Obviously guilty was Re: JKR/Oprah interview

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 189657


> Alla:
> 
> Yep, Peter was one too and that is my point too, that any leader of the small hand picked band of fighters (or leader of such group of any size, really) had a duty to investigate further, and yes, I think he owed such duty to ANY person under his command, including Peter.
> 
Pippin:
Dumbledore had been investigating for a year. The result of his investigations was the conclusion that Sirius was the spy beyond a reasonable doubt and I think we can agree that the evidence supported that conclusion.   For Dumbledore to think  that Sirius deserved a higher standard of proof than ordinary people got because Sirius was his henchman would be unconscionable, IMO -- that's the morality of a mafioso, or a Malfoy. 

Alla: 
<snip>
 I think Dumbledore should have recused himself and actually go and occupy himself with the Ministry. This is the bizarre thing, I think he would not take the mantle he could have been very well suited to, but continued to micromanage with the order and giving the Hogwarts students the education not nearly close to what they needed.


Pippin:
Huh? You don't like the way Dumbledore exercises his authority and your solution is to give him *more* authority? Don't you see that he would have run the Ministry just as paternalistically as he ran Hogwarts and the Order? 

Harry doesn't quite get it in OOP.  He knows that among the races depicted  only the House Elves would actually want the world to work the way the fountain shows it does, but he doesn't see that he's in the grip of the same childish fantasy himself.

He sees  Dumbledore as  a noble wizard raining goodness down on everybody, and when Dumbledore tries to step out of that role, at the end of the book, Harry won't let him. He's still a child, and he *needs* to think that way. 

 He's angry when Dumbledore confesses to weakness and fallibility. Contrast that with the adult Harry of King's Cross, who can't be angry with Dumbledore once Dumbledore confesses that, yes, he made a mess of it. 


At the end of DH Harry has taken Dumbledore's place as the epitome of goodness, and the children gazing on him idolize him the way they did Dumbledore. But we can see, if we choose to disregard  the glamour, that the epitome of goodness is not a shining idol raining blessings from on high but a scarred veteran, a little sad, a little weary, but content to think that he has done his fallible best to bring a little more love into the world. 

Epilogue!Harry does not want to be anything more, IMO. But Dumbledore did -- he never stopped wanting to be the noble wizard on the pedestal, and whether he was at Hogwarts or at the Ministry, he would have surrounded himself with people who thought that's what he was -- or worse, like Grindelwald, would cynically  pretend to. 


> Alla:
<snip> Trusting one with the cloak, is not the same as trusting one with your and your son's lives, and we all know that Potters did not trust Dumbledore to appoint him Harry's guardian (not as if that stopped the bastard of course).

Pippin:
We all know that Lily refused to believe anything bad about Dumbledore. If she'd had her doubts, wouldn't she have wanted to know more about Dumbledore's  involvement with Grindelwald instead of dismissing the possibility?

However, Dumbledore at the time is somewhere upwards of 90, single, has no experience with small children and is already holding down three or four full time jobs. James and Lily would hardly expect him to raise Harry, and in fact Dumbledore was never Harry's primary caregiver at any time. Let me ask you, if Dumbledore was indeed wrong to place Harry with the Dursleys, and Sirius was unable to stand up to him about it, then how could Sirius have been a fit guardian for Harry?

Alla:
And that trust with the cloak of course robbed James from ANY small chance he may have had to escape or to pass it to Lily and for her and Harry to escape instead of him.

Pippin:
Dumbledore can see through invisibility cloaks. What makes you think Voldemort can't?
Harry certainly never tries to use it to sneak past him.

> 
> Alla:Why leave extra witnesses, if he was supposedly so worried that nobody should know about Voldie being Tom Riddle instead of shouting from the roof?
> 

Pippin:
Witnesses to what? Hokey and Morfin couldn't have known that Tom Riddle was Voldemort. At that time they were arrested, only a few of Tom's old school friends had ever heard the name.  I doubt that even Dumbledore had heard it yet. If Dumbledore had been able to free them, it would have meant that there was some hope of the Ministry realizing there was a killer on the loose. Some effort might have been made to locate Tom and bring him back for questioning. But it seems they were dead  long before Tom's return.

 If Hokey and Morfin had still been alive when Tom did come back, they'd have been safer in Azkaban than out of it. And if Dumbledore had wanted them killed, the simplest way would have been to free them and let Voldemort finish them off. 

As it was there were no living witnesses to Riddle's earlier crimes, so what would be the point of linking Tom and Voldemort? To show that Voldemort wasn't a really pureblood? That wouldn't make him any different from the rest of the pureblood faction, according to JKR. He'd have fit in all the better. 

Pippin