Ask a Death Eater....

[alt_moderator]

We've had a question that deserves its own topic thread!

Welcome all the Death Eaters (real, coerced, pretend... you name it) to ask your questions about being on Voldemort/Tom Riddle/The Lord Protector's/MoldyVoldy Crazypants' Council!

First question was from Aleithen: "What was it about the Lord Protector that compelled all of you to follow him, and moreover to bring your own followers and students into his service? Professors Dolohov and Desai, it was clear that both of you had the charisma to attract followers yourself...why was it that you pledged yourselves to him instead of leading your own movements, especially since he was not a pureblood?"

Comments

[alt_crouch_jr]

Lord Voldemort led us to purge the land of filth (rubbish, concrete, tarmac, soot, smoke, plastic) and foul animals. The united kingdoms were overrun with surplus creatures--so many they couldn't feed or house themselves adequately. We cleansed the countryside and the cities, restored nature's beauty, and made wizardom safe for wizards to live without cowering in hiding.

[alt_regulus]

Our Lord was persuasive. Charismatic.

One did not spend time in His presence without feeling persuaded to His cause. Truly, we joined because we wanted to serve His vision, and we wanted to live freely and openly in our own realm.

[alt_savitha]

We were going to build a society by wizards, for wizards, instead of squeezing ourselves into the cracks between muggles. We were going to claim the sunshine, instead of living in the shadows. We were going to end the tyranny of the International Statute of Secrecy -- a law put into place, absurdly enough, because muggles were going around burning people they thought might be like us.

Our Lord was charismatic, yes, and He was strong. But it was His vision for our society that truly captivated me and won my loyalty till the day I died.

[alt_seamus]

To be chosen as a Councilwizard meant that finally, I was no longer the least and the last of my family. Half-blood or not.

Also, it wasn't really my choice, at that point.

for Rabastan Lestrange and Percy Weasley

[atheilen.livejournal.com]

When you both died, it seemed like you were growing ambivalent toward the Lord Protector's agenda, or at least what you were being asked to do in his service. If you had lived, do you you think you would have remained loyal?

for everyone

[atheilen.livejournal.com]

Stephen Rosier seemed to be highly respected among all of you, but we never saw him in the journals. Can you tell us a bit about what he was like, and his role in setting up the Protectorate?

Re: for everyone

[alt_seamus]

Mr Rosier was one of the Lord Protector's older, earlier followers. Losing his son Evan devastated him. He was persuaded to take me on as a foster son because they were hoping to groom me to be a loyal, dependable person on the ground in Ireland, where no one on the Council wanted to live.

He was patient, kind, and thoughtful, and quickly came to love me as another son. The summer after I was forced to kill my mother, he took me out on a 'fishing trip' that I suspected (and later was certain) was actually an attempt to slip out of the Protectorate and take me to safety in France.

Two things about him that I think were not generally know. The first was that he was gay. (As was Evan, but everyone knew that, I think.) In his generation he was a 'confirmed bachelor' for years, then took a wife under family pressure to produce a child. His wife died rather young, but they'd been estranged for years in any case because he simply wasn't interested in her.

The second -- I'm not certain of this, but I suspect he had some slight ability with legilimency. Certainly there were stories about Evan that suggested Evan had some legilimency (like how he never lost at cards). This is how he was able to keep secret from Bellatrix that his own commitment to the Protectorate had begun to waver -- at the same time, this meant that he needed to prove his loyalty again and again, since she couldn't just read him. Which is probably why he called in Bellatrix when I went to him with Neville's notebook.

By then, all he really cared about was protecting me. He was a true father to me in every way that counted.

My biological father and I have never had contact.

Re: for everyone

[alt_selwyn]

Stephen was one of those quietly competent people that there are never enough of in any organisation. If he took on a task, you could be assured that it would be completed, on time, to a high standard. If you checked up on him, he would give you an update without resentment, but you could also just relax secure in the knowledge that everything would simply be taken care of.

People like that are terribly rare.

I found Bill Weasley rather similar, which is why I liked him so much. Bill also had a way of turning up in moments of crisis with a free wand and a willing attitude -- of course, that turned out to be because he was sniffing around for information for the Order! But frankly on the night all the portkeys went awry, I'm not sure I'd have much cared if I'd known that. Their goals were the same as ours, to keep any six-year-olds from accidentally portkeying themselves into the Loch Rannoch or some such. I'd have put him to work and worried about turning him over to Bellatrix once the immediate crisis was contained.

[alt_hydra]

I'm not sure if I was included in this question or not, but I realised that Voldemort was much too dangerous to follow when I was eleven. I couldn't tell you why it took others much longer to arrive at the same conclusion.

[alt_amycus]

Oh, I didn't consider myself so much a follower as a fellow traveler with Our Lord, if you will. I imagine that's partly because I wasn't involved so much in the petty day-to-day concerns of governing the Protectorate. I had the appointment at Hogwarts, of course, but much of my mental energy was poured into my experiments. He was interested in my work, made use of my discoveries, and made it clear my priorities were the same as his. I might have also served him well by working in the Department of Mysteries, but it amused him to allow me to employ my methods with students of the next generations of wizards and witches.

He was utterly ruthless. I admired that. He had no more use than I did for mewling, soft concerns of 'support,' or 'empathy' or any of the other ridiculous concerns of government or education nowadays. He was an example to us all of immediately cutting losses if anyone showed themselves as weak or unworthy.

And he wasn't a Halfblood. Where do people get such preposterous ideas? Anyone who says so is lying through their teeth. Obviously anyone who demonstrated the superiority that he did in his magic, demeanour and ideas could only be descended from the purest blood.

[alt_rookwood]

My family has always been a supporter of a strong wizarding community. The Statue of Secrecy was an impediment to my research. Many of my early research proposals were turned down as "too visible" or "too far reaching."

Purity and Strength were the guiding principles of good society long before Voldemort appeared. His rhetoric of direct action to reshape our society was the catalyst that precipitated our new society from the sludge of the old.

He allowed me free rein for my experiments and the opportunity to work on some of the greatest magical workings since the founding of Hogwarts. How could I not follow that lead?

Looking back into the haze of my final years, we lost our way. We had thrown off the cowering fear of 'The Muggles!' to instead cower in fear at the feet of one man driven mad by unwise magic and megalomania. He had manipulated us all into giving him personal power, rather than power for wizards. We threw off the lassitude of the old bureaucracy only to replace it with fractured, brittle power blocks that thought that assassination was an appropriate governing tool. Myself included. If I find Strangeweale here, I'll kill him again.

[alt_rabastan]

My family and friends were always going on about proper wizarding society. How we should make the world safe for proper wizards and witches. By the end of my time at Hogwarts we could see where the wind was blowing. Rod and Bella were already fully involved when I left and pulled Evan and me into the fold almost immediately. After he was murdered, I lost myself in the work. The guilt over everything between It took a long time to come out of that fog.

[alt_lucius]

There were several factors at play, both for me and for others who fell prey to his deceptions and thus believed joining the Council would be advantageous.

For one thing, it should be noted that his heritage was not widely or well-known. From an early age, Riddle did all he could to conceal his non-magical bloodline, emphasising instead his magical abilities. Then, too, he was particularly adept at making promises - and appearing to fulfill them, in small measure - based on what his followers wished to hear and to be allowed to accomplish. The current vogue in analysis of this phenomenon attributes much of his charisma and magnetism to his use of Legilimency to discover which promises and sentiments would resonate best with those he was drawing to his service.

These promises were as varied as the people you see responding here and many others besides. However, his primary platforms, at least in the earliest days of his rise to power, were threefold: First, the assertion of pureblood value, and thus pureblood supremacy, over those with less august pedigree. Second, the accompanying freedom that he extended to those in his inner circle, not only to exercise privilege but, indeed, to pursue avenues of the arcane and Noble Arts with little to no interference; Third, to his closest followers, Riddle for years dangled his own immortality and tantalised us with promises that in time, we, too, might earn the right to join him in the ranks of those who would never age, never weaken, never die.

On a personal note, my own father and Riddle were contemporaries - class- and Housemates - at Hogwarts. From the earliest time, my father and he had planned to achieve great acts of magic and - so my father believed - unlock the secrets of immortality together. Where my father chose to seek out Grindelwald, Riddle went his own way.

There have been enough histories produced on that time that I should not need to go into detail about what became of my father, but lest you do not have access to them (I believe they are primarily only available in magical circles): My father realised that Grindelwald had planned to subjugate all Europe - possibly all the world - to his rule. He turned on Grindelwald and it cost him greatly. To the rest of his days, his condition deteriorated and he had to rely on a heavy regimen of potions, spells and other methods to maintain even a vestigial existence. He was forced to withdraw from wizarding society as the curse damage he sustained became more and more prevalent. It claimed his life in November, 1971, the year that I was Head Boy at Hogwarts.

Just at that time, I was contacted by Riddle - Voldemort, as he had been calling himself for years already. He claimed friendship with my father, a fact which I was able to verify based on stories my father had told of their salad days together. He informed me that he was returning to England after many years abroad and, out of a sense of obligation to the father, wished to offer his friendship and support to the son.

Commenced a correspondence and a series of meetings in which he undertook to exploit the many advantages which could be afforded him by a young, wealthy, well-connected pureblood wizard, still somewhat naïve but at the time, fiercely concerned with proving to the world that the Malfoy name and fortune were in excellent hands. He most certainly capitalised on my natural fears of an early death, of loss of magical prowess and other worries that coalesce in any young man whose father undergoes a trauma which was the centre of the household for so many formative years.

It is only in retrospect that one realises he, too, thought me ideally positioned to introduce him to the cream of British Wizarding Society and from there to recruit the many others for whom the Ministry's and International Wizarding Commission's regulations had become oppressive. From there, the bonds formed among our number - in my case, with Stephen Rosier, with the Blacks, with Antonin Nikolaevich and so on - became their own lure and reason to believe in the lies we were continually told about the cause we thought we were supporting.

Needless to say, he never intended to extend to anyone else the true secret of his immortality - and indeed, those of us who did discover his solution found it repugnant and offensive in the extreme. Unfortunately, by that time, his rule was so absolute that it became inconceivable that anyone might remove him from power. Those of us who had supported him merely did our best to maintain order and limit his volatility from inflicting itself on the general populace.

[alt_corax]

Power I could never have gained on my own.

Yeah, that about covers it.

[alt_selwyn]

I believed in His vision, for years.

And would have continued to do so, had He ever believed in it. It was rather clear after the Froste Faire that this vision was never more than a tool to manipulate us. Or perhaps it was a true vision, once, but grew corrupted as He divided his soul, again and again, to bind himself to the world and forever escape death.

[alt_antonin]

In 1966, the year I received my Mastery, Arnim Shaw -- a halfblood man no-one had ever really heard of, possessed of a wife and four children and a job as a clerk at Flourish & Blotts -- was sentenced to fifteen years in Azkaban for illegal use of "Dark Magic", reduced to ten years for "cooperation with the authorities" (read: confessing his sins the moment he was brought in, in the hopes of clearing up the 'misunderstanding'). His crime? Using his own blood to lock the trunk in which he and his wife had placed their children's Christmas gifts, so that their six-year-old child, whose wild magic had a way with opening things she wanted to see the insides of, could not spoil her hols. It was a spell I had learned when I was ten years old.

Shaw died of Dementor exposure three years later.

There were so many other factors that led me to the Unmaker's cause, and I could spend hours telling them to you. My father died in Grindelwald's service; my mother publicly repudiated him immediately, while privately raising me to someday continue his work. My brother, twenty years older and serving in loco patris -- to the extent that I use his name as patronymic despite how irregular it truly is -- rose to the Unmaker's banner when it was first unfurled, and although he never overtly pressured me, it was always understood that I would follow in his footsteps someday. I saw the rising wave of integrationism Dumbledore preached, and I am enough of a student of history (despite Binns' best efforts) to know what happens to a small and isolated population possessed of a unique resource when it intersects with a larger population that desires to control that resource; I knew the moment the tattered web of the Statute of Secrecy could no longer keep from fraying completely, and there had indeed been more and more breaches as the years went by, we would be overrun if we did not have a position of strength from which to negotiate.

But the true genesis of my service came from returning to Britain, the ink on my parchmentwork barely dry, to discover that if anyone realised what my past five years of 'travel on the Continent' had consisted of, that realisation would shortly mark the end of my life as a free man.

[alt_rachel]

What Antonin apparently feels no obligation to mention, regarding Shaw, was that he'd already been in trouble with the law three years earlier; the failure of his curse to kill the man he'd duelled with was because there happened to be a Healer close by. That time, he was let off with a warning.

Antonin also left out the fact that the Aurors discovered the blood lock because Shaw's wife worked for a man who had just been arrested for selling illegal potions ingredients. They had excellent reasons for searching the house, and wanting unfettered access to every part of it. Shaw opened the trunk under supervision, but the Auror present believed that Shaw used a nonverbal spell to destroy the other contents while opening it, although obviously he could not prove this.

But, yes. Officially, Shaw went to Azkaban for the mere act of using a blood lock to ward something that might even have been just the Christmas presents that were found in that large, capacious, multi-layered trunk that was otherwise completely empty, aside from the lingering smell of sulfurous smoke.

[alt_antonin]

Shall I name you another dozen examples? I have them, you know. Elisabeth DuMaurier. John Pendleton. Priyanka Bachchan. Sean O'Sullivan. Mary-Louise Elliott. Take your pick: any one of them is a travesty. I only mentioned Shaw because he was the specific case who made me realise the Emperor had no clothes.

The Ministry and Wizengamot of that era was twenty years out from the Grindelwald wars, in full flower of hysteria, and concerned with nothing more than appearing to be "tough" on anything that remotely resembled "Dark Magic". The classification of such spells were arbitrary, byzantine, and unfathomable; any one of a dozen spells people used on a daily basis could be thus classified on a moment's whim. And once a spell was criminalised, no politician worth his salt would ever dare to propose reclassification, lest he be accused of sympathy with the monster under the bed.

Ask anyone who studied with me for their notes on my lectures regarding that phase of the history of my subject. As near as I could tell, the Ministry's definition of "the Dark Arts" -- one shared by many throughout the years, taken to its logical extreme -- was "when I use a spell with this effect it is a jinx; when you use a spell with this effect it is a hex; when they use a spell with this effect it is a curse".

'Jinx' is such a harmless-sounding word, isn't it? But you killed me with a jinx. Or thought you had, at least. And no one can deny that was your goal. (Were you concerned with the prospect of friendly fire, to have decided that I would be best done in by the fall -- or rather, the landing -- instead of by your own hand? Or did you simply not have the fortitude necessary to end my life yourself?) So if your definition of 'Dark Arts' is that they are spells performed to cause harm or death to others, or that they be cast with a specific intent, when will you be turning in your wand and arranging for your own prosecution?

But, ah, I forgot. Magic performed in service of the 'greater good' cannot possibly be Dark Arts, now can it?

Hypocrites. All of you.

[alt_rachel]

Of course I used Dark Arts, though primarily because I was working as an Auror in the Protectorate, where we were required to learn cruciatus on each other, then try it out on prisoners that Bellatrix and Truncheon were done with.

It was absolutely my goal to kill you. I didn't have a clear shot at you, alas, and since I lacked the fortitude of Alecto Carrow regarding friendly fire, I restricted myself to spells that wouldn't accidentally kill someone from my own side. The impediment jinx was perfect for my purposes. I thought a fall from that height would be at least disabling and possibly fatal; it was also something you wouldn't be expecting.

[alt_antonin]

Pity for you that you did not succeed, I suppose. Thus I am repaid for having chosen to stretch my orders regarding your disposition in your youth.

Does Miss Parkinson know you are using her father's death for rhetorical points-scoring?

[alt_lucius]

It is useless to debate, Tosha. The past cannot be undone by means of protesting its inconsistency and you will see snow on the equator before anyone in Albion MLE admits that the policies under Bagnold had grown ludicrous.

Naturally, there had been a trend in Orion Black's time back toward the restoration of certain rights among purebloods - for example, the right to use a wand in places of mixed public gathering - that were symptomatic of the ways in which Wizarding society had already begun to reflect oppression of its most unique elements. The Dark Lord's arrival on British soil happened to come at a time when he could exert the most influence.

[alt_antonin]

I am merely amusing myself by pointing out their hypocrisies. And as, inevitably, the same questions will rise again -- they have already begun to -- I am looking to remind the unpersuaded listener that matters are always more complex than they seem.

Orion did what he could, but so long as Dumbledore persisted in selling out his birthright in the name of useless propitiation, societal forces made the Unmaker's rise inevitable. Had it not been him, it would have been another.

[alt_cedric]

Those lectures were not forgotten, Antonin. Some of us worked hard in the decades after the war to hash out more sensible definitions and punishments based upon the intent and harm done rather than the simple justification of what spell was used. We couldn't simply revert back to the prewar rules, we had to integrate our laws, customs and prejudices with the muggle rules and their advancing technology.

Rituals and spells which alter the caster's sense of self and empathy are a much stickier situation. The byzantine task of sorting out rules for those is up before the ICW yet again next year. They are seeking comment and proposals as always. I would hope that as Grand-Master of the Conclave you were informed and your input solicited.

[alt_antonin]

Of course -- though, in the interest of not having that input dismissed entirely, it was done through a proxy. Or several.

[alt_severus]

I am ashamed to say it was so simple as the Dark Lord's followers being the first to offer me a place in which I could belong. Or feel as though I did, at least.

[alt_bellatrix]

The Lord Protector's goals and ambitions were admirable. No compulsion was necessary.

Though the latter may only be the case because he was the only wizard I'd ever met whose powers actually lived up to his own boasting of them.

Though later he did disappoint in that regard.

[alt_rodolphus]

The Lord Protector had a vision that would allow his followers to be open about our desire for a wizard-made society, for serious inquiry into the potentials and limits of the Dark Arts, for pureblooded advancement, and more. As my estranged wife says, compulsion was not necessary.

It should be noted, however, that he knew just how (and who) to flatter and court. The fact that he won over Bella was itself remarkable, as you'll never meet a witch who has more unforgiving expectations toward wizards.

I can't say that I ever shared my former wife's level of enthusiasm for the Lord Protector himself, as a "person." I saw what he was trying to achieve as a grand experiment bound to either succeed or fail on a grand scale, and I frequently found myself watching with much intellectual curiosity and detachment to see which way things would progress.

[alt_lana]

Of course, I was dedicated to Our Lord's service long before I ever properly met Him. My grandfather and father supported His cause from the start. Abueloberto began acquiring UK businesses and property in the late 1960s and moved to London in the early 1970s; he was quick to recognise Our Lord's promise and gave generously. When the time came, he was pleased to purchase Harrods at the Council's invitation, and he brought my father from Spain to see that London's great luxury emporium would embody the flourishing of New London's free wizarding economy.

So you see, it went without saying that I aspired to be a true Daughter of the Protectorate. I was never more proud than when Our Lord sent a proclamation to honour my coming of age; it was read out by a liveried crier at the party at Somerset House. And I remember knowing that I'd found my true calling at the New Year's gala when I was interning with Auror Lestrange; I was serving as security at the boat landing when Our Lord arrived at the Tate with his entourage. It meant everything to me to live in such a fortunate generation at such a hopeful time.