LogFAQs > #912631576

Grand Kirby posted...

Well, immediately afterward Grindelwald made the point of how long would it be before Muggles turned their weapons on wizardkind and waged war on them. I think the showing of WWII was meant to provide evidence of how barbaric and violent Muggles were and provide justification for attacking them first. It has been pointed out in the series before that generally wizards underestimate how capable Muggles can be, and that their stubbornness and refusal to use Muggle technology leads to them not being aware that Muggles can do a lot of things better with it than magic can (like communication). Showing stuff like tanks and nuclear weapons then ends up being a harsh reminder that Muggles are more dangerous and threatening than they assumed they were.

I know it's a mistake to analyze Harry Potter logically, since this is a franchise with time travel machines casually used by twelve year-olds, but screw it.

It's repeatedly established that normal wizards basically don't know anything about muggles and don't think they're a threat, and the only ones who do are the ones with muggle parents. I remember in the book there's like a random guy who needs to dress as a muggle and dresses up in a woman's nightgown because that's how little he knows. Even Ron's dad, the muggle expert, knows nothing, and it's played for laughs. Harry learns that witch trials are thought of as a joke in the wizarding world because the muggles almost never caught wizards and when they did, the wizard could just make himself immune to fire and leave.

There's no way WWI was a big deal to the wizards. Like, there's no way wizards are going around in trenches fighting Germans or whatever. The only wizards killed in that war would be from bombing cities and being incidentally killed, and even then wizards can make force fields and teleport to Scotland on a whim. Most wizards outside of the main cast also don't seem to care a lot about muggle lives, I remember a part in Harry Potter where a radio host compliments a wizard specifically for defending some random muggles from Death Eaters.

Johnny Depp telling people that muggles are going to start another war with even stronger weapons than before should be mildly-to-moderately concerning to the wizards. Surprising but not horrifying.

I'm saying that if you want to play up the wizard racism angle, making it about how dangerous muggles are to wizards seems like the wrong way to do it after you spent so long establishing how wizards think of muggles as equals at best and most frequently as jokes.
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Started: July 6, 2005