[identity profile] longstrider.livejournal.com
I'm reposting this from the previous thread as it isn't really related to the original topic and that thread is now humongous. I've made a few additions.

I was actually thinking about the camps and the different classes of people in Voldie's England. (Has it been established what portion of the Isles are behind the wards? Is it just Britian, B & Scotland, B & S & Wales or does it include Ireland as well?) I assume at minimum B&S and Seamus's presence would seem to indicate Ireland as well.

We have 4 to 7 classes of people, (1)Pure bloods, blood traitors, those of 'mixed' heritage but several generations back, (2)half-bloods, (3)muggle-born, (4)muggles and squibs.

A couple assumptions/questions here. In canon the muggle to wizard ratio is HUGE (UK pop minus N Ireland in 1981 was ~55,000,000, Ireland and N Ireland add another 3.7 million & even the most generous estimates of wizarding pop are in the 10,000 range unless JKR ignored hundreds of students at Hogwarts or failed to mention multiple other schools in the UK) multiple 1000s to 1 at best for wizards, specifically 5,900:1. If those numbers hold and there hasn't already been a massive slaughter/exodus of muggles this is a logistical problem of control so those in power need to be looking for an intermediary population to control the muggles or even more draconian population controls. When I say massive I mean MASSIVE, 90% reduction in muggle population still leaves the ratio at a barely manageable 600:1. Modern high-tech prisons have a prisoner to guard ratio of 4 or 5 to 1. I tried to find some numbers for the British in Imperial India, but couldn't. Found lots of over all and breakdowns of the native population but no numbers for Anglo or British born. And that's a massively different situation, not camps, very large intermediary population, old government basically coopted and then repeatedly reworked. The best I could find is 45 million in the British Isles and 256 million 'total souls' in India.

However in Wizarding Britian I see no intermediary population for them to coopt. Squibs haven't been touched on as to there treatment (but the absence of Flich speaks volumes,) Half-bloods are being integrated into the wizard population (see numerous examples in the journals,) and the most obvious choice, muggle-borns, is verboten by the PTB. Along with this we've seen no indication of a class of muggle 'foremen' or collaborators given special privileges. Arthur works with a 'mayor' but it really looks like the exception rather than the norm. There's nothing on the order of the Brahmans & Rajputs. This means (barring the aforementioned draconian population reductions something higher than 95%, quite possibly higher than 99%) that Voldie's regime is headed for problems, see real world British Imperial India & Apartheid South Africa.

Now we may just be hand waving the population problems (as JKR did, it's hard to reconcile Hogwarts student numbers and the Quidditch Cup audience numbers and well we're all familiar with her maths... issues) or working with different world assumptions or it's just not plot relevant so it's being ignored but my analytical brain and world building experience makes me want to poke at this sort of thing.

PS there's some really disturbing stuff out there from that era produced by the British, 'Aryan and higher class natives' is just the beginning.
ext_11796: (Default)
[identity profile] lapin-agile.livejournal.com
Is there supposed to have been another Grim Truth post from Sirius? (Arthur tells him he saw his "entry last night.") If so I didn't and can't now see it. I did catch the exchange on Harry's journal where Sirius and Lucius exchanged barbs. Is that all that's meant when Arthur and Bellatrix say that Sirius provoked the attack Lucius led on the Cherwell camp?

Interesting bits and bobs in McGonagall's post tonight, too. (About the book's forgery; mention of Flitwick -- deceased, apparently -- from Molly; about the castle's protections; McG's note that Lucius is not a Legilimens and her clear anxiety about facing someone who IS one.)

ETA. Lucius talks about the provocation as though it was just Sirius' intrusion into Harry's comments thread.

More interestingly, Lucius links the disturbance in the camp with the "robbery" at Gringotts:
After the blackguard (no pun intended) retreated from the journal where he made a nuisance of himself, he apparently decided to incite an attempted break-out at Cheswell. It's all in the papers. He must have accomplices in this country, whom he induced through some method (doubtless an illicit and indecent form of magic) to disrupt the camps. Bella believes, as do I, that these culprits are the same miscreants who corrupted the Goblins enough to gain access to Gringotts and rob the bank last month. It makes sense: Their modus operandi seems to lie more in encouraging - possibly forcing - members of these inferior castes to rise up in revolt, creating chaos and bother for the rest of us.
I take Arthur's account as a truer representation of what happened at Cherwell (Lucius calls it Cheswell), which is to say that Lucius, Bellatrix and others went to the camp and took out their frustration with Sirius on the helpless captives (no uprising, no escape, no initiative on the Muggles's part, just a bit of Death Eater Muggle-baiting like we see canonically at the World Cup match).

I wonder if Lucius' linkage of the Cherwell and Gringotts incidents is more than just a matter of PR spin: perhaps the Gringotts episode was equally a matter of Lucius, Bellatrix, et. al. having done something extra-legal. Perhaps they went to Gringotts with a plan to empty a vault of something of value (the Philosopher's Stone, presumably) only to find that the vault in question (one they did not have legal power to access -- so what would their way around the Goblins have been? maybe I'm wrong) had already been emptied, though they thought that impossible, its rightful owner having been thought to be out of the country. In other words, I'm proposing that the substantial link between the camp riot and the Gringotts "robbery" might be that Lucius and cronies are the active agents in each case and that in each case they've concocted a story of insurgent lawlessness to cover their own dodgy dealing.

Also. It's not lost on me that Lucius hints that Sirius and his insurgent blackguards (a great pun) make use of Imperius to control Muggles.

Profile

Fans of Alternity

February 2025

S M T W T F S
      1
2345678
910111213 1415
16171819202122
232425262728 

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jun. 8th, 2025 08:35 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios