Harry Potter's War

The Harry Potter series, which is on the surface about a boy attending a school for wizards in Great Britain, is really about a great war to control the community of wizards on that island. Hanging over the series like a shadow from the very beginning is Lord Voldemort, part Adolf Hitler, part Osama bin Laden. There are real world parallels.

Long time readers of the Harry Potter series know that Harry Potter's parents were murdered by Lord Voldemort shortly after Harry was born. Lord Voldemort was making his first play for control of the wizarding world by suborning wizards willing to go over to his side, murdering those who were not

But when Voldemort tried to kill the infant Harry Potter, something happened. The killing spell backfired, leaving Harry Potter with a scar on his forehead, but blasting Voldemort into incorporeal nothingness.

Ten or so years later, Harry Potter, having been raised in secret by muggle (i.e. none magic using guardians), is revealed to be wizard born with a destiny to go to the Hogwarts School of Magic, a fabulous place of wonder, mystery, and danger. That story, of a boy of destiny, is older than King Arthur.

It soon becomes apparent that Harry Potter has another special destiny, which is to be the main antagonist to Voldemort, who has not given up his ambition to become supreme ruler of Britain's wizarding world. By book four, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Voldemort has succeeded in reassuming corporeal form and has reconstituted his army of minions, known as the Deatheaters.

By book five, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the war for the wizarding world has begun in earnest. Lord Voldemort's strategy is that of a terrorist, assassinating and kidnapping wizards who might oppose him. In that way he is like Osama bin Laden.

But in other ways, Voldemort is like Hitler. Like Hitler he had a dysfunctional childhood coupled with a seemingly inflated sense of his own destiny. Like Hitler he has a racial purity ideology. Muggles are sub-humans in his world view. Even worse are "mud bloods", wizards born of mixed unions. They are to be exterminated just as Hitler tried to exterminate the Jews.

If Voldemort is Hitler, the reaction of the wizarding world to his rise is a curious parallel to the reaction of the West to Hitler's rise. Cornelius Fudge, the Minister of Magic, is, at least on the outside, a jovial, well meaning bureaucrat, but when it comes to enforcing government policy he can be quite ruthless. His reaction to the return of Voldemort is to deny it exists and, by extension, to crush anyone who contradicts that denial.

In American memory, the man who personifies appeasement of tyrants is British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. This is because of Chamberlain's sell out of Czechoslovakia to Hitler's territorial ambition. But Chamberlain's predecessor at Number 10 Downing Street, Stanley Baldwin, was an even worse appeaser. While Hitler built up his military and began his march to world domination, Prime Minister Baldwin did nothing, not even endeavoring to build up Britain's military in response. Cornelius Fudge is therefore most like Stanley Baldwin in our world.

If there is a Hitler and his appeasers in the wizarding world, there is also a Churchill. In this case, the Churchill of the Harry Potter universe in one Albus Dumbledore, the Merlin-like headmaster of Hogwarts and Harry Potter's mentor. It is his voice that, almost alone, thunders about the threat of Lord Voldemort and of the absolute necessity to oppose him. Like Churchill in the 1930s, he is ignored and ridiculed. Unlike Churchill he is murdered-apparently.

Voldemort is on the march and the freedom of the wizarding world is under threat. The fate of that world, and perhaps ours, rests on the shoulders of a seventeen year old boy. Harry Potter seems to be the last best hope in the war for the wizarding world. Harry Potter's and Voldemort's destiny and the story of the war will be told in book seven of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.