harry potter and asymmetric warfare

Or, Everything I Ever Think About, Together in One Blog Post! With Block Quotes!!

NOTE: While this post does discuss the Harry Potter series as a whole, my goal in writing it is to make you, my fellow freedom-loving, oppression-fighting person, want to read the books if you have somehow managed not to do so yet! So, while I consider any plot points that have been covered in the films so far to be basic cultural literacy, I have taken care not to include any *major* spoilers about Deathly Hallows. Because really, you should read it and experience its awesomeness for yourself.

Onward!

Several days ago I started writing a blog post about the politics of Harry Potter, and why I think the books are fundamentally radical in their political outlook. I soon realized that "the politics of Harry Potter" is a topic on which I have enough thoughts to write a book, or at least a decent master's thesis. And perhaps I will indeed do one or both of those things some day. But for now I'd like to talk about one particular element of JK Rowling's remarkable world which stands out to me particularly sharply post-Gaza, and which I think is one of the most profound and insightful messages of the books.

While on a recent post-HBP news binge, I came across this article, entitled "Missing from Harry Potter: a real moral struggle." (WARNING! The aforementioned article *does* contain spoilers about the final book, so read at your own risk.) After the initial reaction of "MMWUUHHH?" I read the article. While the ways in which "children's literature critic" Jenny Sawyer has oversimplified and misunderstood the basic principles of storytelling can be saved for another post, there can be no doubt that she has also fundamentally misunderstood the world of Harry Potter.

Sawyer argues that because Harry is never "tempted" by the Dark side, he has no moral journey. "Well, DUH!" you are probably saying if you've read the books. "Of course Harry's never tempted to join Voldemort! Voldemort killed his mum and dad!" Exactly. Harry is never tempted to join the Death Eaters for the same reason I was never tempted to donate money to the Yes on Prop 8 campaign--it is completely against my interest to do so.

Sawyer's argument only holds water if you see the world as a completely equal place, where everyone has absolutely free choice, and moral fiber is demonstrated by resisting "temptation," which surely lurks everywhere.

But the world isn't exactly like that, is it? The world, it so happens, is not an equal place at all. It is divided into oppressor and oppressed. And Harry and his allies behave like oppressed people. They do not fight (or rather, fight back) out of some abstract moral duty to "do the right thing." They fight because they are facing an enemy who is determined to crush and exterminate them--one who terrorizes, imprisons, tortures and kills, and who would seek to turn their society into a dictatorship based on racism and maintained through savage political repression.

They do, in short, what anyone is eventually driven to do when facing oppression: they resist. And it should not come as a surprise that they fight exactly the kind of war that oppressed groups tend to fight against their oppressors, the only kind of war a group of poorly-armed rebels can possibly expect to win against a vastly militarily superior force--a guerrilla war. Or, more broadly defined, an asymmetric war.

It should be stated that asymmetric warfare does not simply mean a conflict in which one side is weak and the other is strong (although that may be true in absolute military terms). It means that the two sides have different strengths. And what JK Rowling has to say about the strengths of oppressed people--of our side--is, I think, very profound indeed.

Let us consider, for a moment, the prophecy that we discover in Book 5 regarding Harry and Voldemort's shared destiny:

"The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches....Born to those who have thrice defied him, born as the seventh month dies...and the Dark Lord will mark him as his equal, but he will have power the Dark Lord knows not...and either must die at the hand of the other, for neither can live while the other survives." (OotP p. 841)

The first thing to note about this prophecy, of course, is that Voldemort himself fulfilled it through his own violent actions. Hearing only the first part, the part identifying his would-be vanquisher, he lashed out at infant Harry, the child of two young militants who had escaped his clutches three times...and in doing so, he created his own gravedigger. (It's actually kind of dialectical, if you think about it.) And lest you think I am projecting some of my own politics onto the text, JK Rowling actually makes this point quite specifically in Book 6, and here it is worth quoting her at length.

"If Voldemort had never murdered your father," [Dumbledore tells Harry], "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! 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. Always he was on the lookout for the one who would challenge him. He heard the prophecy and he leapt into action, with the result that he not only handpicked the man most likely to finish him, he handed him uniquely deadly weapons!" (HBP p. 510)

Prophecy is not the same as predestination--on this Dumbledore is very clear. Harry is in control of his own actions--but so too is Voldemort, who will keep hunting Harry until he is stopped.

"But, sir," said Harry, making valiant efforts not to sound argumentative, "it all comes to the same thing, doesn't it? I've got to try and kill him, or--"
"Got to?" said Dumbledore. "Of course you've got to! But not because of the prophecy! Because you, yourself, will never rest until you've tried!" (HBP p. 511)

Voldemort is a victim of the law of diminishing returns of repression--the more violence you throw at people, the more likely they are to feel that they have nothing to lose and everything to gain from resisting.

Why is Harry "the man most likely to finish" Voldemort? Because the war against Voldemort has claimed the lives of nearly everyone Harry has ever loved: James, Lily, Sirius, Dumbledore; plus Cedric Diggory, who was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time due to nothing more than Harry's own decent nature; plus a whole host of people who will perish in Book 7. Many of these deaths are paralyzing when they happen, the source of seemingly unendurable pain. But they do not destroy Harry. They make him stronger, more determined to continue fighting. And, when it comes time for him to face the most difficult task of all, it is not the living he calls on for support, but the dead.

"In guerrilla warfare," says Gene Hackman in one of my all-time favorite movies, Enemy of the State, "you try to use your weaknesses as strengths."

Voldemort, a textbook sociopath who is incapable of feeling or understanding many human emotions, sees human connection only as a weakness. Mercy is a sign of vacillation; love is something to be exploited, a way to control or punish.

But JK Rowling, Dumbledore, and ultimately, Harry, know better. Rowling is very clear that Harry's secret weapon, "the power the Dark Lord knows not," is love. Not all manifestations of love are warm and fuzzy. Grief for those slain, rage against their killers, even hatred and the desire for vengeance--these are all expressions of love, and they can be quite fearsome weapons indeed. Rage and hatred are two emotions that Harry relies on, again and again, to overcome fear when nothing else will, and they serve him quite well.

Love, and its collective political expression, which we might call solidarity, is perhaps the only reliable source of courage when facing vastly superior forces. It is the force that drives Harry into battle again and again, even when victory seems impossible. It helps him fight dementors and Voldemort's possession at the end of Book 5. It is the force that keeps his friends fighting at his side when to do so means facing torture and death. It is the force that keeps members of Dumbledore's Army engaged in underground resistance under the noses of Death Eaters, and that draws every member of every resistance organization Harry has ever had contact with--plus most of their family members--to Hogwarts to fight in the final battle against Voldemort.

Ultimately, it is not Harry's magical qualities that give him a chance of defeating Voldemort, but his human qualities. While he's had the benefit of a steep learning curve in some areas of magic, he's a patently terrible student of other areas (particularly those requiring a lot of book knowledge.) He is an exceptional wizard, not because he is the brightest student at Hogwarts (Hermione clearly claims that title) or because he is intrinsically possessed of more magical power, but because he is an exceptional human being--not in spite of the tragic and violent experiences that have marked his entire life, but because of them.

It is a mark of JK Rowling's enormous political sophistication that she does not shy away from a fundamental truth of asymmetric warfare: that the price of victory is always, always higher for the oppressed. What we lack in military might we must make up for in blood spilt, in terror and suffering endured. That's not noble; that's just life in an unequal world. But the idea that our most powerful weapons are intangible ones, and that even our worst, most terrible and painful experiences, even grief, loss and death, can be turned around and used as fuel to help us keep fighting--that these things can even be the secret to victory--is, I think, an enormously empowering, deeply radical, and incredibly beautiful concept. In fact, one might be tempted to call it magic.