Why didn't DD reveal Voldemort's identity? (Was: Power of names)

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 186780

Alla wrote:
Alla wrote:
> <snip>
>I do wonder why exactly Dumbledore did not scream at the top of his lungs the truth of who Tom Riddle really was. I am wondering if Dumbledore was so deep into his secrets that he thought that this will be something the world better not know, just as when he did not share his suspicions about Tom with anybody while he was still in school.
> <snip>

Carol responds:

I think you must be right that Dumbledore thought that this information was something that the WW would be better off not knowing or he would have publicized it. The only reason I can think of is one that others have already mentioned, that it would interfere with his investigations.

He could quite easily have revealed that Voldemort was really Tom Riddle, the Slytherin student who had won the award for services to the school for supposedly capturing the monster that had killed Moaning Myrtle. That in itself would provide no hint to Voldemort that DD was investigating his past. After all, DD had visited him at the orphanage and he had applied for a job as DADA teacher. Of course, DD knew who he was. That alone would not have tipped LV off that DD was investigating his past. OTOH, it would not have helped much. Few people would have believed it. Tom Riddle, that charming boy, Prefect and Head Boy, Lord Voldemort? Impossible. No, that handsome and intelligent boy must have died young or he'd have risen to fame in the Ministry. So though it would have been easy and probably harmless to reveal that much information, it was also pointless (IMO).

But revealing that Voldemort was the Half-Blood son of a Witch mother named Merope Gaunt and a Muggle father named Tom Riddle Sr., if he could prove it, would definitely reveal to LV that Dumbledore was investigating his past and might suggest that he was investigating LV's activities as well. And DD did not want Voldemort to suspect that he was interrogating people and obtaining memories, much less that through his investigations, he had learned about the Horcruxes and (by HBP) figured out what some of them probably were.

As for the point others have mentioned, that knowing Riddle was a Half-Blood would deter potential followers from joining him or alienate those who had already done so, I don't think it would have. His earliest schoolboy followers must have simply assumed that he was a Pure-Blood, but what really mattered to them, what made them idolize and follow him, was his Slytherin ancestry. He could speak Parseltongue, and he had (I'm sure they knew) opened the Chamber of Secrets. His later followers must have been intrigued for similar reasons--he was powerful, he was the greatest Legilimens the world had ever known, he was a Parselmouth, and he was descended from Slytherin. He was also the biggest bully on the block, Grindelwald having been defeated and imprisoned just as he was graduating from Hogwarts.

Diehard fanatics like Bellatrix would call Dumbledore a liar if he made that announcement about LV's parentage. Lucius Malfoy and other Pure-Blood supremacists would ignore the information because they had their own anti-Muggle/anti-Muggleborn agenda and being Voldemort's followers allowed them to act on it, giving them power by association. Still other DEs were Half-Bloods themselves, so his parentage wouldn't matter. 

I don't think that Pippin's argument about encouraging prejudice against Muggle-borns by betraying Voldemort's half-Muggle origins had anything to do with Dumbledore's reasons for not revealing Voldemort's identity and background. I think he must have thought that, at best, it would be futile to expose LV's hypocrisy (his hatred of Muggles and Muggle-borns was, in any case, quite real), and, at worst, it would cause Voldemort to suspect that Dumbledore knew too much about him.

And, of course, there's Dumbledore's penchant for secrecy. Best not to let anyone, whether it's Snape or Harry or McGonagall or Scrimgeour, know what he's doing for fear that it would get back to Voldemort.

Anyway, I think that Alla is on the right track here.

Carol, just speculating but unable to think of any other explanation that makes sense