Why didn't DD reveal Voldemort's identity?

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 186885


> 
> Magpie:
> And therefore, Dumbledore saying that Voldemort is Tom Riddle, who came to Hogwarts from that Muggle orphanage, worked at B&B and applied for and got turned down for a job as a teacher, is not revealing anything. 

Pippin:
It reveals that Dumbledore is not going to make it easy for Riddle to leave his past behind as Riddle clearly wants to do. Now, Riddle isn't trying to obscure his past because he believes that purebloods will never follow a halfblood leader. He already knows they will, because he recruited them at Hogwarts. Dumbledore knows this too, because he's been spying on the Death Eaters already and knows who some of them are. 

Riddle is trying to leave his old name behind because *he* doesn't want to be reminded of his previous life. And he's quite capable of eliminating anybody who knew him as Riddle, and those who did know him as Riddle are afraid he will do that. That's why they were afraid to talk. 

But Dumbledore believes that Voldemort's weaknesses lie in those parts of his history and his knowledge of magic which he has always discounted. DD doesn't know, as he begins his investigations, what those weaknesses are, but he does know that if Voldemort kills all the people who knew him as Riddle, it is going to make it rather difficult to obtain information from them. It seems to me as if he started collecting information when Voldemort first returned, trying to find evidence of Voldemort's murderous intent, which only later became evidence in the Horcrux quest.  

People over-estimated the powers of Lord Voldemort, but they under-estimated the powers of Riddle, and that was equally dangerous.   When Voldemort first returned, he was  saying that rumours that he had done terrible things were false. His schoolboy reputation could actually have helped him there, if he had chosen to use it. 

I have yet to understand why DD should sacrifice potential informants for the sake of publicizing information which he already knows that Voldemort can counter, and which in some ways might even be helpful to Voldemort. 


Pippin