Grim Truth 93/20/02
Feb. 20th, 2010 02:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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alternityGreetings, 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.
Order Only
Date: 2010-02-20 09:37 pm (UTC)I feel as though the pieces of a puzzle have suddenly shifted themselves and fallen into place. Of course, they were adding it to the water: that's precisely why the camp staff never fell ill. And that's why Rookwood felt no need to inform St Mungo's: there was no danger to their research staff. Until the disease altered itself, as diseases will do.
And now we are all at risk. (And rightly so, I'm afraid.)
Order Only
Date: 2010-02-20 09:53 pm (UTC)Re: Order Only
Date: 2010-02-20 11:52 pm (UTC)Re: Order Only
Date: 2010-02-22 11:26 pm (UTC)I Solemnly Swear That I Am Up To No Good
Date: 2010-02-21 02:17 am (UTC)It'sThis is justCan you believeWas Carrow in on this? Didn't he mention Rookwood when he was babbling about the camps over holidays?
Giving people a POTION to make them be docile is just about the worst thing I've ever heard.
Re: I Solemnly Swear That I Am Up To No Good
Date: 2010-02-21 03:00 am (UTC)That--
Wow, I don't even know what to say. Nobody in the Gryffindor Tower does. Everybody's talking all about it, of course, and most of the Prefects are all saying it's a lie, it must be. But people are whispering in corners, and I dunno. I think some might believe it's true. I mean, no one's ever caught this Sirius Black in a lie, have they? But how can he know this, anyway?
What are they saying in the Slytherin Common Room?
Re: I Solemnly Swear That I Am Up To No Good
Date: 2010-02-21 03:10 am (UTC)Now people are talking about it, though. Antigone Fletcher thinks it's all a lie. Cassandra Calderwood doesn't, she thinks the potion is probably real because it's an excellent idea and just the sort of thing the Ministry would try to develop BUT she doesn't believe for a minute it had anything to do with the disease.
Some people are being really quiet and I don't know if it's because they think it's all true and don't want to say, or if their parents knew something about it and they overheard enough during Christmas hols to KNOW it's true.
Re: I Solemnly Swear That I Am Up To No Good
Date: 2010-02-21 04:09 am (UTC)Boot would know. Terry, I mean. But that doesn't help. Maybe
GraHermione knows.And yeah, it's just the kind of rotten thing the Ministry would do, don't you think?
Re: I Solemnly Swear That I Am Up To No Good
Date: 2010-02-21 05:30 am (UTC)And it's EXACTLY the sort of thing the Ministry would do. They'd think it was a grand idea to make all the muggles into sheep (but less wooly) and they'd certainly do it with a potion (because Imperius is far too much work when you're talking about thousands of poeple) and trying it out without working out all the problems first? Well I hardly think they were expecting Fred and George to work out an invisible ink and a special code to use the journals when they sent them to all of us.
Re: I Solemnly Swear That I Am Up To No Good
Date: 2010-02-21 05:43 am (UTC)I remember reading it last spring, it made me feel sick. It's different reading it now and seeing the parts under the lock. Carrow isn't any less of a beast, but I'm glad Terry had friends talking to him that Carrow didn't know about.
Re: I Solemnly Swear That I Am Up To No Good
Date: 2010-02-21 02:15 pm (UTC)Re: I Solemnly Swear That I Am Up To No Good
Date: 2010-02-22 04:12 pm (UTC)One doesn't really talk about things like that, you know. It doesn't do any good to bemoan things, so we all just sort of take it, and then we maybe think about it on our own, but especially in the camps, complaining isn't the done thing
Re: I Solemnly Swear That I Am Up To No Good
Date: 2010-02-22 04:40 pm (UTC)Re: I Solemnly Swear That I Am Up To No Good
Date: 2010-02-22 04:41 pm (UTC)Re: I Solemnly Swear That I Am Up To No Good
Date: 2010-02-22 04:57 pm (UTC)Re: I Solemnly Swear That I Am Up To No Good
Date: 2010-02-22 04:55 pm (UTC)I don't think that's it though, I mean Terry did complain under the lock about the smell of the fish. If this potion to make people happy with their lot were any good at all it would surely make you not mind something like fish smell, don't you think? I mean I'd think the point of the potion would be to sort of turn everyone into Dennis. Dennis would NEVER complain about fish smell, I don't think it would even occur to him to complain about fish smell. Terry was still Terry when he was in the camps. I think maybe the potion was new this fall, they just started using it when everyone got sick.
Re: I Solemnly Swear That I Am Up To No Good
Date: 2010-02-23 12:44 am (UTC)Terry wasn't like that. I mean, maybe it's worse, but you could always tell he had to work really hard at not getting punished. Like it wasn't normal for him to be the way he had to be for Carrow. The thing about Dennis was that he just was that way, like he didn't even think about being anything else.
Re: I Solemnly Swear That I Am Up To No Good
Date: 2010-02-23 12:59 am (UTC)iswas just the way they thought all the muggles ought to be.I reckon muggles taking the potion were a lot happier than they were without it. Just like Dennis always looked happier than Hermione and Terry, at least until his magic came. But UGH. I'd rather be unhappy but able to think my own thoughts.
Re: I Solemnly Swear That I Am Up To No Good
Date: 2010-02-23 01:37 am (UTC)Oh, wait. There was something I was meaning to ask you about this earlier. Er.
Yeah. D'you think that's what Carrow's doing with those rats? With his NEWTs group, y'know? Figuring out how to turn rats brains into sawdust or corn or something? So they could really do that to Muggles?
Re: I Solemnly Swear That I Am Up To No Good
Date: 2010-02-23 04:44 am (UTC)I mean I suppose you could make a rat a little more obedient but I don't know how well it would work to do that to a human because rats really aren't much like humans.
I don't know. I would think that if you transfigured just the rat's brain into corn the rat would die. Usually when you transfigure an animal into something else you change the whole animal, like a mouse into a teacup or a hedgehog into a pincushion, you know?
no subject
Date: 2010-02-21 02:55 am (UTC)I Solemnly Swear That I Am Up To No Good
Date: 2010-02-21 04:05 am (UTC)Way to stick your wand in it, Perce.
Re: I Solemnly Swear That I Am Up To No Good
Date: 2010-02-21 05:27 am (UTC)I expect your brother thinks Black's attacking your father, since your father works for the Ministry. Even though he doesn't work in the Department of Mysteries.
Re: I Solemnly Swear That I Am Up To No Good
Date: 2010-02-21 01:55 pm (UTC)I noticed, though, that Percy wasn't one of the Prefects in the Common Room last night loudly insisting that it was all a lie. He was one of the quieter ones.
Re: I Solemnly Swear That I Am Up To No Good
Date: 2010-02-21 09:57 pm (UTC)And Percy? He wants to work for the Ministry, y'know? He doesn't want this to turn out true, cause then he'd have to think harder about whether it's right to go work there. He sees Dad, same as I do.
no subject
Date: 2010-02-21 05:14 am (UTC)Sometimes the truth is much harder to believe than a lie, however, and much, much more cruel. I wish it weren't true, but I believe my sources and trust that they would not misinform me, whether to my embarrassment or the Ministry's.
no subject
Date: 2010-02-22 04:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-22 04:25 am (UTC)I'm sorry