Another sucky paper by E.R.E. Sorry it's all wonky-looking. I am too lazy to screw with it.
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Harry Potter and the War on
Terrorism After the events of September 11th, the issue of terrorism was brought to the forefront of American politics. But what is a terrorist? George Bush seems to think he knows, or at least wants us to think so. "The terrorists are the heirs to fascism," he said on Pearl Harbor Day in 2001, "They have the same wield of power, the same disdain for the individual, the same mad global ambitions. And they will be dealt with in just the same way. Like all fascists, the terrorists can not be appeased. They must be defeated. This struggle will not end in a truce or a treaty. It will end in victory for the United States, our friends and for the cause of freedom." But the Bush administration hasn't got all of us fooled. I, for one, think ole' George W. reads too much Harry Potter. The Harry Potter series is much more than the whimsical children's series that it appears to be on the surface. There is, for example, an ever-present terrorist group in J.K. Rowling's novels known as the Death Eaters. Before they reached their most sinister, they called themselves the Knights of Walpurgis. Now they make no attempts to disguise neither their actions nor intentions. The group is lead by a sociopath, formerly known as Tom Marvolo Riddle, who has fashioned himself into Lord Voldemort. He is so feared that most people throughout the wizarding world refer to him only as "He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named" or "You-Know-Who." Even then-Minister of Magic, Cornelius Fudge, is too frightened of him to speak his actual name; instead preferring to call him "Lord -- Thingy." (Order of the Phoenix 845) His own followers also fear him and have taken to calling him the Dark Lord. Before Voldemort was stopped in his tracks by Harry Potter, a mere baby at the time, he and his Death Eaters had the wizarding world in a constant state of complete and utter terror. In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Harry's godfather, Sirius Black, describes what it was like before Voldemort's temporary defeat: "Imagine that Voldemort’s powerful now. You don’t know who his supporters are, you don’t know who’s working for him and who isn’t; you know he can control people so that they do terrible things without being able stop themselves. You’re scared for yourself, and your family, and your friends. Every week, news comes of more deaths, more disappearances, more torturing ... The Ministry of Magic’s in disarray, they don’t know what to do, they’re trying to keep everything hidden from the Muggles, but meanwhile, Muggles are dying too. Terror everywhere ... panic ... confusion ... that’s how it used to be." (527) The Death Eaters employed many tactics to achieve this result, including torture and murder. They used the three Unforgivable Curses (Imperius, through which the caster can control the actions of the victim; Cruciatus, the torture curse; and the Killing Curse, Avada Kedavra) without hesitation time and time again. There was nothing that the Ministry of Magic could do but try to round up as many Death Eaters as possible. There was no room for negotiation in Voldemort's quest for immortality and unquestioned power and, while unbeknownst to everyone at the time, no straightforward way to kill him, for that matter. The events that took place during the first war and the little we've seen of the second war in the series prove that the Death Eaters will stop at absolutely nothing. Witches and wizards were reminded of this every time they saw the Dark Mark: a skull with a snake coming out of its mouth -- Voldemort's sign which graces the left arm of all of his minions. J.K. Rowling illustrates the power the very symbol of Voldemort had over people in the times of the first war: "'..You-Know-Who and his followers sent the Dark Mark into the air whenever they killed,' said Mr. Weasley. 'The terror it inspired ... you have no idea, you’re too young. Just picture coming home and finding the Dark Mark hovering over your house, and knowing what you’re about to find inside....' Mr. Weasley winced. 'Everyone’s worst fear ... the very worst.'" (Goblet of Fire 142) The fear felt by the wizarding world was not misplaced. Dozens, maybe even hundreds, of people were killed by Voldemort and his Death Eaters in England alone. That is a lot, considering that the wizarding population of England is speculated to only be somewhere around 3,000. But some people weren't lucky enough to just be killed. For example, Neville Longbottom's parents, Frank and Alice Longbottom, were both tortured to the point of insanity using the Cruciatus curse by admitted Death Eaters Bellatrix and Rodolphus Lestrange. It has even been suggested that Muggles (non-magic people) were tortured and killed for the Death Eaters' amusement at Dark Revels. Before the commencement of Voldemort's resurrection ritual in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, an innocent boy was killed needlessly with the flick of a wand -- a prime demonstration of the very little consideration that the Death Eaters pay to life.
Upon inspection, the Death Eaters seem to represent the
quintessential terrorist group, although they are never so named by
Rowling. However, they do
not fit any reasonable definition of terrorists, only the Bush
Administration's. "In
the To make the comparison between the imaginary terrorist group of J.K. Rowling's creation and the groups that are actually working in the world today, we need to agree upon a definition of terrorism. Unfortunately, there are very many different perspectives on what exactly a terrorist is, and how to best define them. There will probably never be any real consensus on what defines a terrorist, but that doesn't negate the need for a definition. Stephen Nathanson proposes some criteria for determining whether a group can be classified as terrorist which make sense. They are as follows: 1. Has the group committed a series of deliberately violent or destructive acts? 2. Were these acts part of a campaign to promote an agenda? 3. Did these acts "target limited numbers of people but aim to influence a larger group and/or leaders who make decisions for the group"? 4. Did the group kill or injure innocent people or pose serious threats to do so? (Crotty 10) Viewing the Death Eaters through the lens of Nathanson's criteria, one must come to the conclusion that they are not what we would consider a terrorist group. Au contraire, they are far beyond terrorism. They are the embodiment of evil. There is no appeasing them, nor reasoning with them. J.K. Rowling has never once mentioned them making demands. They do not even seem to acknowledge the Ministry. They seem to just run wild, wreaking havoc wherever they wish, whenever they wish, for no apparent reason other than they are pure, unadulterated evil. Even to the most blood-thirsty (as G.W. would say) terrorist group out there today there is no comparison. If Palestinian suicide bombers, Al Qaeda, or Hizbullah are evil, then there is no word that exists in the English language to encompass what Voldemort and the Death Eaters are. They exist to terrorize. Terror is not a means to an end for them -- it is the end. More or less, they torture and kill for pleasure. The Wikipedia entry for Terrorism states that " those accused of being 'terrorists' rarely identify themselves as such, and instead typically use terms that reference their ideological or ethnic struggle — separatist, freedom fighter, liberator, militant, insurgent, paramilitary, guerrilla, (from guerra, Spanish for 'war'), rebel, jihadi and mujaheddin (both meaning 'struggler'), or fedayeen ('prepared for martyrdom')." The term "terrorism" evolved from Napoleon's infamous Reign of Terror and the tactics of totalitarian regimes such as the Nazis. (Walker 1) These acts were committed, however, by governing forces to keep the populace under control and ultimately to enhance a political strategy, which doesn't seem quite congruent to our current perception of terrorists as small groups of renegades. In this day and age, the acts of the Nazis or Soviets could be called state-sponsored terrorism. While it will never be admitted by dogmatic talking heads, what constitutes terrorism today is regularly the result of asymmetric warfare or conflict, which is defined as "[a conflict] in which the two sides are dramatically mismatched, such that the strength, influence, and resources of one utterly dwarf the other." (French 32) One example of this is when the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), "too weak to fight an orthodox struggle," adopted terrorist tactics in the late 1960s/early 1970s. (Walker 2) The Death Eaters were not in a situation remotely similar to this. There was no colonial power they were fighting against -- no repressive force undemocratically imposing things upon them. No, within the wizarding world there is no such thing as asymmetric warfare unless it's a case of Squibs (witches and wizards who have difficulty performing magic) against fully-able witches and wizards. While the Ministry employs Aurors to seek out and capture/destroy dark wizards and witches, there was no official army to battle the Death Eaters until the Order of the Phoenix was formed by Albus Dumbledore, Headmaster of Hogwarts and Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot (wizard court) during the first war. Even then, the side of the light was outnumbered. The tactics employed by the Death Eaters, then, weren't a desperate grasp at exerting influence in a situation where they had no power, but a demonstration of power for its own sake. Witches and wizards don't fight using guns, knives, and explosives -- they all have the potential to use powerful magic against one another if they work at it hard enough. The quest of Voldemort and his Death Eaters can't even be considered a struggle, much less a case of asymmetric warfare. By Nathanson's definition, the Palestinian Liberation Organization is, indeed, a terrorist one. It fits all of his criteria. 1. The group has a very long history of violent and destructive acts, 2. which were part of a campaign to promote an agenda, 3. and which generally targeted limited numbers of people in order to influence a larger group or its leaders and, 4. it has killed and injured so-called innocent people. The main point of contention here would be whether or not Israeli citizens constitute innocent people. Palestinian refugees may not agree that they are. Either way, their consciences allow them to embrace the only real strategy a powerless, marginalized people such as themselves have. It probably doesn't help the Israeli side that their government has time and again murdered defenseless Palestinian civilians, opening themselves up to the same sort of attack. Let's say for a moment that the last criterion of Nathanson's is killing or injuring civilians, and not "innocent" people. Then, the PLO is a terrorist group or, rather, a group that uses terrorist tactics, according to this definition. So? The Bush Administration would have us believe that this makes them reprehensible to the point of being almost inhuman. The fact of the matter is, terrorism did not always have such a negative connotation. Terrorist strategies have been employed by "the good guys" time and time again in crises and war or even only to further economic and political interest, but never have these regimes referred to themselves as terrorist. The negative construction of the term "terrorist" is, I feel, the main problem when it comes to applying the label upon a group, as it imposes a value judgment upon said group. Instead of seeing terrorists as people or groups struggling to have some control of their lives under the crushing waves of imperialism, as is often the case, any group referred to as terrorist is automatically blacklisted and considered an enemy -- criminally insane at the best, demonic and subhuman at the worst -- even though the United States, Israel, Britain, et al., have historically used and continue to use terrorism in both domestic and foreign affairs themselves!
Just as the Death Eaters are a fictional construction of
terrorists, I think the question the debate over terrorism really comes down to is how far should a person or group reasonably go to secure their fundamental rights? Many people will, throughout the courses of their lives, make efforts to change as many of the negative social realities they face as they can, mostly through political reform and education. I do not mean to devalue the importance of education in this essay. I feel that every person alive is responsible for the state of the whole of society in some way or another and, ideally every person alive would take part in altering it. The systemic inequalities that exist today are not timeless phenomenon, set in place by some supernatural force. On the contrary, they are constructions of the human mind and, in turn, they force the perpetuation of a certain social mentality. They may not have been expressly created for this purpose, but probably developed over time, growing exponentially so that we are progressively more and more alienated from them. And only through educating ourselves and each other can we even begin to grasp what part we play in the maintenance of the status quo and how best to change that. Be that as it may, we cannot afford to waste the lessons learned through centuries of struggle towards social, political, and economic equity. As the problems increasingly worsen, the reality of the sort of action we need to take to affect change grows clearer. Petitions are arguably a waste of paper. No number of letters to your Senator is going to change anything fundamental about our society. When you are dealing with a colonizing force, pressing your interests through the traditional channels would be more often than not constitute only wasted time and effort. When the elements of these problems are so ingrained in a system itself, any attempt to work through that very system will surely fall short of real change. "[The] essence of agency is that individuals through collective action are capable of changing the structure of society and even the course of history. But while agency is important, we should not forget the power of the structures that subordinate people, making change difficult or, at times, impossible." (Eitzen & Zinn 574) Those who wish to construct a better tomorrow need to come to terms with what needs to be done today, and more or less what that involves is bringing the existing structure down, instead of simply addressing the varying symptoms of a massive problem. "[The] evil of pinning faith to indirect action is far greater than any such minor results. The main evil is that it destroys initiative, quenches the individual rebellious spirit, teaches people to rely on someone else to do for them what they should do for themselves . . ." (de Cleyre) The answer, then, must lie within direct action. It is by and because of the direct acts of the forerunners of social change, whether they be of peaceful or warlike nature, that the Human Conscience, the conscience of the mass, becomes aroused to the need for change. It would be very stupid to say that no good results are ever brought about by political action; sometimes good things do come about that way. But never until individual rebellion, followed by mass rebellion, has forced it. Direct action is always the clamorer, the initiator, through which the great sum of indifferentists become aware that oppression is getting intolerable." (de Cleyre) What exactly direct action entails, however, is debatable. Harald Beyer-Arsenen presents us with an interesting analysis of direct action. "Direct action has been defined as action without intermediaries," he says, and individual and collective empowerment are the roots of direct action. He also provides this example to demonstrate what direct action isn't, for clarification purposes: "If you lack water you might have to dig a well, and the act of digging will be direct action. . . We could imagine that . . . we organized to sit down outside the landowner residence, the King's Palace, the White House or the parliament building, called in the press and proclaimed we would remain seated on the lawn (committing the crime of trespassing) until the absent landowner, a legislative body or somebody else with authority, granted us a permit to dig for water on his or her property -- or until we were carried or otherwise forced away. This surely would be civil disobedience, a breach of law, but would it also be direct action? Hardly. We had tried to put pressure on an authority to make or undo a judgment. In this we had abided by their power and authority to make such a judgment in the first place. Rather than letting our ends only be mediated by our own efforts and (wo) man-made tools . . . we had put their rule between our means and ends." Likewise, when I use the term direct action, I do not mean to reference just any action which involves measures other than or slightly beyond casting ballots or signing petitions. I feel that the term has been diluted as politics and times change. "Some would define any non-parliamentary action as a direct action, such as any street demonstration. But to make a statement about what we would like something to be, or not to be, is not likely to move any mountain. If the mere words, 'Stop the bombing!' halted bombs in mid-air, or took away their deadly effect, the world would be a better place to live. It is not any more likely that breaking window panes would generate this effect, either." (Beyer-Arsenen) There is a saying that goes "if voting changed anything, it would be illegal." I think the most important message to get across to people is not to abstain from voting but not to view voting as an ends in itself. Voting is little more than making a statement, which may or may not be accepted by the government. "Statements don’t do it. If [they] did, we would have transformed society in this country more than a century ago." (Clyne) Not only do I feel, as I said before, that not enough change can come through working with the system, but voting and signing petitions gives individuals a false sense of accomplishment, of action. As Ward Churchill states, "if you conduct your protest activities in a manner which is sanctioned by the state, [it is only because] the state understands that the protest will have no effect on anything." (Clyne) Most protests and rallies seem to do little more than work to alleviate middle class guilt. All this could be characterized a drive-through activism. And to think of all the time and energy which is being put into political campaigns for various issues, the organization and participation in vastly ineffective protests which could be used in more productive ways. And what are those more productive ways, you may wonder? The formula is simple: do what they don't want you to do. "You can gauge the effectiveness—real or potential at least—of any line of activity by the degree of severity of repression visited upon it by the state. It responds harshly to those things it sees as, at least incipiently, destabilizing. So you look where they are visiting repression: that’s exactly what you need to be doing. People engaged in the activity that is engendering the repression are the first people who need to be supported..." (Clyne) Some of the first things that may come to mind when considering what the powers that be don't want you to do may include sabotage and property destruction and sometimes physical violence. These things generally don't appeal to your run-of-the-mill middle class liberal apologist, but must be taken into serious consideration. However, they are not the end-all and be-all of this argument. "Nonviolent action can [also] be effectual when harnessed in a way that is absolutely unacceptable to the state: if you actually clog the freeways or occupy sites or whatever to disrupt state functioning with the idea of ultimately making it impossible for the state to function at all, and are willing to incur the consequences of that. That’s very different from people standing with little signs, making a statement." (Clyne) Whether activists are willing to admit the reality of what they must do or not is probably strongly dependent upon their attachment to the status quo of their lives. Revolution is not a painless process, and if people are dedicated to making change they will have to take risks which may come with unhappy consequences. In a speech from "U.S. Off the Planet: An Evening with Ward Churchill and Chellis Glendinning," Ward Churchill had the following to say about killing your colonizer (a phrase coined by Frantz Fanon, inextricably linked with the idea of direct action), figuratively and literally: Understand the rules of engagement. You did not create them. They are rules imposed upon you. . . Rules that are imposed every 357 magnum strapped to the hip of every cop that is walking a beat today, . . . by the existence of nuclear weaponry, by the existence of fragmentation bombs, [et cetera. No one knows the full list but these things are there for] a reason. The reason is to keep us in line. . . There isn't a pill we can take, there's not a prayer we can say, there's not song we can sing, there's not a petition we can circulate, there's not a vote we can make, there's not an argument that can be extended in speaking truth to power that will alter the situation fundamentally because fundamentally power ain't listening; there's nothing we can tell them that they don't know already and they flatly fucking don't care. So if we're serious about liberation,. . . if we're serious about forging a different future . . . we're going to have to look things square in the eye and figure out where we stand and how we go about getting it done and do it. (Emphasis mine) One of the great figureheads of the antislavery movement in the United States could, for all intents and purposes, be labeled nothing less than a terrorist. And when John Brown wasn't striking fear into the hearts of those who were slave-owners, he was plunging knives into them. "John Brown was a man of violence; he would have scorned anybody's attempt to make him out anything else. And once a person is a believer in violence, it is with him only a question of the most effective way of applying it, which can be determined only by a knowledge of conditions and means at his disposal." (de Cleyre) Both the actions of Brown and the participants in the Boston Tea Party were looked upon at illegitimate at the time, but consider the venerable places that they hold in our history books today. (Shuman 20) We will never truly know how much we owe to them, but we do know that terrorists don't only come in one flavor: evil. Direct action is alive and well today, all throughout the world. So-called ecoterrorism happens semi-regularly throughout the states in housing and industrial developments. While the ethics of the tactics used by, for example, the Earth Liberation Front, is a matter for debate, their impact is a bit less so. It may even be scientifically measurable. "At some level, the elves' action will cause developers to think twice . . . [and in] the whaling industry, for example, concerted sabotage has made it almost impossible for prospective whalers to insure their boats." (Phillabaum) Another example on a smaller scale is the reaction of students at MIT in 1988 who were concerned about an on-campus showing of the film Deep Throat. "The MIT administration did not stop it . . . [so activists] responded by taking direct action. A dozen women and a few men leafletted the audience, and then interrupted the movie, cutting the cord of the movie projector. The action was successful in substituting a constructive discussion of the severity of both actions for an endless debate on how (and whether) the MIT administration should define pornography." (Cowan) But there's a lot more to direct action than the cessation of work or sabotage. A prime example of this took place in India where: "At 3pm on August 13, 2004, Akku Yadav was lynched by a mob of around 200 women from Kasturba Nagar. It took them 15 minutes to hack to death the man they say raped them with impunity for more than a decade. . . Laughed at and abused by the police when they reported being raped by Yadav, the women took the law into their own hands. . . Each time he was arrested, he was granted bail. . . But the 32-year-old was never changed with rape. Instead, the women say, the police would tell him who had made the reports and he would come after them. According to residents, the police were hand-in-glove with Yadav. . . The women decided that, if necessary, they'd go to prison, but that this man would never come back and terrorise them. . . Now every woman living in the slum has claimed responsibility for the murder." ("Arrest us all") The action
taken by these women to stop the suffering inflicted upon so many by
this man was undeniably effective. The
saying that dead men don't rape seems quite fitting here.
"Violence definitely solves some things.
A dead rapist will not commit any more rapes:
he's been solved." (Clarke)
What's more, in taking action as such a big group, it is harder
for the women to be punished for exercising what should be considered
their right when the law enforcement system has failed them.
Additionally, activists have taken on not only rapists but things
which they feel promote rape. Take,
for example, the fire-bombing Vancouver 5, also known as the Wimmen's
Fire Brigade, which had "decided to make literal the name of [the
Red Hot Video chain] which specialized in violent pornography. . .
According to Open Road, '(m)any of the films depicted not only explicit
sex scenes, but women being trussed up, beaten, raped, tortured, forced
to undergo enemas by armed intruders and other forms of degradation'. .
. Women's groups had been
fighting for six months against Red Hot Video, but there was no response
from the state. Within a few
weeks [of the bombings] . . . six porn shops had closed, moved away or
withdrawn much of their stock out of fear they would be the next target.
Within two months the first charges were laid for combining
explicit sex with violence." (Campbell)
In this case, direct action achieved the desired results (the Red
Hot Video stores were gone) and then some.
While the For members of the PLO and other terrorist organizations, this legacy is one of misery which they live every day. Often it culminates in the ultimate sacrifice on their part. The price is high, but decades have proven that the Israelis will make no adequate concessions to them. They've been forced into this position and, unwilling to passively accept their fate, are fighting for their dignity and life as best as they can. "Terrorism, according to the 'root causes' theory is a revolt against desperate conditions or circumstances who objective is to bring about a change in their circumstances." (Conteh-Morgan 258) Blowing oneself to smithereens isn't often done for the sheer enjoyment of it, but out of the necessity for it that these suicide bombers feel exists. I was trying to show with my Harry Potter comparison that the bottom line is that the terms "terrorist" and "terrorism" have become almost comical in implications -- little more than caricatures of a madman's view of the world, cultivated both by U.S. economic interests and the Rita Skeeters of the world. We need a new prescription for coexistence with one another that defies everything we know about how society operates. Like it or not, this new reality will be built on the backs of "terrorists" and not the peaceful demonstrators that governments love to ignore. Works Cited "Arrest us all." The Guardian. 16 September 2005. Beyer-Arnesen,
Harald. "Direct Action;
Towards an understanding of a concept."
Anarcho-Syndicalist Review. Campbell,
Jim. "The Churchill,
Ward. " Glendinning." Lemming. Eugene, Oregon. 17 June, 2001. Conteh-Morgan,
Earl. Collective
Political Violence. Routledge:
Cowan, Rich. "The Challenge to Pornography at MIT." War Research Info Service. September 1992: Vol. 2, #1. Nathanson,
Stephen. "Prerequisites
for Morally Credible Condemnations of Terrorism." The
Politics of Terror: The De Cleyre, Voltairine. "Direct Action." Spunk Library. 10 November 2005. <http://www.spunk.org/library/writers/decleyre/sp001334.html> Eitzen, D.
Stanley & Zinn, Maxine Baca. (2006).
Social Problems, tenth edition.
French, Shannon E. "Murderers, not Warriors." Terrorism and International Justice. Ed. James P. Sterba. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.pp. 31 - 46 Kapitan, Tomis. "The Terrorism of 'Terrorism.'" Terrorism and International Justice. Ed. James P. Sterba. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. pp. 47 - 66. Phillabaum,
Lacey. "ELF BURNS DOWN
VAIL." Earth First!
Rowling,
J.K. Harry Potter and the
Goblet of Fire. Rowling,
J.K. Harry Potter and the
Order of the Shuman,
Samuel I. Law and
Disorder: The Legitimation of Direct Action as an Instrument of Social Policy.
Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1971.
"Terrorism." Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Nov. 2005. < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism> Walker, Martin. "A Brief History of Terrorism." Terrorism and 9/11: A Reader. Ed. Fredrik Logevall. Houghton Mifflin Company: Boston, MA. 2002. pp. 1 - 4. *
Special thanks to the Harry Potter Lexicon!
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