Suspension of disbelief -Idiots of War

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 182400

> Magpie:
> Pretty much just until Harry found a way--nobody was rallying
anybody either. The DEs had a pretty free reign until Harry returned
like  King Arthur and then everybody ran to fight in the one battle in
one  building and become war heroes.

Pippin:

It looks from the emphasis on Harry's pov as if the adults  left the
kids to fight the war, but that's not actually what happens. One may
overlook that other people have been growing up too, and that Neville,
and the majority of the DA  are  adults in their own and society's
eyes by the time of the final battle. But the story makes that explicit. 

Over the course of the story, the Trio tried several times to rally
the DA, but only  Luna, Neville and Ginny responded.  As kids, most of
the DA didn't see the war against Voldemort as their fight, and the
text does not fault them -- they joined the DA so they could pass
their OWLs and no blame to them.  But as adults they did respond as
soon as they were called for. 

I'm seeing  an unstated assumption that bothers me in some of the
posts I've read -- as if  revolutions were spontaneous and success was
the birthright of decent people. As if  no tyrant ever stayed in
power five minutes before Che Guevera and the Rebel Alliance showed
up to pull down statues in Tienamen Square. That's not even fictional
reality. In RL as in fiction, revolutions can fail, some that succeed
are no better than the regimes they supplanted, and some never begin
at all.

In the Lord of the Rings, most of the hobbits were at the mercy of
Sharky and his men till Frodo and his friends came back. Why didn't
the hobbits fight back sooner?  Farmer Cotton explains that he wanted
to, but folks wouldn't help and he had his wife and daughter to think
of. We're shown why folks wouldn't help -- they didn't trust
each other. And they had reason. Like all people in tyranny's grasp,
they'd had to make compromises to survive. 

That truth is put gently in LOTR.   In canon, it's in your face and
people have to deal with it, readers and characters alike, unless,
like  Elphias Doge, they're determined to believe only  good about
their friends.

Sirius tells us how it's going to be:

"Imagine that Voldemort's powerful now. You don't know who his
supporters are, you don't know who's working for him and who isn't;
you know he can control people so that they do terrible things without
being able to stop themselves. You're scared for yourself, and your
family, and your friends. Every week, news comes of more deaths, more
disappearances, more torturing...the Ministry of Magic's in disarray,
they don't know what to do, they're trying to keep everything hidden
from the Muggles, but meanwhile Muggles are dying too. Terror
everywhere...panic...confusion...that's how it used to be.

Well, times like that bring out the best in some people and the worst
in others." --Sirius Black, GoF ch 27 


Substitute "The Order" for "The Ministry" and his words speak   to the
situation in DH. But Sirius oversimplified a bit, because what we
learned in DH is that times like that bring out the best and the worst
in each individual soul. 

Perhaps the Order was in as much disarray as the Ministry was
in VWI. But maybe not.  We do know that the townspeople and the others
showed up when they were summoned, ready, willing and able to fight.
Either they didn't need to be organized, or they had been organizing
in secret all along. 

One of Voldemort's great weaknesses was his tendency to
overconfidence. Did the Order play to that by letting him think he was
having free rein until Harry was ready to confront him?   Harry, with
his built-in connection to Voldemort, is the last person the Order
would have wanted to know. 

It's not part of the story, and we're free to speculate. But I don't
see how we're forced to conclude that the Order should have been doing
something they didn't do --  when it came time to fight, there were
fighters available. They hadn't all been rounded up and thrown into
Azkaban, or deprived of their wands, or forced into hiding in
Australia. Who deserves credit for that if the Order doesn't? 
 

> Magpie:
 In DH they'd lost Dumbledore and Harry...and then there was Neville.
Nobody has  this kind of force prepared until they need it.
>

Pippin:
What did Neville do that the Order didn't? He was able to help some
but not all of the people who were being hunted, he put out a bit of 
rebel propaganda, and he resisted openly  until his family was
threatened, whereupon he had to give it up and go into hiding like the
others. When Harry asked for his help, he summoned the people he
thought would be willing to help, and they came. As far as I can see,
The Order did exactly the same things.

I can see where it seems stupid that if there were all these people
willing to help they couldn't have helped Harry more directly. But how
could he rally them to help when he himself wasn't sure he could trust
Dumbledore, and yet the only credibility he had was Dumbledore's
authority and a prophecy he didn't understand? 

Harry had Frodo's problem also -- those he didn't know, he couldn't
trust, and those he could trust were too dear to him. He didn't want
his friends to die to help him, and yet who else could he ask? As for
Lupin, how could he possibly trust  Lupin, when it was clear as day
that Lupin didn't even trust himself?

 Harry could not have built a "coalition of love" when he himself
hadn't yet learned to distinguish between righteous anger and
vengefulness. Nor was Hogwarts prepared to join it. "And we must unite
inside her/or we'll crumple from within" was not an appeal to love. It
was an appeal to fear ::forehead slap:: and so of course it failed. 

When the Houses are ready to join as they once did, in friendship
based on the recognition of their similarities instead of the fear of
their common foes,  why then perhaps they'll be united once again. We
can see Harry trying, in a small way, to make that happen. 

 I can see where we might have hoped for more out of Harry's vaunted
power of love. I did.   But no one can make  people love
one another. You can't even make them love you back. Far greater
proponents of love than Harry Potter have discovered that. I shudda known.

I can see where some people might feel that Harry has no right to be
content with himself if so much still needs to be done. But I hear in
the epilogue the voice of JKR, the depression survivor,
saying  loud and clear that though you may have to go through hurt and
sorrow to become healthy, healthy people don't beat themselves up just
because things aren't the way it's s'posed to be in fairy tales.

Pippin