Led, Fought, and Won by Children
The battle against fascism starts, and ends, at Hogwarts
Many people have said this about Harry Potter: the characters have to grow up too soon. The students of Hogwarts are left to fight for a better world for themselves because the older generation refused to learn from its mistakes and let Voldemort rise to power again.
This analysis is not wrong. By the fourth book, when the political gears are turning and the wizarding world is on the edge of a colossal shift, the trio are deeply invested in what’s going on in the world around them. How many fourteen-year-olds do you know who are as invested in politics as they are? Harry is working directly with Mad-Eye Moody (although he is an impostor) on what could’ve happen to Barty Crouch Sr. Hermione is glued to The Daily Prophet. By the fifth book, she understands that it’s become state-sponsored propaganda but she continues to read it anyway to “see what the enemy are saying”. The mass breakout at Azkaban during the fifth book sees a shift in the collective psyche of the Hogwarts students as a whole: they begin to distrust the government more, they don’t believe the reporting coming from the Ministry, and they are working to undermine the meddling of the government in their education. They begin to train themselves for the fight ahead, a fight that they know is coming but that the adults in their lives either don’t believe is coming or are greatly unprepared for.
Of course, the adults that do help are the Order of the Phoenix, the society that works against Voldemort. Many members of the Order this time around are surviving members of the first Order before Voldemort fell to ruin. Many members of the first Order, like Molly Weasley’s brother and Harry’s parents, are dead. The Order of the Phoenix has two jobs; figure out what Voldemort is doing, and then stop it. They’re already a step behind by the time that they reform at the end of the fourth book. It seems like they can never catch up; the sixth and seventh books are littered with Order members being murdered, being captured, being tortured. Their movement eventually has to go underground. They can hardly keep students safe from Death Eaters like the Carrows, who are installed to teach at Hogwarts. Although they’re fairly well organized, are highly gifted at magic, and work incredibly hard to undermine Voldemort, recruiting is not easy for them. Over the three books where the Order operates, there are hardly any new members. Slughorn remarks that the death rate among Order members is especially high. In short, no one wants to join them in the fight against Voldemort.
Harry and his friends know that Voldemort’s return to power was directly aided by the government, particularly Cornelius Fudge, who refused to believe that Voldemort had returned. Cornelius Fudge is the most powerful adult in the wizarding world in the series. And instead of acknowledging the greatest threat that anyone has ever had to deal with in sixteen years, he plugs his ears, hums, and says, “I’m not listening!” This seems preposterous, but is it really? After that much time of peace, wouldn’t it be hard to acknowledge such an existential threat to your way of life? Fudge is comfortable in his office, and after coming to power at the end of Voldemort’s first reign, he is perfectly happy to plug his ears and hum. Isn’t pretending that nothing is wrong so much easier than making a battle plan? I know from experience that it is. I’m someone who doesn’t face my problems until they explode in my face, and in the case of Cornelius Fudge, that problem was fascism.
This is what Harry and his friends are up against. They have a strong relationship with the current members of the Order and know that they’re out there doing their best, but at the end of the day, the Order is not that big. It’s a very small faction of people in a relatively large country where the adult populace just sits around while fascism happens. We all say that we’ll be members of the Order of the Phoenix if we faced a similar threat, but the reality is we wouldn’t. We’d hide in our homes and try to go about our lives because it’s easier that way, not because we’re bad people. We all like to think that we’d have hidden members of the Jewish community in our basements during WWII, but let’s be real. Right now, during the pandemic, we’ve been tasked with wearing masks and staying home as much as possible and we couldn’t even do that properly.
The adult wizards who aren’t in the Order aren’t fascists. (I mean, the Death Eaters are. Obviously.) But the average witch and wizard who go about their day, doing their best while Voldemort takes over the ministry? No, they aren’t fascists. They’re every day people like you and me. They’re the ones who said “Yeah, I’ll rise up against fascism”, but when the opportunity to join the Order presented itself, they decided not to. Because it is more comfortable, because it is easier. It is these people, the every day people who do nothing, that are the biggest threat to Harry and his friends, and the biggest letdown.
Something that strikes me about the seventh book is the chapter where Lupin comes to visit Harry, Ron and Hermione at Grimmauld Place while they are hiding and planning to break into the Ministry. He shares with them that Muggleborns are being rounded up and being stripped of their wands, an allegory for The Holocaust. They’re being subjected to blood purity tests and are given blood purity statuses. Harry optimistically (and angrily) says, “People won’t let this happen.”
But, Lupin says, it is happening. And people are letting it. More to the point, adults are letting it.
The big battle of good vs. evil does not take place at the Ministry of Magic. It is not a big political battle, not a big election where the will of the people triumphs. It is at a school. The battle is full of children. It is a battle of children and a few trusted adults against evil. The battle is fought, and won, by children. Yes, the Order helped. Yes, members of the Order died. But the battle culminated on school grounds and it was led by, and won by, children. They did what their parents could not — they said that enough was enough. They looked at the failures and the passiveness of their parents’ generation, their grandparents’ generation, and they said we will not live in a world like this. Their parents had, and their parents had let it happen again. What is that, if not failure?
It is our job to make the world better than it was when we entered it, to continue to make it a better throughout our lives. It is our duty to create a better world for our children and our grandchildren. So far, in Harry Potter and in real life, we have not done this. Sure, we want to. But it’s not easy work. It’s difficult to fight for what is right and just. That is what the core of Harry Potter is about — it is about fighting for what’s right and just, even if it means pain and hardship. And as we know from the battle of Hogwarts, the fight is littered with loss. Fighting what what is right and just does not come without cost. It is a cost that the children of Hogwarts are willing to pay, but not the country as a whole. After years of watching an apathetic country succumb, they are willing to bear the burden themselves, doing the work to leave the wizarding world a better place for the generation behind them.
