Headscratchers / Harry Potter Government

Harry Potter headscratchers relating to the wizarding world and its government. Please add new entries at the bottom.

For a specific book, please go to its specific page:

• Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
• Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

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Muggle artifacts

• What exactly constitutes a 'misuse of Muggle artifacts'? Enchanted brooms seem to be okay, because it is tradition, yet flying carpets are forbidden because carpets are Muggle artefacts. Ministry cars are enchanted to be TARDIS-like, but that's okay, and the Knight bus is a freakin' purple triple-decker bus that zigzags through streets full of Muggle cars, but that seems to be okay, too. On the other hand, Mr Weasley faced an inquiry because of his enchanted Ford Anglia. So, somehow it seems to be a bit random what 'Muggle artefact' can be legally enchanted, and when such an enchantment becomes illegal. The only explanation I could come up with so far is 'politics'.
  • Mr Weasley got in trouble more because of the fact that his car was spotted flying by several Muggles. If he'd enchanted it to only do the things the other Ministry cars can do, there probably would have been no inquiry at all. It seems to be more along the lines of protecting the statute of secrecy than politics. The flying carpets being outlawed in England seem more a precaution than anything else. They might be more noticeable and people would have a lot less reason to have one in their possession as brooms are necessary for Quidditch and used less often for transportation.
  • Arthur's car had a defective invisible spell and was seen by a dozen muggles. The Ministry sent out a squad of Aurors to mind-rape (obliviate) the witnesses. Arthur was fined G50, I assume G20 paid for the clean-up squad and G30 was punishment. When the twins used the car to rescue Harry, the invisiblity spell worked and there was no punishment.
  • Crouch makes a big deal that his family used a carpet before the ban. I assume that carpets had an efficient invisible spell and the ban was political/economic.
  • Muggles have invented flying cars. We just realized that they were an incredibly dumb idea because they used up huge amounts of gasoline, and then crashed once they ran out. Needless to say, we stopped producing them. Why wouldn't the people who saw Arthur's car flying just assume it was some idiot trying to revive that concept?
  • They'd probably notice a flying car without wings or any propulsion.
  • Broomstick riders can use disillusionment charms so that the flyers cannot be seen by Muggles. They could do the same thing with carpets.
  • Also, permits. The Ministry knows that it has some flying cars, and the bus is probably registered. Nobody knew that Mr Weasley had enchanted a car in such a way. About flying carpets, I think they're legal.
  • Flying carpets are illegal. There is a conversation between Arthur Weasley, Barty Crouch Sr., and Ludo Bagman in book four where they talk about the ban. It seems to be a political thing, though. They're banning the import of flying carpets from Asia, while British made brooms are perfectly legal. Okay, Crouch mentions a "12-seater Axminster", which is a British carpet, but all together, it sounds like a conspiracy along the lines of "the oil industry is holding back electric cars". Perhaps the Quibbler should do some articles on the subject.
  • Um. I don't think flying carpets are illegal. IMPORTING them is. Perhaps Britain wants to keep a monopoly?
  • Flying carpets are illegal in Britain. Crouch's mention of an Axminster is followed immediately by the assurance that "it was before they were banned, of course." It's a Misuse of Muggle Artifacts issue, not a monopoly issue.
  • And in what way are brooms different from carpets? Both can be found in any given Muggle household, so classifying one as a Muggle artefact whose enchantment is illegal and the other as a legal magic object sounds a bit odd.
  • Muggle brooms don't come with footholds, aerodynamically cut twigs, and names inscribed on the end. It would be pretty easy to tell the difference between a sweeping broom and a flying broom.
  • I reckon it's a subtle hint at racism within the wizarding world - "oh, they're Asian/Middle-Eastern, you can't trust them." Replace "flying carpet" with "burqa" and the metaphor might make sense.
  • Inconsistency in government regulation is Truth in Television. Example: Drugs. Marijuana is illegal in many American states, yet alcohol and tobacco are legal in all 50 states. Another example: I once read an article about a UK law that would ban beer over a certain alcohol content, yet that content was actually lower than the alcohol content of absinthe, which is not banned in Britain.
  • Flying carpets aren't traditional in Britain the way that they are in Arabia or the way that flying brooms are in Britain. Therefore, they can be banned without a general uproar.
  • I believe that the issue of carpets and brooms is trackability. Broomsticks and ordinary brooms look very distinctive, and to a wizard eye, it is easy to spot the difference. Carpets, on the other hand, are not as easy to tell apart if they are enchanted. Just a thought.
  • Also, if a flying carpet were to accidentally fall into Muggle hands, there's a fair chance that some ignorant non-wizard will be standing on top of one, not realizing it isn't a normal piece of floor covering, and mistakenly activate it. No Muggle is likely to try to ride a broomstick, save perhaps when they're goofing around at Halloween, so there's much less chance of some unsuspecting soul accidentally being carried into the stratosphere.
  • In addition to the reasons in the example above we learn in book 1 that you actually have to command a broomstick in order to use it by shouting UP. I realize we never actually hear them say it again after broom training but that doesn't mean that they aren't thinking it. The same scene also implies that it is very difficult to do as Hermione could barely make it twitch whereas the natural born flyer Harry could master it on his first attempt. A muggle might be able to mess around on one for hours before triggering it.
  • Personally, if it were up to me, I would enchant a snowboard and get a personal hoverboard.
  • With the advancements in Muggle technology, perhaps the straw and staff broom has being supplanted in the Muggle world by vacuums and more effective brooms. This would leave the for-flying-only brooms as something that isn't of the Muggle world anymore.
  • On top of the general politics, it may be excused with safety concerns. With the broom, you pretty much have to hold on, but with a carpet, there is really nothing to hold on to. Maybe there were handles or something, but there is no way of knowing. And of course, it is likely that the foreign carpets were judged more harshly than the traditional brooms on that matter.
  • Political arguments are a bitch. Even the most sensible Muggle governments have inconsistencies and can get into fights over minutiae, and the Ministry isn't shown as being especially sensible or even intelligent.
  • IIRC carpets are forbiden not because they are a muggle artifact, but because there's some sort of monopoly on brooms. Flying carpets are outright said to be the most common way of transportation for wizards in the Islamic and Eastern world, is just in Britain were they are forbiden and maybe in the rest of The West (tho maybe is just that they're not traditional but not forbiden in the rest of Europe or The Americas).

Timeline

• Not really something that bugs me, but something I kept thinking about: The books take place in the nineties, but now it is 2010 and the world has changed a little bit. Cities like London are riddled with CCTV surveillance cameras, and Joe Average carries a mobile phone that can not only take pictures and videos but also post them on the internet in a matter of seconds. On the other hand, we have seen wizards depicted as being utterly ignorant to the most basic muggle inventions. Put those two factors together and wizards will have a really hard time to uphold The Masquerade. Or are there plausible ways to prevent that?
  • The Masquerade is revealed all the time. Then the squad of teleporting, mind-altering, human-sensing, wizards able to disguise as anyone comes in.
  • While there may be ways to prevent that, like having wizards working for various technology groups to put memory charms in the devices, it would also be beyond most wizards to maintain this level of technological intelligence combined with memory charms. In all honesty, something would have happened by today where some dark wizard attacking a town would have been caught on camera and posted on the internet before any government (magic or Muggle) could stop the leak and break The Masquerade. I saw a fanfic where such a thing happened in Argentina and Harry was a primary diplomat between the two worlds and helped them ease into living with the societies together (that, and Quidditch got even bigger).
  • The epilogue doesn't mention anything unusual, so we can probably assume that they managed to keep it secret until at least 2017. Given their numbers, capabilities, and intelligence of Muggle society, that is nothing short of a miracle; the masquerade is definitely living on borrowed time.
  • A) Disillusionment charm. B) Most wizards seem to avoid Muggle population centres whenever they can. (Was it ever said in Deathly Hallows whether Voldemort and his followers were openly attacking Muggles?)
  • Presumably, someone could devise a spell to render a given closed-circuit camera blind to magical phenomena and creatures. Agents of the Ministry can cast it on any cameras within range of nexuses like the Leaky Cauldron or the train station, and the Muggles who view the feed would never know they're missing things.
  • But there's still an incredible amount of possible scenarios by which the masquerade could be broken. It just doesn't make any sense for it to have survived this long.
  • Memory Charms. People on the inside (such as Kingsley a la Half-Blood Prince). Muggleborns and half-bloods that are savvy to the Muggle world. I think a lot of the bases are covered.
  • It's also pointed out several times that magic screws with technology. Those cameras might simply not work to see wizards or record them in a meaningful way. Besides, if anything would break that masquerade, it's the Knight Bus banging all over England making buildings jump out of the way. If that didn't do it, some kid's Nokia phone won't.
  • Maybe one of the reasons so many quickly-debunked "supernatural" viral videos circulating on the Internet is that Squibs are planting them online, to keep people sceptical about the real sightings when they happen...
  • What I would want to know in relation to this is how Hogwarts deals with all the pissed 11-year-old muggle-borns who are suddenly stranded without their phones and thus can't mail their friends and family on a regular basis anymore. Or are unable to use computers for google and stuff. For kids who grew up in the quick-paced, technology centred world we live in today, the wizarding world would be frustratingly slow...
  • I think the vast majority of them would be so awed by the fact they are learning actual factual magic that they wouldn't be much bothered by the lack of phones and internet access. And the few who would complain would be slapped down by the rest. "Dude, shut up! You keep complaining about your stupid phone and we're going to get thrown out of class and I don't want to miss the lesson on how to turn someone into a newt! So cut that shit out!"
  • On the subject of the sudden proliferation of cameras, keep in mind that it didn't happen instantly. Just 20 years ago, it was unthinkable for virtually every single person you meet on the street in even a small town to have a pocket device capable of uploading photos and videos to a worldwide network within seconds. Even 10 years ago, many people didn't have phones that could capture anything but a tiny, low-resolution image and it was common for them to have phones that couldn't take pictures at ALL. The magical word is a hell of a lot more than 20 years behind the trend, especially given how insular they are (even Muggleborn children tend to spend the majority of the year in a 100% magical community thanks to schooling), so they probably just never even considered the proliferation until problems started to hit them.
    That said, it's not hard for both magic and human nature to counter technology. Large amounts of magic already puts it on the fritz, so any cameras near Diagon Alley would probably be suffering from glitches and any magical activity caught on them could be handwaved as another error (which could be done on a lesser scale with cameras away from magical hotspots). Making someone forget occurrences takes a few seconds and a simple spell that a teenager can perform. And, most importantly, humans have a Weirdness Censor. Muggles not only don't believe in magic but they really can't believe in it because of how long they're told that there's no such thing as magic. Unless a person is very gullible or mentally ill (or the occurrence is so bafflingly alien that it CAN'T be justified or handwaved away), their first response to seeing what appears to be a person flying on a broom or someone firing a jet of green light at a guy across the street is to start thinking of completely normal explanations, if only so they don't sound silly or high when recounting the tale. The proliferation of image editors means that any photos or videos can and will be called out as hoaxes. The only occurrence that would actually cause a complete break in The Masquerade would be one that is witnessed live (not on a video or simply an urban legend spread around) by a very large amount of people, extremely obvious, and has no sensible justification. It would take something on par with a magical battle between Aurors and Death Eaters in the middle of Times Square that causes huge amounts of property damage to have an incident that completely runs out of justifications.
  • Have you any idea how many videos are in Youtube about “real mermaid caught on camera” “flying witch caught on camera” “real alien caught on camera” and the like? We generally disregard them as fake, some people believe they are true (and are not the majority), as far as we know real life Masquerade was already broken by the internet and no one believes it.

Wizard world bubble

• This is related to the wizard world bubble above. I can kind of understand them not wanting to do much with Muggles (the oldest wizards probably had grandparents who the Muggles tried to burn as witches), although it still seems very odd. What is even worse is that the wizards form their own bubble within the magical world, and English wizards form one within that. House Elves, for an example, would be more powerful then wizards if they had a wand. Yet no one seems to actually use them for the purpose of fighting. Centaurs will have as much to suffer under Voldemort as anyone, yet don't do anything until the last battle (for that matter, why don't centaurs interact with Muggles?). Apparently, the order of the Phoenix can't call upon any foreign powers for assistance. The wizarding population doesn't even consider the needs of giants and Dementors (they do care enough to stop Muggles from employing giants). And from what I understand, any modern Muggle battleforce could have slaughtered an army of wizards. And here I was hoping for an enormous team-up in the last book (Death Eaters + giants + Dementors + some goblins + some foreign powers vs order of the phoenix + centaurs + some goblins + UK military + freed house elves + other foreign powers).
  • Well, we saw parts of that in Hallows: If I remember correctly, some Centaurs participated in the Battle of Hogwarts, as well as the Hogwarts House Elves. Voldemort had at least some Giants and a number of Dementors on his side.
  • Considering the elves: There are only two freed elves that we know of (Dobby and Winky), and the others are servants/slaves of the families that own them. Keeping the general opinion on house elves in mind, it would have been like having your cook, maid, or gardener go into battle. (And no, not that Cook)
  • Involving the British Armed Forces would be an egregious break of the Statute of Secrecy, and could open a really big can of worms. (Imagine that large parts of the military learn about the existence of magic... cue black ops laboratories that try to find out how wizards tick and how to militarize them.)
  • The British prime minister already knows about wizards, as do all previous ones. I don't really know how the British government works, but couldn't they simply have also revealed themselves to a general and made a friendly request for some guns? Or just take 'em without asking? Battling for the rights of Muggles and Muggle-borns in a drawn-out bloody battle seems kinda odd if the Muggles could end the battle within minutes. But no, keeping ourselves secret is more important than the potential enslavement of Britain.
  • For that matter, couldn't they have recruited some Muggle soldiers or police who are related to Muggleborns, so already know that magic exists? Surely some of them would be more open-minded than the Dursleys, and eager to defend both the Muggle and wizarding worlds, not to mention their own family members.
  • Recruiting Muggle soldiers or police who are related to Muggleborns into a 'Hogwarts Guard' military/security unit would render the unit susceptible to government corruptions not unlike the ones created by pure-blood crony-ism and nepotism. Despite the Ministry of Magic's extensive corruption, as a whole, they had not yet engaged in widespread crony-ism or nepotism, aside from the Death Eaters regime. Even those who are open-minded might assume all pure-bloods are Death Eaters when they are briefed about the latter. The resulting anti-pure-blood prejudice and brutality by the Guards, alongside Muggle corruptions, would be excellent recruiting sergeants for the Death Eaters.
  • When people say that the Ministry of Magic has "extensive corruption", from where do they take such a notion? I'm curious because I see it mentioned often, what exactly represents corruption or what example of corruption can they bring up that has ever been seen on the pages?
  • For one we see Lucius paying off Fudge in OOTP. From this we can infer that wealthy Death Eaters are lobbying the government both to create legislation to benefit them and also to have them focus governing in such a way as to be less susceptible to the notion that Voldemort has returned. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
  • Regarding Centaurs: According to the side-material, the Centaurs have voluntarily separated themselves from humans due to past discrimination on the part of wizards who tried to classify them as "beasts".
  • Okay, let's just accept that guns don't work on wizards, OK? Otherwise, the whole story is null and void. They'd probably sense the gun and stop it, or else do accidental magic or something.
  • Except that if melee weapons and arrows work on them, then guns should as well. So yeah, the story is pretty much null and void.
  • WMG: involuntary magic is most effective against Muggles/Muggle technology. More likely theory: magic weapons. And no, you cannot enchant a gun. Magic screws up technology.
  • Problem with the whole 'guns don't work on wizards' is that Word of God has said that technology will beat magic every time.
  • Also, Word of God is that wizards have yet to create a magical means to stop bullets. A Death Eater can be stopped cold simply by shooting him. The problem is that wizards and witches live in such an insular society (and one that's in a notoriously anti-gun area) that you'll find very few of them who are able to even operate a gun without an instruction manual in front of them, let alone do it safely. As has been mentioned, the Statute of Secrecy means that magical folk try to minimize their footprint in the Muggle world specifically to avoid exploitation and prevent bigotry or politics between the two turning into actual, dangerous conflict. They only inform the Prime Minister because he's a very high authority in the government and is trusted with knowledge of magic (probably including very sobering knowledge of what would happen if word got out to the public) to let him help keep things secret. The more people you involve, the more questions get raised and the more leaks get out.
  • The Prime Minister definitely knows about the wizarding world. Do you really believe that he/she just takes it with a shrug and agrees to stay out of their way? If there's anything you need to know about government, it's that for every leaked black-ops project or scandal that comes to light, there are a thousand more secret programs that the people really don't want to know about. There would be something seriously wrong with the Prime Minister if he/she didn't have SOME sort of contingency in case the wizarding world decided to go nuts.
  • Another issue that people probably haven't noticed: there are some aspects of Muggle life that actually COULD be improved if the Statute of Secrecy were repealed. For example, wizards are able to travel by apparating and using portkeys. If muggles could do that, it would totally revolutionize transportation, and maybe even put an end to global warming from fossil fuel consumption!
  • According to Pottermore and some other sources, apart from the most fanatical anti-muggle ones, most wizards agree that muggles beat wizards on means of transportation as they find things like cars and trains more suitable and comfortable. Broomsticks were never thought for long-term travel, probably not capable of interoceanic travel either and portkeys are incredibly dangerous, so there's no logic into sharing that with humans if wizards think (correctly or not) that muggles already have better transportation systems.

Wizarding UK's allies

• Where were the UK's traditional allies during the War? Voldemort qualifies as a rebellion, shouldn't the Ministries of the US and France and the rest of Muggle UK's allies be helping the UK's Ministry of Magic? In fact, the countries that Magical UK seems to have diplomatic relations with all seem to be Eastern European countries (like Bulgaria) or small countries (Andora). Sure, the UK plays Quidditch with places like Uganda and such, but the West is pretty much never mentioned. Wizarding UK must have done something to damage relations with them.
  • Fridge Horror. That's what Voldy was up to in book five. The UK's the last unconquered Wizard Government left. Alternatively, those countries are helping, but a) they don't correspond in size, for whatever reason, to the Muggle countries they represent, and/or b) they just aren't doing much good.
  • Maybe the other countries don't have a pureblood supremacy movement, and the UK is the backwards, underdeveloped country that's having a civil war.
  • I see this one as the most likely case. The other (magical) societies see the UK as some third-world country having an internal conflict. Like Syria today. No real need to step in unless the country had valuable resources or the conflict went past the borders. It's clearly behind other countries in terms of social development. I mean, France has a half-giant as a headmistress of their premiere school of magic and a part-veela girl as their best representative, while the UK still has plenty of racism against full-blooded humans. Mixed-race people wouldn't have a chance.
  • I second that. Wizarding UK seems to be somewhat Victorian in its attitudes, so the Americans are probably seen as 'uncivilized colonials' and real-world relations with France have been somewhat frosty in the past. Additionally, there wasn't much time for the UK wizarding government to call for help: Fudge refused to acknowledge Voldemort's return and was occupied with discrediting Dumbledore and Harry. Scrimgeour was in office for about a year before Voldemort took over the ministry. Then there's the matter of pride ("We can solve our problems by ourselves!").
  • It's pretty unusual for governments to intervene and stop revolutions in fully independent nations in real life (the main exceptions I can think of here are the Russian Civil War and the East/West proxy conflicts in Africa and Asia during the Cold War). Usually, nothing gets done until the new regime has been in place for decades, and then something else tips the balance towards action (say ,a conquering spree or a pile of bodies that's just a little bit too big to ignore anymore). And I'd say that we aren't given enough information on the geopolitics of the magical world to know what sort of governmental infrastructures even exist in the Wizarding World outside of Britain.
  • Sarcasm Mode: If the Wizarding US are like the Muggle US, it could have been plausible for the US Wizard Government to order an invasion of Wizarding UK during Book Seven, to eliminate the 'Dark Lord Threat' before it spreads to other parts of the world. (*Thinking* This sounds like a viable Plot Bunny for a seventh year Fan Fic...)
  • I'm American and I find this offensive. Our country would never interfere with Britain's affairs! They aren't one of our main sources for imported oil.
  • Forget writing a fanfic about America intervening. Write one about why it doesn't.
  • The U.S. until post WWII wasn't the world police force we know now. While we weren't isolationists, we would of ignored the war since it would be seen as an 'European affairs' and since the Wizarding world is behind the times and less populated, it would make sense for the U.S not to get involved.
  • Going to war would take a bipartisan effort.
  • I don't recall anything in the 7th book indicating that Voldemort's rebellion had spread beyond the UK. In fact, I don't recall anything to indicate that the outside world even knew Voldemort was back. The Ministry warned the Muggle UK Prime Minister, but apart from that, it doesn't seem like they told anybody. And after Voldemort took over, he certainly wouldn't want the French or US wizard governments knowing about it, just in case they did decide to invade.
    • Hermione sent her parents to Australia, so he hadn't gotten that far at least.
  • Tyrants coming to power in a single state and the coup being given only bureaucratic attention by governments elsewhere unfortunately is Truth in Television. It's actually one of the most realistic thing about the last book. Far worse things have been done in the real world than what Voldemort was doing to the UK and its Muggles, Muggle-borns etc.
  • Voldemort is a British citizen, other countries will be at least reluctant to intervene in a internal conflict. The real life analogy will be like having Hindenburg asking Britain to please help them kill Hitler (or Obama asking Canada to kill Trump, time will tell).
  • An explanation I saw in a fanfic is that foreign governments won't intervene until the British ministry asks for aid and the ministry won't ask due to a combination of Head-in-the-Sand Management and the risk of the foreign help sticking around long after Voldemort has been dealt with. But I agree that it being seen as an internal issue by the rest of the world is the most likely answer.

Magic and Muggle Governments

• Each nation on Earth apparently has its own Ministry of Magic or the equivalent. These are essentially self-governing, and have minimal contact with the Muggle governments of their respective countries. So what happens if a Muggle country breaks up, like happened to the U.S.S.R., or if two Muggle nations merge, as with Germany? Do their Ministries suddenly have to rearrange themselves in response to political changes that the wizarding world played no part in?
  • Not necessarily. Who's to say that each Wizarding government directly mirrors it's muggle counterpart? Britain could be the odd man out in this regard. Maybe there is no German Ministry of Magic. Maybe in the Wizarding World Germany never unified and still exists as a jumble of small states, just like muggle Germany before 1871. Hell, maybe in the Wizarding half of the United States each state is its own independent nation and there is no federal government to hold them together. (It would explain why we never see or hear about any representatives from the United Wizarding States if there technically is no United Wizarding States.)
  • Also, it seems like the small size of the magical community in general means that it would be quite rare for a large governing body to take hold in each country with a magical population. Britain appears to be a highly important magical community, with one of the most famous wandmakers in the world calling London his home and a large, very well-respected school of magic in the Scottish Highlands. Despite this, it seems very small by the standards for a country's population and Hogwarts doesn't seem to have more students than an average public high school despite being the only wizarding school in the entire United Kingdom (and thus the ONLY choice for anyone not going international). There probably just isn't a large enough community in many other nations to justify a full-sized wizard government, rather than just having a representative for the International Confederation.
  • If worth something, the official Potterverse wikia does mentions in the article about the British Ministry of Magic that Norway, Germany and Bulgaria all have ministries for magic and they reference Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, chapter 5, as the source. Also the section of “see also” includes the pages of the ministries from Andorra, Bangladesh, Brasil, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Germany, India, Iran, Liechtenstein, Mongolia, New Zealand, Norway and Pakistan. About the USA, they mention the Magical Congress of the United States of America led by a President that seems to be the magical equivalent of both the British Minister for Magic and the POTUS. The source of this is Pottermore and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (film). Also Argentina has the Argentinian Council of Magic whose president is Valentina Vázquez (Pottermore as the source).
    
    Clearly, there is a magical government (not always call “ministry”) in most of the “normal” countries, those that have their borders well defined and recognized by the international community. This is canon. So did Germany always had the same ministry and the division was saw as “a muggle thing” or they did have two different ministries and they follow the reunification as the rest of the country? Places like India and Pakistan are probably harder to explain if wizards do not abide by muggles' division of borders. Now the real headscratcher will be cases like really really complicated border disputes and state sovereignties, can you imagine a case like Israel and Palestine? Ditto for a case like North and South Korea, which is not only a country divided in two but has technically been at war since 1950.
  • Yes, having separate wizarding communities in such small countries as Andorra and Liechtenstein (just check how tiny their Muggle population is) is a strong argument that for some reason wizarding governments cover the same or roughly the same borders as Muggle ones. Maybe Britain DOES stand out in the level of mutual isolation between wizards and Muggles...
  • Just looked at the Harry Potter wiki and seemingly the sole reference to communism is in the Fantastic Beasts movie, in a newspaper article about the French (and muggle) prime minister warning about the coming communist threat in the 1920s. From this it seems a pretty safe assumption that wizards never saw any merit in communism, and have always been about capitalism as an economic system. Therefore, states which split over the issue, such as West/East Germany and North/South Korea can be assumed to have not similarly fractured in their wizarding governments. People with friends and families in seperate jurisdictions would maintain their relationships. Of course, they could simply disapparate over the Berlin Wall and the DMZ of Korea. The exception would be with their muggle acquaintances who may find it shocking to see wizards (who they think are muggles) moving back and forth over the jurisdictions rapidly and wily nily. Also, if one presumes the wizarding economies of West Germany and South Korea would also be superior to those of East Germany and North Korea as with their muggle economies (due to some level of muggle/wizard trade, wizards buying food and other goods in the muggle economies, etc) the majority of wizards would choose to settle in said superior economies, but they could still travel between the jurisdictions as they saw fit.
  • As far as states which have evolved due to differing theological reasons, while religion seems to exist in the wizarding world, it seems so much more secular and tolerant (specifically regarding religion, not regarding other things) than the muggle world. It is quite possible that a Two State Solution already exists for magical Israel and Palestine, rather than reflecting an earlier version of the muggle jurisdiction of the territory (because as someone said earlier, most countries seem to mirror their current day muggle geographies for the most part). Furthermore, Isreal and the Islamic wizarding nations probably cooperate much better than their muggle counterparts. The knowledge of magic binding these nations together could make them believe that God has a shared, benevolent purpose for them, so there's no reason to spill blood unlike their less-enlightened muggle fellows.

Sea serpents

• If each country's Ministry of Magic (or whatever they call it) is responsible for hiding magical creatures within its jurisdiction, who are responsible for hiding sea serpents, or other critters that are found in international waters?
  • The International Confederation of Wizards probably handles that.

Statute of Secrecy

• The whole statute of secrecy kind of bugs me, since not only do wizards hide from Muggles, they also hide all magical creatures, which defies us all access to potion materials. Basically, Wizards aren't just hiding, they stop Muggles from ever getting access to any magic.
  • Hagrid states outright in Philosopher's Stone that one of the primary reasons for The Masquerade is basically to keep Muggles from bothering them too much with their problems.
    Harry But what does a Ministry of Magic do?
    Hagrid Well, their main job is to keep it from the Muggles that there's still witches and wizards up and down the country.
    Harry Why?
    Hagrid Why? Blimey, Harry, everyone would be wanting magic solutions to their problems. Nah, we're best left alone.
  • No, my problem is not that the wizards are hiding because they don't want to solve our every problem, my problem is that they are hiding the stuff which would make us capable of solving our own problems.
  • How would Muggles solve their own problems if they had access to magical creatures/plants? They'd still need magical knowledge or a wizard's help to make anything useful. Also, it would be kind of hard for witches and wizards to remain hidden if the Muggles had to deal with goblins and centaurs prancing about blabbing about the Ministry of Magic and Hogwarts, wouldn't it?
  • For magical knowledge, that's what experimentation is for.
  • JKR once said that if a Muggle picked up a wand, they wouldn't be able to use it properly and that they couldn't brew a potion (despite Potions being "the most Muggle-friendly subject"), which basically explains the need for a Statute of Secrecy. But, as noted elsewhere on this page, the Wizarding World is very traditionalist (many times to the point of stupidity), so it could be a bunch of antiquated anti-Muggle sentiment keeping it from being at least re-written.
  • That article explains a lot, although it is quite vague as if the author hadn't decided yet.
  • I always thought that "We don't want the Muggles to bother us with their problems" was the bowdlerized version they tell to kids. If the Muggle world would realized the existence of magic, no wizard would be safe any more: Witch-Hunts, Mengele-like experiments on wizards in government labs, etc. (Just compare the treatment of mutants in X-Men)
  • The X-Men scenario is one option, but it's also possible that the reveal of magical CREATURES such as dragons, goblins, or giants would create a different scenario, wherein the muggle population became aware of creatures they did not know to exist before (something that might not be as negative an impact as a human of greater power). As for wizards themselves being revealed, it's possible that would cause an X-Men like scenario, but it's also possible they would be immediately associated with the current (real-world) use of 'witchcraft', which almost unerringly is applied to Wicca and other pagan religions. It's not UN-likely that the first impulse would be to lump witches and wizards in with Wiccans, and that people who stuck their hands up later and said 'no, we really CAN do REAL magic' would be identified as delusional or attention-seeking, and that the wizarding world would be treated much as it has been - as something that isn't realistic or doesn't exist. The fact of the matter is that in order for witch-hunts the like of what we saw in Salem to even be possible, most people would have to be strictly Christian and to take 'thou shalt not suffer a witch to live' as a direct command from God. Even now, most Christian sects do not take this stance toward other religions. The reason it is more plausible in the X-Men is that the majority believe now in evolution, which is fueled by natural mutation like what the X-Men display, and as such there would be more easily manipulated convictions based in science than there would be based in religion. Evangelical Christians are some of the most vocal, but not the most numerous individuals out there, and would be the most likely nemesis of real witches and wizards.
  • Let's be honest. The real reason nobody persecutes Wiccans is that no one believes their ridiculous claims about knowing magic spells. If Muggles were made aware of REAL magic, the response would be quite different. After all, the reason the Bible considers witchcraft sinful and immoral is because of what it can do, not just because it is allegedly a product of a pact with Satan. If magic were real, society would be utterly unable to tolerate it. How do you live next to a person you know could make your house burst into flame with a word? How do you deal with people who can read and control minds at will and without any physical trace that they've done so? You can't. The only rational response is to either wipe them out or forcibly segregate them from the rest of society (and by "segregate" I mean "move them to another continent", not "put them in a ghetto").
  • Given apparition and portkeys, "wipe them out" is the only option.
  • Hell, Muggle society can barely even stand different races that are no different from each other without devolving into genocide. Imagine what racism would be like if that other race actually had innate powers that could threaten the safety of your property and life and was so easy that a simple word and wave of an innocuous stick could perform it? Even a young child has access to magic that can seriously injure someone; imagine a moody teenager delivering a Sectumsempra on a bully, perhaps? And the aforementioned attempts to figure out how wizards "tick", which takes very little to go straight to unscrupulous governments kidnapping and performing painful torture and gruesome experiments on witches and wizards. We've already seen how Squibs can be moody due to being part of magical society without having any magical ability. What would happen if that resentment and jealousy ended up being applied to 99.9% of the population that had no magic? I guarantee that within less than a year you'd have news stories of nutbags draining wizards of their blood or disembowelling them to consume their innards to try and gain magic (and even worse, actual government experiments on that exact thing). Conflict between wizards and Muggles brings an added fear that the magical people will use their strange and seemingly unlimited powers to cast horrible things (even schoolchildren in Hogwarts are seen causing bats to fly out of people's noses or instantly paralyzing them as part of simple childhood fights that Muggles would resolve with a punch or two to the nose), which gives the impression that any Muggle would gingerly treat a wizard the same way that you'd treat an angry man who you knew was carrying a gun and willing to use it frivolously even in minor arguments. It's good fanfic fodder, but not a good idea.
  • You know what is written above? A comprehensive summary of the "Muggle Studies" course, taught to the students of Hogwarts by professor Carrow in the year 17 AP (Anno Potter). It is pretty much elaboration on the briefer summary given by Neville Longbottom: "We’ve all got to listen to her explain how Muggles are like animals, stupid and dirty, and how they drive wizards into hiding by being vicious toward them". I'm not going to argue the accuracy of that viewpoint, for another thing's been bugging me. If this viewpoint is not just propaganda and vilification of non-wizes on part of Death Eaters, if it is not restricted to a few narrow-minded bigots, but it is in fact an adopted and common, if unspoken, outlook of the wizard society in general, then what exactly were the Death Eaters WRONG about, and how was the "good guys" opposing them not hypocritical? If we put aside the superficial cartoonishly-evil appearance, they are simply proactive and are willing to engage the problem directly rather then beat around the bush and shortsightedly hope that the Weirdness Censor and casual Mind Rape will stave the confrontation off forever, like the "good guys" do. Sure, their methods are extreme and brutal, but that's to be expected when they are in the minority and the majority, including the authorities, stubbornly persists in self-deluded denial of their rightness.
  • There's a difference between sober realizations about human behavior and teaching kids that Muggles are dumb, violent animals. Many of us in real life acknowledge the flaws of humanity and its ability to perform terrible deeds with ease, but we usually don't wax lyrical about how we're all just monsters who deserve to die for our inherent faults. Wizardkind can acknowledge the reasons why Muggle and Magical society are not understanding enough to be mixed yet, but that doesn't mean that a class teaching magical children to fear and hate Muggles is going to go over well any more than a real world class about the horrors of humanity would.
  • We must've learned different definitions of "dumb, violent animal", because mine does includes things like "performing painful torture and gruesome experiments", or "disemboweling them to consume their innards". You may call it nice PC names like "sober realization", but that won't change the fact that the supposedly "good" wizards would rather let the non-wiz population be enslaved and slaughtered rather than expose the threat and give them a fighting chance. Which can only mean one thing - in the eyes of even the supposedly "good" wizards the non-wizes were worse than Voldemort was. So sure, the kids would not like the Carrows' lessons, because they were in such a stark contrast with the lovey-dovey "peace and coexistance" propaganda they'd been fed their entire life by the good grandpa DD and nice Mrs. Burbage, BUT if it turns out it was exactly that - complacent, misguided propaganda, and the adult wizard population did in fact fear and hate non-wizes, even if is was unspoken, then, I reiterate, what exactly were the Death Eaters wrong about, and why was it wrong for them to oppose the so clearly evil Muggles?
  • (third party) I think you're missing the point here. Yes, some people are capable of committing such atrocities. But not everyone. Yes, there are some people where the label of "dumb, violent animal" would fit. But the key difference is that the Death Eaters believe that every Muggle is a "dumb, violent animal". But such behavior isn't limited to just Muggles. It's apparent enough in the wizarding world as well, as Voldemort and his fan club show. Because regardless of whether or not the Death Eaters' propaganda is accurate or not, the fact remains that they're still guilty of murdering and torturing hundreds of innocents.
  • The Death Eaters were wrong because they were genocidal maniacs who believed that anyone with non-magical ancestry should be killed so that the two worlds could be completely separate. Not only were their methods deeply immoral, but also doomed from the start — the fact that Muggle-borns exist means that if there was no contact between the worlds, the Muggle world would eventually find magic on its own through Muggle-borns and the same problem would happen, only the Muggle could objectively cite the wizards' violent actions and disregard for human life as reasons to fight them. Because the thing is, the Muggle population is a giant sleeping bear, and the Death Eaters' tactics would essentially end up poking them with a stick. The protagonists were presumably reluctant to seek non-magical assistance because they were concerned with the time after victory, in which they believed that a wizarding world without Death Eaters or widespread Muggle knowledge was the best end condition. Besides, the protagonists (and Dumbledore, and J.K. Rowling, I believe) have a higher view of human nature. I suspect that they believe that in the event that magic was exposed, the best defense the wizards could use would be a PR blitz that shows that they are not a threat, combined with some signs of goodwill. Recall that in the very least, the Prime Minister of Britain knows about them, so if the government was going to do something horribly unethical, they'd have started by now. It would take a lot for the non-magical public to support kidnapping and dissecting human beings, but if those beings appear to be both dangerous and homicidal, then the military might be considered justified in such a response. In short, while there would certainly be some Muggles willing to do horrible things to try and exploit wizards (some evil MegaCorp, for example), encouraging them to stay hidden, if they are exposed, it would be better for everyone if the wizarding world was controlled by Harry & co at the time, not Death Eaters.
  • When I read the books I never had the impression that the regular wizard/witch despise muggles or have negative feelings toward them… us… whatever… and that was one of the reasons why the Death Eaters were clearly considered extremists and hated by the main magical society. I really feel some readers have a darker perception from the books, as if all wizards except Dumbledore and the Trio are deeply anti-muggle. Yes, I think the good wizards (see no reason for the quotes) have certain condescending attitudes over muggles, but hate and hostility? I never perceived that. Anyway, I think the reason for keeping certain things in secret is a) To protect muggles from magical creatures (can you imagine what would happen if a muggle discovers a dragon or giant on a mountain?) b) To protect magical creatures from muggles (can you imagine what would happen to centaurs or goblins if their existence became public?). About keeping magical artefacts secrets that can help muggles to solve problems, as another troper said, what? No magical artefact works if in the hands of muggles.
• Honestly it seems like the primary reason for the Statute of Secrecy is probably because some Wizard or another noticed the Muggles had surpassed the Wizards in terms of destructive potential. Wizards sling spells that kill instantly without fail but the original books are set in the 90's meaning that in addition to two of the most brutal conflicts any living human of either world had ever seen the Wizarding world has witnessed the advent of nuclear weaponry. For possibly the first time in history Wizards are not only on the decline but at real risk of being wiped out both from the fallout of so many families being wiped away by the recent Wizard War but also because if the Muggles found them there would be a lot of uncomfortable questions about why they were left out in the rain while the Wizards enjoyed the fruits of magic without sharing. A Wizard with a wand can kill one person at a time as fast as he can say avadakedavra but muggles have guns and atom bombs which should terrify any Wizard self-aware enough to realize the implications. At least in theory guns would still work in the presence of wizards and magic, their chemical reactions are not much different than a standard potion.

Wizards and muggle census

• This doesn't really bug me, but I was just wondering if the Muggle bureaucracy even knows that wizards exist - not in the sense that they know Ron Weasley is a Wizard, but in the sense that they know a boy named Ron Weasley exists who was born in whatever year. Do wizards have whatever the British equivalent of social security numbers are? And of course, that relates to another question; just how much population is flying under the radar? Also, presumably Muggle-borns are registered in the system, but what about half-bloods where one parent is a Muggle? What about THEIR kids?
  • Probably not. Wizards existing in the records of Muggle bureaucracies opens up a whole slew of problems. For instance, who keeps these records? I can't see wizards doing it, given their strong cultural bias against doing anything in close proximity to Muggles. So they would have to be kept by Muggles. What happens if some Muggle bureaucrat is going through the records and starts finding more and more people who apparently don't exist? Does the Ministry of Magic keep a full-time company of Aurors on hand to memory-wipe any Muggle who stumbles upon the records? No, the alternative is much more likely. The names and births of wizards don't exist in Muggle records, with the exception of muggle-borns or wizards who are publicly visible to Muggles (i.e. Squibs, wizards who've had their wands snapped, or wizards whose profession involves regular contact with Muggles), and the records of the latter are probably forged. Half-blood wizards are probably registered (it would be hard to keep them secret from the Muggle side of the family), but not their children. As far as the Muggle government is concerned, half-blood wizards grow up, move away, and die alone and unloved.
  • What do you mean, people who apparently don't exist? All wizards except those in Hogsmeade have Muggle neighbours. Even the Weasleys in Ottery St. Catchpole. Muggleborns and half-bloods don't drop off the face of Muggle Earth. Wizards may not mingle with their Muggle neighbours much, but an inspector looking to confirm the existence of Ron Weasley or Marvolo Gaunt would succeed in doing so. And an aversion to working with Muggles? They're in contact with the Prime Minister.
  • I mean people who exist on paper but have never been seen or heard from by anyone else. If a record of a person named Ron Weasley existed in a muggle database but no muggle had ever seen him, people would start to suspect some kind of fraud. And if huge volumes of records start being found of people who seem to only exist on paper, people would start to suspect a vast conspiracy. Also, you're wrong. All wizards outside of Hogsmeade do not have muggle neighbours. The Weasleys may technically be attached to a village (a fictional one, BTW) but they live way out in the boonies with not a soul around for miles. There's no indication in the books that they have any contact with muggle residents of Ottery St. Catchpole, assuming there are any. And there are undoubtedly many other "wizard only" villages similar to Hogsmeade all over the UK and around the world. As I said, wizards who are publicly visible to muggles might have some minimal paper trail in the muggle world, and that would include those who (by choice or otherwise) live amongst muggles. But there's no reason for the rest of them to appear in muggle records. It would only threaten The Masquerade. And lastly, the only reason the Ministry of Magic stays in contact with the Muggle Prime Minister is that they have to. If complete separation were possible I'm sure that's what they would do.

  • Hogsmeade, it is expressly stated, is the only entirely magical village in Britain. The Weasleys do sometimes interact with the people of Ottery St. Catchpole (in one of the books, for example, Mrs Weasley goes to the post office to use the phone and call a taxi to get everyone to King's Cross). Wizards and witches exist in muggle records: the Prime Minister knows about the baffling murders of Amelia Bones and Emmeline Vance in Half-Blood Prince. However, he doesn't know how or why they were killed, and to him, Madam Bones (Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement) is just "a middle aged woman who lived alone".

  • Many magical universes feature some version of a "don't notice me" spell that can be cast on people or places. Why not an equivalent that can be cast such that any official record made of the person you want to hide is never noticed? The record is there on paper or on the computer all right, but every time someone reads it, the reader's eyes just end up passing over it to the next name. It would actually be better concealment to have the records present in the normal way but repelling attention than to have them absent, which might draw the attention of police, social services or immigration authorities. So yes, Ron Weasley's birth was registered in the usual way. He has a National Insurance number. But somehow people don't see his name as interesting in any search of the records. This could be a sort of reverse version of the way that mentioning Voldemort is widely believed to attract his attention; no wonder most wizards are so scared of saying Voldemort's name when most of them have relied their whole lives on a spell whereby saying or reading their name makes the person saying or reading it lose interest!
  • There was that scene in Prisoner of Azkaban where Sirius Black's escape is reported in the Muggle news as if he had escaped from a Muggle prison. Maybe he was put into a prison's records.
  • The reason Hagrid gives for keeping the Muggles in the dark is what bugs me. Apparently, magic is so wonderful that it can't possibly be shunned as a solution like every other new and scary thing exposed to the masses. There are still plenty of people who refuse to touch a computer! "Well, I never needed a wand to look after my house, and I had more kids than this Weasley person!"
  • Hagrid's answer is likely a) something he came up with on the fly, b) something he's not given a lot of thought before, and c) a drastically simplified answer given to an eleven-year-old boy who's just discovered that wizards exist. Explaining the social and political ramifications of the fall of The Masquerade to a child (potential violent response from Muggles, social unrest, demands to access to magical artefacts for scientific study, cruelty to magical creatures/beings, etc.) when you're not that well-educated yourself is probably pretty difficult.
    • Think of the inherent bias in this excuse- "Magic is so wonderful, and muggles are helpless and jealous of our magic!" Versus, "We're scared of muggles burning us at stake, and our magic is useless in the face of their sheer numbers and rapidly advancing technology we can have no hope of comprehending, let alone keeping up with!" Which one is the Ministry going to put out?
  • But those computer-phobes are decreasing every year. The same would no doubt hold true for magic.
  • Conclusion: the masquerade is useless.
  • The thing is, a computer isn't magic. A computer can't let you instantly cause someone to simply die with absolutely no markings or signs of death beyond "They're dead" and thus confounding all attempts to find a murderer, or let you cause excruciating pain, or let you control someone's mind with nothing but a wave of a stick and the desire to do so. A computer can't let you turn a man's face into a pufferfish or instantly paralyze him. It can't let you con people by inventing items out of thin air and selling them before they naturally disappear. Or teleport. Or make benign objects fly or gain sentience. And what a computer does is known and finite. People who are dumb or out of touch think computers can do things that they really can't, but even then they have some idea of what limits are and aren't ridiculous. Magic? Even wizards and witches don't know everything any more than Muggles 100% understand science. To a Muggle, magic is an unknowable force that lets it user (even a small child) do amazing and terrible things. Not only would they be demanding magical solutions to common problems because "You lot can do it with just a silly word, right?" but they'd also be terrified of what someone with magic might do. As is said above, what would you feel about living next to someone who can turn your house into kindling with a muttered word, or turn you into a ferret because of a minor dispute? It would be terrifying for Muggles to try and live among a minority that has unknowable and awesome powers and would result in tremendous fear and discrimination.
    • That's one of the problems with wizard education being limited to spells and potions; they learn to practice and memorize spells that have already been discovered, but they don't learn the skills necessary to advance, things like science, communications, creativity. If the masquerade were to be broken, I guarantee you that the first thing muggle scientists would do- after confirming that magic is real, of course- is set about figuring out why magic works the way it does, why some people can use it, and how others can protect themselves from it. In-universe, of course, we don't have the answers to these questions, for a variety of reasons; Harry, the narrator, doesn't know, Wizard society hasn't advanced one iota since the 1800s, etc. But that doesn't mean the answers don't exist!
    • We don't know how investigation and improvement work in the Wizarding World. Even if there is a wizard counterpart for scientists most scientific investigation is done in colleges, not in high schools. The books do show that in-universe there is a change in Wizard society and that potions, spells and magical artefacts are constantly changing and improving and some kinds of magic became obsolete, so there has to be some sort of experimentation among wizards for this to happen. Also, even if muggle scientists discover the existence of magic and try to find an explanation on how it works, they may simply never find it as is, well, magic, and probably do not work according to physical laws.
  • You are also forgetting something; anyone can use a computer, but magic wands (and all other magical artefacts) only work with wizards. If The Masquerade falls and the existence of wizards became public knowledge Muggles still can’t use magic wands to make spells. So Hagrid’s worries are well founded; in the best case scenario Muggles will request Wwizards to solve their problems because there is no way they can do it themselves, worst-case scenario governments will take wizards hostage and force them to do stuff and weird experiments.
    
    About the records, well it seems again that a lot depends on the interpretation of the reader. I never felt Wizards were absolutely isolated from the rest of society, my impression was that they were simple citizens of their country interacting more or less with the rest of (muggle) society, yet with their own culture, laws and rules, a lot like vampires and werewolves in other fantasy settings with Masquerades, so I see no reason why they don’t have normal records like anyone else, especially when they probably would need it for things like, well own a house like the Wesleys do or that an aunt can legally adopt her orphan nephew.

  • a) The British equivalent of an SSN is the National Insurance (NI) number. b) If you want safe record keeping of wizards in muggle bureaucracies, the way to do it is with a well-paid squib or team of squibs. These individuals would enjoy a dual salary from muggles (for doing the day job) and also from the Ministry Of Magic (for helping to maintain the masquerade) and would be an enviable role for a squib willing to work a desk job. There would also be other perks, e.g. the hiring process is streamlined (you only need to pass the wizarding interview panel, then they do some low level memory modification and Confounding for the muggle panel, and boom you're in.

Muggle/Wizard legal interactions

• Exactly how does the Ministry of Magic handle matters between the wizarding society and Muggle Britain. For example, let's say that a Muggle aware of the Masquerade is invited to a social function containing mostly wizards and ends up killing most of them. Do the wizards take matter into their own hands and have to figure a way to explain his disappearance to the authorities, or do they simply report to Muggle police while trying their best to hide the fact that they are members of a secret community of actual wizards and witches? Also, how do squibs integrate into Muggle society if they presumably have no National Insurance number or birth certificate that would be recognized as legitimate?
  • The answer to all your questions is magical forgery. If a muggle kills a bunch of wizards, the wizards convict him in their own courts, then literally conjure up evidence indicating he actually killed a bunch of Muggles, modify his memory so that he believes that he killed a bunch of Muggles, and then turn the killer over to the Muggle government. If a Squib decides to go off and live with the Muggles, the Ministry of Magic magics up all the documentation they need. Or alternatively, they don't do this, and the Squib ends up living on the streets as a crazy beggar.
  • Presumably have no birth certificate why? Wouldn't all wizards have them, so that they can prove their existence (as Muggles) to the Muggle government?
  • This presumes that all Muggles have birth certificates, but guess what? There are a lot of people who don't have them and a good 70% probably have never and will never see the actual document, since it's filed away in a government office somewhere near their birthplace.
  • Also, people disappear all the time. In 2001, over 50,000 adults disappeared without a trace. If the wizarding world wanted to punish a Muggle for a crime against wizards, it would be trivial to simply grab them and remove any forensic evidence (and even if the Muggle authorities can follow a trail, we've already established in canon that wizards can easily hide entire villages, castles, and districts of a large city from Muggle eyes, let alone wizarding courts and prisons). They'd never be seen again and simply presumed to have either been kidnapped and dismembered far from home or intentionally went off the grid and are either dead or living elsewhere under a pseudonym.

Pensieves in court

• While veritaserum isn't used in courts because it can be circumvented, why not use pensieves to establish that the testimony isn't a lie? Or why not have witnesses make an Unbreakable Vow to the judge to not lie for the duration of them being on the stand? Of course, neither would establish that the testimony is factual, since memories can be modified via magic, but establishing that the witness isn't lying would be extremely useful.
  • It's never really established how widespread pensieves are in this world. For all we know, Dumbledore has one because a previous Headmaster of Hogwarts created it and left it for Headmasters only. If, however, they are widespread enough for commercial use, it's entirely possible that the way veritaserum is bypassed can bypass pensive memories as well. Unbreakable Vows, on the other hand, might be really bad, as, if I remember correctly if you break one, you die. That would be bad in the courtroom for lying about something small on accident. Unfortunately, even if phrased correctly as an oath of truth, it could probably still be bypassed by the above method of fooling veritaserum. The fact that a truth serum can be bypassed usually means there's a magical method to completely fool one's perspective of the truth. In that case, there would be no way to get the truth unless there's a way to prevent the method.
  • Well, I would presume that the British Ministry would have enough resources to get a single one to be used at trials. As for bypassing the truth serum, according to Word of God, "he [Barty Crouch Jr.] might have sealed his own throat [to prevent swallowing it] and faked a declaration of innocence, transformed the Potion into something else before it touched his lips, or employed Occlumency against its effects", so those techniques couldn't be used against a pensieve or the vow. And when Slughorn tried to tamper with his extracted memory, it was obvious that it had been altered. And as for dying from breaking the vow: 1) the vow could be worded along the lines of "I swear to not intentionally lie" to prevent death from accidents, and 2) I don't think people would be willing to die in order to lie over minor matters.
  • What really gets me is that their solution to the possibility of veritaserum failure is simply to take testimony without any veritaserum. So, because there is a method of interrogation that can possibly be suborned with significant effort, it is then cast aside and instead, they use... a method that can be suborned by the simple effort of opening one's mouth and lying? Refusal to use a method because it's imperfect only makes sense if the alternative is more reliable; otherwise, it might not be ideal, but it's still better than nothing. As for the Word of God in question; in that very same paragraph, Rowling also mentions that the reason veritaserum did work on Barty Crouch was that he was 'groggy' at the time he was dosed and thus unable to perform any tricks. The solution is thus obvious; feed the interrogatee a stunner (or some type of confundus or disorienting charm, if you just want to daze them momentarily), force-feed Veritaserum, then enervate.
  • Veritaserum is not better than nothing because it lends a sense of false confidence to the interrogation. It is easily understood that the person being questioned may lie, but people may have a harder time accepting that if they've been dosed with veritaserum.
  • That depends on how they use it. If Veritaserum is used so that a confession is treated as proof that it works on the suspect but no confession is not proof that it doesn't then it can be a basic screening method to save a lot of time and effort. The only flaw I can see in this is that it wouldn't detect people confessing to things that they did not do but I think that would only happen in a minority of cases when the person who took the Veritaserum either had a thing for confessing to things they didn't do or if they were trying to protect the person who did commit the crime or who they believed to have committed the crime.
  • Think about this in terms of the Muggle equivalent: do you really think execution is an appropriate punishment for perjury, in EVERY instance? What if you were a witness to a murder, had been through unspeakable horrors, and after therapy agreed to testify at the trial, only to be drugged, threatened with death if your accounts were imperfect or you told a white fib (e.g. "I was on that street to pick up the dry cleaning, not buy sex toys..."), made to give up your private memories and experiences to be scrutinized by strangers, and treated with extreme suspicion and disrespect. Do you think your testimony would be the best quality and calmest it could be?
  • On that note, who WOULD testify if they knew that they would be put through such danger for it? If you were aware that testifying meant being put under a death sentence for even a minor lie meant to protect your reputation or safety and had your very brain poked and prodded for information, would you want to show up in court? Hell, would you even trust a government that's so willing to execute its citizens or invade their most private life for a common criminal conviction?
  • What's all this tangential talk about execution for perjury? The fact of the matter is, wizards have so many ways to verify a suspect's innocence that they never, ever use. What they should be doing is using several of these techniques in tandem and develop standard procedures for mitigating resistance to them (sedating the subject before administering the potion for instance). Seriously, they have Veritaserum. Pensieve. Legilimency. Yeah, that's right. Wizards can read each other's fucking minds, but they still rely solely on witness testimony and circumstantial evidence to convict what appears to be an uncomfortably high amount of innocent people to be sent to a prison that effectively constitutes a living hell. The victims don't even have the option of requesting that those techniques be used on them if they have been "proven" guilty by a dry trial. Now, this may say more about Fudge running an insanely corrupt judicial system than it does about the wizarding world, but it's not difficult to notice that there are gaping flaws in the trial system presented to us throughout the course of the series.
    • In this case, "execution for perjury" is the equivalent of having a witness take an Unbreakable Vow (to not lie to the court), because apparently the effect of disobeying it is that you die.
  • Well, it IS insanely corrupt; according to Word of God, Crouch Sr. was becoming increasingly unreasonable and power-mad during the trial and never even gave Sirius the chance to testify under Veritaserum before throwing him into Azkaban. Even if he had testified, there are so many ways to block both Veritaserum and Legilimency that even a teenager could perform if learned enough (there's a reason Harry was being taught Occlumency in HBP) that the prosecution could simply declare that trickery was involved and reject the usage if it didn't suit their desires. And this is no mistake on Rowling's part: large parts of the latter half of the series are dedicated to demonstrating how the Ministry of Magic is corrupt, bloated, and filled with self-serving pricks.
  • Unbreakable vows are dark magic, so I could see why using it as a way to resolve court issues wouldn't happen. Pensieves could be fed false memories and you wouldn't know if the memory had been manipulated by the one to whom it belongs because he has something to hide or by someone else who wants to hide the fact that the memory owner has nothing to hide, and you wouldn't know without using veritaserum. Which might or might not be beatable by people who know some occlumency, and there's no registry of people who have any skill in that area. Of course providing veritaserum while they are unconscious remains an alternative, but people who are important enough that they can't just be kissed-on-sight the way Barty Crouch Jr. was are also important enough that giving them veritaserum while they are unconscious would be frowned upon ... and if they happen to be innocent, that bombs the current minister's chances to get elected again because those important enough people are also people who vote when it's time to change ministers.
  • In regards to "memory modifications are immediately noticeable" - wasn't it stated explictly in the book that Slughorn's memory was only so obviously tampered with because it was done poorly? Presumably a properly cast memory charm would be much harder to detect.

Wizarding military

• Okay, here's something that really bothers me. The wizarding world seems to have no semblance of a military. I mean, sure, there's the Aurors and Order of the Phoenix, but they seem more like police/intelligence, so there's really no military. Doesn't this seem like it would put the "Muggle sympathizers" in the story at a distinct 'advantage' to Voldemort, or at least his cronies? Sure, fewer people in Britain have guns than in the US, but they're not impossible to get, killing curses could be defended against with simple riot shields^note although a given riot shield would probably only work once, etc. Also, considering that the wizarding world is run by the "Ministry of Magic," and assuming that all wizards are still loyal to Britain, wouldn't the fact that one of their ministers had been 'deposed' by some magic Hitler-wannabe set off a bunch of red flags for the British government? Forget Britain's allies turning a blind eye. The British Military could have, and should have, handled this instead of forcing it on a 17-year-old, even if he is a wizard.
  • It was more an off-the-cuff remark about Muggle vs. Wizard, she didn't particularly think it through. There is evidence through the series that wizards aren't much threatened by guns.
  • Not only that, but the Order of the Phoenix is NOT international, and it was mentioned that they were unable to get foreign help.
  • What are you going to do about the British Military being sent in to kill a wizard? The Statue of Secrecy is there for a reason: keep the knowledge of magic away from the public eye to prevent wizards and witches from being exploited or abused. Even if you justified Voldemort and his Death Eaters as terrorists, what are you going to do when they start flinging magic? Swear the entire unit to secrecy? That's proven to not work 100%. And since Death Eaters seem to live and operate in populated areas or at least the countryside of first-world countries, how are you ever going to keep that operation secret and keep it from having collateral damage?
  • You won't need to swear anyone to secrecy. Voldemort broke the Statue of Secrecy first. And if the Prime Minister wanted to stretch things, he could twist it to sound like Voldemort has effectively declared war on Great Britain, if not NATO and the UN as a whole. Voldemort, by all rights, is completely FUCKED.
  • On the subject of a wizarding military, they don't need one. The biggest threat to the wizarding world from actual magic users in the past centuries has been smaller than some street gangs in number and has no advantages in power, number, or equipment over the wizarding police force. The only thing that made Death Eaters difficult to combat has been their leader's effective immortality, and they likely could have quashed that if they had access to the necessary intelligence regarding the horcruxes (otherwise it wouldn't have been handled by some rogue teenagers hiding from Voldemort's government, who had to operate with intelligence gained from one of the most powerful wizards in history who was specifically fighting Voldemort outside of government circles).
  • I’m not British so I may be wrong, I don’t get how things in the UK works but, if I understand correctly Voldemort is British. So if Britain has some problem with a domestic terrorist (I mean a terrorist that is a British person) does that mean the UK would ask NATO to kill the guy? Or would they use the army for that matter?
  • Yes, Voldemort is British and a domestic terrorist. In terms of the UK government response for (muggle) domestic terrorists, they would not rely on NATO (mind you they are a member state of that organisation) but rather handle it themselves. Usually the response would be to call in counterterrorism teams in the police units, such as for the Metropolitan Police. However, depending on the severity of the threat, they have been known to deploy the very best the British Military has to offer (SAS in the Iranian Embassy seige, for example).

Underage magic

• How enforcement of underage magic is handled bugs me. The way the trace works is that they can't tell if you did magic, only if someone did magic near you, right? Given the Ministry's history of pure-blood supremacy, it doesn't really surprise me that they'd go after Muggle-borns and those raised by Muggles while relying on the parents to enforce it in pure-blood households. However, what about households with Muggle parents and more than one wizarding child (ie the Creevey brothers). If Colin Creevey sets off a hovering charm, say, then how will the ministry know to punish him and not Dennis? And what about when one sibling is of Hogwarts age but the other is still quite young and in the "Doing magic by accident" phase? What then?
  • You forget about "Priori Incantem". Yeah, sure, they don't use it in Chamber of Secrets, but that's bureaucracy to you - always going for the simplest and most formal approach.
  • Of course, the one time we see that spell used in the books, it provides evidence against someone innocent (the culprit had taken another person's wand). But it would work in that particular accidental-magic case.
  • How many times have kids in Real Life gotten away with false accusations against their siblings? A fair few. So witches and wizards have to deal with the same problem…
  • They target Muggle-borns because they can't tell if a family with of-age wizards have underage wizards breaking the law (they rely on the parents to enforce it within wizard households). It's a magical blind-spot that would be the case with or without their suspicion of Muggle-borns.
  • Question: Why did the Ministry try to expel Harry after Dobby used a hover charm in book 2, but NOT when Arthur Weasley used magic to blast the Dursleys' fireplace open a few books later?
    Answer: Because in the second case, the Ministry knew Arthur was going to be in the house. He had to get special permission to temporarily connect the Dursley house to the floo network, so any magic detected by the trace during that time-frame would have been disregarded by the Ministry as the work of the adult wizard Arthur Weasley. On the other hand, the Ministry had no idea Dobby was in the Dursley house so they naturally assumed that any magic detected in Harry's vicinity must have been cast by him. Extrapolating from this logic, if a muggle family gave birth to two or more wizard children then any magic detected in their house would have to be investigated before either could be punished. And that would be as easy as sending an Auror over to the house and casting Priori Incantem on both their wands.
  • Is not that I want to defend the magical government, but I don’t think the Ministry targets underage wizards living in muggles homes out of racism, they target them out of simple common sense. If they detect magic been use in a house where there is only one wizard, they obviously are going to assume that wizard did it, right? Probably if the Ministry knows that a pureblood or half-blood underage wizard is staying temporarily with a squib aunt or a muggle relative and detects magic they’ll assume the same. Sometimes the simplest answer is the best.

Muggleborns coming of age

• So, if the Ministry has a special quill that records the names of all magical children in Britain at their birth, why, oh WHY, do they not bother to tell the parents of any wizard child born to Muggles that their child has magical powers until they are 11 freakin' years old?! Wouldn't it make a hell of a lot more sense and be much kinder to give those poor parents at least a few years to get used to the idea that their child is going to have superpowers and be accepted into a fantastic and bizarre hidden society where they'll only be allowed to see them for 3 months a year for 7 years of their teenage life, instead of just casually dumping this life-altering and world-view shattering revelation on them all at once a mere month or two before it begins? Not to mention, how many Muggle-born wizard children do you think have been needlessly traumatized or institutionalized by people that think they're crazy because the wizard government never thought it was necessary to warn their parents that, oh hey, your kid might accidentally bend and/or break the rules of physics with magic every now and then, don't worry though, cause it's perfectly normal?
  • It fails the Law of Drama, you need the Call to Adventure to come as a shock, not as something that the protagonist has been groomed for for all his/her life. As for in universe reasons... I guess the Wizarding world's prejudice against Muggle-borns also extends to the Muggle-born's parents; not telling them them that their child is magical until the last moment possible (after which said child is immediately removed from the parents to be immersed practically full-time in the magical culture) has the effect of neatly locking out the parents from the Wizarding world. If you tell the parents that their kids are magical from birth, presumably they can meet with with other such parents during the pre-Hogwarts years and worm their way into the Wizarding culture, and before you know it, there would be this subpopulation of Muggle parents running around the magical world, and that's probably a little too much multiculturalism for the old-fashioned wizards.
  • Only Harry (being the protagonist of the series) needed the Law of Drama, and he got it from the Dursleys purposefully trying to quash any and all opportunities for him to learn about the wizarding world (and it took Hagrid bursting in to overcome their efforts). There's no excuse for anyone else.
  • I think the above response is on the cynical end of things. On the other end, there's: a) By eleven, the kids have produced some weird events that can be used as proof to persuade the parents that you're not insane. Think about it; what would you think if Some Dude appeared and said "Hey, that baby you're holding? Magical powers. Totally not crazy. Not a joke. Prepare yourselves. Also, we'll be back in eleven years to take him away. Ta ta." Versus "Hey, you know all those crazy things your kid does? Magic. Only explanation for it." Yes, the person could demonstrate for proof, but that could be "eyes playing tricks" or "temporary insanity," whereas the children's tricks usually have non-family witnesses, have been building up for years, and aren't looked on with serious suspicion from the beginning. b) To discourage children from purposefully escalating their "accidental" magic displays. We learn towards the end of the series that some experimentation is not unusual, but think about how much more there would be if the children knew how and why they did these things. It legitimizes it and opens up the opportunity for messing around to get a leg up before school starts. Yes, wizarding families' children do know, but if they experiment like that, it's unlikely to be around Muggles and they have more people to slap them on the wrist and teach them The Rules.
  • They get their Hogwarts acceptance letter a week before they turn 11. (Incidentally, it's also entirely possible the whole 'birthday' thing is a coincidence. Students might just have to respond a month before school starts, and a letter gets sent a week before that if they have failed to do so.) But we have no evidence Muggle-born aren't introduced to the Wizarding world well in advance of that. What people forget is Harry Potter is not Muggle-born. His parents were Wizards, and it's probably pretty unlikely for a Wizard to be sent to live with Muggle relatives. Presumably, he slipped through the cracks, either accidentally, on purpose thanks to Dumbledore's meddling, or simply because the Dursleys threw any wizards out of their house before Harry saw them.
  • I think we're given some evidence that the Muggleborn students haven't been introduced to the wizarding world well in advance. Justin was supposed to go to Eton until he got his letter and if he'd known for years they wouldn't have made plans to send him there (or at least he wouldn't still be talking about it years later). Colin babbled about how shocked they were when he got his Hogwarts letter and so did Hermione. If these people had known that they were wizards for longer than a month or so than they'd be well used to the idea and have likely spent enough time in Diagon Alley or around other wizards that they'd be much less...bubbling. Harry Potter might as well be Muggleborn for all the good having wizard parents did. Dean isn't Muggleborn and presumably there have been other cases of magical children being raised by Muggle relatives who aren't their parents. Tom Riddle wasn't Muggleborn and he got the same sort of treatment as Harry did. In fact, it actually shows that he had never heard of magic being real before he got his letter so I think that's even stronger proof that Muggleborn students find out around the time Harry does. And it makes so much more sense to send the notes out at the same time rather than doing it a week before their eleventh birthday. Hermione's birthday is in September so should she find out a year before she can actually go to Hogwarts? Where's the sense in that? It's also so much more work to remember (or magic it) to send letters out periodically to students whose birthday it's approaching than to do it all at once.
  • Concerning Hermione, this might be Fridge Brilliance. Remember how she's a year older than Harry and Ron because she waited a year to find out about the wizarding world and reading books and stuff? While she was happy to do so, maybe she just had to because she got her acceptance letter just a little to late and her parents had already planned something for the year!
  • Hermione's birthday is in September. Most schools have a cutoff date for when the student-to-be has to be a certain age, which was likely before the start of term (September 1st) for Hogwarts.
  • The policy not to alert Muggle parents about their children's potential might date back a long way, to an era when there'd be no guarantee a newborn wizard or witch would survive to age 11. Child mortality was sky-high for most of human history; better to wait until they're sure the child will live long enough to come to Hogwarts before the family is informed.
  • I have to agree on the suggestion that it's to keep children from abusing their power. Look at Tom Riddle as a boy, and how his cleverness let him quickly find out that he had powers and could use them to get what he wanted. What's going to happen to a child in a Muggle household that's told from an early age that he has magic powers? What's going to happen with parents that learn that their child is magical and try to take advantage of them, raising them to hone their powers to solve their problems through magical means?
  • "I guess the Wizarding world's prejudice against Muggle-borns also extends to the Muggle-born's parents" when I read things like that I sometimes think some tropers really extrapolate their own worldview and personal experiences over the work of fiction. For me it was clear that the muggle-born prejudice was not common in the Wizarding world and that’s why people that hold it, like the Malfoys, were generally considered mean and rude by… well, almost everyone else. Basically as we see openly racist people in our society. I really wonder why some people get the idea that most of the Wizarding world was like the Malfoys. Truth is muggle-borns are in-universe treated as any other wizards, the real reasons is probably as some tropers said before; not only is more likely that the wizard/witch can handle it psychologically better at that age, is only probable that their parents already suspect there is something special about the kid and be more willing to accept it. About the "how many Muggle-born wizard children do you think have been needlessly traumatized or institutionalized by people that think they're crazy" well, I have no idea in what country kids under 11 can be considered "crazy" and put in psych ward, but I’m pretty sure that in the UK they don’t put kids that young in mental institutions. You do have to be over 18 to be considered legally crazy in most jurisdictions. Some tropers really have a very dark vision of the world.
  • The point is not whether the majority of wizards hold this view; obviously, they aren't all interested in disenfranchising muggleborns and their parents. The important thing is WHO, exactly, holds this view: people who are high up in the ministry, and purebloods with a lot of influence in the Ministry. This is important, because while the wizard population as a whole might be okay with muggleborns, if enough politicians hold an opposite view, they can pass whatever the heck laws they want to promote their own principles. Keep in mind that we don't have a very clear idea of how wizarding politics work, so their may not be as much of a "citizens' mandate" to keep politicians in check.
  • Am I the only one concerned that the childrens' first introduction into the wizarding world is being accepted to a school they've never heard of and never applied for? I mean, there's a reason you apply for schools; I'm not going to get accepted to a private boarding school if I was just planning on going to public school. I'm not going to get accepted to UCLA if I was planning on community college. Don't kids have the option of choosing to go to Durmstrang or Beauxbatons, or another wizarding school? They're boarding schools, so location obviously isn't as big of an issue. To me, snatching the kids and putting them through seven years of magic school where they learn magic and only magic indoctrinates them into wizarding society, and prevents them from learning any skills that would allow them to function in the muggle world.
  • I’m under the impression that some tropers really didn’t enjoy the books and are like kind of angry toward the way wizarding society is represented, thinking that the world of Harry Potter is a Crapsack World full of horrible people and an evil government akin more to George Orwell’s 1984 that a children’s fantasy book.
  • Oh, was it that obvious?

Wizards understanding muggles

• Given that the books say more than once that many witches and wizards are half-blood or muggle-born, otherwise the wizarding world would be dying out, why is it that the head of the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts department doesn't get almost everything muggle? Ditto most of the wizarding population. You would think everyone would know someone they could ask questions concerning muggle stuff.
  • What gets me is how Mr. Weasley and his kids keep mispronouncing the names of Muggle technologies, even after they've heard Harry say them correctly. Isn't proper enunciation something that's drilled into young wizards in every spell-casting course from Day One? They have to pronounce spells correctly for them to work, so should have a good ear for words in general.
  • Do YOU pronounce new words properly 100% of the time as soon as you hear them?
  • I would probably learn to if it was my job to know about these things.
  • I'm of the opinion that Muggle Studies was not yet a subject during Arthur's time at Hogwarts, or he would know about certain technologies and trinkets a lot better. The Ministry doesn't offer postgraduate NEWT or OWL-level equivalent courses he could have taken to educate himself for the same reason. As the department grows, it does start to hire Hogwarts graduates with appropriate qualifications in the subject, but it takes a while for their accumulated knowledge to filter up to Arthur. As regards pronunciations, proper enuciations of spells is one thing, but that's because professors drill it into them. Some muggle words may be difficult for them to conceptualise; e.g. does mechanic have a "eck" sound or a "chuh" sound? Where Arthur says "eclecticity" instead of electricity, maybe he's dyslexic. Where he says "firelegs" instead of "firearms", he's just not paying too much attention to the inferred root meaning of the word. But he has a keen interest otherwise.

Harry and Ron's jobs

• Harry grows up to head the Auror office, and Ron becomes one too. This is rather surprising given their record of breaking rules when it suits them.
  • Exactly, then they'll know all the criminal's dirty tricks, perfect. The bigger question is which one of them will turn into Gene Hunt.
  • Oh come on now. Breaking rules when it suits them? Sheesh. The way you tell it you'd think Harry and Ron were hardened criminals by age 12. First of all, whatever rule-breaking they did was almost always for the greater good. I hardly think that breaking rules to save lives should be held against them. In fact, I think it's safe to say that every single instance of Harry and Ron breaking the rules at Hogwarts was:
    A) justified by extenuating circumstances,
    B) a minor infraction blown completely out of proportion by the adult characters,
    C) harmless juvenile mischief,
    or D) an innocent mistake by a couple of kids who didn't know any better.
  • You're right. It was after they grew up and became Aurors, that they began to break rules when it suits them, like mind-raping driving instructors to get a licence. Huh, I guess it's true what they say: it always starts with doing it for greater good.
  • Forgive my rudeness, but what in the Hell are you even talking about?
  • Ron admitting he Confounded his instructor to get a driving license in the epilogue. Although, we don't need to go that far, of course. How about Harry using an unauthorized and unverified book of magic to get ahead in his classes, which nearly lead to the death of his fellow student? Which of the four categories would you put that instance under?
  • Ron's actions easily fall into category B) and arguably also A). The Confundus charm is hardly a "mind-rape", and if you'll go back and read that epilogue again you'll see that Ron only Confunded the driving instructor to make him forget a minor mistake with his side-mirror. And Ron himself pointed out that in a real-life driving situation he would have cast a Supersensory Charm anyway. As for Harry's use of the Half-Blood Prince book, a couple of things. Firstly, "unauthorized and unverified"? It was a textbook, not the Necronomicon. And it was given to Harry by his professor if you'll recall. So what exactly makes it "unauthorized"? The fact that it's annotated? Most of the textbooks I owned in college were used books full of notes left by previous students. And sure enough, some of those notes helped me better understand the material and get ahead in my classes. Does that mean I cheated my way through college? Of course not. Secondly, Harry had no idea and no reason to assume that any of the spells written in the book were dangerous. In fact all the ones he tried up until Sectumsempra seemed to be harmless amusements. The fact that Sectumsempra was actually capable of killing anyone was a complete surprise. And after Harry cast the spell on Draco he was crippled with guilt and shame and started looking at the book with a more fearful eye from that point on. So I would put Harry's use of the book squarely in the D) category with a heavy helping of a new category I've just made up:
    E) the person making this complaint needs to pay better attention to the books.
  • On another note, I think that any of Harry and Ron's schoolboy rule breaking would have been overlooked by the fact that they stopped the most notorious dark wizard known to mankind when they were teenagers. Any questions about them being poor cops because of their school record are made moot by the fact that most of this record comes from saving the world.
  • Knowing when it's appropriate to bend the rules a bit is part of being an effective cop, actually. When do you let a speeder off with a warning, rather than a ticket? How often do you overlook a petty crime like smoking weed in exchange for information the pot-smoker can give you on his dealer? Did the thump you just heard behind the suspect's door really sound like somebody getting punched, which gives you exigent circumstances to justify busting in, or did they merely drop a book on the coffee table? It's a long way from Incorruptible Pure Pureness, but police have to operate in the real world, not an ideal one.
  • My uncle was a troublemaker as a teenager and even got expelled. He now works for the military because no employer cares if you broke school rules or caused mischief as long as none of what you did was illegal. And the actual illegal things Ron and Harry did can be justified due to circumstances.

Wizards not understanding muggles

• This was the only category that I can think of to properly sort this complaint into, but: why do so many wizards act like a Fish out of Water? The Statue of Secrecy is pretty important, but they don't do anything to teach wizards how to act among muggles. And it's not like that's difficult. Here is the pamphlet:
  • Dress in Muggle clothing. See figure one for standard wardrobes, sorted by gender. women may wear men's clothes, but the reverse is not true.
  • Theoretically this could work, but it would require extensive research by the Ministry (or someone) of Muggle fashion trends, and it would have to be updated regularly as Muggle fashions change, and it would have to include explanations of certain social dress codes (you don't want a wizard showing up at a fancy restaurant in a pair of jeans and an old t-shirt, for instance). That kind of research is something no one in the Wizarding World can apparently be bothered with. On the rare occasions they must interact with Muggles it's simpler to just grab a box full of assorted Muggle clothes and throw them on.
  • Pottermore goes into more detail on this: wizards tend to pick a fashion style, then spend decades insulated in wizarding society (which has a well-established prejudice against Muggles and tends to be slow to adopt new pop culture and technology) and come out wearing clothes that are out of date or even downright anachronistic. Some witches and wizards even intentionally wear ridiculous outfits to screw around. It doesn't help that Muggle fashion sense changes within a decade or less.
  • Don't gawk at things muggles aren't gawking at. Act like muggle objects are mundane for you.
  • While that is good advice for wizards, actually putting it into practice is another matter. In real life, tourists are often told by travel experts not to act (or dress) like tourists in foreign countries because it can make them the targets of criminals. Yet they still do it.
  • Pay using Muggle money. If necessary, there is a goblin in Gringotts who will give you Pounds for Galleons.
  • They do pay using Muggle money. It's figuring out what is essentially foreign currency that they have a problem with. Truth in Television.
  • And remember that Loose Lips Crash Broomsticks. Don't mention magic in any way, shape, or form.
  • Easier said than done. Magic is an essential part of their lives and they're used to talking about it freely. Not everyone can manage such strict self-discipline without training.
  • See how easy that was?
  • The office of Muggle Relations probably has one, but considering the insular attitudes and smug superiority of wizards, I have a hard time seeing that pretty much anyone would pick one up. Also, Wizarding Britain is a radically different culture from Muggle Britain. Acting like you belong in a completely different culture is not something you learn to do overnight. It can take years or decades, if it is at all possible.
  • Your first point is completely valid, your fourth slightly less, considering how pervasive magic is in Wizarding Britain, but I'll grant it. Remembering to exchange your money is a valid point as such, but the question is which is more likely to breach the masquerade, someone who tries to exchange gold for goods or services, or someone who doesn't know how to tell what denomination paper money is and thinks there are 493 pence to a pound. As for gawking, I gawked a LOT the first time I visited London, definitely enough to make me stand out in a crowd, and I come from a city in a similar culture. How do you think someone from a rural part of Africa or Asia, who has never been further away from home than the nearest village would react to seeing London, even if he/she had seen London on TV? Yeah, like that.
  • Here's a short and probably pretty accurate reply to all that: No pureblood wizard would sully his hands with those ... pamphlets. Give them to the mudbloods.

Muggle government interfering

• Why in the world does the Muggle government NEVER interfere with the Wizarding government in Britain, ever? Why do the only times the Prime Minister has any fucking idea of what's going on in Wizarding Britain when Fudge tells him about the Ministry importing dragons or something like that? And why does the Prime Minister get the "privilege" of being the only Muggle who is told about magic who doesn't have a magical child? We've seen 7 books of dangerous practices at the largest and most well-known Wizarding school, discrimination against Muggle-borns and anyone who likes Muggles, fucking terrorists attacking Muggles throughout the last 4 books, people being thrown into a Hellhole Prison without a trial, the creatures running said prison eventually escaping and wreaking havoc on the entire country. The wizards are still British citizens, correct? Are they not subject to the same rights and protections as British Muggles? Is the Ministry of Magic's secrecy also the reason that Wizarding Britain has so little contact with other magical nations? Did wizards just stop mingling with Muggles altogether in the Victorian era or something? It boggles my mind that the Muggle Prime Minister is so ignorant of what's going on in his own country and even his own bloody staff!
  • I'd chalk it up to a combination of wizard arrogance and the fact that the Prime Minister shouldn't go on TV telling everyone that magic is real, then having nothing to back it up with since the wizards keep him in the dark and get rid of any evidence before (if) they tell him about it.
  • Presumably anytime the UK PM starts talking about how he is going to clean up Wizarding Britain, the Minister of Magic starts talking about how it is time he started restocking the frog-pond. Then they change the subject and decide stuff like "the time isn't right", "in principle it would be nice, but", "perhaps more more study is needed...", you know the go-to excuses of politicians when their reach exceeds their grasp.

Corrupt government

• Something that's always kinda bugged me about the wizarding world and their government is just how wildly, shamelessly corrupt it all is, even among the "good guys". The example that always sticks out in my mind is how Mr. Weasley is so awesome and cool to Harry and company for acquiring prime tickets for the Quidditch world cup by throwing his weight around to get criminal activities of his friends in the ministry dismissed or swept under the rug. Meanwhile, Lucius Malfoy acquires similar tickets by throwing a fat stack of cash at a hospital, causing Harry and friends to act like he's a walking embodiment of corruption and crooked dealings. While greasing the wheels by throwing money around at popular charities is definitely underhanded, it's nowhere near as bad as helping your coworker's criminal relatives get off the hook in exchange for goodies and kickbacks.
  • So you mean the wizarding world government is corrupt and people, even normal decent people, is willing to apply different standards over those who like them than over those who dislike them? No way! Is not like that in real life at all.
  • I think you're missing the moral or Aesop or lesson or whatever here. I think what Rowling was writing about is how the poor/the middle class people must get around the hard way, if it means receiving violations for a potential sacking, to obtain the same objective as a person with enough money that can 'legally obtain' the exact same price. The government does seem to be corrupt, and you, Original Troper, are looking at the wrong people. Arthur Weasely would only bend the rules, while Luscious Malfoy would outright cheat the system by donating money to a charity that could return most of the money back to the sender.

Erasing memories of criminals

• Why don't the wizards simply erase the memories of the captured Death Eaters? One "Obliviato" and BAM, DE is no longer a threat, you can now put new memories instead and turn them into a model citizen and make them pay for their misdeeds by serving the society they wronged (yes, I stole the idea from Babylon 5).
  • They might view such brainwashing as highly immoral (considering that the Imperius curse is one of the Unforgivable Curses and similarly involves mind manipulation). They perform it on Muggles regularly, but that's because they both view Muggles with disdain and a sort of racism and they find it more important to maintain secrecy than to have moral quibbles over memory wiping.
  • "...highly immoral" as opposed to feeding them to soul-eating demons who would basically do the same thing - wipe out their memories and identities, except slowly and in the most excruciatingly torturous way possible, leading to madness and death? "...they both view Muggles with disdain and a sort of racism" - so much for "sober realizations about human behaviour" then, isn't it?
  • Out of sight, out of mind.
  • It's "Oblivia-te", not "Oblivia-to". Learn to pronounce properly before you accidentally explode some Muggle. Anyway, the difference between obliviating everything from their minds and giving them a dementor's kiss is that in the latter case they stop feeling anything and pretty much become brain-dead people whose bodies are kept alive by a respirator in form of their magic, and in the former case they are brain-crippled but still feel. The results seem the same, but the latter is, in spite of how inhumane it appears, actually more humane of the two. Oh, and the effect of losing sanity and/or memory due to exposure to dementors without being kissed is completely different too, as it's no caused by artificial memory loss but rather by people simply not focusing on details and naturally forgetting them; of course you may argue that actually giving them a dementor's kiss might seem like mercy, but capital punishment is an iffy topic and some courts simply won't give that verdict no matter what.
  • Is there any indication, in canon, that it is even possible to erase someone's entire history and personality using a Memory Charm? Every time they've been used in the books, it was usually for the purpose of making the victim forget a specific event or incident (making Mr. Roberts forget about the Death Eater attack at the World Cup, for example, or making Antonin Dolohov and Thorfinn Rowle forget that they had seen Harry & Co.). The only time we've seen a TOTAL obliviation as described here was when Hermione changed her parents identities in Deathly Hallows, and even then, that was just a matter of giving them new names, sending them to a new country, and making them forget her existence - there's no indication that she changed their personalities or skills or much else. So is this notion of turning Death Eaters into model citizens via obliviation really a viable option?
  • It is certainly possible to erase someone's entire memories, as Lockhart was trying to do exactly that to Harry and Ron in Chamber of Secrets. Granted, the end result is less "model citizen" and more "Permanent resident of Janus Thickey Ward in St. Mungo's".
  • I would point out that for all appearances, Obliviate can both remove and/or, as is stated by multiple wizards many times, modify memories, not just rip them out of your mind, so essentially you just forget something like happens naturally, or remember something different then what happened. It seems it's only when you overuse/overdo it that it can harm someone, like with Bertha Jorkins or Lockhart. On that note, why they probably don't is because as Voldemort says when Pettigrew tries to say they could have modified Bertha's memory instead of kill her, he points out that the level of torture he subjected her to broke the Memory Charm, and Dumbledore, with extensive Legilimency, was able to extract the real memories that Riddle had replaced in Hokey the House-Elf and Morfin's heads with false ones. All it would take is one magical accident, or a dedicated ally of the Dark Side, and BAM, the exact issue that comes up with Heel–Face Brainwashing if it were to wear off-Namely, angry Death Eaters who can use their new Beneath Suspicion position to murder and torture more people, or possible newly changed Death Eaters in an emotional dilemma and a bad position from their new and old allies, and so on. An argument could be made to try it anyway, but it would be a long ethical and political discussion that I doubt JK Rowling wanted to go into, and few readers would want to read about if it was given any amount of significance over the action, heartwarming and tearjerking moments that are actually in the series. Also, Hermione actually just altered her parents memories, and only erased herself, so she basically just resituated them memory-wise on who they were slightly and removed the memories that they had a daughter. A large change, but likely Hermione extensively prepared to get it right without hurting them, and it didn't change litereally everything about who they are that we know of.

Convictions

• How is anyone ever convicted of anything in a wizarding court? Confessions can be forced, bewitched, and falsely implanted memories, truth serums can be resisted, witnesses suffer the same problem as confessions, a wizard who commits a crime can just Obliviate himself to prevent the court from drawing a pensieve thread, material evidence (including DNA evidence) can be conjured/transmuted and therefore would be inadmissible in any reasonable court, and photographic evidence apparently doesn't exist around magical acts. Even "reasonable suspicion" is hard to meet with all the ways to get out of being connected to a crime, and given the way the Ministry acts in the books, we know they don't have more reliable methods for prosecuting people than the ones we've seen. Adding that to the fact that defendants are not tried by their peers, but instead can face a completely biased judge (as with most of the trials in the books) and jury, and it seems like the Ministry doesn't adhere to the principle of granting a fair trial.
  • Oh it adheres to the principle, just not the practice. As with a lot of Potter-verse stuff it is an exaggeration (and sadly just a mild exaggeration at that) of 1970s and 1980s UK civil service practices. Its a rough takeoff of the Birmingham Six or Guildford Four as well as numerous much more recent unnamed cases.
  • Firstly, DNA (assuming wizards know to look for that, granted, which is unlikely) would be harder to magically fake than you'd think, given how complex it is - even if you replicated, say, a strand of hair that looks like your friend Joe's hair, the odds of the fake standing up under close scrutiny at a genetic level aren't good. But anyway, Transfigurations and conjurations (which likely also includes duplication of genetic material via Geminio) are probably not permanent, and anyway I would assume there's a magical equivalent to forensics that will allow you to tell genuine evidence from doctored evidence, just like in the real world. You can't know for certain if somebody's Obliviated themselves, especially since apparently Veritaserum and Legilimency are not used in courts (though memory threads can apparently be evidence, since Dumbledore nearly got Morfin a retrial using one of his), but you can check their wand to see if Obliviate or Confundus has ben cast from it or not, and search their premises for "spares" while also checking in with friends and local wandmakers to see if they've recently purchased or borrowed a wand. They have the Thief's Downfall in Gringotts so it's at least magically possible to undo, say, an Imperio-forced confession. The problem is not that its literally impossible to convict (at least not significantly moreso than in Muggle court), it's that the wizarding court is always ethically bankrupt and fairly inefficient in some way or another every time we see it.

"Imperius Curse defense"

• Why on Earth did even the Ministry of Magic swallow the "Imperius Curse defense?" Pleading coercion is an affirmative defense - the burden of the proof shifts the defendant to prove that he was coerced, not for the prosecution to prove that he is not. At minimum, the court should have attempted to examine the defendants before certifying that they were cursed. And remember, Dumbledore was on the panel of judges (we see this in his pensieve memory of Bellatrix's trial in book 4, so its canon) so we can't say "bribes" (Dumbledore might not always be the wisest wizard, but at least he's an honest one) and we can't say "lack of ability to tell whether the Imperius curse was really applied or not" (in addition to being the greatest living master of magic in general and mind magic in particular, Dumbledore can read minds, and has proven able to get past memory charms cast by Voldemort himself, witness the case of Morfin Gaunt as recapped in book 6). It just don't add up.
  • I believe Mad-Eye Moody mentioned at one point that they didn't have a way of sorting the liars from the truly innocent, so no form of "examining them" would've told the courts anything. And there is a difference between non-magical coercion, which relies more on threats that can be detailed later, and a spell that you can only rely on your own willpower to overcome. The latter is a lot more difficult to prove, especially since you aren't really aware that you've been cursed until after you start to come out of it.
  • The other problem is that magical mind-reading and truth-compulsion in the wizarding legal system is ironically a big no-no, because none of the available methods are technically foolproof. Even assuming that the suspect has been stripped of their wand and screened for pre-applied charms to evade such tactics, the suspect could be an Occlumens capable of beating and fooling Veritaserum or Legilimency and that gives some suspects an unfair advantage over others. Memories via Pensieve could be viable, but we know those can be doctored, and just because Slughorn's was an obvious patchwork doesn't mean that a person with more experience in memory manipulation magic couldn't make a more seamless fake, and anyway Pensieve memories are seen third-person and therefore wouldn't tell if the person was being controlled or not. Adding on to that, a person could just False-Memory-Charm themselves into genuinely believing that somebody Imperiused them, and since it's established that Memory Charms are incredibly difficult to reverse and generally involve breaking a person's mind, it's highly likely that getting the perfect original memory would be impossible to retrieve. Even if a talented enough Legilimens managed to figure out some inconsistency in the memories that indicate them to be fake, without access to the real memory, there's no way to prove that they changed their own memories to protect their innocence.

Prisoners and House Elves

• Why can't prisoners in Azkaban just use their house elves to get themselves out? We know that (a) elves are capable of Apparating in and out of places wizards can't, i.e. Hogwarts, Voldemort's hidden cave, the Malfoy's secret chamber, etc. This is because (I speculate) house elves' magic operates on the principle that their highest priority is serving their master, unlike wizard magic, which seems to operate on the principle of Magic A is Magic A. We also know that (b) many of the prisoners in Azkaban are wealthy Death Eaters, like Bellatrix Lestrange, who probably have house elves. These house elves are bound to do their masters' bidding. Last, we know that (c) house elves seem to be able to hear whenever their master calls for them, as evidenced by Kreacher Apparating into the Dursley's house in book six when Harry calls him. So... why couldn't prisoners in Azkaban simply call for their house elves to come get them? Is it because the builders of Azkaban were privy to a more powerful anti-Apparition jinx than the one cast by the HOGWARTS FOUNDERS?
  • The loophole in Hogwarts' anti-Apparition ward is likely intentional, considering it uses house elves as the servant staff. It's much easier to allow house elves to come and go as they please than force them to walk through the hallways to get to whatever bit of work needs to be done. Azkaban, being a prison, would undoubtedly disallow such a hole in security. Outside of those two scenarios, it's likely easier to cast a spell that prevents only a certain kind of Apparition (in this case, the wizarding brand) than it is to create a blanket block on all forms of teleportation. It's not that the Hogwarts founders were incompetent, it's that they only blocked what they needed to, nothing more.
  • Except the wards on V's Horcrux cave, which he'd have no reason to exclude anyone from, still didn't stop Kreacher with no explanation given but "It's elf magic, we don't have to explain it!".
    • True, but it's explicitly mentioned that he didn't even consider house elves capable of Apparating where witches and wizards weren't able to - otherwise, he wouldn't have left Kreacher for dead. Whatever no-Apparation wards Azkaban has in effect are probably something only the Ministry knows about.

Inheritance

• What is up with Wizarding law? In 'Half-Blood Prince,' there is serious concern that Harry will not inherit Sirius' estate in accordance with his will, since Black tradition passed the estate only to pureblood wizards. Dumbledore is worried that makes Bellatrix Le Strange Sirius' closest living pureblood relative. But there's a problem with that; Bellatrix killed Sirius. It's been part of common law for centuries that you cannot inherit the estate of a person you murdered. This is called the Slayer Rule in the United States, the Forfeiture Rule in Great Britain, and it's a rock solid piece of the legal infrastructure. Why in the world would Dumbledore think even for a moment that Bellatrix would inherit, unless there is no provision such as this in Wizarding Law.
  • Considering the fact that Fudge was minister and his level of denial by then was nigh-legendary, combined with his penchant for taking advice from "upstanding citizens" like Lucius Malfoy, and taking that advice so strongly that he treats it as some sort of absolute truth, Fudge being bribed by Malfoy and declaring that "undoubtedly Bellatrix Lestrange wasn't the one to kill Sirius Black, because upstanding citizen Lucius Malfoy said so", was not outside of realm of possibility; remember, for the past two or three years (if not more) Fudge was minister in name only and the one who had real power was Lucius Malfoy. Not to mention that by that point the only "pureblood" members of the Black family that were not thrown out of it were Bellatrix, Narcissa, and Draco (the last possible member was Andromeda, but she got disinherited), and any of the latter two getting the inheritance would be just as bad. Oh, and you can't forget the fact that the wizarding world is behind the times as far as the law is concerned so they might or might not actually have that law.
  • That doesn't work, because at the end of Order, when Sirius dies, not only is Lucius Malfoy arrested red-handed in the middle of his Death Eater-ing, but Fudge also has the rock solid evidence of Voldemort's returned shoved in his face. Malfoy is in no position to influence whoever it is in the Ministry adjudicates inheritance issues, and Fudge is ready to do pretty much whatever Dumbledore wants in order to keep his job and survive the coming war with the Dark Lord.
    • Of course there is also a different worry: Draco and Narcissa Malfoy. Even if Bellatrix can't get the stuff, those two can, since there isn't a hint of them doing anything beyond being jerks, and that includes Kreacher, the kinda loony, Walburga-worshipping House Elf that knows a lot of the Order. Imagine what would happen if that guy got into the hands of the family of a Death Eater in hot water with the boss.
  • Did Bellatrix actually murder Sirius in the book? From what I remember, she hit him with a spell while they were dueling and that caused him to stumble back and fall through the veil.
    • She was the proximate cause of his death in what all witnesses would likely agree was a life-or-death fight, and Sirius was fighting her in defence of others - it could be manslaughter, but I think there's a reasonable case for the law to consider it murder.
  • From the implications of Dumbledore's discussion, it isn't Wizarding Law that's the problem, it's more that the noble houses have some sort of enchantment on their property and claims that apply only to their bloodline, due to their obsession with blood purity. It isn't the Ministry that's making the call, it's the magic of highly immoral and twisted family that are the Blacks, possibly going back to before even Dumbledore was born, since the concern is more ambiguous on whether Harry owns it or Bellatrix, and they use Kreacher to test it. After it works, Dumbledore says that Sirius must've done all that was needed to make Harry the proper recipient and owner of his possessions, which implies that to add in someone who is not an actual member of the family line requires some sort of magic or specific set of actions to counter the intitial "only those of our clan/blood will inherit what is ours", and only someone who is of that family can do it or know about it. Likely Harry now either is an "Honorary Black" if not officially, then in essentials, by virtue of being Sirius' chosen Heir (Possibly in the "view" of the magic, "The last living heir to the Black name has chosen Mr. H. Potter to be his heir, and as such he has been judged to be worthy of taking ownership despite not being a member of the family"), or Sirius dismissed/ended the magic making it essential for a proper Black to inherit what belongs to the family and Harry now basically just owns all of that stuff and can pass it on and give it away to whomever he likes.

Free speech trials

• Why does the Ministry allow free-speech trials, when they can easily pour down a bottle of Veritaserum down the victim's throat? In Harry Potter v the Dementors case, they could have just done that, as they could find out that there were seriously Dementors there, who were about to attack a 'harmless' Muggle boy, and there was a justified need to use a Patronous charm. Now, the only question would be, who in the Ministry of Magic would do it?
  • In that scenario, Cornellias Fudge would have to order all Ministry of Magic members into the building and issue a lockdown, because they can't have rouge agents for Tom Riddle run around loose, killing innocent people.
  • Hell, this could've worked in Sirius Black's case, and the Ministry members could have arrested Wormtail. Sure, Harry's parents are dead, but at least Harry could have lived a somewhat 'normal' life with the Dursley's until he is old enough to life with Sirius Black.
  • Sirius was sent to Azkaban without a trial.

Wizard/Witch-Muggle Weddings

• When does the International Statute of Secrecy stop applying to the Muggle in question? After the wedding? At the engagement? (One would hope something like the latter, but Seamus mentions how his mother kept it a secret until after the wedding and no one seems particularly shocked.) Does the magical partner have to prove to their country's government that their relationship is secure and long-term? What happens if they split up afterwards? To what extent are the Muggle in-laws allowed to know? (Petunia told Vernon about Lily and James, but it's unclear if the Ministry even knew - and on that subject, what are the immediate relatives of Muggle-borns allowed to tell their loved ones?)
  • I don't see why the Ministry would need to know whether a witch or wizard were marrying a Muggle, any more than they would need to know if the two of them were having a baby. Presumably, a witch or wizard would be able to tell their significant other about magic whenever - or if - they so desire, and if they end up splitting up, the Ministry would just have to be alerted so they could send out an Obliviator to mind-wipe the Muggle in question.

Breaking the Statute of Secrecy

• According to Book 5, underage magic, even if in violation of the Statute of Secrecy, can be excused legally if performed as a result of life-threatening circumstances. Harry is able to prove that he and Dudley had been accosted by dementors, but does this also apply to non-magical life-threatening situations? If an underage wizard is attacked by some Muggle in the street or there's someone trapped inside a burning building with no other way to save them, would the use of magic be allowed and excused in that instance? Or does it not extend beyond dangers of the magical sort?
  • You could probably use magic to defend yourself from a Muggle assailant (but probably you'd have to prove that your life was absolutely in danger, not just your relative safety). You could probably save yourself from the burning building, but it's up in the air if you'd be allowed to go out of your way to save another person if you aren't in the building yourself - that would be probably be down to specifics of the case, and you might get convicted on one charge but not the other.

Love potion control

• How come the imperius curse is outlawed but love potions aren't? Especially considering they are the direct reason to the birth of Voldemort.
  • Probably intent. With the exception of Merope's potion, love potions seem to just cause a temporary inflatuation over someone, with no evidence given in-universe that the person would do something really serious like self-harm or having sex against their will, thus a love potion is the equivalent of a practical joke. Imperious on the other hand is a deliberate enslaving of a person's will to the point that you can make him/her self-harm him/herself or his/hers love ones, or if you imperious a government official like a minister you can have an entire country in danger. Thus both the consequences and the intent are very grave. Merope's potion was exceptionally strong to the point that it practically had the same effects that the Imperious, only temporary, but we don't know if there are laws for this kind of potions, notice that Merope's action are taking in-universe with dismay, showing that there is moral objection over that kind of potions.
    • Speaking of intent, Romilda Vane clearly intended to commit Date Rape. Judging from Ron's reaction to the spiked cookies that is a big deal.
    • The potion Ron consumed was expired so the effects were not what was intended.

What happened to the death penalty?

• What made the Ministry decide that the Dementor's Kiss should be the "worse than life in prison" legal punishment? There's no mention anywhere of humans (or elves, goblins, centaurs, etc) receiving the death penalty (except for when Aurors were allowed to use lethal force in the first war, but that was a special case), but why not, when Wizarding Britain accepts the destruction of people's souls? Whatever your opinions on capital punishment, a quick death that lets the soul go on to whatever comes next in the Potterverse is infinitely more humane than letting the soul be eaten, digested, and destroyed utterly - why choose that rather than a quick Avada Kedavra? (Yes, I know Slughorn claims murder is the supreme act of evil, but that doesn't make sense when you can also feed people's souls to depression-demons. Death shouldn't be more taboo than that.)
  • There's an interesting theory that it's precisely because they know for a fact that the Afterlife is real, but not exactly what it's like. They can't know if the Afterlife has a Heaven/Hell, Divine Court system, or if it's just "everybody gets in and sort themselves out". Ergo, the wizards don't want to have to deal with a dead Dark Lord taking over the Afterlife and ruining it for them when their time comes, so instead, they make sure there's nothing left of the criminal to Pass On.
  • The Ministry has been established as being incompetent at its best and horribly corrupt at its worst during Harry's time - maybe the Dementor's Kiss is their way of sort of brushing people they don't like under the rug, without having to outright kill them, in order to avoid bad publicity. (Since I have heard that the death penalty isn't generally accepted in Britain.) Also, is it mentioned how many people do receive the kiss? Sirius only did so because he was thought to be a madman who'd escaped from prison, and Barty Crouch was intentionally silenced by the Ministry so he wouldn't squeal to them about Voldemort. It could be that they don't use it often enough for there to be much of a public outcry.
  • Also we have similar things in real life. Lobotomy was used as a way to deal with criminals in the UK for decades long after death penalty was abolished and was seen as a more "humane" way to deal with them.
  • Alternatively, it may be that the Ministry does this out of an ulterior motive, which is to appease the Dementors. The Dementors just kind of "came with" Azkaban and the Ministry seems to have little to no actual control over them. It may be that keeping them fed with a steady supply of souls in form of condemned criminals is the only way that Fudge's Ministry can see to keep the Dementors from going on a feeding frenzy among the general population. Of course, the fact that Kingsley abolishes their use means that he presumably found a way to stop that from happening, but I can see a corrupt and feeble Ministry taking the easy way out in this situation.

The Postal Service

• Given that most Wizards are capable of Apparating, possess cars such as the Knight Bus for those who can't, and possess the ability to carry large amounts of objects in a Bag of Holding, it often begs the question why they bother with the mess of using Owls to deliver their mail. Theoretically a single wizard could serve as the postman to the entire country. So, why not?
  • Owls are implied to be capable of always finding the person they are supposed to give a letter to, and Apparating isn't depicted as something that is entirely pleasant for the user, so it may just be that its far more convenient for everyone involved to use owls.

Muggle Defence Against Wizards

If some Muggle politicians know of the existance of Wizards in their world, such as the Prime Minister of the UK,then surely there should be somekind of private defence against wizards if a full blown war was to occur?

• The British Prime Minister explicitly forbade himself from ever telling anyone about the existence of wizards, for fear of being labeled insane. The only administrative decision he ever made regarding them (warning the Muggle populace about the escape of Sirius Black) could only feasibly be accomplished with help from the Ministry of Magic to fill in the holes. On top of that, there are other wizarding communities who remain completely separate from their host nations, like in America.

An Unforgivable attempt

• Would you still be sent to Azkaban if you tried to cast one of the Unforgivables, but didn't succeed? We know that for the Killing Curse, you have to want it, and for Cruciatus, you have to mean it - what if something didn't really have the heart to do either of these, but tried one of them anyway? I don't doubt that they would be punished, but would it still be an instant one-way ticket?
  • For that matter, what if you were tackled and didn't hit anyone?
  • Presuming that this question is asked regarding the period after the Ministry-wide reformation which Harry, Hermione and Ron helped to enact. Then, the justice system would be more progressive, so you'd go to Azkaban, but not for a life sentence. It should be in line with the sentencing a muggle would get for pulling a weapon on someone, or missing a shot but causing reckless endangerment. If it applies before said reformation, the corruption of the Wizenagmot might stil make it a life sentence.

Permissibility

• So it's said that Veritaserum and Pensieve memories are completely inadmissible in wizarding court proceedings, due to how they can be tampered with or flat-out unreliable...But the same holds true for eyewitness testimony, and we still allow that to be presented at a trial. Rather than forbidding their use, wouldn't it be better to present them and leave it up to the judge/jury to decide what's true? What good is a super-powerful truth potion or a memory projector if they aren't allowed to be used when it really matters?

Ministry during the war

• Other than the Default Answer, how did Voldemort and his Death Eaters take over ALL OF BRITAIN just by placing an Imperius Curse on just a few officials? The citizens just accepted the new regime despite being in an open war with the Death Eaters and vastly outnumbering them! Shouldn't there have been some sort of resistance from the Aurors and normal citizens alike? I mean, they were just allowing citizens to be dragged away and killed. Don't tell me they didn't know, everyone did.
  • Same story as with any such regime. The tyrant was cracking down hard, and not enough people were willing to organize out of fear. (And the rumors about how, for instance, Harry killed Dumbledore, can't have helped.)
    • This isn't the same story because: 1. the citizens all had weapons (their wands) and 2. Voldemort has, what, 1 to 2 hundred Death Eaters against thousands of armed citizens. And as for the rumors, what kind of idiots would believe a regime that includes known mass murderers (Bellatrix and others)?
    • With regard to the weapons, it's a myth that merely owning a weapon means you can't be oppressed. Just look at a lot of regimes across Africa and the Middle East where gun control is "do you have the money?" and have some of the worst regimes on the planet. It's really difficult getting ordinary people to use weapons against other people, even in live or death situations. Armies spend a lot of time, money, and effort physically and psychologically breaking that mindset in their recruits. And even then it isn't that successful, most trained soldiers still have enormous difficulty firing on other human beings. Add into that wizards are taught, almost as soon as they get it, that their wand is a tool, most would never think of it as a weapon.
  • Believe me when I say people under oppressive regimes are are reluctant to rise due to many reasons other than weapons. I come from one. Yet we call ourselves a democracy. We have known child rapists and murderers in the government. They manipulate and intimidate law and court system. But people are used to it. Most people hate them. But it doesn't make anyone stand up against them because they don't want to be adversely affected, and they aren't sure that even if they do stand up, others will rise up with them to get rid of the oppressors. The government controls the state media. Half the population believes the lies they spout out. Some people support the regime because they and their families benefit from it. People are scared of more things than outright death. People fear losing jobs or not getting a good one. We fear other subtle retribution. They don't want to risk our families. It is harder to stand up against a regime which makes a mockery out of democracy than an outright killing rampage. In short, wizarding community is totally believable to me. I see it every day. If I had a gun, I won't use it one the random chance of getting past their security. They, after all, control the security forces of the country. Even if I do manage to kill one, it's effectively the ruin of my family. Rowling's representation of wizards is very accurate as I see. But I do get that most people from places without that sort of thing will not get that mentality.
    • After what we've seen of the Ministry in Order of the Phoenix, that they went along with the Thicknesse policy even after it became clear he was under Voldemort is hardly a stretch. And even outside the Death Eaters, there's a mainstay of pureblood supremacism. But as for your main point, about the wands... yeah, all right. Rowling never did strike me as big on gun rights, so it's pretty reasonable to say that she never gave the idea of an armed citizenry much thought.
    • Still, known Death Eaters working for the Ministry? Come on, someone must have noticed that! You also wonder why no one noticed the tremendous imbalance of numbers in favor of the general public, who hate Voldemort. As for the pureblood supremacy part, only the purebloods themselves believed that, there weren't many left, and not all of them believed in it. Of course, Voldemort is the exception.
    • Voldemort and the Death Eaters effectively divided and conquered. They forced all the kids to come to Hogwarts, splitting them from their parents, then kept each in line with threats to hurt the other (ex: The Lovegoods).
    • You mean Yaxley? He's one of the folks who wriggled out of Azkaban, and was in the Ministry long before the coup. And there's still the dementors, giants, and Inferi. The former two being the ones Dumbledore mentioned as critical to the war effort.
    • Hey, a known Death Eater ran Durmstrang. If they'll let their kids be educated by one, they'll let them do anything.
    • From all we've seen, Voldemort tended to focus on Britain first. It's entirely possible that most of the people who send their kids to Durmstrang don't know what a Death Eater is - and that the rest would be happy to see him in charge (remember, the Malfoys considered sending Draco there).
    • One effective way I can think of to get people to accept the Death Eaters would be for Thicknesse to announce that anyone who defected would be given amnesty and a Ministry position. A liberal amount of "defections" later and the Death Eaters are in control of the Ministry and the statue gets built.
  • Wizards are well known for sticking their heads in the sand, and Voldemort carefully forged a reputation for blowing the families of those who opposed him into little pieces. Add to that the fact that the Ministry pretty much centralized all authority, and the Wizarding world is pretty much leaderless. Death Eaters Apparating to the area whenever someone says Voldemort's name can't have helped much either.
    • That's a reasonable explanation; however, some things still need to be addressed. Voldemort seized control of the Ministry through the Imperius Curse, and not a word was muttered in opposition by the wizarding world. There would have been some form of resistance, even if it was not well organized, in the beginning. Death squads would have eventually stamped them out, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't have tried. The author comes across a significant problem in this regard, because Voldemort takes control of the Ministry, and... literally within a matter of seconds, his rule is accepted outright, the wanted criminals and villains forming his ranks are allowed to operate openly in society with absolute impunity, and people still recognize the Ministry as the legitimate authority. Furthermore, the Order of the Phoenix and the Death Eaters have been engaging each other in literal death matches for years (essentially mounting to open war between the two groups), and yet once the Ministry is taken, both sides immediately stop fighting. Members of the Order are allowed to continue operating normally in society (e.g., Mr. Weasley maintains his job at the Ministry) and the Death Eaters are no longer challenged. The problem is that history and human nature inform us that if Voldemort had seized uncontested control of the Ministry, one of the first things he would have done would have been to eliminate the greatest threats to that control, namely the Order. Mr. Weasley would have at least been removed from the Ministry. Explanations may abound, some of them may even make sense, but in the end, the lack of interest Rowling showed in addressing these questions leaves the reader with a sense that Adults Are Useless and All Adults Are Stupid.
    • By letting them keep their normal jobs, Voldie's rubbing their noses in the fact that they failed. Not to mention the fact that he considers just about anyone who's not a threat or an ally beneath his notice.
    • So firing them both was going to make it easier to keep tabs on them, to see if Harry tried to contact them or their son?
    • Voldemort himself probably didn't bother too much with running the Ministry after setting up his puppet Minister. He wasn't even the one who Imperiused Pius. Voldy probably saw to it that the Ministry was under Death Eater control, got some of his followers planted to keep an eye on things/run everything, and concentrated on stuff like killing Harry.
  • And there was a sizable resistance, though it doesn't seem to have been doing very much. Note Radio Harry, and the huge numbers that turn up at the end.
    • The sizable resistance consisted of people, some with ill-repute and others with strong repute, hiding in the shadows doing nothing. Sure, they resisted intellectually, but big deal. Meanwhile, Vold-dude and his cronies killed and enslaved people. There may be good explanations as to the reason why the general wizarding populace didn't rise up in rebellion, but the significant problem is that those explanations were not given in the book. The author did a poor job in this regard. In a society as highly educated and sophisticated as the wizarding world, it is very unlikely that a notorious criminal (one so vile, so evil, so undeniably malicious that none but a significant minority dared even mutter his name) could seize control and not be met by a massive uprising. It would be akin to the world's most renowned murderer taking control of a democratic government and no one having the balls to stand up to him (even though numerous members of the armed forces [aka aurors, etc] were opposed to him as well).
    • The explanation was clearly stated within the first few chapters of the book. The wizarding populace is afraid that their families will be attacked by Voldemort, just like other families have been. And, like most people, they rely upon the government to handle these threats. Even in the US, we would reasonably expect these kinds of things handled by one of the various law enforcement agencies at the national or state levels at the least. Even if civilian assistance was needed, there's the draft. And the Geneva Convention makes distinctions between combatants and civilians and how they are treated.
    • Like the Nazis in the 30s, oppressive regimes rely on the fact that most people won't actively resist and they concentrate their efforts on the hard core that do until the reign of terror is well established. "First they came for the communists and I did not speak out, because I was not a communist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists and I did not speak out, because I was not a trade Unionist.... Then they came for me. And there was no one to speak up for me," is probably just as true for the wizarding world as it was for Germany.
    • Yes, but the Nazis also came to power because a lot of the people were buying what they were selling. They would never have lasted as long as they did if, at minimum, the majority of the army wasn't willing to obey the orders coming down. A lot of the population of 1930s Germany wanted Germany to be a strong national power again and get out of the Weimar-era depression and were willing to back anybody who looked like they could pull it off. Making the same analogy re: Magical Britain leaves Magical Britain looking really really bad.
    • And along that line, consider that the Department of Magical Law Enforcement apparently has no equivalent of the "illegal orders doctrine" used by most Western militaries, seeing as how there is nothing in canon to indicate that the already-existing Aurors on duty either resigned en masse or bugged out to form their own Resistance Army and had to all be replaced by Death Eaters. Nope. Yaxley gets made their new boss and they get sent out to drag Muggleborns in for Umbridge's show trials and the Aurors actually do it. If somebody Imperio'ed the US President tomorrow and had him issue orders to the federal law enforcement agencies and the military to start rounding up all people of [insert whatever ethnic background here] for concentration camps, the best-case scenario he could hope for was impeachment. Worst-case, it starts the Second American Civil War. But everybody just snapping to and going 'Hokey-dokey boss, ethnic cleansing it is!'? Not happening.
    • Except for that one time that it totally did happen... [1]
    • Highly educated? Wizards are, quite frankly, not the brightest lights in the firmament. Don't forget that at age thirteen, Harry is taught that the historical witch burnings were "pointless" because none of the tens of thousands of victims were actual wizards or witches. And this is under Dumbledore's supposedly progressive leadership. This is not the sort of thinking that results in a population that is inclined to defend itself. (And just to ice the cake, the "historical witch burnings didn't kill any witches" was later retcon'd to be total bullshit; hundreds of wizards were killed by the inquisitors).
    • Do not get me started on JKR's take on the witch burnings.
    • How can Wizards be highly educated when Hogwarts has no math, science, or English teachers? Hell, they don't even have a gymnasium! The real question is, why aren't they all fat little functional illiterates?
    • ^ Wizard children are home-schooled or Muggle-public-schooled before getting their letters and going off to boarding school. Besides, they ARE taught math and science and presumably, literature: Potions, Herbology, Arithmancy, and some others we probably didn't hear about; why teach them useless Muggle versions, like Algebra and Chemistry? Not to mention, I'm sure that flying and Quidditch involve more physical fitness than just hanging on to a broomstick — if dodging Peeves and out-racing the moving staircases don't count as exercise.
    • Since when the hell are algebra, chemistry, and other such subjects useless because magic exists? To make things like guns, for example, you need to know the properties of metal, the explosives of gunpowder, and the ballistics of the bullet, which take science and mathematics to know. And that's just a directly practical application; one of the most important things to learn from science, apart from the facts it has discovered, is the thinking of the method itself (the idea of finding evidence and testing hypothesizes and applying Occam's razor and so on). Those would make wizards better thinkers, if nothing else.
    • "To make things like guns..." Wizards don't care to make things like guns. Wizards don't need to know these things because magic accomplishes for them what math and science accomplish for us. You're assuming that the things that signify progress in our world would also signify progress for wizards; they don't. Even between different real-world cultures, there are plenty of practices that one culture might consider absolutely necessary for a modern society that another might consider superfluous.
    • Yes, and the problem with the Hogwarts subjects is that they consist almost entirely of following directions. They learn how to do the things they're taught to do in class, but there's no non-magical skill-building: no critical thinking, no learning how the natural world works, and so on. The only class they have that isn't all about the direct practical application is History of Magic, and that's all about listening to lectures, not to mention entirely focused on the Wizarding minority. A Hogwarts education is the equivalent of an apprenticeship. They may have learned some basic skills before age 11, but they're not "highly educated" by any stretch of the imagination.
    • It's easy to forget that wizards aren't soldiers. Just because Mrs. Smith has a stick that could create a mushroom cloud doesn't mean she's ever used it for anything more destructive than clearing out the gutters. The schoolchildren have been taught some combat-effective spells because Dumbledore thought it was necessary, not because blowing people to bits is part of an ordinary Wizarding education. Most witches and wizards are ordinary people, not heroes, not adventurers, not shining warriors of the light. They're just people who happen to have magic instead of elbow grease.
    • The Ministry (before its fall) had published free pamphlets on how to use defensive spells and distributed them to all wizarding homes. Therefore, most wizards should be capable of a simple Stunning Spell and should have no problem fighting with magic. So logically, there are thousands of armed citizens that should have been easily able to overwhelm the Death Eaters through sheer numbers, if nothing else.
    • You can't learn to be a duelist from a pamphlet. Umbridge vs Harry Re: Defense Against the Dark Arts in book five should have made that clear.
    • Anyone remember Snape's puzzle from Philospher's Stone? During it, Hermione says something like "Even the greatest wizards have no logic whatsoever," and that is what made it an effective guard for the Stone. I haven't read the book in a while, but the gist seems to be that wizards rely on their powers a bit too much, and looking for answers outside of them is clearly not a strong suit. See also Muggle subjugation of wizards, possibly.
  • Using Inferi? The ones that can only be created through Dark Magic? Hmmm, looking mighty suspicious there, new regime. And the fact that Dementors were working for the Ministry even though it was made public that they had joined Voldemort. Wow, how did no one notice that even with all of those creatures, the citizens still had a massive numerical advantage? Plus, they can do magic, while those creatures can't. And if a few hundred students managed to drive those same creatures back, how do you think they would hold up against thousands of fully trained adults?
    • I think the answer here pretty much has to be "Because 99% of normal people will not organize and resist when an evil regime comes to power, because they're either scared of dying (Big V is really good at murdering people), misjudge the threat (Rumor has it that Voldemort can kill you with just a dour look), aren't entirely sure the new regime is worse than the old one (Specifically relevant here, since it's taboo to even speak Voldemort's name, so most of the Wizarding world can't actually discuss the matter safely. I think someone explains that most people aren't 100% sure that Voldemort really has taken over), don't think it's their place (He's only going after the mud-bloods), don't realize that most everyone else feels the same way (Sure, they've got numbers on their side. But classic thief's dilemma. If everyone else stays home and doesn't resist, it's a really bad idea for me to go out and resist; our superior numbers aren't worth much if I'm the only one who shows up), or has better things to do (If I go off and join the Order, who's going to look after my wife and kids?
    • There's also something to be said for a regime that has at its disposal creatures capable of inducing the symptoms of depression — I really don't doubt that the Riddle administration was strategically deploying Dementors to maximize feelings of powerlessness and anxiety (recalling that very few members of the general population would be capable of casting the counter-charm, much less knowing it).
    • The Wizards weren't even sure that Voldemort was capable of dying (as it turns out, he wasn't, but they didn't have all the details). Assaulting a tyrant who is literally invincible is suicide, and not everyone is brave enough to make a suicidal charge to prove a point.
    • So, in a word, it's the Bystander Effect. Nobody does anything because they think everyone else is doing it. Typically, the larger the group of people, the worse the effect gets. An entire nation of people suffering it is brutal.
    • And on the point of the Inferi being created by Dark magic, how often in Real Life have people let their governments get away with immoral things for the greater good? If it's possible for the wizards burying their heads in the sand to convince themselves that it's all part of the Ministry's efforts against Voldemort, then they probably will.
  • The book is told from Harry's point of view. Harry spent about 90% of his quest hiding in forests with Hermione and Ron for company. How do we know that there weren't more active resistance groups than Potterwatch? It was mentioned that there were witches and wizards who cast defensive magic spells on their Muggle neighbors, and we find out later that a good number of students at Hogwarts were actively defying the Carrows and Snape.
  • The one who said "wizards sticking their heads in the sand" is closest to correct. The way the book portrayed, it was that Voldemort's rule was so accepted because no-one really knew whether or not it was really him in control, and no-one particularly wanted to know, as that would get them in trouble. If he had openly seized power all at once, there would have been rebellion, but he did not. Actually, his finesse in the matter reminds me of Palpatine and the whole Clone Wars bit. Only the Order knew definitively that the Ministry had fallen, and they didn't move because many of them were still in the Ministry, and could work from the inside out, but most of the citizenry just wanted everything to be okay and move about their business without getting rounded up.
    • Keep in mind that Voldemort wasn't the Minister of Magic. Pius Thicknesse was. Officially, Voldemort was still an enemy of the state, though the fact that the government was suddenly following his philosophy was probably a dead giveaway. Even so, Voldemort controls the Daily Prophet (most wizards' source of news) AND the Quibbler (the primary opposition), so he can keep his activities relatively secretive. Yaxly might have kept on Arthur Weasley to keep some semblance of normalcy. This also explains why no international support came in; as far as wizard France or America is concerned, everything is under control in Britain. That and the bystander effect explain the lack of public uprising. It doesn't help that the Ministry's new official opinion on blood purity is somewhat popular even among some non-Death Eater groups or that a killing-curse-spewing Death Eater is scary to face even as a trainer Auror, let alone someone who got their only combat training from a pamphlet.
• This has to do with why the Creevey brothers were at Hogwarts. I had always assumed that they came when Neville summoned the DA, but in the scene when they're evacuating the younger students, one or both of them is in the great hall with the regular students, not in the Room of Requirement, and McGonnagal specifically insists that he evacuate, which suggests she has jurisdiction over him still. However, the Creeveys are Muggle-born, so why are they attending school? Wouldn't they have had to have been in hiding up to that point? I know Dean Thomas and others come back for the final fight, but the IJBM is more to do with the fact that they were implied to have been there the whole time.
  • It could be that McGonnagal was using the residual authority she had as acting headmistress - the Creevey brothers did attend school in her house for a number of years, so that "jurisdiction" may have just been force of habit. The Creeveys could have snuck in earlier than the evacuation; people had been arriving all day since Harry arrived, and Minerva was just telling them to forget it and turn back. Alternatively, the Creeveys were simply one of the families to successfully fake their Wizarding heritage in order to attend school.
• How were Squibs treated under the new regime? It seems like they would be hated, being non-magical and a sign of shame, but they also seem like a good way to scapegoat Muggle-borns (oh, these thieves stole magic away from the poor, virtuous would-be wizard!).
  • It seems like they were probably treated badly; Filch was on Umbridge's side in the fifth book, but was on the light side during the Battle of Hogwarts.
    • Umbridge may be willing to use Dark spells when she deems it necessary, but she's not a Dark witch. She was the second-in-command of the Minister of Magic - a rather respectable position - and at the time of Umbridge's reign in Hogwarts, Voldemort was not in control of the Ministry. So, comparing the situation under Umbridge to the situation under Voldemort is a bit like comparing apples and oranges.
    • Um no its not comparing apples to oranges... since she was on Voldy's side in book 7. Who was it that was in charge of the "Muggle-Born Registration Committee"?
    • I think it is more a question of unquestioning loyalty to the government, regardless of who runs it. Remember, there is such a thing as collaborators.
    • If worth something, Word of God says Umbridge was never a Death Eater.
    • Filch is combination of Lawful Neutral and Token Evil Teammate. He seems to be loyal to whoever runs the school, however Filch's devotion for Umbridge is more on a personal level, he hates children, chaos, disorder and filth, and Umbridge brought order, control, discipline and punishment, all the things he loves. If Umbridge methods were cruel is not of his concern. That is very different than siding with the blood supremacist terrorists. Is like the difference between been loyal to Margaret Thatcher and to the Nazis, or to the Saudi Arabian regime and to Al Qaeda, or in other words Even Evil Has Standards. So whether squibs are mistreated under Voldy's is impossible to know by Filch's actions, however what we do can have some guess is how the Black family treated them, and they were seem as a big shame and a disgrace according to Sirius. Of course we don't know if the Black family's view was that of the DE but is indicative.

Scourers

• Ok so. We know that the US, until its revocation in 1966, had Rappaport's law, which forbade relations between witches/wizards and non-magical people. The reasons can be summed up as "some witches and wizards with a grudge who went to the Americas worked with the witchfinders to commit Salem, the witchfinders had descendants who never gave up, the daughter of the MACUSA president once fell for one and revealed her secret to him, bad things happened." Now, question is, if we want to believe the witchhunters never gave up in the US, why should we believe they ever did anywhere else?
  • Who says they did? In certain countries, I've heard it's still possible for you to be arrested, locked up, and even executed for supposed feats of witchcraft and sorcery. Even in developed countries, we're meant to believe that the witch hunters just became more subtle in the way they do things — rather than chasing down and accusing specific people, they're just the kinds of characters who stand on street corners preaching their philosophy, like the Barebones in Fantastic Beasts.

MACUSA

• This is a bit of a meta-headscratcher, but why is the American magical government called a congress? Congress is only one branch of the overarching American government, which itself is a federation, technically speaking. MACUSA being called a congress would be like the British Ministry being called the Parliament of Magic. And MACUSA was apparently founded in 1693, before even the first Continental Congress was ever held, so it's not like they could've thought to borrow the name from the No-Maj.

Dementor loyalties

• The HP wiki has entries which say things to the effect of "most of the dementors of Azkaban revolted and joined Voldemort". Which is to imply that a minority of them didn't. Is this actually supported by the canon? And if so, what caused the minority to remain at Azkaban in loyalty to their Ministry "employers"?

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