thepostmodernpottercompendium: Imperiused? Sneaks, Snatchers, Wise Men and Britain’s prejudice

thepostmodernpottercompendium:

Imperiused? Sneaks, Snatchers, Wise Men and Britain’s prejudice problem. By Cho Chang. Bageshot Press; 470 pages; 7 Galleons. 2005.

‘THE problem is highly overstated; prejudice among pureblood and half-blood witches against their muggleborn counterparts are at an all time low - those who areprejudiced, enough to participate in hate crimes, are far beyond our reach; pretending otherwise is naive.’ So argued the former Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, Bartemius Crouch Sr, in early 1981, while persuading the Wizengamot to allow the use of Unforgivables and other punitive magic when fighting against the Death Eaters. Ms Chang, however, disagrees with this position, calling it “nothing more than a smoke screen” in her new history of the second wizarding war.

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Most historical writing about the second wizarding war is agreed on this one point at least - that You Know Who and his followers were exceptions to the rule, the result of years of pureblood inbreeding and mental instability fostered by the constant use of dark magic. Cho Chang takes a rather different approach in this book of hers, asserting that the problem lay not with the acts of ‘an exceptional few’, but with this very idea of exceptionalism itself, which, according to her, resulted in the disastrous Wizengamot vote of 1997.

In denial of this pervasive prejudice, she claims, the Wizengamot voted Charles Nott in as Minister for Magic despite his alleged previous ties with the Death Eaters - ties that he was acquitted of in 1982 after a trial that lasted nearly a year and ended with the Wizengamot concluding that he, like so many others, had been under the influence of the Imperius curse. This vote consequently paved the way for the establishment of the Muggleborn Commission. This too has been dubbed an exception, a mis-step of judgement, by historians writing on the subject, but Ms Chang argues that this was not onemisjudgement, but a symptom of a larger “disease” which declared purebloods trustworthy and fit for government, despite their past brush-in’s with the law - while muggleborns were frequently thrown out of office for infractions of the Statute of Secrecy.

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Ms Chang paints a particularly bleak picture of wizarding Britain and in doing so, casts all of the wizarding world, but particularly purebloodwizards, as villains in this piece- willingly complicit in a genocide that took the lives of hundreds of muggleborn and half-blood witches and wizards. One wonders whether blanket statements are helpful - as Ms Chang insists they are - and if in these generalizations, they miss out on the finer nuances of the politics of the second wizarding war. Ms Chang, sadly, leaves those questions unanswered.

FromThe Wixenomist, September 16th - 23rd, 2005. 

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Grindelwald on Trial: 50 Years Later. By Amanda Abbott; Foreword by Miriam Smith. Xenophon Press; 300 pages; 10 Galleons. 2005.

IN 1950, five years after after the horrific events of the Great Wizarding War, Gellert Grindelwald and his generals were put on the stand to testify about their war crimes. The Nurmengard Trials, as they would later come to be known, sparked a fiery debate over who was to be held accountable for the atrocities committed at Schloss Grimmshel. What shocked everyone most about those trials was how normalandcivilizedthese witches and wizards appeared on the stand; not at all the frenzied, bloodthirsty madmen the public had come to be acquainted with in the popular press.

Five years later, Amanda Abbott wrote the controversial first edition of Grindelwald on Trial in which she boldly asserted that no one could be held responsible for the torture of muggles at Schloss Grimmshel. In making this claim, she coined the much bandied about and even more frequently misused term, Apate, to explain how ideas gain lives of their own and how in spaces of uncertainty, these ideas come to fabricate realities that are then realized through the actions of wizards and witches.

Upon its release, the book sparked uproar with its unheard of suggestion that wizards and witches could be held not-responsible for having used dark magic, without being under the influence of dark magic themselves. Wizarding law, till then, made allowances only for the actions of magical folk who could prove that they had been under the influence of either the Imperiusor the Confunduscharm – and other similar spells. With the release of this book, however, Amanda Abbott forced the wizarding world to re-examine the relation between spellcasting and the constantly shifting uncertainties of belief and their implications for lawmakers. Could men and women be held responsible for torture when they truly believed they were following orders, whether those orders ever existed or not? In her book, Ms Abbott lays out a powerful case againstany one witch or wizard being held responsible – rather that das größere Wohl be held responsible, if anything at all.

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Fifty years later, her ideas remain as provocative as ever and with a new foreword by Miriam Smith, provide a challenging means of thinking about the second wizarding war and its causes and consequences. Ms Smith does an excellent job of describing the trials of the first and second wizarding wars, where known Death Eaters claimed to have committed their worst acts of violence while under the influence of the Imperius curse.  While Abbott develops her idea purely in relation to the diffusion of responsibility, Ms Smith pushes the idea of Apatefurther and talks of an Apate Imperius, where witches and wizards carried away by what she deems the “violence” of You-Know-Who’s propaganda, found themselves whipped into a frenzy that led them, almost as if Imperiused, to kill and torture.

While it might seem that Ms Smith is overreaching with her idea of the Apate Imperius, nevertheless she provides a succinct and strongly delivered challenge – admirable for an idea that is laid out in less than fifteen pages – to the way we think about the first and second wizarding wars and the frequently shaky testimonies of being under the Imperiuswhich saw so many acquitted in the few months following You-Know-Who’s first downfall. Fifty years later, Ms Smith proves that Amanda Abbott’s seminal work still has the power to shock and provoke serious critical thought about the ethics of the use of magic.

From The Wixenomist, August 12th - 19th, 2005.

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Memo from the Editor for Britain to the Editor-in-Chief of The Wixenomist

Really, Blythely,that’s the angle we’re going with? Purebloods writing in defense of unapologetic murderers (and the abhorrent mess that is the wizarding world) are ‘thought provoking’, while Cho Chang with her radical critique of the wizarding world ‘generalizes’ and ‘leaves questions unanswered’?

I’m disappointed in you.

M Prewett.

(Pics:1,2. Big thank you to essayofthoughts for help creating the terminology for the idea of Apate.)