Wands and Wizards...Again

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 183643

> Magpie:
> But Luke clearly recognizes exactly what you're talking about where 
> Harry doesn't.

Pippin:


 What about the crowd pleaser moments that came before, when Luke used
Vader's signature move to break into Jabba's Palace, and  when he blew
up the sail-barge even though Jabba was already dead? There were a
bunch of slaves, dancers and musicians who may not have wanted to be
there any more than Han did. What did they ever do? But hey, I cheered
as loud as anybody.

Maybe I'm the only one who thought about that sometime after I'd left
the theater, and maybe I'm not,  but it doesn't change the moral
lesson one bit.  What Luke needed to learn was not that he shouldn't
kill  unless he had to. He knew that. What he had to learn was that if
he let his mind fill with anger and fear, he'd kill whether he had to
or not.  

When Snape shouts at Lily "in his humiliation and his fury, the
unforgivable word" that's the same lesson, IMO. We know Harry gets it,
because he changes his analysis of what happens. He no longer believes
that Snape called Lily a mudblood because he hated her.

The adjective throws us back to Harry's unforgivable curse. Maybe 
McGonagall did think Harry was being gallant in an unironic sense,
though the italics make me doubt it. But it doesn't matter.   

Whether the reader sees it in this example or not, the larger lesson
is this, as Yoda might put it: Rage and humiliation not make one gallant. 

> Magpie:
> These sound like very reasonable things for JKR to think, but I
don't  see where she's dramatizing these things in the scenes we're
talking  about. You still seem to be saying that by showing Harry
looking cool  using the torture curse, or by happily enjoying his
slave labor who  loves him, JKR is giving us reasons to be against
torture or slavery  in those scenes. 

Pippin:
Harry is a happy slave-owner whose non-human slave feels greatly
honored to serve him. That has little to do with human slavery as we
know it, because most human slaves don't see slavery as a great
honor. The hypothetical slave-owner reading the books is in a
better position than we to know that. 

 It's like if you were to dramatize your opposition to capital
punishment by showing a parade of prisoners tearfully confessing,
saying how honored they are to pay the price for their crimes, and
happily throwing themselves into the noose.


> Magpie:
> I have little use for labeling anything "evil" but I think I'm 
> misunderstanding you here. Why would good people eschewing torture 
> and slavery mean that bad people are more likely to torture and have 
> slaves?

Pippin:
I didn't mean that. I meant that if the wizards drive out the people
who  sometimes let their minds fill up with rage because they've been
so deeply hurt, those  people will be used by those who have no
conscience at all.  

> Magpie:
> The Goblins don't seem to have gotten very far in their rebellions.

Pippin:
It seems to be a Mexican standoff. The goblins have control of the
financial system, and a lock on the secrets of treasure-hunting,
mining and magical metallurgy, despite the wizards' attempts to wrest
them away.  The wizards have the government and the wands despite the
goblins' attempts to do likewise.

Goblin/wizarding society is dependent on both.

Meanwhile, the two rebellious house elves in canon both get exactly
what they want. I'd say that the elves are potentially more dangerous. 

Pippin