Harry Potter and the Military Industrial Complex

  • WolfdadCigarette@threads.net@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    107
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    4 months ago

    This is explored at length in the books. The wizard supremacists are an allegory for race supremacists, and it’s pointed out repeatedly that they’re delusional, broadly impotent, and small-minded. The death eaters believe so completely in their godhead and his divine right to rule that they neglect to consider even the most basic countermeasures or alternatives. There’s some “death of Stalin” paranoia but it’s overwhelmingly unforced incompetence.

    Voldemort, likewise, blocks out even the potential for his lessers to outdo him. He is utterly infallible and his insecurities as an incest orphan to a fallen house will not allow him to feel any differently. Meanwhile, he’s been repeatedly circumvented and beaten by a group of teenagers, and his brewing plans will lead to the complete genocide of wizardkind upon reaching the world stage. It perfectly encapsulates the way race supremacists view the world and why they fail so frequently. The enemy is both strong and weak.

    Darn shame rowling’s turned into what she hates. She wasn’t terrible at writing populism 101.

  • atro_city@fedia.io
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    60
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    4 months ago

    Wizards would be rounded up and experimented on to try and find out how to make it an injection to make super soldiers. There’s absolutely no way wizards and magical beings wouldn’t end up in test tubes.

  • MindTraveller@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    61
    arrow-down
    10
    ·
    4 months ago

    I had trouble believing Harry Potter as a kid. The whole house elf thing seemed unrealistic. Then when I grew up, I realised English people really are that racist.

    • Johanno@feddit.org
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      43
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      4 months ago

      I remember seeing a meme of Harry Potter, but I can’t find it anymore. Basically a conversation between Harry and dumbledore.

      Harry says to dumbledore:

      We are wizards, we could cure cancer. Fix world hunger and end all wars. Why we don’t do it?

      Dumbledore says:

      Harry you forgot the most important reason: we are British

    • pyre@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      15
      ·
      4 months ago

      you don’t enjoy a little decorating decapitated slave heads for some wholesome Christmas joy?

        • MindTraveller@lemmy.ca
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          16
          ·
          4 months ago

          That’s in the book. Grimmauld Place has the preserved heads of all the Black family elves hanging by the door. During book 7 when Harry and gang are hiding there, they put Santa hats and beards on the heads for Christmas.

          These are supposed to be the good guys.

        • pyre@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          12
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          edit-2
          4 months ago

          Shaun has a takedown of the entire series on his channel, and this is one of my favorite parts:

          so our heroes decide to decorate their decapitated slave heads with little Christmas hats…

          now I’m gonna need to hit pause here, next to the Christmas slave heads, and ask: what is happening right now… why are the Harry Potter books like this

          not my absolute favorite quote either. long video but definitely recommend; even Shaun’s extremely dry delivery breaks at a couple points: https://youtu.be/-1iaJWSwUZs

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      12
      arrow-down
      3
      ·
      edit-2
      4 months ago

      My father grew up poor in the East End of London and got a scholarship to go to the sort of upper-class school that Hogwarts emulates. Apart from being proud of the achievement of doing so well academically there, he had very little good to say about it, especially the upper-class snobbery and, yes, the bigotry (he was Jewish) from both the students and the teachers. He told me that every morning just before school prayers, the headmaster made a big deal about excusing all the “Jews, Catholics and other heathens” (or something to that effect) to humiliate all of those kids. One of his only friends at the time was another kid there on scholarship.

      Ironically, he said his favorite teacher at the school was the school’s chaplain, who was a really kind and funny man that didn’t care that my father wasn’t an Anglican, just that he was a smart kid.

      My wife loves Harry Potter but I could never get into it after hearing all of my dad’s stories about his school when he was growing up.

  • Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    40
    ·
    4 months ago

    Imagine the IRA, except they can fly, go invisible, or simply step into a phone booth or fireplace and vanish, and had an entire other dimension they could disappear into where they could be self sufficient.

    Technology means nothing if you don’t even know who you enemy is.

    • AbsentBird@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      19
      ·
      4 months ago

      Heck, they can mind control people, wipe their memories, or take a potion and assume their identity. It would be like fighting the Face Dancers from Dune if they were all trained in The Voice.

    • ImWaitingForRetcons@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      29
      ·
      4 months ago

      True enough, the capabilities of Magic haven’t been explored enough canonically to disprove that - but if the government learned of Magic, the first thing they’d do is subvert some wizards to their side, who might be able to counteract them - in many ways, it’s a battle of statecraft as it is of actual power.

        • ImWaitingForRetcons@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          10
          ·
          edit-2
          4 months ago

          But they were able to setup the core of their commercial and governance infrastructure in the middle of London, with no particular notice from muggles - not to mention, we know that the government already knows about wizards (MoM liaises with the PM). So there must be a quid pro quo already in place, with the government tolerating and aiding in the existence of a semi-independent polity in their heartlands in return for unspecified benefits, probably defence against foreign wizards.

    • Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      10
      ·
      4 months ago

      The greatest problem you would have fighting the Wizarding World is there is no easy way to tell who your enemy is. You’d be fighting an insurgency that can just vanish into thin air, with some pretty potent abilities.

  • nednobbins@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    37
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    4 months ago

    That’s one of many many plot holes in Harry Potter.

    There’s really no depth to the world building beyond, “What if British public schools taught magic?”

    It doesn’t make sense in any context beyond that because the author never considered it from any context beyond that. Whenever you run into some crazy crap in HP and wonder, “Why TF would anyone do it that way?” The answer is almost always, "Because that’s how they do it in British public schools.

  • meep_launcher@lemm.eeOP
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    33
    ·
    4 months ago

    The reason Hermione is sworn to secrecy about the wizarding world is that they know if muggles found out there was a deep state, the revolution would be swift.

  • ryathal@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    33
    ·
    4 months ago

    It comes down to how powerful static wards are, and how much technology just gets corrupted by magic. The real power of the wizards is memory and time manipulation. Close range is definitely in favor of wizards, you can’t surprise them unless they are intentionally careless. They can always go back a few hours and ambush you back. Chaos would ensue if they deleted every memory before 5 of a handful of leaders.

    The tech killing thing is poorly defined, but hogwarts seems to disable electronic devices within a radius. If it’s similar to an emp, it may have countermeasures, but it’s hard to say they also work on magic. Operating within the radius of somewhere like that would be difficult.

    There’s also the animagus issue. Every dog, cat, bird, or bug is a potential spy or assassin that is practically undetectable.

    The big question is can spells stop a large bomb/nuke. Even if they couldn’t, it would be possible for wizards to escape the blast zone pretty easily, unless they couldn’t detect the attack.

    I think the big weakness would be sniper fire that may be fast enough to prevent reactions at the borders of wards.

    • morrowind@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      20
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      4 months ago

      Ah yes, the good old solution of every contemporary fantasy world.

      “modern technology just doesn’t work”

      • octopus_ink@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        11
        ·
        edit-2
        4 months ago

        I mean, depending on the book, you have already accepted a number of ridiculous premises by real-world standards. It’s surprising to me that “and by the way, it interferes with or can be used to disable various kinds of technology” is where you would decide to roll your eyes.

        • morrowind@lemmy.ml
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          13
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          4 months ago

          Because it’s a cop out. You’re not putting any thought into how your systems would interact with modern tech. Even if you really need a modern setting with no technology, at least be imaginative with why that happens and maybe let that reason affect your setting in some other ways as well. It’s the difference between a world that feels real, messy and casual, and some hypothetical scenario you made to tell your story.

          Harry potter isn’t the worst world for sure. Like Rowling does a pretty good job in explaining how wizards stay invisible from regular society, with the ministry of magic, their memory erasing and multiple incidents that all make it feel very real. But for technology we get little beyond Arthur weasly having a interest in collecting electric plugs or something.

          There’s also no good logic or intuition about what technology does or doesn’t work. An electric kettle won’t work but a whole ass car will? It prevents any conflict that has technology involved from having stakes because you don’t have limits or an idea of what’s dangerous/important

          • octopus_ink@lemmy.ml
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            5
            ·
            4 months ago

            There’s also no good logic or intuition about what technology does or doesn’t work. An electric kettle won’t work but a whole ass car will?

            Sometimes the answer could be “hey, we don’t know everything there is to know about our magic. Sure would be nice to know why some kinds of tech are more affected than others, but our level of understanding isn’t there yet.”

            Because it’s a cop out. You’re not putting any thought into how your systems would interact with modern tech. Even if you really need a modern setting with no technology, at least be imaginative with why that happens and maybe let that reason affect your setting in some other ways as well.

            But maybe it doesn’t matter to the story. HP isn’t a role playing game (there probably is one now, but at the time it was created). There’s all kinds of things we didn’t and/or don’t fully understand about our real world. If they had defined the “rules” of HP magic in a way that satisfies the concern in your example, I don’t see how it would have impacted the story much. If anything it might have killed some of the fantastical bits of the storytelling. It’s not that sort of magic - I’d call it a “soft-ish” magic system if we’re going to define things that way. Muggle tech is unreliable around it - and Weasley had apparently done some kind of tinkering to kind of get the car to work because he was a geek like that. Works for me.

            I get your points, I’m not trying to say you are wrong, I’m just saying the importance of that sort of detail can be kind of subjective. What I enjoy about the HP universe isn’t the slightest bit ruffled by that little bit of ambiguity. In a universe where the author really tried to keep things real feeling, I probably would be bothered, but there is so much more to criticize about HP before you get to muggle tech for someone who wants magical realism that it just seems like a weird stopping point to me.

            Maybe you just prefer a hard magic system which is totally valid, but IMO that’s a matter of personal preference, not “correctness” if that makes any sense.

      • ryathal@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        9
        ·
        4 months ago

        Yes, Rowling was pretty lazy about the edges of world building that weren’t directly related to her story.

      • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        4 months ago

        More like: they know how modern technology works and have designed spells dedicated to preventing them from functioning.

  • juliebean@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    34
    arrow-down
    5
    ·
    4 months ago

    of course muggles would win a war against wizarding folk, that is why they made the international statue of secrecy (also cause jkr is a hack who never wants to bother extrapolating from the consequences of her own worldbuilding)

    • GBU_28@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      13
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      4 months ago

      This is not clear cut. One teleport into a nuke silo + a brainwash spell = big problems

      Edit (yes maybe one or two other brainwashes to get the proper codes forwarded)

      • BowtiesAreCool@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        12
        ·
        4 months ago

        Who’s to say some governments aren’t keenly aware of the wizarding world and they have their own protections and wizards

          • Scubus@sh.itjust.works
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            9
            ·
            4 months ago

            But apparition becomes exponentially more difficult when you are bringing more with you. That’s why tandem apparations are licensed differently from regular, and why ron, who knew how to apparate, got splinched when he accidently brought yaxley(?)

            That being said, most wizards do not understand the concept of electricity or the finer details of physics. So just post a video giving the wizards assassin’s your current location and wait for them to appear. Except your current location is in a room with an electric floor. Or filled with tear gas. They wouldn’t recognize a gas mask or know what rubber boots do.

            • Dasus@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              6
              arrow-down
              1
              ·
              4 months ago

              Bubblehead charm and shield charm? And teargas wouldn’t much harm the effectiveness of a wizard who can do non-verbal casting. Unless they’re in a closed space with it for a loong time without any protection.

              Also, the whole “wizards don’t understand muggle tech” doesn’t make sense seeing how many muggleborns there are. Like honestly, Hermione wouldn’t bring pencils/pens to school? Would pens not work in Hogwarts , as “muggle tech”? Pencils?

              And how on Earth is it that non-muggle wizards into muggle shit can’t like, visit a library or purchase an encyclopedia? They clearly interact with the muggle world, and that’s not illegal, nor are muggle objects (unless you enchant them.)

              The worst part is how muggle-borns can have siblings who aren’t wizards and how muggle-born kids seem to not be able to keep any of the friends they had before turning 11. That or we’re meant to believe 12-year olds wouldn’t boast about being actually magical to their best friends on their first vacation.

      • juliebean@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        4 months ago

        that’d be an issue, though nukes are pretty indiscriminate, and wizarding folk generally live among muggles, not in one isolated wizard country, which limits their usefulness. they can’t exactly nuke london without destroying diagon alley, and vice versa. plus, you need to know your destination pretty well to apparate, so there’d need to be some more involved infiltration beforehand.

        • GBU_28@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          4 months ago

          Sure, I’m handwaving a lot, just saying the ability to manipulate minds and teleport to places (even with the kidnapped person) presents an x factor that is hard to overstate.

  • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    27
    ·
    4 months ago

    If wizards were incapable of shielding against fast moving projectiles, they would have more spells dedicated to creating fast moving projectiles against their opponents.

    • dariusj18@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      22
      ·
      4 months ago

      I think part of the subtext of the wizarding world is its parallels to British sensibility. You do things the way they’ve always been done because that’s just the way of it. You don’t come up with new spells, you rely on the tried and true spells that have been around for centuries.

    • Snowclone@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      24
      ·
      4 months ago

      They were being killed by muggles left and right, and this was way before the invention of guns, so, yeah, they weren’t winning that war in any case.

      • MrAlternateTape@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        4 months ago

        Actually, at some point in the books they talk about this, and somebody comments how Muggles seldom would actually catch a real witch or wizard. And if they did, the witch or wizard would cast a spell to shield themselves from the fire and pretend to be in pain.

  • ramble81@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    19
    ·
    4 months ago

    There’s a WP. Voldemort succeeds and then gets drunk on his own power and attempts to take over the muggle world (pure blood and all that) and he promptly gets his ass handed to him by the military.