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#14818598
Just to make some heads explode :D :

The Secret Rightwing Messages of Harry Potter

    It’s the 20th anniversary of the first Harry Potter book, and it’s high time we reflected on the series’ hidden right-wing messages.

    You see, left-wing interpretations of the books have been done to death not least by their virtue-signalling author. The left has written extremely long, glowing columns about the books, with titles like “Turning to Harry Potter During the Trump Regime” and “19 Harry Potter Quotes That Will Get You Through A Trump Presidency”. They’ve even created a Chrome extension that changes the names of Trump’s cabinet to Death Eaters.

    All of this is very strange, considering how many secret right-wing messages are hidden within the novels. Let me explain.

    1) Walls between different societies are good

    One of the ubiquitous elements of the Potterverse is the separation between the world of wizards, like Harry, and non-wizards, known as “Muggles.” This separation is strictly enforced by the wizarding government (the “Ministry of Magic”), which goes to great lengths to ensure that the world of wizards is kept secret from the world of Muggles. In some cases, wizarding communities are actually separated from Muggle communities by a physical barrier, like the magic walls at Diagon Alley and Platform 9-and-three-quarters.

    The primary reason for the separation is familiar to anyone well-versed in Potter lore. Muggles, motivated by bloodthirsty religious reasoning, kept trying to kill wizards and witches by burning them at the stake. So, in 1692, the wizarding community established the International Statute of Secrecy, which officially separated the world of wizards and muggles.

    Another reason for the separation is explained by Hagrid in the very first Harry Potter book:

      ‘But what does a Ministry of Magic do?’

      ‘Well, their main job is to keep it from the Muggles that there’s still witches an’ wizards up an’ down the country.’

      ‘Why?’

      ‘Why? Blimey, Harry, everyone’d be wantin’ magic solutions to their problems. Nah, we’re best left alone.’

    In other words, if muggles were aware of the advanced capabilities of wizards, they would demand handouts — a kind of redistribution of magic from the haves to the have-nots. One could easily imagine thousands of muggles queuing up at the borders of the magical world, demanding access to their superior healthcare and infrastructure. Who wants that kind of hassle, right?

    The message of Harry Potter is clear: if there’s a big enough gap between two societies, the less advanced party will either try to kill you (especially if they belong to militant religions), or demand access to your superior standards of living while being unable to contribute to it. You only have one option — build that wall!

    2) Don’t trust establishment politicians (or establishment media)

    The Harry Potter books offer a contemptible picture of establishment politicians. The wizarind government (the “Ministry of Magic”) is portrayed as weak, ineffectual and corrupt, home to control-freak bureaucrats like Dolores Umbridge, who delights in using her official powers to meddle in the affairs of private citizens.

    Throughout the book, Umbridge is portrayed as the personification of an overbearing government, determined to regulate its citizens into misery. As soon as she arrives at Hogwarts on orders from the Ministry, she starts banning things: most importantly, practical Defence Against the Dark Arts classes, which previously taught young wizards essential spells to defend themselves against the deadly servants of Voldemort. Persecuted by the government, the young wizards of Hogwarts had no choice but to set up their own self-defence club, in secret. They named the club “Dumbledore’s Army,” after the school’s beloved headmaster.

    Yes, that’s right: an overbearing, meddling bureaucrat from The Swamp took away Hogwarts’ equivalent of the 2nd amendment, and students responded by establishing a private millitia. Sort of like the Oath Keepers, but with magic wands instead of AR-15s.

    It doesn’t end there. For much of the series, the Ministry of Magic is led by Cornellius Fudge, a weak, bumbling leader who spends an entire novel in denial about the return of the evil Lord Voldemort and his Death Eaters. To maintain his fiction, Minister Fudge wages a frantic smear campaign against Harry Potter, Dumbledore, and others who insist on telling the truth.

    Most alarmingly, Fudge is able to enlist the wizarding world’s newspaper of record, The Daily Prophet in his smear campaign. In book five, Fudge is revealed to be “leaning” on The Prophet to print negative stories about Potter.

    The lesson? Never trust the establishment, or their lapdogs in the media. They’ll smear the real truth-tellers, take away your right to defend yourself, all the while denying the existence of a growing terrorist threat within your borders.

    3) If a group has a terrorist problem, sometimes you have to ban them

    Yes, yes, people always talk about the One Good Slytherin, Severus Snape. But even he initially joined the Death Eaters! It took the murder of Snape’s high-school crush, Lilly Potter, at the hands of Voldemort, to finally deradicalize him.

    But despite the existence of a few peaceful Slytherins, it is made abundantly clear, throughout the book, that Slytherin House has a serious problem. As Hagrid puts it in the first book, “there’s not a single witch or wizard who went bad that wasn’t in Slytherin.”

    Yes, that’s right: dark wizards, the terrorists of the Potterverse, almost always come from just one Hogwarts House — Slytherin. Hagrid’s claim isn’t entirely accurate, because readers do encounter a few of non-Slytherin baddies, like Gryffindor’s Peter Pettigrew and Ravenclaw’s Professor Quirrell — but the book still makes it abundantly clear that Slytherin produces the overwhelming majority of terrorist wizards. Lord Voldemort himself was a Slytherin!

    By the end of the series, the Slytherin-terrorist problem has gotten so bad that virtually all of the prominent Slytherins in Harry’s year — Draco Malfoy, Vincent Crabbe and Pansy Parkinson among others — had actively tried to assist Voldemort in some way.

    As Voldemort and his goons bore down on Hogwarts, this caused a minor crisis for the school’s professors. In addition to the evil intruder outside the castle gates, but there were also dozens of Slytherins inside Hogwarts who would actively assist that intruder once his attack begun. They were just sitting there, quietly waiting, hidden among the Peaceful Majority of Good Slytherins.

    With no time to vet the Slytherins (or even “extreme vet” them), the professors had no choice: they enacted a Slytherin Ban, locking all students of the house in the dungeons for the duration of the battle.

    The message? While an ideological faction with a propensity for terrorism might harbor some good, even admirable people, sometimes – to be on the safe side – you just have to ban them all.

    Thanks, J.K. Rowling!
#14818605
Image
The Great Hall in the Hogwarts Castle

Image
King's College Hall (Cambridge) as it is today.

The author is not a Cambridge graduate but she has an attachment to elite colleges in the UK. J.K. Rowling has never attended Oxbridge institutions because she was turned down by Oxford. Umbridge is likely to be the personification of Oxbridge, considering her overbearing persona. Muggles are incapable of performing magic, lowly individuals compared to wizards like Harry who are elites in the Harry Potter world, which reminds us of the class divide in British society.
Last edited by ThirdTerm on 27 Jun 2017 09:04, edited 4 times in total.
#14818606
You forgot the caste system whereby goblins with long noses did the banking -> Jews
Destitute elves did household chores -> Hispanics
Prisoners used for slave labour -> Blacks

I made that last one to make it fit into USA even though the book is set in Britain. There was blatant racism though- Hermione is a mudblood.
#14818609
I got a different message from Harry Potter. Sure, the Wizards believed that they were doing what was best by separating the two worlds, or the government with its vast military capabilities developed to combat a great foe could do no wrong, but Harry, Ron, and Hermione were the heroes despite the fact that they did not fit in with this authoritarian, extremely conservative system. It was in fact these three people that believed in egalitarianism and had seen the darker side of racism, classism, abuse, and murder that became the heroes. They did not lose faith in the humanity of others along the way.

Lets not forget that in many ways Harry Potter criticizes the class system. A lot of the problematic behavior in the Harry Potter universe is carried out by individuals of great prestige, even though the main villain himself was a commoner. It's kind of ironic that Voldemort was able to influence so many of the established families of the Wizarding world even though he was a half-blood. Anyway, I don't think there are that many rightwing messages, it's just very critical of power structures in general, but British conservative power structures in particular in my estimation (class, caste, aristocracy, servanthood, etc).
#14818708
I am personally stunned that an English person had some kind of hang-up about social classes and boarding schools, subliminal or not.

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