Why didn't DD reveal Voldemort's identity?

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 186896

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? 

Pippin:
Because Dumbledore believes the things that people want most are the worst for them. Dumbledore's strategy often consists of encouraging Voldemort to go after things that won't really help him reach his goals, or will at least require stealth, and therefore not  acts of mass murder, to achieve. 

Magpie:
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:
You seem to be conflating two different parts of Voldemort's career. He did not want to be openly known as a terrorist when he first returned. He was playing a double game, on the one hand recruiting fanatics who favored the ruthless suppression of Muggles and Muggleborns, and  meanwhile pretending to the WW at large that the rumors about him were lies, put about by the jealous and ignorant. The Riddle name and reputation might actually have helped him to do that. He wasn't hard over about losing it, at first. After all, he still wanted the Hogwarts job even after Dumbledore made it clear that he'd be calling him Tom.

It seems like it was only the last few years of the first War that Voldemort started taking responsibility for all his work, leaving the Dark Mark over the sites of murders, and making his new name the one that wizards feared to speak. 

I'm sure the articles that Regulus had on his wall didn't describe Voldemort as a mass murderer. He was written up as a hero. 

> 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:
As you say, Voldemort thinks in symbols. He wouldn't care about killing the secret logically, he'd want to kill it symbolically. There are skads of Muggles and Muggleborns too, but does anyone doubt that Voldemort's eventual purpose was to kill them all?

> 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? 

Pippin:
The knowledge from CoS was that Voldemort had to have made *more than one* horcrux. Dumbledore would have suspected the existence of one horcrux at least since Godric's Hollow. And before that, he was trying to prove to the WW that Voldemort was a murderer. I assumed that was why he had collected the memories of  Morfin and Hokey.

Magpie:
And even if he had developed this hobby earlier, why not let some other people in on it?

Pippin:
He did! He attempted to convince people that Riddle/Voldemort had been responsible for the Riddle murders and for the death of Hepzibah, but he didn't get anywhere. 

Magpie:
 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:
I'm sure Voldemort invented a past that was more to his liking, and that's what's in books like The Rise and Fall of the Dark Arts.
> 
> Magpie:

> 
> 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:
It's true that he has a deep psychological need to keep secrets, but he also has a deep psychological need to see himself as reasonable and good. As I said, he did try to reveal what he'd found out in order to free Morfin and Hokey. 

It's not a fan invention that people who knew things about Voldemort  thought they'd be in danger if they talked about it. It's canon. And there are at least two whom Dumbledore would be sorry to lose: Slughorn and Hagrid. 

Pippin