What the Harry Potter Books Taught us about Anti-Fascism
Content warning: bigotry, ableism, classism, systemic oppression, hate crime, genocide, and spoilers for the entire Harry Potter book series.
I asked myself, if I were to begin by assuming that the Harry Potter book series can function as an anti-fascist manual, what lessons could I glean from its text about fascism and how to effectively resist it?
Here is what I came up with:
Fascism isn’t an ideology, but an opportunistic implementation of ideology: the co-opting of existing biases, political institutions, social structures and their supporting theories, all for the ulterior goal of consolidating centralized nodes of power to the detriment of all other parties.
“There is no good and evil, only power, and those too weak to seek it.”
Think of Voldemort as the ultimate fascist. He allows his followers to believe that their movement is ideological and motivated by love for them and their culture. But in fact, he doesn’t give a damn about them or their culture. He will destroy the last living descendent of a powerful, ancient family for nothing but his own self-preservation. He is himself a half-blood; it seems almost as if his choice to center his organization on a pretense of pureblood pride and magical supremacy is simply because those biases and ideologies already existed and they were the easiest to manipulate to self-serving ends — as long as he could convince his followers that he represents the pinnacle of pure wizardly power, and that he could provide for them the society they longed for with all the impure and the deviant cast out or destroyed, he would have their loyalty. And then, he could successfully convince them to hate and destroy anyone he could plausibly characterize as insufficiently pure or powerful — he could weaponize their bigotry against anyone who dared oppose his rule.
If fascism is all about using any means whatsoever to accumulate and concentrate power for the few or one at the top, the opposite system would be to diffuse power, so that no individual or institution or group could control or destroy another. If the ideal fascist condition is a single node of power in complete control of all below it, and with nothing existing outside its cone of control, the ideal antifascist condition is one with absolutely no power at all, only autonomy and purely voluntary associations. I think neither is really possible, but we can act to move our society in the direction of one extreme or the other. The only question, then, is how?
For fascism, the how is relatively simple: wield what power you have to get more power. Think of capitalism, and how earnings can be invested to yield yet more returns, indefinitely until megabillionaires compete for who wants to be a trillionaire. Except in addition to capital, the fascist power node accumulates legal authority, military force, popular favor, and the loyalty of enough followers to keep the rest from mounting a resistance. Voldemort started with very little except his magical talent, intellect, and enough charm to get on good terms with most of the people he met early on. Moreover, he had both the motive and the willingness to use those to get more power, not necessarily because there was something he wanted to get done, but just for power’s own sake. Remember, he may have convinced his followers he wanted to strengthen the magical community by weeding out those unworthy of magic, but he didn’t care about wizard society. If he had, he wouldn’t have murdered Hepzibah Smith, one of the last surviving descendants of Helga Hufflepuff. Voldemort cared more about a trinket once owned by Hufflepuff than the living witch who was just as much her legacy, if not more. And he didn’t want to preserve that trinket, which Hepzibah was doing just fine — he wanted to use it to preserve himself. The preexisting pureblood aristocracy wasn’t something Voldemort actually believed in, it was something he wanted to leverage for his own personal glory.
Early on, Ron spoke truth by saying that the magical community would have died out if they hadn’t begun marrying and starting families with muggles. Insistence on blood purity doesn’t protect the wizard community, it dooms it — for whatever won’t change will vanish from a world that is constantly changing. I think Voldemort must have known this; he was smart, and he wasn’t raised among wizards who would have imparted their biases from an early age. He did not enter Hogwarts as Draco did, with ready-made opinions about what an acceptable identity for a wizard might be. Voldemort entered Hogwarts with no notion of who deserves power except himself. In self-important purebloods, he found a subculture he could easily exploit, not one he could securely belong to. After all, he was a half-blood. It probably didn’t hurt that a lot of these old magical families were also wealthy, so he could convince them to leverage that wealth in his pursuit as well. Once he got the snowball rolling, he could eventually crush the whole world under his foot. If he managed to also use that power to destroy anyone who might stop him.
And that’s where we get to our end of the “how”. How do you stop Voldemort? It’s complicated, but the Harry Potter books lay out some of the methods. In the books, it works, but not before a heartshattering barrage of death and destruction, and not without a great convergence of several disparate acts and movements and rebellions. Remember: the Death Eaters were unified under Voldemort. The resistance were not one individual or group, but many, not even necessarily coordinating with one another but with just enough contact between them to exchange important resources, intelligence, and aid. The resistance was not centralized. Its individual members did not know whether what they were doing was actually going to fit in to the larger effort, or even whether it was connecting at all. And it’s certain that nobody could have known how large their role in the story was. They consistently, constantly underestimate their own and others’ contributions. Even Harry himself. But that’s one beautiful thing about the resistance: nobody cared how important their actions were, because they just wanted to do whatever they could to help. Because it wasn’t for the sake of anything but getting the job done. Stop Voldemort. Defend and protect his victims. Everything else, including recognition, was secondary. Because they were the opposite of Voldemort. Voldemort would hate to not know his own power, or to not have his power acknowledged by himself and everyone around him.
“It is our choices, far more than our abilities, that make us who we are.”
It’s the opposite of what Voldemort said. Did anyone else catch that Dumbledore said “abilities” and not, say, “characteristics” or “personalities” or even “values”? Ability is literally power, and the reason it doesn’t make us who we are is that power doesn’t care who you are. It will use you for whatever purpose it can put you to, or it will throw you away. The Sorting Hat doesn’t check someone’s IQ score before placing her in Ravenclaw, even though “wit” and “cleverness” are abilities. What if a person with an intellectual disability was placed in Ravenclaw? Perhaps she chooses to spend her precious few mental spoons on studying and learning and growing her intellect, not to overcome a disability but for the sheer love of learning. Would we then still reach to say that Ravenclaw is for the smart kids?
What I’m driving at here is: to fight Voldemort, you must reject the power structures he is using to elevate himself, including structures which favor intellect over simplemindedness, strength over weakness, wealth over poverty. It’s not enough just to reject the supremacy of purebloods over half-bloods and muggle-borns. You must also reject the supremacy of the educated, which strips all power and status from anyone who hasn’t completed their magical education. You must reject the supremacy of settled institutions over newer, less conventional ones. You must reject the supremacy even of wizard over muggle, as difficult as that might be — after all, the Death Eaters always punctuate their violence against other wizards with cruel and pointless abuse of muggles, whom they don’t even see as people.
And that’s where we may remember Dumbledore’s puzzling insistence that “love” is the greatest tool we can use against Voldemort. Voldemort must hurt and exploit and destroy others in order to climb that ladder. If we value one another more than we value the hope of climbing the ladder, or our position partway up it, that gives us the strength to cut the ladder out from under him. He will have no leverage if we wake up to the bonds of love that connect us. If Bellatrix had loved her cousin more than she wanted the power that Voldemort had promised her, she would have been useless to him. She would have turned on Voldemort the moment he threatened her kin. The closer you are to the seat of power, the less you are allowed to love the people farther away from it. Because if you love them, you won’t be able to do what power needs you to do for it.
So that’s the big picture I see when I try to apprehend the basic difference between Voldemort and those who fought him, and a fundamental theory for why and how the resistance worked. But there are more chapters in this manual, detailing specific strategies and methods that can and must be used.
Embrace deviants, embrace deviance
Even from the very first book’s first chapter, the Harry Potter series taught us to embrace deviants: weirdos in cloaks roaming about town, eccentric old men wandering suburban streets, giants on motorcycles who defy gender expectations by openly sobbing in public. Every book emphasizes trusting in those whom society has deemed untrustworthy. Ghosts. Ex-cons. Werewolves. People who never finished school. Foreigners. Thieves and troublemakers. People who reject civilized society in favor of living in the woods. People you don’t like. People who have hurt you in the past. Teachers who give out unjust detentions. Crackpot conspiracy theorists. Even squibs.
And, also from the very first book although with a bit more subtlety, Harry Potter sows seeds of distrust in conventional authority figures. Handsome, well-spoken young men. The government. Popular books and media. The newspaper. Prestigious institutions. Parents. And good ol’ “common knowledge”. The story makes it clear that these things aren’t inherently untrustworthy, they just have the potential to be used duplicitously and are therefore worthy of cautious skepticism. Moreover, they could just be wrong. Sometimes a well-meaning authority figure makes a big mistake, and it’s okay to admit that and make a conscientious choice to undermine them. And when the authorities are wrong, some of the best allies you can have are the deviants, who have spent years, maybe their whole lives, dodging and weaving in and out of power’s reach to survive and live their lives in peace.
Knowing that sometimes the rules are unjust and destructive, it certainly helps to have some experience at breaking the rules. And that’s why, in every single book, Harry and his friends repeatedly break the rules. At first, just for fun or petty personal gain, not for some grand moral purpose, and that’s the key. By practicing at rule-breaking in low-stakes, recreational ways, characters learned the skills they needed later on to break the rules in life-or-death situations where it’s crucial to neither follow the rules nor get caught breaking them. In other words, we can’t just save up our mischief for when we can morally justify it to those who insist on orderly conduct from their heroes. We must learn mischief along the way, by sneaking around and learning the ways around the law. There are those who might say that the ends do not justify the means, and that children should learn obedience and good consistent morals. But obedience to authority is yet another power structure that Voldemort is happy to exploit; it is as useful to him as the bigotry of the old pureblooded families. This isn’t a guide to how to avoid stooping to Voldemort’s level. It’s a guide to how to defeat him, and if you’ve any chance to defeat him, you must love the people he will destroy more than you love your own moral purity.
Learn where Voldemort came from, and how he operates.
Harry Potter was already quite experienced at resisting Voldemort before he began to explicitly study the dark lord’s origins, history, and modus operandi. I think it’s important to recognize this: one does not simply decide to study fascist history and strategy on a whim. Something must happen to convince you that it’s necessary. I know there are some who would happily study any villain who sparks their morbid curiosity, but we aren’t all like that. Some of us only want to live our lives, and only take up the study of “what, exactly, is a Voldemort anyway?” when Voldemort has begun to threaten us and those we love. That’s when we kick into emergency mode and force ourselves to analyze the unthinkable, and delve into the mind of evil. I was a devoted Harry Potter reader for more than half of my life, but I only began to scour it for antifascist lessons when I began to suspect a fascist threat to myself and the people I love. I’m just not especially interested in the psychology of sociopathic authoritarian despots. Or at least, I wasn’t until recently.
But knowledge is fundamental to the fight. Accurate knowledge. Deeply hidden knowledge. The more powerful Voldemort became, the more effectively he could control information about himself and his doings. He hid evidence of his name and his family, his status as half-blood, his secret murders and his covert search for forbidden dark magic. He fostered terror at even the mention of his chosen name, and thus inhibited the spread of information about himself. He encouraged misinformation about who might be supporting him and who might be simply his involuntary pawns. It takes a great deal of critical thinking, careful searching, and ingenuity to find out anything true about Tom Riddle the man or Voldemort the dark lord. But any true information is potentially crucial to resisting him, and so it must be found. It must be prioritized. It must be put together with other pieces in hopes of constructing a useful picture of his plans and weaknesses. It is essential to learn who can be trusted as a source of information, and how to hold even the most trusted allies up to scrutiny.
Until Harry began to actively study Voldemort under Dumbledore’s instruction, he knew that Voldemort was bad, but didn’t know why he was bad. Killing people is clearly wrong. Killing people strictly for the circumstances of their birth or their ability level is worse. Terrorizing people with violence and threats of violence is bad. But why do it in the first place? Just for fun? Because you just strongly believe you’re doing the right thing? When we looked long and hard into the story of Tom Riddle, the boy who became Voldemort, we found a fundamental psychological dynamic at his core: an inability to love others, which enabled the ruthless promotion of self at the expense of all others. This, combined with an obsessive interest in not only belonging to but possessing all the world and its wonders, explains not only Voldemort’s motive but his means and methods. Voldemort’s most closely-held secret, known only to him and only speculated on by Dumbledore and passed on as a plausible theory to Harry, was that he had used dark magic to escape death in the most heinous way possible. He would commit murders, which would injure his soul. Then he would use that injury to tear his soul apart, so that if one piece was destroyed, another would remain. He did this several times. As a result, his soul is horribly mutilated, and he is immortal, because he judged his own life fundamentally more valuable than any of the people he killed for this purpose. That was his method. And knowing the method gave us the key to fighting him: destroy each piece of his soul, and he can be defeated.
We’ve been told in the past that “knowledge is power.” But more importantly in this case, knowledge can protect you from power. If you know how power works, you can work with it, evade it, turn it against itself, and potentially destroy it.
Read Between the Lines. Listen for the Dogwhistles. Constant vigilance!
Many of us remember Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix as the moment we all became paranoid conspiracy theorists. That was when Hermione began pointing out the covert authoritarian messages embedded in Umbridge’s boring, milquetoast speeches. That’s when Sirius pointed out all the dots he was connecting in innocuous newspaper stories, suggesting the government might be covering things up. That’s when Harry was being systematically gaslit by a teacher whose job was essentially to prevent her students from learning. That’s when we learned that if you want to make sure everyone is going to see a piece of literature, all you have to do is ban it. Because this was the year that Voldemort was back, alive and well and plotting his world conquest, and the Ministry decided to pretend it wasn’t happening and brand everyone who said otherwise as criminals, crazies, and vicious liars. That was when we learned some terrible lessons about the importance of discretion, effective communication, and constant vigilance.
It can be really hard to tell the difference between a paranoid delusion and a legitimate threat. What we learned that year was how easy it is to dismiss one as the other, because truth is stranger than fiction, and we’ve seen far too many cockamamie schemes already to assume that something’s false just because it sounds ridiculous. Sometimes paranoia is justified. Sometimes you sound crazy because what you’ve experienced is extraordinary. Sometimes, the enemy speaks in code and hides in plain sight, and you learn to recognize them by covert symbols and signs and rhetorical tells. That’s when you know you have to form a secret organization to train yourself and your friends to fight Death Eaters because apparently you aren’t allowed to learn that in school anymore. And that’s when you start making friends with outcasts and criminals and fugitives, so they can work outside the system to help you get what you need to survive within it. It’s also when you learn that sometimes, you can screw up in ways that put the people you love in danger. And that makes you feel so bad that you don’t want to be human anymore.
And you will remain human, but you’ll never be the same again. When Voldemort is in charge, there is no authority but the horrendous moral ambiguity of all-out war against a ruthless, uncompromising evil. There is no such thing as fact; the newspaper prints lies to the effect that muggle-borns are not wizards, and thousands of them have their wands stolen and destroyed, and they are reduced to begging in the street. Muggles are deprived of all recognition as people, and wizards brutalize them with impunity. Those who defy the Dark Lord are imprisoned and tortured. It’s dangerous to be anything other than what the government demands you be. Do you comply to survive? Do you escape to survive? Do you put your own and others’ lives on the line to protect a vulnerable few, who may (we hope) become many? Do you use the enemy’s own weapons against him? Do you break the law? Do you break your own conscience? Do you break a friend’s heart rather than tell him you’re on his side, for the good of a mission that depends above all else on secrecy?
The world changed. Everyone in it changed. Many of them died. Some in horrible, nightmarish ways. Some of the survivors are arguably in worse condition than the dead. Even if we win, we’ll have lost so, so much. And it’s not even relevant to ask ourselves “was it worth it?” because we never chose this. We never chose any of this. The only person who chose this was Voldemort, and he chose to destroy everything blocking him from ultimate power, including his own humanity. We could ask him, “was it worth it?” But we know he will never answer. He can’t. He doesn’t even know what he gave up in the first place. But we know what he took from us. He took the people we love. And we can never have them back.
There was a time when I felt betrayed by how dark and dismal the Harry Potter series became at the end. The last book is the only one I have never re-read. I still shudder when I think of the terror and despair in those pages. It was a beautiful world transformed into the most hideous dystopia, a dark version of reality that in most speculative fiction would have turned out to be a false future that we’re destined to prevent with some precise time-travel trickery. But here, there was no way to erase it. There is no way out of it, only forward through it. And that is the last and hardest lesson I learned. The danger is real. The consequences are catastrophic. We may not be able to prevent them, and we definitely will never be able to undo them if we can’t. But that just means we have to do what we can to stop it. The sooner we do, the less will be lost.
Thank you for reading. Keep reading. Think critically. Love one another. Keep the magic alive.
