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Grim Truth 93/20/02
Feb. 20th, 2010 02:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alt_siriusGreetings, British Wizarding World!
Last weekend in America, they celebrated the birth of one of their former presidents. He was a man named Abraham Lincoln, and he was perhaps most famous of their political leaders because he led the country during its Civil War. That war was fought over a difference in philosophy astonishingly similar to the one in which we find ourselves. When half his nation chose to defend the practice of racial slavery, he freed them by presidential edict. Lincoln followed in the footsteps of great British men like William Wilberforce, who successfully outlawed slave trading in Great Britain more than fifty years before Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.
While Wilberforce died peaceably just three days after learning Britain would abolish slavery, Lincoln was assassinated because he made a decision that was progressive and just.
Obviously, I’m over-simplifying the situation. Other historians can offer a lot more detail, most of it more accurate than I can provide. Books and examinations of his life – and death – fill entire shelves in libraries and bookstores, not just in America, but all over the world.
In the case of British wizardom, your leaders have borrowed opinions and positions from, among other things, slave-owners of the 18th and 19th centuries, undoing all the good Wilberforce achieved on the topic two hundred years ago. They cling to the fiction that purity of blood is a shield to all sorts of hardship – especially illness. I’ve read posts swearing that ‘Muggle paralysis’ (also known as the Herfordshire Scourge) has no effect on purebloods, that halfbloods who contract it are somehow weaker for their susceptibility to the disease. I have even seen purebloods claiming that those who have died due to the Scourge somehow deserved their fate. As if anyone who falls prey to a germ deserves to sicken and fail!
But there are those who have suspected for a while that this disease had a more sinister beginning. They theorised that the Ministry may have been trying to kill off the Muggle population, despite the fact that without them, as we’ve seen, your society would quickly collapse. Well, they’re partially right. The motive wasn’t genocide, but in some ways, much more insidious and repulsive. I recently came into possession of evidence that the source of the epidemic gripping the country was none other than an experiment begun in the camps by the Department of Mysteries itself.
‘Project Panacea,’ so dubbed by its Ministry overseers, began as a trial in selected internment camps in the spring and summer of last year. The premise was to introduce a potion into the drinking water, which would ensure the cooperation and willing subjugation of all its drinkers. I gather it was conceived as a potable version of the Imperius Curse. Unspeakable Augustus Rookwood conducted a few controlled experiments, first on animals in the DoM, then on human subjects in Epping Forest and elsewhere. The effort was expanded to all camps in the early autumn. The effects, as we have seen, were dramatic. By mid-October, there were cases spreading throughout the Muggleborn and Muggle communities.
I don’t believe it took long for the Ministry to realise the camp populations were under attack, but I do think it took some time for them to connect the DoM’s involvement to their predicament. Tracing the threads, it looks like what turned the tide was an incident in early November, when the Ministry attempted to meet the labour shortage by awakening some of the Muggles you refer to as ‘Sleepers.’ The Ministry and the camp administrators must have known that the Sleepers would be disorientated and less docile when they were revived, so they contrived to provide a high-dose regimen of Rookwood’s ‘panacea’ potion in an attempt to make them pliable. You may recall that in mid-November the epidemic suddenly took a dramatic turn for the worse? That was the moment that these poor souls were unwittingly infected with enough of Rookwood’s panacea poison to send them into paralysis.
Unfortunately, by that time, it seems the disease had taken its own turn for the worse. It adapted somehow, mutated to find new hosts, and the first halfblood cases were already showing up. If it can mutate once, it is only a matter of time before a pureblood falls.
In all fairness to the Ministry, I suppose it should be acknowledged that the goal was not to kill any of the subjects. The fact that the contagion was introduced in the water explains why the camp personnel were never infected; I can’t imagine many workers would deign to drink the same water as their charges. But the fact remains that the Ministry covered up its secret agenda. Had anyone shared the Department of Mysteries dossier with St Mungo’s, the Healers might have been able to understand and control the spread of this ailment much sooner. The lives that could have been saved, the suffering that could have been avoided, had they owned up to the Grim Truth, may never be quantified.
But they must be held accountable. The Ministry are responsible for this plague. Even had not a single life been lost, they are responsible for the wholesale oppression of innocent people and they are culpable in the attempt to rob those workers of their free will. Augustus Rookwood and his colleagues directly brought about a public health crisis and compounded it through their attempts to obfuscate their involvement in that same crisis.
I don’t pretend that the Ministry will seek justice on behalf of the thousands who have died or become paralysed, even those who have suffered milder cases of Panacea poisoning. Nonetheless, I could not in conscience withhold this information from you, especially when forcing it into the light might also compel the Ministry to work with St Mungo’s on a credible cure.
I pray they put reason above self-interest, for all your sakes.
Last weekend in America, they celebrated the birth of one of their former presidents. He was a man named Abraham Lincoln, and he was perhaps most famous of their political leaders because he led the country during its Civil War. That war was fought over a difference in philosophy astonishingly similar to the one in which we find ourselves. When half his nation chose to defend the practice of racial slavery, he freed them by presidential edict. Lincoln followed in the footsteps of great British men like William Wilberforce, who successfully outlawed slave trading in Great Britain more than fifty years before Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.
While Wilberforce died peaceably just three days after learning Britain would abolish slavery, Lincoln was assassinated because he made a decision that was progressive and just.
Obviously, I’m over-simplifying the situation. Other historians can offer a lot more detail, most of it more accurate than I can provide. Books and examinations of his life – and death – fill entire shelves in libraries and bookstores, not just in America, but all over the world.
In the case of British wizardom, your leaders have borrowed opinions and positions from, among other things, slave-owners of the 18th and 19th centuries, undoing all the good Wilberforce achieved on the topic two hundred years ago. They cling to the fiction that purity of blood is a shield to all sorts of hardship – especially illness. I’ve read posts swearing that ‘Muggle paralysis’ (also known as the Herfordshire Scourge) has no effect on purebloods, that halfbloods who contract it are somehow weaker for their susceptibility to the disease. I have even seen purebloods claiming that those who have died due to the Scourge somehow deserved their fate. As if anyone who falls prey to a germ deserves to sicken and fail!
But there are those who have suspected for a while that this disease had a more sinister beginning. They theorised that the Ministry may have been trying to kill off the Muggle population, despite the fact that without them, as we’ve seen, your society would quickly collapse. Well, they’re partially right. The motive wasn’t genocide, but in some ways, much more insidious and repulsive. I recently came into possession of evidence that the source of the epidemic gripping the country was none other than an experiment begun in the camps by the Department of Mysteries itself.
‘Project Panacea,’ so dubbed by its Ministry overseers, began as a trial in selected internment camps in the spring and summer of last year. The premise was to introduce a potion into the drinking water, which would ensure the cooperation and willing subjugation of all its drinkers. I gather it was conceived as a potable version of the Imperius Curse. Unspeakable Augustus Rookwood conducted a few controlled experiments, first on animals in the DoM, then on human subjects in Epping Forest and elsewhere. The effort was expanded to all camps in the early autumn. The effects, as we have seen, were dramatic. By mid-October, there were cases spreading throughout the Muggleborn and Muggle communities.
I don’t believe it took long for the Ministry to realise the camp populations were under attack, but I do think it took some time for them to connect the DoM’s involvement to their predicament. Tracing the threads, it looks like what turned the tide was an incident in early November, when the Ministry attempted to meet the labour shortage by awakening some of the Muggles you refer to as ‘Sleepers.’ The Ministry and the camp administrators must have known that the Sleepers would be disorientated and less docile when they were revived, so they contrived to provide a high-dose regimen of Rookwood’s ‘panacea’ potion in an attempt to make them pliable. You may recall that in mid-November the epidemic suddenly took a dramatic turn for the worse? That was the moment that these poor souls were unwittingly infected with enough of Rookwood’s panacea poison to send them into paralysis.
Unfortunately, by that time, it seems the disease had taken its own turn for the worse. It adapted somehow, mutated to find new hosts, and the first halfblood cases were already showing up. If it can mutate once, it is only a matter of time before a pureblood falls.
In all fairness to the Ministry, I suppose it should be acknowledged that the goal was not to kill any of the subjects. The fact that the contagion was introduced in the water explains why the camp personnel were never infected; I can’t imagine many workers would deign to drink the same water as their charges. But the fact remains that the Ministry covered up its secret agenda. Had anyone shared the Department of Mysteries dossier with St Mungo’s, the Healers might have been able to understand and control the spread of this ailment much sooner. The lives that could have been saved, the suffering that could have been avoided, had they owned up to the Grim Truth, may never be quantified.
But they must be held accountable. The Ministry are responsible for this plague. Even had not a single life been lost, they are responsible for the wholesale oppression of innocent people and they are culpable in the attempt to rob those workers of their free will. Augustus Rookwood and his colleagues directly brought about a public health crisis and compounded it through their attempts to obfuscate their involvement in that same crisis.
I don’t pretend that the Ministry will seek justice on behalf of the thousands who have died or become paralysed, even those who have suffered milder cases of Panacea poisoning. Nonetheless, I could not in conscience withhold this information from you, especially when forcing it into the light might also compel the Ministry to work with St Mungo’s on a credible cure.
I pray they put reason above self-interest, for all your sakes.
