Why didn't DD reveal Voldemort's identity?

[sistermagpie]

No: HPFGUIDX 186890

> > 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.

Magpie:
And why does Riddle want to leave his past behind? Because it helps him to be Voldemort. So why's it obviously a bad thing to make that difficult? He's already terrorizing everyone. We know Voldemort doesn't want to be ordinary. He doesn't want anyone to think of him as ordinary or human. That might make them feel less helpless.

Pippin:
> 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. 

Magpie:
They'd be a lot safer if it was common knowledge, then. Killing them isn't going to kill the secret anymore. Shouldn't there be skads of them?

Pippin:
> 
> But Dumbledore believes that Voldemort's weaknesses lie in those parts of his history and his knowledge of magic which he has always discounted. 

Magpie:
Not with any specifics until quite late in the game, iirc. Without the Horcrux knowledge from CoS is there a plan to ferret out information like this for a real reason? And even if he had developed this hobby earlier, why not let some other people in on it? Studying the actual life of the guy terrorizing you is a totally natural impulse. Especially when the guy's been gone for over a decade. In the real world, that seems to be the way it goes, without these dire results. Everybody would want to know about the guy. Frankly, it's a bit of a cheat to say nobody studied the guy and wrote an indepth biography in Harry's childhood anyway.

Pippin:
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.  

Magpie:
That's still sacrificing a rather obvious and potentially powerful morale booster for the whole country based on a vague idea that there was something in his past that would defeat him so he won't ever reveal to anyone something as mundane as "Yeah, I knew him when he was Tom Riddle at Hogwarts." Maybe some other random person might have figured out the secret sooner based on his own musings about Voldemort. The main thing about Dumbledore's way is it guarantees as few people as possible have a chance of figuring it out. (Hopefully there's just him.)

Which does make perfect sense if I imagine Dumbledore as the man he seems characterized as--the kind of person who would look at any Voldemort war as a personal chance to prove his own cleverness, and a man who clung to valuable information like his life depended on it. It still just seems like us making up some dire peril to justify behavior that we've seen as fundamental to Dumbledore on every level. I've no doubt he would tell himself he had to keep the secret to protect somebody, but that's his M.O. about everything. The guy doesn't like to share secrets with anybody. 

Pippin:
> 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. 

Magpie:
First, because it's not particularly helpful to Voldemort that I can see. He certainly doesn't think it is. Letting him control his own biography lets him control yet another aspect of the game. 

How many years is Voldemort on the scene here? Not as many as he's been defeated. So what would be wrong if Voldemort's biography got written up in history books (where it belongs) while the guy's gone? If Dumbledore got a lot of this info in the many years while Voldemort wasn't around or able to threaten anyone it was a done deal anyway. If he wasn't investigating anything anyway for years, there's no investigation to protect. The actual memories and witnesses actually aren't even essential to the investigation that I remember. It's the path Dumbledore follows but if you had other people following different paths they might have gotten there sooner. It's not so logical a reason for keeping quiet as, the decision to, say, not tell Slughorn that you found special directions in your Potions book because that would ruin your plan to make him think you came up with it due to your mad Potions skillz. 

Imo, Voldemort and Dumbledore are on one level very hard-working plot devices. Both of them work really hard to keep the plot moving, coming up with straightforward plans they then complicate and undermine themselves to create a plot. But this isn't ultimately a big flaw, because JKR molded their personalities around the things they have to do. Voldemort is obsessed with symbolism even when it goes against his goals. Dumbledore loves to manipulate and hold on to information even when it goes against his goals. 

I'm sure Dumbledore himself made up plenty of doomsday scenarios and "logical" reasons to keep secrets and lie. We know he did that. Maybe some of them sounded like these. But his plans always lead to the same place: giving himself more knowledge than others, keeping people in the dark, often about their own lives. I think it would *kill* Dumbledore to have the whole WW walking around knowing who Tom Riddle was. That behavior's already canon. This situation doesn't need to be the one time Dumbledore really would have shared the information and think people had the right to know the truth if only there wasn't this potential danger to somebody somewhere that forced him to keep his mouth shut (if we only imagine one). It's really not even in character to think that way.

His whole personality's bound up in the burden of being smarter than everyone else and so having to make decisions for them. Dumbledore kept Voldemort's secret imo for the same reason he always kept all his secrets. I think he would have benefitted from having someone who called him out on what he was really doing.

-m