Harry Potter and the Tyrant's Bane
A longtime pet theory of mine which, regrettably, I’ve had occasion to propound more than once over the last few years, is the notion that every would-be tyrant carries within himself the seeds of his own destruction. Whether it be Genghis the Khan’s megalomania, Hitler’s obsessions about “race,” or Stalin's deeply-ingrained—and very Russian—cultural inferiority complex and paranoia, I think history supports my idea quite well.
Forced as we have been for nearly a decade to acknowledge and deal with the increasingly obvious tyrannical bent of Amerika v2.0’s central government, I’ve recently been put in mind of similar remarks made by Professor Albus Dumbledore in the penultimate volume of JK Rowling’s fantastic Harry Potter series, namely Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. So I went to the bookshelf and dug out my battered, many-times-reread dead-tree copy to retrieve this:
“So, when the prophecy says that I’ll have ‘power the Dark Lord knows not,’ it just means—love?” asked Harry, feeling a little let down.
“Yes—just love,” said Dumbledore. “But Harry, never forget that what the prophecy says is only significant because Voldemort made it so. I told you this at the end of last year. Voldemort singled you out as the person who would be most dangerous to him—and in doing so, he made you the person who would be most dangerous to him!”
“But it comes to the same —”
“No, it doesn’t!” said Dumbledore, sounding impatient now. Pointing at Harry with his black, withered hand, he said, “You are setting too much store by the prophecy!”
“But,” spluttered Harry, “but you said the prophecy means—”
“If Voldemort had never heard of the prophecy, would it have been fulfilled? Would it have meant anything? Of course not! Do you think every prophecy in the Hall of Prophecy has been fulfilled?”
“But,” said Harry, bewildered, “but last year, you said one of us would have to kill the other—”
“Harry, Harry, only because Voldemort made a grave error, and acted on Professor Trelawney’s words! If Voldemort had never murdered your father, would he have imparted in you a furious desire for revenge? Of course not! If he had not forced your mother to die for you, would he have given you a magical protection he could not penetrate? Of course not, Harry! Don’t you see? Voldemort himself created his worst enemy, just as tyrants everywhere do! Have you any idea how much tyrants fear the people they oppress? All of them realize that, one day, amongst their many victims, there is sure to be one who rises against them and strikes back! Voldemort is no different!”
I won’t go into any lengthy digression explaining the backstory or who the characters mentioned above and what the relationship betwixt them might be for the nonce; for purposes of this brief essay, Dumbledore’s last few lines above speak for themselves adequately enough, I think.
One minor quibble with the above passage I feel compelled to mention is with Dumbledore’s assertion that all tyrants greatly fear those they misrule; in our own case particularly, they appear to despise much more than fear us, which may well hold true across the whole spectrum. It’s my own contention that it’s entirely possible, if not damned likely, that the two mindsets—fear and contempt—might be not so much incompatible as they are intertwined, in Lord Voldemort and his real-life emulators as well.
Be all that as it may, this debate shouldn’t distract those forced to confront a tyrant in their own time from the truly central issue, which is disposing of him. As for Rowling's Potter novels, if you haven’t read them before, I can’t recommend them highly enough.