Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Democracy, Fascism, and Magic

Reverend Amy Zucker Morgenstern
November 4, 2007
Palo Alto, CA

First Reading: “My National Security Letter Gag Order”

When the Nazis came for the communists, I said nothing; I was, of course, no communist.
When they locked up the Social Democrats, I said nothing; I was, of course, no Social Democrat.
When they came for the trade unionists, I said nothing; I was, of course, no trade unionist.
When they came for me, there was no one left who could protest. — Martin Niemöller

 

Here in the Muggle world (is anyone such a Muggle that they don’t know what a Muggle is? Muggles are non-magical people) — here in the Muggle world, we talk about magic as if it were the solution to all problems. We say, “If I could just wave a wand, I could fix this … ” But it doesn’t take a long stay in the magical world of J. K. Rowling’s novels to disabuse us of that illusion.

In the sixth installment, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the Muggle Prime Minister of England learns that the disasters that have been plaguing his country have all been caused by a powerful evil wizard. The inexplicable collapse of a bridge, the nervous breakdown of one of his closest aides, a handful of gruesome murders in locked rooms, even a persistent malaise that is sweeping over the people like the fog: all are the fault of Voldemort and his followers. The Prime Minister’s counterparts in the wizarding world, the outgoing and incoming Ministers for Magic, Fudge and Scrimgeour by name, come to his office — via a puff of green smoke in his fireplace, as they usually do on these state visits — and explain the chaos that is loose in magical England since Voldemort’s return. They are clearly at the end of their ropes.

The Prime Minister gazed hopelessly at the pair of them for a moment, then the words he had fought to suppress all evening burst from him at last.

“But for heaven’s sake — you’re wizards! You can do magic! Surely you can sort out — well — anything!”

Scrimgeour turned slowly on the spot and exchanged an incredulous look with Fudge, who really did manage a smile this time as he said kindly, “The trouble is, the other side can do magic too, Prime Minister.” ¹

Magic not only can’t fix the problems in Harry Potter’s world, it is in a sense the cause of many of them. Not just because Voldemort has tortures at his whitened, skeletal fingertips that the interrogators in secret CIA prisons could only dream of, such as the Cruciatus Curse that, with a word, makes the sufferer feel like every nerve is on fire, but because Voldemort’s followers, the Death Eaters, divide the world into desirables and undesirables along magical lines. Desirables are pureblooded witches and wizards, and undesirables are Muggles; Muggleborns (those who are magical but whose parents are not); mixed-blood folk the racists call “Mudbloods”; “race traitors” (purebloods who support the rights of these “lesser” wizards and witches); and all the other magical races, such as house-elves, goblins, and centaurs. In the first couple of books, the Death Eaters’ racist agenda is only hinted at. By the middle volume of the seven-part series, it is revealed as a toxic stream running through wizarding society, causing thuggish behavior like the cruel levitation of a helpless and terrified Muggle family forty feet above a drunken mob. By the end of the series, it is clear that race purity, the violent “cleansing” of society, and all-out war between the so-called superior race and the undesirables, are the main agenda of the Death Eaters. The rise of fascism and the question of how to combat it are gradually revealed to be among Rowling’s main themes.

No small shakes for a fantasy series for children.

Some have speculated that Rowling’s vision may have grown to encompass torture, secrecy, racism-tinged war, and the widespread abandonment of civil liberties after the September 11 attacks, and the two wars that followed them, shook our Muggle world as she was writing book five. Who knows. She undoubtedly weaves the anxieties of her time into the final three books, as in a parody of “duct tape and plastic sheeting” civil defense in the pamphlet Harry receives via owl post, “Protecting Your Home and Family Against Dark Forces.”

[M]ak[e] sure that family members are aware of emergency measures such as Shield and Disillusionment Charms …
Agree on security questions with friends and family so as to detect Death Eaters masquerading as others by use of Polyjuice Potion … ²

His headmaster, Professor Dumbledore, winkingly chides Harry for not having confirmed his identity by asking him his favorite kind of jam (I noted with pride that Dumbledore’s is the same as mine: raspberry).

But in a more serious sense, it is clear that the books warn against the temptations of fascism — and flag various tendencies that endanger our would-be democratic nations:

• The suspension of civil liberties.
• Rushed trials in which terrified defendants are given little chance to clear their names.
• Others being imprisoned without trial, and held in torturous conditions far from society’s gaze.
• The division of the country, and the world, into us and them, friends and enemies.
• The guilt-by-association of those who share some characteristics with the enemy.
• The racist mistrust of an entire little-understood category of people, and the exploitation of that mistrust to silence opponents of the administration and push through new laws that undermine free and democratic debate.
• The portrayal of the increasingly fascist nation as a victimized people who must reclaim power, so as to justify acting as a world power that imposes its will unilaterally on other nations.

Most significantly, in Rowling’s world, it is not only the raving racists, the ideologues, as it were, who send society on a downward spin into totalitarianism. Fascism is an enemy within, taking root in apparently neutral soil. Muggles, take heed!

If you polled Harry Potter fans on the question, “Which character do you hate the most?”, I doubt the top vote-getter would be Voldemort. He’d be up there, along with Harry’s slimy rival Draco Malfoy, and the inscrutable but undeniably nasty Professor Snape, but I bet the most despised person in the books is Dolores Umbridge, whom we met in today’s reading.

For if Voldemort’s pureblood ideology is the fuel that drives the engine of fascism in the wizarding world, Umbridge embodies the engine itself. She is a bureaucrat, a petty tyrant, more concerned with keeping the Ministry’s tight control over the wizarding community than in racist ideology. She’s a bigot, certainly, and a sadist, but she is Eichmann to Voldemort’s Hitler: the functionary without whom fascism could not flourish.

Hannah Arendt described it as “the banality of evil,” in one of the most misunderstood insights of social analysis. ³ Although she was a Jewish refugee from the Holocaust herself, Arendt was vilified for “sympathizing” with Eichmann, the man who did so much to design and carry out the “Final Solution” of genocide of Europe’s Jews. Critics, then and since, accused her of downplaying not only his evil, but that of the entire Nazi project. But she did not intend “banality” to mean “something not really so bad.” With brilliant perception, she saw how the unspeakable evil he did was clothed in the ordinary office functions and mental habits of a man not very different from thousands of others. As Leonard Cohen wrote in a poem about the same man, “What did you expect? Talons? Oversize incisors? Green saliva?” ⁴

Instead, this very ordinary man had a severe deficit of empathy and a chilling ability to separate himself from the results of his actions. As have the thousands of people who have carried out atrocities in our past bloody century. And the millions who knew about them and did nothing, including, let us be honest, ourselves.

Rowling expresses Umbridge’s banality through her taste in clothes and furnishings: pink cardigans, little bows in her uncompromisingly iron-gray hair, collectible plates of frolicking kittens on the walls of her office, an overabundance of “lace draperies, doilies, and dried flowers,” pink post-its detailing who requires punishment. Rowling likes to give characters she detests taste she also detests, as if bad taste were a moral failing. Her little joke — but under it is a serious assertion: that evil is done by very ordinary people. If we only watch for the gleaming eyes, the dripping fangs, we’ll miss it — and it will conquer us, not only from without but from within.

Our country is in danger. We have flirted with fascism before; it is not new to have popular broadcasters, administration officials, and members of Congress promoting torture, dismissing civil rights, advocating broad new executive powers, and spouting racism. But that makes it no less dangerous.

Are their motivations banal? Does it even matter? Some want world domination. Some are blindly pursuing profit, approving of an endless war machine that will allow companies like Blackwater, Boeing and Halliburton to keep the income flowing. Some have a true fear of terrorism and a desire to defend innocents like the thousands murdered on September 11. Some have an overpowering dislike of the “other,” whose current incarnation is Muslims and Arabs. Some mistrust democratic processes. I’m sure all of the above and more are factors in the conversion of our country to a perpetual state of emergency rule and quasi-military law, where civilians can be redefined as combatants and then denied even the rights of prisoners of war. The crucial question is not “what are our leaders really worried about?” — “what are their true motivations?” — but “what must we do to make sure we come out of this period with a democratic and not a fascistic United States of America?”

Fascism divides to conquer. Umbridge requires all Muggle-born wizards and witches to report the Ministry and be registered. And the rest of the society says, “Whew, at least it’s not me.” I’m a half-blood, they protest. I’m not one of them. I’m safe.

My passport isn’t flagged for extra attention at the border. No one’s interested in my phone records or whom my clients are e-mailing. Well, okay, maybe my clients’ e-mail is under surveillance, but not mine. And so it goes. Divide and conquer and divide again, until we are each in our separate cells, gazing out in terror at each other instead of banding together to fight the real enemies: injustice, violence, intolerance, the control of the many by the power-mad few.

That’s why silence is such a vital tool of fascism and one we must resist with every ounce of air in our lungs. When Harry speaks an unpopular truth that gives the lie to the world view of the administration, Umbridge tries to silence him with punishment. She assigns him “lines,” one hundred repetitions of “I must not tell lies,” and with every line he writes, the words are magically cut into the back of his hand, his blood becoming the ink on the page. Rowling challenges us: if this fifteen-year-old boy can resist torture and keep speaking, will we allow ourselves to be silenced? The recipients of those national security letters — hundreds of thousands of them now — they are hidden from the rest of us by a wall of government-imposed silence. Some of them may be sitting among us right now, dying to stand up and say, “I got one of those letters too!” Our neighbors are being deported under the guise of national security, like the leader in Peninsula Interfaith Action (an organization we belong to, too) at St. Athanasius just down Central Expressway, who was unlucky enough to answer the door when the immigration police came looking for someone else, and unwise enough, unschooled enough, to answer them when they asked, without a warrant, for his visa. ⁵ (An aside: If I were to devise a citizenship test, not that I would, it would require everyone to know their constitutional rights against unwarranted searches and self-incrimination.)

And there is probably no one here whose private phone records are not in the hands of the federal police, while the government retroactively clears the company officials who surrendered them and, not incidentally, its own officials who demanded them. ⁶ Do we shrug and say, “They’re looking for terrorists, not me?” Do we trust that only the guilty ever become the accused? And how close do these outrages have to come to us before we resist them?

In her reflection, [Worship Associate] Joy [Morgenstern] suggested that one tool of fascism is fear, and so the countermeasure is courage. Two other tools, close kin to fear-mongering, are division and silence. And so the remedies are to recognize, declare, celebrate our connectedness. We are not separate from the person bundled aboard a Jeppeson plane⁷ and flown to a land where he will be plunged into a 20-degree cell and forbidden to sleep; where her throat will be filled with water, and filled again, until she is drowning on dry land. We are not separate from the Muslim moderates who come under interrogation for giving money to their religious communities, just as we give to ours. We are all connected, and we allow ourselves to be divided at our peril. And we will know how closely connected we are if we keep talking, keep meeting, keep informing ourselves and everyone of the facts, without fear of a government that may photograph who’s at rallies and may demand lists of who’s taking what out of the library. We still have a constitution that guarantees us free speech, free assembly, free religion, a free press, even if there are many who would repeal these rights if they could. We need to not only say, but shout, that we will tolerate no attempt to take our voices away. And as long as we have them, we need to use them.

“The other side can do magic too.” It has the same tools we have. It isn’t magic that will save us. It isn’t magic that saves Harry and preserves what is good in his world, because his enemies know magic too. In fact, the books emphasize over and over again that they are stronger, older, more experienced — they are the better wizards in many ways. But he is the better person. It is his courage, and integrity, and refusal to be silenced — and the same qualities in his friends — that save the day.

It is his simple solidarity with the first victims of fascism’s rising tide that makes Harry Potter a hero. You see, Harry has a pretty good wizarding pedigree, a better one than that of Voldemort himself. (More parallels between Voldemort and the non-Aryan Hitler.) But Harry feels a kinship with the nonmagical victims of Mugglebaiting, the house-elves whose magic is exploited by wizards, the Muggle-born witch who is his best friend. No resting in his approved status for him.

And so when Umbridge denies what he knows to be true — that the tyrant who endangers all of these people has regained power — Harry refuses to be silenced. And when a terrified woman walks into the dungeon to be interrogated, Harry Potter goes with her.

Will we do the same?

 

Reflection: Fascism by Joy Morgenstern

 

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