-By Warner Todd Huston
Orlando Sentinel movie reviewer Roger Moore was excited to report on the efforts of some Harry Potter fans that want to “change the world” based on their interpretation of Potter character Dumbledore’s philosophy of life. He was happy, you see, because the group is all about “global transformation” and spreading global warming fears, gay marriage and the Employee Free Choice Act.
Moore writes abut a group called the Harry Potter Alliance whose website is a sort of Potter fan message board where fans write about what they are doing with their ideas on Potter philosophy. But, it goes “beyond the personal,” Moore approvingly says.
The Doctrine, however, goes beyond the personal, discussing how Dumbledore’s values can be translated onto the national and global stage into public policy that legalizes same sex marriage, indigenous people’s rights, the Employee Free Choice Act, and media reform while joining the HPA’s partner NGO’s in their stand against genocide, poverty, prison torture, and global warming.
And sure enough, a look at the website proves that subjects like “LGBT” (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender), anti-capitalism, and global warming abound. There is the rather silly “don’t buy new stuff” section that encourages a fan base built on buying new books and movies not to buy “new stuff” in order to screw capitalist companies world wide. There’s a race section and a section about “political prisoners” in which the only entry is one detailing how evil the USA is for its policies… and not a WORD is spoken about Russia, China, North Korea, or any number of Middle Eastern countries that kill their own people on a daily basis.
The site was created by a 29-year-old failed actor named Andrew Slack who claims himself a “social organizer and human rights activist.” His “What Would Dumbledore Do” website offers a full plate of anti-U.S. and anti-western propaganda for Potter fans to get stirred up about. And it’s because the world faces “dark and difficult times,” you see? We are, the site’s creators sonorously intone, faced with:
- Genocide, Poverty, AIDS, and Global Warming are ignored by our media and governments the way Voldemort’s return is ignored by the Ministry and Daily Prophet.
- People are still discriminated against based on sexuality, race, class, religion, gender, ethnicity, and religion just as the Wizarding World continues to discriminate against Centaurs, Giants, House Elves, Half-Bloods, Muggle borns, Squibs, and Muggles
- Our governments continue to respond to terror by torturing prisoners (often without trial) just as Sirius Black was tortured by dementors with no trial
- A Muggle Mindset pervades over our culture-a mindset that values being “perfectly normal, thank you very much” over being interesting, original, loving, and creative
Slack and the girls that help him run the site want fans to get involved. In the “rock the vote” section, for instance, the site urges California’s voters to support gay marriage. One of the commenters in “The Common Room” expressed her rage that the Dumbledore character never “came out of the closet” in the kid’s books. And money is being raised for Slack’s favorite causes from site visitors.
Anyway, what we have here is left-wing indoctrination hiding behind a kiddie book and movie series. Let’s hope not too many kids get snared by this false front and get taken in by the propaganda. You know that some people have no lives when they take a movie and/or book and use it as a template for their lives. Too many Star Trek and Star Wars fans have been like that and now Harry Potter can claim the same sort of lonely, sad people, it appears.
It is great to be a huge fan of some bit of entertainment. Fun to go the movies, collect toys and books, go to conventions. But when you start trying to lead your life via the character’s claimed ideas, then you have gone too far. Forsaking real, ages old philosophy and religion for some kitchy TV, movie, or book series is an act of foolishness. And it never seems to take too long until some propagandist like this Andrew Slack fellow comes along to try to fit his left-wing ideology onto the entertainment in order to lead others toward his own political ideas.
Sadly, the Orlando Sentinel sees no reason not to try to help Andrew Slack snare as many unsuspecting Harry Potter fans as possible.
(Image courtesy of Scholastic Books, American distributor of the Potter book series.)
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer, has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and is featured on many websites such as newsbusters.org, RedState.com, Human Events Magazine, AmericanDailyReview.com, townhall.com, New Media Journal, Men’s News Daily and the New Media Alliance among many, many others. Additionally, he has been a frequent guest on talk-radio programs to discuss his opinion editorials and current events and is currently the co-host of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Conservatism” heard on BlogTalkRadio. He has also written for several history magazines and appears in the new book “Americans on Politics, Policy and Pop Culture” which can be purchased on amazon.com. He is also the owner and operator of publiusforum.com. Feel free to contact him with any comments or questions : EMAIL Warner Todd Huston
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“You know that some people have no lives when they take a movie and/or book and use it as a template for their lives.”
Ahem. Bible.
And then later:
“Forsaking real, ages old philosophy and religion for some kitchy TV, movie, or book series is an act of foolishness.”
So your argument for “realness”, I can only assume, is nothing but the age of these particular thought processes; the argument is that being really, really old is a suitable substitute for being right. Explain to me, please, why a storybook written thousands of years ago is a more appropriate template for our lives than something written now?
Perhaps I’ve misunderstood and it’s not just age; maybe it’s ubiquity that makes “ages old philosophy” more valid? Because 400 million books sold is certainly not 2 billion – the 2005 estimated number of Christians in the world (Zuckerman, Phil. “Atheism: Contemporary Rates and Patterns “, chapter in The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, ed. by Michael Martin, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK (2005)) – but it’s a big number nonetheless. And even if we don’t count people who bought the books to burn them, or people who bought one and didn’t like it, or even people who just don’t care one way or another and received it as a gift… we’re still in the hundreds of millions of people who love these books, and feel that this text speaks to something in them, encourages something warm and wonderful inside, makes them want to reach out to other people and improve the world for EVERYONE.
Maybe it’s that they’re touched by the message of love and tolerance that they can’t find in “real, ages old philosophy and religion.”
Or maybe you just didn’t explain yourself correctly. I invite you to try.
Lonecavalier,
Thanks for your message and I’d be glad to delve further into your points.
First of all let’s start with your “Ahem. Bible” comment.
You said this in answer to my quip about the non-starter of using a book or movie to guide your life. Your reply is “Ahem. Bible”?? So, you are saying that the Bible is a mere book like Harry Potter is? This shows a complete lack of understanding of religion, history, philosophy and the centuries of human experience. You don’t even have to believe that the Bible is the word of God to understand its importance in human history and philosophy.
Let me be clear. If you using something like Harry Potter and are basing your life on a silly kid’s book, a thin as paper piece of fiction, an empty kiddie show, a thing of no substantial philosophical weight… you are a fool. If you are turning your back on thousands of years of Catholicism, Buddhism, Protestantism, or even Stoicism or Aristotolean philosophy, if you have no time for Lucretius, Kierkegaard, Spinoza, even Leo Strauss, if the great books are meaningless to you… if you are forsaking all this REAL human thought to base your life on a childish fantasy you just aren’t too bright.
Harry Potter is junk, popcorn, fantasy, bubblegum, a mild timewaster, pointless. It is not a template for your life and should not be.
I have no problem with the books as entertainment. I think it was a stroke of fortune that its writer made the series that encouraged millions of kids to read that might not otherwise have cracked open a book.
But if the Potter series did not open a world of learning and reading for kids because they stopped reading with the last Potter book, then it was, in the end, a pointless waste of time, something of no practical value. And it is probably a pointless waste of time for most of the kids that took the series up. But for those few smart enough to move on and begin to explore the world of REAL thinking, real philosophy and religion, REAL human history, then a salute to J.K. Rowling is due.
For those that didn’t move on to something more substantial, well, those kids are probably not smart enough to have ever done so anyway — Harry Potter or no.
So, I hope that answers your questions?
Thanks again for the message and enjoy your summer.