he's not a troll either. 

> Pippin:
> He doesn't, IMO, have any more interest in the day-to-day tedium
> of running the wizarding world that Voldemort does. He never
> wanted to be a Dark Lord himself, he just didn't want those upstarts
> at the ministry telling him, Lucius Malfoy, what sort of magic he
> could or couldn't use. 

a_svirn:
But he was ok with having an upstart half-blood as his Master? 

> Pippin:
> Lucius for me is analogous to the German upper class and high-
powered
> industrialists who supported Hitler because they thought he would 
keep
> the Communists down for them. They thought they could control him. 
By
> the time they realized they couldn't, it was too late. 

a_svirn:
I don't think they were particularly interested in stopping him. 
Hitler did wonders for German economy. And he did keep communists 
down. He got rid of their Jewish competitors. He even provided some 
of those industrialists with cheep slave labour. And unlike death 
eaters they didn't have to risk their lives and limbs in the line of 
duty. On the contrary, Hitler even got rid of Rohm and his thuggish 
Sturmabteilungen to please the industrialists. Compared to them those 
members of wizading upper crust families who jointed Voldemort got a 
shockingly bad bargain. They were expected to give up everything from 
their dignity to their lives (and those of their nearest and dearest) 
and had only the thrill of killing and torture to balance the scale. 
That may have been enough for such derange persons as Bellatrix, but 
Lucius doesn't strike me as deranged. He had too much to loose and 
very little to gain by joining, particularly if – as you say – he 
didn't want to be a Dark Lord. So he didn't want to be a lord, but 
longed to be a servant?