Fear and Fascism in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
FASCISM IS A HARSH TERM—AND YET, THERE IS NO DOUBT THAT THE TERM FITS MANY OF THE SITUATIONS FOUND IN ALL OF THE HARRY POTTER BOOKS. THIS BECOMES TERRIBLY CLEAR, AS ADAM-TROY CASTRO POINTS OUT, IN THE LATTER THREE. AND CONSCIOUSLY OR UNCONSCIOUSLY, ROWLING HAS SHOWN US OUR OWN WORLD, THROUGH A GLASS, DARKLY, AND IF THE REFLECTION IS A BIT SIMPLER, IT IS NO LESS UGLY.
IN YEAR 5, politics enters the world of Harry Potter.
I am not speaking, here, of Harry Potter the fictional universe. Politics was always present there, motivating the power struggles of the wizarding world and complicating the young hero’s efforts to survive whatever horrid menace stalked the halls of Hogwarts each semester. It’s certainly a major factor in the backstory, though its sheer importance to the narrative as a whole doesn’t make itself evident until later volumes.
No, I’m speaking of Harry Potter the brave, principled, much put-upon and increasingly angry boy in the process of becoming a man: Harry Potter who learns that he can be menaced not only by those who want to do him harm, but also by those who find him politically inconvenient. That Harry Potter spends the fifth year of his schooling as a wizard having politics rubbed in his face is appropriate enough given that he’s then at a time of life when many bright youngsters are, like him, also developing their first comprehensive understanding that the power struggles of the playground are only amplified by the political give-and-take between adults.
I’m also speaking of Harry Potter the pop-cultural phenomenon of an era when considerations like the extremes our governments are driven to out of fear for their own stability are not just theoretical, but very immediate concerns, which are wreaking a profound effect on the world the young readers and moviegoers thrilling to their hero’s adventures will have to face for themselves just a few short years from now. With the fifth novel, that Harry Potter takes on a shape profoundly resonant with the issues we face, not only in the United States (where I write these words and just barely get by), or in Great Britain (where Rowling works and prospers), but throughout the globe.
This is the year Harry Potter spends trapped between fear and fascism.
Of course, a case can be made that he was already there.
Ethnic politics, often a seed of repression, have always been an issue in the Harry Potter novels. The very issue that Lord Voldemort exploits in his reign of terror, and which motivates the vile Malfoys to support him, is the overwrought sense of entitlement some pure-blood wizards use to distinguish themselves from Mudbloods, who have non-magical ancestry, and “Muggles,” who possess no magical aptitude at all. The Malfoys (notably described as aristocratic blondes, who wouldn’t have been out of place as illustrations of the Third Reich’s own hypothetical Master Race) believe themselves guardians of a superior people, sullied by lesser specimens like Mud-blood Hermione and the Muggle-sympathizing Weasleys. They consider Voldemort justified in his quest to purify the wizarding race, and eagerly support the first reign of terror that ends with Voldemort’s failed attempt on the life of the infant Harry.
Like the real-world equivalent, it’s all self-serving claptrap. Nobody who ever fought to separate people into superiors and inferiors ever came up with the novel idea of categorizing their own into the ranks of the inferiors. (Somehow, the people who define the categories are always classed on top.) Voldemort’s chief ambition is no more profound than the freedom to wreak terror on anybody he dislikes, and the Malfoys want anything that will increase their own wealth, prestige and power. Their bigotry is just an excuse they use to justify their ambitions to themselves. But it’s still the nucleus of a movement that ripped the wizarding world asunder in the years immediately prior to Harry’s birth and that continues to threaten the world of his adolescence.
There are other manifestations of racial politics. There’s the slavery that afflicts the race of house-elves, which goes unquestioned by everybody but Hermione. Even Harry has little problem with this. Oh, yes, he does employ a clever ruse to free Dobby from his cruel master, Lucius Malfoy, in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, but that seems more a stab at Malfoy than any conscientious concern over the civil rights of house-elves. Subsequent developments reveal him as relatively unbothered by the discovery that his beloved school runs as efficiently as it does by keeping a small mob of other house-elves working 24/7 in the kitchen. By the time we get through Order of the Phoenix we also know of the wizarding world’s despicable treatment of giants and of further discontent brewing among the world’s magical creatures, who consider themselves exploited by wizard society. None of this occurs in a vacuum. All of it reflects crimes and resentments going back generations, part of a long and rich history which Harry is just now having explained to him. He’s just unfortunate enough to be the focal point of the generation finally forced to deal with it. He is, in short, like all young people, caught up in conflicts that took root long before he was born.
One more background element deserves special mention, before we take up the action of the fifth book. That is Azkaban fortress, a dark and foreboding place where inmates spend years not only physically imprisoned but also afflicted by the proximity of Dementors, whose presence keeps them locked in a constant, crippling state of despair. Few people in the wizarding world question the justice of this cruel and unusual punishment—with the exception of Dumbledore, who quite rightly sees the Dementors as uncertain allies destined to resume their alliance with Voldemort at the very first opportunity. Just about everybody takes it for granted that anybody imprisoned in Azkaban deserves to be there. Nobody bothers to debate it. And yet the first two Azkaban prisoners we meet are the innocent Hagrid (who is sent there briefly for a crime he didn’t commit), and the just-as-innocent Sirius Black (who rots there for years, his guilt unquestioned, before escaping as the titular Prisoner of Azkaban). In the end, the very inviolability of the prison serves not justice, but rather the permanence of injustice: another element echoing certain real-life concerns, born in well-known places where the accused spend years locked out of sight without so much as access to defense attorneys. The corruption is inherent in the very system Harry inherits.
Again: this is not his fault.
But it is something with which he has to deal.
Fascism can be defined as what happens when a government treats the people as a threat to its own power. It often occurs when the commonwealth perceives a menace, either internal or external, that operates at least in part by internal subversion, and thus provides an excuse to increase societal repression under the pretext of providing societal security.
It’s worth noting that such perceived threats are not always real. They can be wholly imaginary constructs conjured up by mass paranoia, or by political movements that foment mass paranoia in order to cement their own grip on power. Returning to the Third Reich as an example, we find the propaganda Nazi Germany used to portray the Jews of Europe as a race of money-grubbing, politically subversive sub-humans. By painting the activities of the Jews as an immediate threat to the survival of the Fatherland, Hitler and his followers were able to enlist the people of Germany in the creation of a regimented, totalitarian society which the average German accepted as the only legitimate response to ensure the nation’s survival. History, in this case and in many others, documents that such a response is often as dangerous to the freedoms enjoyed by any free society as the enemies governments cite as justification.
In the particular case of the Harry Potter novels, the threat of Lord Voldemort is real. But the actual threat that drives Order of the Phoenix is fear itself, as manifested by the policies of Minister of Magic Cornelius Fudge. Fudge doesn’t believe Voldemort is back. He suspects Harry, and his mentors at Hogwarts, of using rumors to prepare their own power grab. Based only on suspicions of this illusory threat, which on a narrative level functions only as the obstacle hampering our heroes from effectively dealing with the genuine menace, he therefore institutes a series of draconian measures designed to control what he sees as the subversive elements at the wizarding school.
This is also profoundly reminiscent of real-world precedent. Schools and universities have long been seen as the breeding ground of dissent, political activism and open defiance of established orthodoxy. They have therefore long been subject to the tug-of-war between the intellectual freedom that gives young people the tools to question their societies, and the guardians of the status quo who believe students should be taught nothing but loyalty. The debate has been a fixture of every society with an educational system, from the time of Socrates (who was forced to drink hemlock) to the revolt at China’s Tiananmen Square (started by students, whose protests were put down by government forces). In extreme cases, the very idea of education becomes an anathema. Witness the Khmer Rouge, who upon taking power in Cambodia began a bloody purge against anybody foolish enough to admit to having an education.
The classic example in the United States is of course campus activism, which reached a peak in the 1960s. The government of the time was not entirely wrong in finding some of these activities dangerous; after all, some organizations that recruited on American campuses saw no problem in advocating, and practicing, violence. Nor were the peaceful activists of the time entirely wrong in distrusting the government, which sometimes employed violence to put down even the trappings of dissent. In one infamous incident out of many, National Guardsmen opened fire on protestors at Kent State, killing four. Even today, long after the fires of that decade have cooled, the battle over the lessons we teach our students still rages, with each side outdoing the other in condemning educators whose lesson plans conflict with their own version of proper political orientation. Look online and you’ll find any number of conservative groups with “enemies lists” of professors who teach students to “hate America,” and competing liberal groups who take similar exception to professors whose work adheres too closely to a jingoistic, nationalistic orthodoxy.1
With all that in mind, it therefore makes perfect sense for the Ministry of Magic to see Hogwarts as a potential den of subversion, run by a politically suspect faculty and attended by a student body that just might be a bunch of fanatic revolutionaries.
Fascism comes in when the pre-emptive steps taken to address this perceived threat do more damage to that body politic than the perceived threat ever could.
In the case of Order of the Phoenix, those measures make Hogwarts increasingly less a school dedicated to education than a virtual penal institution more interested in keeping its students under strict control at all times.
The first indication of government control of Hogwarts comes on opening day, at which point the Ministry’s plant Professor Dolores Umbridge2 hijacks the banquet to make a turgid speech about “a new era of openness, effectiveness, and accountability, intent on preserving what ought to be preserved, perfecting what needs to be perfected, and pruning wherever we find practices that ought to be prohibited.” As with any number of speeches by real-life leaders, the dangerous passages are buried in a sea of indigestible rhetoric. In this case, a promise of “openness” begins the very same sentence that warns about mysterious, and sinister, new prohibitions.
Most Hogwarts students, with the notable exception of Hermione, perceive Umbridge as a boring old blowhard and fail to pay any attention to this early statement of intent. But the density of her rhetoric is the very point: If she spoke her intent in plain language, she’d inflame the opposition at the very start. Her true purpose, here, is not to introduce all of her changes right away, but merely to get a foot in the door.
The thing is, it’s perfectly possible for freedom to fail overnight, but it usually takes an invading army. More dangerous fascist movements proceed with caution, instituting their abuses incrementally. One oft-cited metaphor for the way this works is the frog and the pot of water. Toss a frog in a pot of boiling water and it will react to the sudden agony by jumping out if it can. Put the same frog in a pot of room-temperature water and increase the heat by one degree every ten minutes, and the frog won’t realize the trouble it’s in even as it starts to cook. The principle develops sinister resonance when applied to governments.
Professor Umbridge understands this, which is one reason her own adjustments to the curriculum and Hogwarts’ power structure function as a series of nested abuses, each one couched in the most beneficial language possible. It’s worth noting that if any one of her actions met with effective resistance, the next would not be possible, which is one reason why the earliest are so carefully couched in obfuscatory language.
This is absolutely true of her stewardship of the Defense Against the Dark Arts class, which is no longer the hands-on training of previous years, but a “carefully structured, theory-centered, Ministry-approved course,” which has been specifically restructured to discourage students from either obtaining, or using, any practical knowledge. Umbridge couches this as “theoretical knowledge . . . more than sufficient to get you through your examination, which, after all, is what school is all about.” But it’s not so much an education as the pretense of one, aimed at pumping out students incapable of challenging the Administration. When the class reacts with predictable anger, Umbridge first places tight controls on who’s allowed to speak, then attacks her predecessors as “irresponsible” and (in the case of Lupin) “dangerous half-breeds.” Harry’s objections result in him being placed under a detention that (he soon finds out) includes torture.
It’s Professor McGonagall who warns Harry of the true danger he’s in: “Do you really think this is about truth or lies? It’s about keeping your head down and your temper under control!” The atmosphere of fear already has less to do with the facts at hand than keeping the obvious questions from being asked.
The outrages continue and grow more, not less, reminiscent of the way things work in analogous real-world situations. There are far too many to relate all of them to their real-world equivalents, but the parallels are so transparent that they hardly need explication to anybody who’s ever read a history book or newspaper. Harry’s friends are pressured to drop him. The newspaper overflows with stories attacking Harry’s credibility: stories that seem to have been written at government behest, by reporters who just take down what they’re being told. Those who defend Harry or Dumbledore, or question the motives of the Ministry, are themselves scapegoated: Madam March-banks, whose protests appear in one news story, is cited as having “alleged links to subversive goblin groups.” Hermione is punished for expressing an opinion that conflicts with the one she’s read in her textbook.
Umbridge is given the new office of Hogwarts High Inquisitor, and tasked to question every member of the Hogwarts faculty, prior to a planned purge. She uses this opportunity to direct her full wrath at anybody suspected of sympathizing with Dumbledore, and when she cannot find evidence has no qualms about manufacturing it (at one point filing a negative report about Hagrid that she maliciously concocts on the spot).
There is a real-world name for this kind of agenda. It’s called an Enemies List. It condemns not only those who oppose the administration, but also those associated with them. Given full power, an Enemies List can blight the existence of anybody unlucky enough to even know somebody listed there. In Stalin’s Soviet Union, and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, people associated with others on such lists could be hauled off to prison on the flimsiest of pretexts; if they were lucky, they merely suffered financial hardships and official harassment. Enemies Lists have also been, unfortunately, in common use in the United States.3 Senator Joe McCarthy used one to attack people associated with his tally of dangerous communists; President Richard Nixon used one against people who had opposed his administration. With the turmoil of recent years, enemies lists have become ever-more prominent in the mainstream, with many political pundits using them for unrestrained attacks on those whose agendas oppose their own. Accusations of treason are flung again and again against the same short list of names, rendering their very words and ideas beyond the pale, regardless of the points being made.
All of this is consistent with an administration no longer interested in answering questions so much as shutting up the people who ask them. These are the actions of a runaway state, obsessed with its own survival, to the exclusion of all other considerations. When used in schools, in the real world or in Hogwarts, the agenda has less to do with educating students than with raising a class of obedient little functionaries. The dangerous thing, of course, is that there is no bottom line. The more repressive a society becomes, the more repressive it tries to become. There’s a steady progression from shutting somebody up to shutting him away, from discouraging certain curricula to outlawing them, from curtailing some rights to taking away all of them. All tyrannies, however long-established, exist in a constant state of experimentation, as they continue to discover what they can get away with next. In Hogwarts under Umbridge, the outrages that here climax in Hagrid under siege are just the beginning of a process that, if allowed to go unopposed, would only have found new depths to plumb. Readers can only shudder at the prospect of just how terrible Hogwarts would have become had Umbridge been allowed to run it unopposed for another five years, or ten, or twenty. Who would be allowed to attend? What would they be taught? And what would the state-approved faculty be free to do to any students who dared to think inconvenient thoughts at an inconvenient time? If Umbridge already engages in torture now, what would she be willing to do in a decade?
Were Harry’s world, or our world, entirely populated by unquestioning sheep who could be trusted to accept such misuses of power without protest, that would be that.
But tyrannies fall.
And the reason they fall is that people oppose them.
In Order of the Phoenix, that opposition takes two forms:
At the urging of Ron and Hermione, Harry recruits a group of trusted students for his own illicit Defense Against the Dark Arts classes. His friends have been brought around to the point of view that they are being shortchanged out of an education they will need to stay alive. It’s worth noting that they are doing nothing here but taking charge of their own lives and guiding their own educations. They are risking their futures to learn that which the state, with its current fascistic excesses, would prefer them not to learn.
The difference between their situation and that of similar students struggling under repressive regimes in the real world is only that the magical nature of Harry’s universe brings the nature of their trespass into startlingly literal relief. Because these illicit lessons empower them. These illicit lessons make them dangerous. These illicit lessons give them what they need to survive. These illicit lessons free them from the empty rote-learning Fudge has mandated to keep them harmless. The metaphor here is not accidental. Nor is it accidental that Harry’s illicit teachings are, manifestly, not quite as good as those they might have received from a real Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher. Lessons that must be taught in secret, while in hiding, by a teacher not yet fully qualified for the job, are not likely to be as good as lessons taught in the full light of academic freedom. The remarkable thing is that they take place at all, and that they do make a critical difference.
The other major rebellion, a series of spectacular stunts performed by the practical jokers Fred and George, is just as influential. They succeed in making Umbridge look ridiculous and, once caught, reject her authority over them outright, flying off to begin their adult lives, while offering major discounts on their practical-joke equipment to any Hogwarts students who “swear they’re going to use our products to get rid of this old bat.” The groundswell of public admiration for these pranks makes it increasingly difficult for Umbridge to maintain her position as unquestioned authority figure. After their departure pranks become ubiquitous, and Umbridge is driven ragged trying to maintain her composure in the face of steadily increasing chaos.
And this, too, has a precedent in reality. Nothing hurts an established power figure more than being made to look ridiculous,4 and the history of resistance movements overflows with incidents where official repression was greeted with guerrilla stunts dedicated to bringing that ridiculousness into sharp relief.
One of the most famous pranks of this kind was the Boston Tea Party, when colonists opposed to the tax policies of the British crown boarded a ship dressed as Indians and poured its entire shipment of tea into the harbor. In the United States, the story is taught anew to each generation of schoolchildren, but (alas) almost always in summary only, with little attention given to explaining exactly why this incident proved such an effective rallying point for the gathering American Revolution, or why it should resonate more than two centuries later. After all, if the point had only been the mere destruction of the tea, there would have been any number of other ways to do it. The ship could have been set afire or damaged in a manner that made it founder. But dressing like Indians—a tactic never intended to shift blame, but rather to echo the stereotype of “noble savage,” then the common perception of the natives with whom the Bostonians shared their continent—turned the Tea Party into street theatre, with enormous popular resonance.
Citizens chafing under even the most repressive systems are likely to be alienated, rather than recruited, by genuine terrorism; the same citizens are likely to feel admiration for gestures that deflate the pretensions of stuffed shirts. That kind of rebellion is contagious. That kind of rebellion establishes the authorities as fallible and encourages more of the same. It’s the main reason why police in totalitarian countries seem so determined to catch the unknown parties who draw big, bushy moustaches on the propaganda posters of El Presidente. The big bushy moustache doesn’t hurt anybody, per se. It doesn’t inconvenience the government a whit. But it does undermine the government’s self-importance, particularly in the eyes of the people, which can be dangerous indeed.
With this in mind, Harry Potter is not the hero of Order of the Phoenix, at least insofar as the threat of Dolores Umbridge is concerned. He remains relatively ineffectual against her. There’s a reason it feels so deeply satisfying when Fred and George drive her to fury and then blithely fly off, calling her an old bat. They’re the ones who demonstrate, by vivid example, that Umbridge cannot remain in power as long as those she seeks to terrorize simply refuse to cooperate with her.
They’re the heroes. They’re the inspirations.
And it’s a good thing they’re around to strike the blow.
Because, as a sad Dumbledore notes at the end of the book, “[Harry has] enough responsibility to be going on with.”
Politics remain a factor in book six. Fascism is largely out of the picture, at least as far as Hogwarts is concerned. The Ministry that succeeds Fudge’s a rather weak one by comparison, deeply committed to surviving the political fallout of the war with Voldemort, but offering the population little but irrelevant safety advisories, publicity-minded arrests of likely suspects, and assurances that they have the situation in hand. They want Harry’s endorsement for his propaganda value. There’s little evidence that they’re equipped to handle Voldemort or anything else. Their activities are far less important, to the actual narrative, than those of their predecessors in book five. But that’s the very point. Their focus on image, to the exclusion of all else, renders them irrelevant: also a situation hardly unknown to educated readers. It’s worth noting, though, that Dolores Umbridge is still among them, still as hateful as ever—and that she remains a threat as long as there remains a chance of her ever returning to power.
It’s a truism that many novels are not only about what they merely seem to be about. A great story is not just an engine to drive the readers from one page to the next. The best are fueled not just by the intangible, often arbitrary rules of make-believe, but by the very same issues that drive the real world inhabited by their authors and readers. Such resonances may not be immediately obvious to those caught up in the stories. But they exist just the same, giving the narratives a weight they might not possess otherwise.
It’s worth noting, then, that many of J. K. Rowling’s younger readers may not identify Umbridge’s behavior as politically repressive so much as single-mindedly mean. They may even leave the book imagining Umbridge’s agenda to come from Voldemort, and not the Ministry. There is nothing particularly wrong with this. Everybody absorbs a narrative within the limitations of their own frames of reference, and you don’t need to know that L. Frank Baum was commenting on the monetary gold standard to appreciate the comical self-delusion of the denizens of Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz.
The fact is, Umbridge is mean. Her political agenda completely notwithstanding, she clearly takes great pleasure in her mission to break Harry’s spirit, whether that includes attacking his reputation, depriving him of the after-school sport that gives him so much pleasure, or downright torturing him at every opportunity. And she is very much an “ally” of Voldemort, if not in actual fact,5 then at least in type. Young readers who follow that much, and no more, have absorbed all they really need to thrill to Order of the Phoenix as a mere story of a boy caught in a clash between good and evil.
But the young readers who see her as nothing more than a mean lady may find additional layers of resonance if they return to the volume later in life. They may even see similarities between Umbridge’s behavior and certain figures they find in their daily newspapers.
By then, they might even be voting.
ADAM-TROY CASTRO’S short fiction has been nominated once for the Stoker, twice for the Hugo and five times for the Nebula. His collections include An Alien Darkness, Vossoff and Nimmitz and Tangled Strings. His work for BenBella includes essays for the Alias, Hitchhiker’s Guide, Superman, Wonder Woman, King Kong and Lost volumes. He is currently working on a book about the TV-reality series The Amazing Race, due from BenBella in late 2006, and has also recently completed a novel. All of these will soon be knocked off his shelves by his cats, Maggie the Cat, Uma Furman and Meow Farrow. His beautiful wife, Judi, will just shake her head slowly and try to cope.