DH reread CH 20 - The Name of a Mobster

[a_svirn]

No: HPFGUIDX 186770

> Pippin:
> My point was that Dumbledore objected to Scrimgeour's methods and didn't think they could produce the results that Scrimgeour was claiming for them. Exposing a wizard who went bad is fine, and Dumbledore tried to do that. 

a_svirn:
No, he did not. He sat on the relevant information. 

> Pippin:
But the argument was that Dumbledore should have made an issue of Riddle's ancestry in order to discredit him. That would have proved detrimental to all those honest and hardworking people with Muggle ancestry who hadn't done anything wrong.

a_svirn:
How? Your analogy with anti-Semitic government doesn't work with Scrimgeour, because the Ministry for all its many faults wasn't anti-Muggle. Nor was the public opinion. So it wouldn't be like "See you can't trust those half-bloods, I always say." If Dumbledore had revealed that Lord Voldemort was actually one Tom Riddle, named so after his Muggle father, he would have merely exposed him and those in the inner circle who were privy to this information as hypocrites. What is wrong with that?

 
> > Alla:
> > 
> > Hm, I am not sure I follow actually. I mean, I am all for making him less unbeatable, but I would place the reason to call him Riddle to show his bloodline as of utmost importance. Are you saying that  name Voldemort also gives him some additional magical powers? I guess I do not quite understand how the name Voldemort makes him less than human? Could you elaborate? 
> 
> Magpie:
> It doesn't give him additional magical powers, but it gives him the illusion of them. Most wizards only know him as a name and a legend. "Lord Voldemort" is by design a spooky dark lord name. Nobody knows where he came from or how he became so powerful. He might be the devil himself for all they know (if they have that type of concept). Tom Riddle is a human guy just like everybody else is. He has an ordinary background that's not really scary at all.
> 
> That's why Dumbledore and Harry both call him a version of his real name when they face him as equals imo. They're not going to call him what he wants to be called, they're going to call him by who he really is. It bugs him and it cuts him down to size. Any mundane details of the guy's life chips away at the mystery he's intentionally created around himself.
> 
> Sometimes it makes me think of something else that isn't quite the same thing, but I believe Churchill always referred to Hitler as "Corporal Hitler," just to stress that he wasn't some military high commander but a guy who'd never been promoted above corporal. He wasn't going to play into the fantasy.

a_svirn:
I had a similar association -- how Wellington and the British in general would insist on calling Napoleon *Buonaparte* instead of *Bonaparte* -- a French version of the same name he adopted. Meaning, you can reinvent yourself all you want as a "first council" or an "emperor", but we all know that you are nothing more that a Corsican adventurer, not even a Frenchman. That's also cutting down to size. You know that guy who calls himself Lord Something? He's actually called Tom Riddle, his father's folks were Muggle neighbours of that crazy old Marvolo Gaunt.