[HPforGrownups] Was Sirius railroaded? And what was his view?

[Hilton Hubbard]

No: HPFGUIDX 192713

Yippee - a real, live discussion! This is like having a Time-Turner!

Sirius was railroaded all right. He was firmly established as a traitor and
murderer by Peter Pettigrew, who then strategically vanished in a cloud of
carnage, knowing that he couldn't hope to defeat Sirius in wand-to-wand
combat.

After that, hysterical laughter seems a reasonable response, since Sirius
must have worked out instantly what had actually happened; of course, in
the prevailing mood of hysterical suspicion and justifiable fear, it was
open to misinterpretation and taken as triumph rather than mixed emotions
of shame and survivor guilt. Because, by suspecting Lupin, Sirius had been
part of the culture of fear and suspicion; by choosing PP as the
secret-keeper rather than either Lupin or Sirius, James and Lily showed
that they were also infected by it.

And Dumbledore? He believed that Sirius was the secret-keeper, and why not?
He was certainly the obvious choice. And he said as much. But, though he
didn't have any hard information about the alleged spy in the Order, he had
every reason to claim that there was one: this could potentially serve as
an explanation for any of Snape's real espionage activities that might
otherwise have exposed him.

AD and SS would of course have quite literally seen through PP if they'd
ever thought of using Legilimency on him; but like everyone else, they
despised and ignored him and didn't bother. The fact that AD accepted
Sirius's story so readily surely suggests that he had used Legilimency then
and been convinced by what he saw.

And, the more I think about Sirius and his reaction, the clearer it seems
that he believed that Azkaban was where he deserved to be. Of course, as
Padfoot he was safe from the Dementors, but not from his own obsessively
guilty thoughts - until Fudge's newspaper gave him something worth living
for. And then he acted.

The whole plot line serves to illustrate how easy it is for people with
otherwise high standards of ethics and high expectations of law and its
enforcement can shed them in times of crisis. Consider the innocent owners
of Dachshund dogs in WWI England, reported as German spies! Consider the
responses of the United States (government and people alike) to 9/11, when
the rule of law and the restrictions on detention without trial and even
torture suddenly seemed irrelevant.

All the best

Deborah
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://archive.hpfgu.org/pipermail/hpforgrownups/attachments/20141112/6bbf8043/attachment.html>