The Hammering

THE HAMMERING

Dear Harry,

I agree with you about Professor Binns, but you should not, all the same, have gone to sleep during one of the most important classes of the course. Now, if you cannot find material about the Hammering during the Easter holiday, it is largely your own fault. I'll try to summarize what I remember. Good general sources are Manrico Schwicowister, THE ROOTS OF THE HAMMERING (English translation by Albus Dumbledore); Lutatius de Wauvrainvilliers-Oudenhoven, HISTOIRE DE LA CATASTROPHE (on the Continent, what we call The Hammering is known as La catastrophe, Die Katastrophe or the like); Attila von Stammenbach, THE SACRED GANGS (English translation by Cassius Marcellus Binns - our Professor's elder brother); and Servanus macCambridge, BRITAIN AND THE HAMMERING. I must warn you, von Stammenbach's book especially is very grim reading. If you don't want to know, for instance, about the magical procedure for skinning a baby alive and then burning it to death, I would recommend you give it a miss.

I said that it is "largely" your fault, not entirely, because Binns' lesson was, I thought, very faulty. And for this there is an odd reason. Binns was the only teacher old enough to remember the Hammering; and I have found, speaking to all the old folks I met, that it has a very strange effect on them. They don't like to speak of it. Almost always, one meets a sense of personal shame; otherwise, of horror. With Binns, it is hard to understand exactly what he felt while alive; and now, of course, he is only the echo of whatever it is that he was. But the result is that there was a shame-faced and therefore rather confused tone, to all he said, so that it was often rather hard to follow the sequence of events. When events are already sufficiently confused, this can be really deadly.

Here is the best I can do for you, which I edited together from class notes and stuff I transcribed from books:

Between 1859 and 1861, two Muggle wars united most of Italy under the rule of the House of Savoy. This was an earth-shattering event, that broke, almost beyond hope, a political settlement that had been enforced by the armies of most of Muggle Europe for almost fifty years, and set the direction for Muggle political developments for decades to come.

The consequences for the Italian magical community were equally shattering. The struggle about national unity and what was called "liberation" had lasted for two generations, caused several wars, and forced practically every person resident in Italy to take sides. The Italian wizarding community had tried to stay out of it, but, as other wizarding communities in other areas have found, a Muggle conflict that lasts fifty years has a way not to let anyone alone. A split developed, with traditionalists hostile to Italian nationalism and to liberalism remaining in the traditional covens, and liberals organizing under the cover of Freemason lodges - an organization then, as now, very popular in Italy, and that serves, there as elsewhere, to bring together under one roof both Muggles and wizards.

The collapse of the Muggle political structure had direct consequences for all wizarding organizations in Italy. The network of covens, institutes, and leagues, that had thus far kept contact with Muggle governments and looked after wizarding interests, found itself without a referent; while the Freemason lodges gained complete control, sealed with the institution of a Ministry of Magic based in Turin, whose structure was based on theirs. (Since then, while Muggle Italy has moved its capital twice, the Ministry of Magic has remained in Turin. As a result, this cold, foggy, square-boned industrial city has the deserved but unexpected reputation of being the most magical place in the country.)

Thus far, this only insured that there would be trouble in Italy; and that was, in a sense, only the inevitable overhang of Muggle political convulsions that were, in spite of their great echo throughout Europe, essentially local matters. Certainly, sorcerous war in Italy began in earnest even before the Muggle wars had ceased. What caused the war to spread to all Europe was the famous ruling of the 1863 International Council of Wizards, which recommended that all European wizards should set up Ministries whose areas of control would correspond to those of Muggle States, to facilitate - it said - cooperation with Muggle Governments.

This was a model that had slowly developed in the far West of Europe - England, France, Spain, Portugal - and in the United States, where Muggle national entities were ancient and stable; and which had more recently been taking root in Holland and in Prussia (a Muggle country that was, within the next six years, to conquer most of Germany in various ways) and was now being tested in Italy. But to extend it to the rest of sorcerous Europe was to ask for trouble. There, political organization was not often based on Muggle national borders, and there was a great degree of fragmentation, with most sorcerous communities being effectively autonomous. The International Council tried to cater for that, by saying that the Ministries were only for contact with Muggle governments and would have no administrative powers: but the example of the existing Ministries, especially in Prussia and Spain - where driving, ambitious Ministers had managed to make their offices the centre of sorcerous life anywhere in their kingdoms - was not such as to reassure the ancient powers. By the time the Council dissolved, fighting had already begun in Serbia, Bavaria (Landshut) and Finland; and the only thing it could do to save its face - but which could only worsen the situation - was to solemnly confirm its decision and to call on all legitimate wizarding authorities to support it.

A seismic shock of fury followed this statement, and even covens and associations which had not taken sides and had not felt any irritation against the idea of Ministries suddenly exploded. It was against all wizarding precedent and protocol for the International Council to direct individual authorities to enforce its decisions; for all the millennia it had existed, it had served purely as the place where individual authorities solved their differences and ratified their agreements. The ancient Comitate of Transylvania released a strongly worded tract stating that there was nothing whatever to bind them to any authority in Vienna or Budapest (which were at the time the capitals of the Muggle state to which Transylvania belonged) and that it would be both inexpedient and illegal for them to resign any authority to bodies so distant and so alien. The glory, antiquity and prestige of Transylvania, with her seven thousand years of history, insured that this tract would become the virtual Bible of the whole opposition movement, across all its divisions and complexities; except for the far West of Europe, it became required reading matter in any wizarding household.

On the other hand, many wizards had in fact lent their hand and power to the setting up of ministries. There was even one in Budapest, which tried for a season to come to an accommodation with Transylvania, and then - pressed by trouble much nearer home - decided to sweep the problem under the carpet by setting up an understaffed and nominally autonomous Transylvanian Office to which nobody referred. This may have been the safest place to be in: during the entire war, not a single member of the Hungarian office for Transylvania was assaulted.

Both sides, Harry, behaved in an almost insanely irresponsible way. The word war just kept being chucked around as if it was just a chip to be played in some sort of game, a reasonable option if the other side did not change their stupid minds. I wonder about wizarding education in those days, I really do; because their history textbooks do not seem to have taught them how dreadful a wizarding war really is. There is a reason, Harry, for their taking place so rarely - one every several centuries - and, whatever our textbooks may say, it is not because wizards are wiser or less violent than Muggles. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Harry, keep what I am saying to yourself. It is totally against the whole wizarding mindset, and if you ever have the bad idea of airing it in class, you can look forward to a D for Dreadful. Binns in particular is simply not prepared to contemplate the idea; but then, Binns' mind runs on narrow iron tracks from which nothing can now remove it. But I have read and read and read the tales - and my dear Merlin, Harry, you cannot imagine what it cost me! - and I can only say one thing: the reason why wizarding war is so much rarer than Muggle, is that wizards are so much more cruel and destructive. Think about a phenomenon such as the long Decian war, that lasted two centuries, destroyed the Roman Empire from the inside - while Muggles strove to hold it together and could not understand what was going wrong - and almost wholly disenchanted Europe and the Mediterranean. If I have read the figures correctly, it took six centuries for the wizarding population to recover

The three countries which are routinely mentioned as having suffered the worst under the Hammering are Switzerland, Sweden, and Russia. In each of them, the native wizarding classes were practically exterminated, and what is interesting is that in each of them, the destruction had a different cause. Two of them, Switzerland and Sweden, form good case studies to show what a wizarding war can do; the third shows another disaster that can happen, where non-wizarding powers are ready and willing to exploit the chaos.

In Switzerland, the establishment of a Ministry upset delicate balances set up in the course of centuries; somewhat in the same way as in Italy, but without a Muggle war to justify the change. It is hard to believe that a country so small could have so many different wizarding institutions - covens, institutes, lodges, isolated self-ruling families in remote valleys; but they were all set up in the interests of peace, to try and reduce the destructive in-fighting between small, proud mountain clans of sorcerers that had already in the past proved a liability. With the formation of a Ministry, the validity of all these institutions was called into play, bringing about an increasing sense of instability and nervousness; and where everyone began to feel his or her position threatened, each group began to think of striking first. Millenary feuds were revived, and soon every Swiss wizarding family or institution was at another's throat. The in-fighting that followed is so complicated that most general histories of the Hammering avoid description of it and send readers back to specialist histories of Wizarding Switzerland. The champion butchers of the time were the Institute of Coira, a Romantsch-speaking coven that is reckoned to have accounted for at least 5,000 Swiss wizards before it was itself destroyed by raiding Sacred Gangs driven out of Austria and Italy (8-10 November, 1889). That is normally reckoned as the date of the Disenchantment of Switzerland, although there is evidence that destructive feuds in remote valleys smouldered for a few more years, until every last sorcerer had fled the Alps.

In Sweden the situation was simpler. The Michelsons of Dalsland, a half-Danish provincial clan distinguished by remarkable gifts and courage, had in the course of the nineteenth century all but taken the pre-eminence in Swedish witchcraft away from the traditional Uppsala families. When a Swedish Ministry was set up, the Uppsalaers took advantage of their entrenched and central position to oppress the Michelsons, with the unwitting help of the Swedish Muggle monarchy. The Michelsons, hardy and talented, managed however to resist every hostile act (their most memorable deed was the destruction of a marauding Sacred Gang in Bengtsfors, 1883) until the whole of sorcerous Sweden, with reinforcements from both Norway and Finland (then part of Russia), fell upon them in the magical battle of Dalbosjön (1891). What followed was destruction so insensate and total that neither party could claim to have won; both were essentially broken. It is perhaps exaggerated to say that every last Swedish wizard died, but the few survivors were so traumatized that the whole community collapsed. To this day there is no wizarding presence in Sweden: the country is quite disenchanted.

Russia was again different. This was the only country in which Muggles became involved in the war, and the result reminds us why so many of us hate and fear Muggles. What happened was, essentially, that the forces of the Russian Ministry of Magic, defeated and fearing extermination at the hands of coven rebels and Sacred Gangs, went to the Muggle Imperial Government for support. They handed over lists of every known witch and wizard in the country - the majority of which were in open rebellion - and talismans and spells enough to overcome any of them. The Muggle Secret Police did the rest: wizards and witches in their thousands were arrested and shot out of hand, their children sent to Muggle orphanages, their property confiscated or - when it was found that this could be dangerous - simply burned down. The Secret Police then decided to turn their attention to the Ministry for Magic and to loyal wizards, and destroyed them in turn in one night of long-planned, swiftly-executed bloodshed (April 29, 1891), feeling that it was not safe for the Empire to have such a potentially powerful autonomous group within it; even though wizarding tradition is unanimous that the Ministry and its followers were devotedly loyal to the Muggle Emperor, to an extent that made them look ridiculous and naïve among West European wizards. (Incidentally, there are those who feel that the practice in mass violence and destruction which the Russian Secret Police got then preluded to the persecutions of Jews that they would then unleash - called pogroms - and even to the butchery of the Russian Civil War. I would take all this with a grain of salt, noting that the Muggle Russian Secret Police already had plenty of practice in mass murder and persecution in such places as Poland.)

But events in Russia, Sweden and Switzerland were always secondary. These were countries whose contributions to the sorcerous life of Europe had never been great. The really important events took place in the Balkans, in Germany, in Italy, and to a lesser extent in the Western countries - Britain, France, Spain, Portugal - which changed decisively the sorcerous map of the world.

In Germany, the newly-established Ministry proceeded with ruthless and brilliant efficiency to suppress violence within all the areas which it was able to control, which means largely the Prussian homeland (Brandenburg, Prussia, Silesia, Mecklenburg, Lausitz), the great cities, and the Rhineland; as a result, Germany suffered rather less from the Hammering than most countries; if that can be counted as a matter for rejoicing when "only" 40% of the wizarding population was destroyed, mostly in remote country areas where the Ministry either could not or would not intervene.

"Or would not intervene;" because, Harry, there remains a strong suspicion that the Berlin Ministry deliberately allowed provincial wizards and witches to destroy themselves to further its own power and influence and that of Prussian great families. This suspicion is redoubled by their selfish and short-sighted behaviour towards their neighbours in need. The Berlin Ministry helped the Vienna Ministry against rebels and Sacred Gangs, but stood by and did nothing as Switzerland, Russia and Sweden were destroyed, Poland, Denmark and Norway taken to the brink of annihilation, France and the Low Countries reduced to chaos. What lay at the back of this was seen when, towards the end of the war, the desperate Dutch called in the Prussians; the Prussians imposed their own men, and to this day the Dutch Ministry of Magic is the only one in Europe ran by foreigners - Germany nominates the local Wizangemot and sends over a German minister. One suspects that only the wise backing of Britain for the French and other neighbouring ministries prevented similar German takeovers elsewhere. It was thanks to the backing of large contingents of British Aurors that the last-ditch concerted action by Belgium, Denmark and Norway managed to destroy a large body of Sacred Gang and rebel forces in the island of Fyn (September 1892) and went on to successfully clean-up the three countries. In Poland, then enslaved by Russia, the wizarding classes were saved by a strange, pragmatic alliance with the Catholic Church and the large local Jewish community, who banded together (1877-1891) to prevent Russian destruction of Poland's sorcerous communities, with all that would have implied for the survival of the country. But they were not able to hold the line all along; it was at this time that Durmstrang was lost to the Polish sorcerers and passed into the control of a strange coalition of Russian refugee wizards and German influence (1890). It was the price the Poles had to pay not to be stabbed in the back by the Prussians, with the Russian exiles serving, essentially, as Berlin's catspaw.

In the Western countries, as I said earlier, the Ministries were ancient and well established institutions, and trouble was, at first, muted or absent. Chaos slowly seeped into France and Spain, corrupting the political structure and encouraging the more irresponsible members of the sorcerous community to indiscriminate violence, mainly by imitation of what was happening further east. It was only by 1876 that the French Ministry seems to have awakened to the danger, and even then its measures were feeble and ineffective; two years later, of course, the Sacred Gangs exploded from the Balkans, and all hope for stability was lost.

In the early years of the war, most fear was felt for Britain, where the ancient disaffections of the Celtic fringe, the dispossessed sorcerers of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, and the violent changes that had overcome even England, seemed to give plenty of grounds for trouble. Fortunately, the Wizangemot leadership at the time was far-sighted and made plenty of provisions to accommodate the various complaints, including the effective recognition of the autonomy of the three outlying countries and measures to redress distress in England; a behaviour that compares very favourably to the smug and obstinate Muggle leadership at the same time. As a result, Britain did not really start to suffer until the arrival of the Sacred Gangs, and was then able to react vigorously and, in the long run, effectively, as well as to lend help to her beleaguered neighbours.

We must not deceive ourselves, Harry: until the Hammering, England and Britain counted for very little in European and world sorcerous affairs. Hogwarts, of course, was always respected, but it was the one British sorcerous institution which had a European repute. One of the reasons why witch hunts were so much less severe here than in continental Europe - with the exception of Scotland - is that, again with the exception of Scotland, there weren't all that many witches to burn. It was the fact that the British ministry managed to keep the plague almost completely out of the Isles, that led to the swift rise of our country in wizarding Europe.

In particular, the peculiar role of the Corps of Aurors comes from this period. Aurors, of course, are an ancient institution; but it was during the Hammering that they were first allowed to operate on foreign shores, thanks to a series of bilateral treaties, preluding to their current worldwide role. France was the first to ask for their help, in May 1880; Belgium swiftly followed suit; Spain and Portugal were forced to ask for help in front of a wave of Sacred Gang attacks in early 1883; Norway and Denmark followed Belgium's lead in accepting Auror help between 1891 and 1892; and Italy finally decided to call them in in the final months of the war, in the autumn of 1893. In effect, all of Europe west of Poland and Transylvania had been divided into two spheres of influence: Britain, in spite of its comparatively minor status, protected Spain, France, Italy, Belgium, Denmark and Norway; Germany protected its own enormous territory, the Netherlands, and Austria-Hungary; with Switzerland and Sweden, deserted and disenchanted, serving as debatable border marches.

But the worst of the war was in the Balkans, once the centre of sorcerous Europe. My dear Harry, the glory of the ancient sorcerous realms of South-Eastern Europe is something that we in this day and age cannot imagine; and the whirl of violence that destroyed them is something from which, even though we don't think about it, we suffer to this day. Indeed, it gives you some idea of the past greatness of these realms, when you realize what is left even now - when I visited Bulgaria, I could not believe the libraries and the fairy palaces, even though the books tell us that 95% of the Bulgarian sorcerous population and at least four-fifths of all the enchanted homes were destroyed in the Hammering. You can still see them here and there, covered by ivy or dust; some are still smouldering to this day, victims of spells of everlasting fire; many are lost, because the charms that let people into them have been broken, and nobody survived to repair them. And the land is haunted. I could not move without feeling ghosts by my side; and more than once I saw the sun go down in the evening surrounded by fiery mounted warriors that fought in the sky.

The Balkans were, first and last, wonderful ground for plunder. From the moment that the Comitate of Transylvania rejected the International Council's ruling and made war certain, gangs of thieves and wizard-plunderers headed to the peninsula from all over Europe, indeed from the Middle East, India and Siberia, moved by greed and the love for indiscriminate violence. Europe had its first foretaste of what awaited it when Ram Chand Gopal's gang stormed and burned the fortress of Apomarobriga, killing all its Druids and enslaving the rest of the population (1 September 1865). The loathing and disgust this produced brought the two factions briefly together, and three weeks after the storming of Apomarobriga, a joint Allied and Transylvanian force stormed the fortress again and killed Ram Chand and all his gang members. At the time, Europe was still capable of being shaken by irregular and brutal war methods.

The war ground on, and the attrition began to tell. One after another, the smaller Balkan principalities and leagues fell into the hands of bigger players, or were destroyed. Only the Comitate stood head and shoulders above the storm, apparently incapable of being destroyed. It is reckoned that by the year 1878, when the Sacred Gangs appeared on the scene, something like 30% of the Balkan sorcerous population had died, fled, or been de-powered; and yet the worst was yet to come.

The origin of the Sacred Gangs is in Muggle rather than sorcerous war. There was in Europe, straddling the Balkans, an ancient conquering empire, that of the Turks. It was, at this time, gravely weakened and generally felt to be ripe for being conquered in turn. The Turks themselves, understandably, did not like the idea, and reacted with savage violence against the minorities within their borders which were thought to be most disaffected and potentially disloyal. Over the years, a number of minorities - Maronites, Armenians, Bulgarians (of course I am speaking of Muggles) - suffered repeated pogroms. It was in this atmosphere of ethnic and religious violence that the Sacred Gangs were born.

What they were "sacred" to is difficult to know, since they are held to have been destroyed to the last witch and wizard. I am fairly certain that a number of Sacred Gang members escaped, covering up their past and reinventing themselves as respectable members of the community; I suspect this contributed to that underground current of dissatisfaction and disguised violence that has contributed so much both to Grindelwald and to Voldemort. But it would obviously not be easy to go up to, say, Antonin Dolohov's father or Narcissa Black Malfoy's grandmother and ask them, pardon me, I know you are a former Sacred Gang member - could you describe me its rituals and beliefs?

What happened was that by 1877 the long-expected collapse of the Turkish Empire seemed well on its way. The Russians (this was 14 years before the extermination of Russian wizards) had invaded its European territories and seemed about to put an end to it. Faced with this last extremity, the Turkish government unleashed the Sacred Gangs. This is generally held to be another typical Muggle crime, but there are two things to be kept in mind: first, the Turks only let the Gangs loose when they were faced with complete annihilation; and second, it is quite clear that they intended them to engage and destroy the Russian Muggle Army - not to run amock among the ancient wizarding powers of the Balkans, neglecting the Russians altogether. For this act of disobedience, the Gangs alone are responsible, and as they were made only of wizards, it is wizarding ambition, disloyalty and self-seeking that is responsible for what the Sacred Gangs did.

With the apparition of the Sacred Gangs, the war - I mean the wizarding war, not the Muggle episode that briefly overlapped with it - assumed another dimension. Within two months, six of the oldest Balkan powers and the Greek Ministry of Magic had been subjected to complete destruction. The Sacred Gangs did not even care to plunder or take slaves. However little is known of their credo, it certainly included a belief in destroying anything that did not join them. They swiftly swelled to monstrous size - the largest, the Boz Dag gang, had as many as seven thousand fighting members - with wizards and witches who had fallen in love with destruction or who simply had been given the choice between joining and dying.

For a long time, the forces of the Ministries still paid attention mainly to rebels and Transylvanian or Balkan enemies. Many considered the Sacred Gangs merely as a different version of the same enemy. It was only when they smashed into Germany (1882) that their full destructive power was recognized; and even so, it took nine years of desperate struggle before they were cleared out of West and Central Europe and back into their Balkan homelands.

The war ended, as it began, in Italy. When the Comitate of Transylvania had managed to force an unwilling, Ministry-run Europe to accept its own continued existence, the end of the war in the Balkans was in sight. On the 28 of October 1892, Transylvania and the Ministries signed a peace deal that recognized the Comitate as a power independent of both the Hungarian and the Roumanian Ministries, as it remains to this day - the reason, for instance, why Transylvania field their own Quidditch team. (What connection this has with the Muggle stories about Transylvania I haven't discovered yet.) The rest of the Balkans was organized into Ministries by the simple expedient of turning local covens and associations into ministries; it helped that, between 1858 and 1878, several new Muggle states had been created and recognized out of what had used to be the Turkish Empire. (Unleashing the Sacred Gangs did not do them much good.)

In Italy, the Turin Ministry had been well on the way to getting control of the whole country, with a mixture of force and compromise, when several Sacred Gangs broke into the country in 1879. The result was chaos, and the Ministry came near destruction; it was only saved by the defection of several local covens, disgusted and frightened at the excesses of the Sacred Gangs, and by the rise of a number of hitherto little-known wizarding families. The houses of Zabini, Alberico-Cassiano, and De Valeriis, which were certainly in the leading positions by the end, do not seem to have been very important at the beginning: it is largely by the destruction of earlier leading Nationalist families, which the Sacred Gangs took care to uproot to the last baby, that they gained their prominence. About the Alberico-Cassianos there have always been ugly suspicions that they may have encouraged or even taken part in the Sacred Gang destruction of the Houses of Frangipane, Lattanzio, Vadilavìa and De Medici-Storniari, only to then turn against the Sacred Gangs and destroy them in turn, thus gaining Brownie points from the Ministry. Of course, they deny it vigorously, pointing to the number of their own victims of Sacred Gang activity.

With the Sacred Gangs destroyed in Fyn,, the end of the war was near in northern and central Europe. France, then Spain, then Portugal were finally cleared; and by early 1893, the peace between the Comitate and the Ministries had le to the final expulsion of surviving Sacred Gangs and unreconciled rebels from the central and eastern Balkans. Unfortunately, every expulsion from every other country only worsened the situation in the central peninsula; and it was not till 1894 that the joint efforts of Italian Ministry troops, British Aurors, and auxiliaries from several other European countries finally managed to surround and isolate most surviving Sacred Gang and rebel forces in two areas, Monte Amiata and Lago Fucino, and then simply destroy them till nothing that moved was left. The Hammering was over. From then on, the Ministries have kept sorcerous peace in Europe, cooperating to keep the wizarding world out of all major Muggle wars.

So easy it sounds, Harry. You say "the population in Germany decreased by 40%; the population in Italy by 65%". You count and you make sums, and behind these sums there are realities that would make you tear your own eyes out and blast your ears rather than have to actually to see or hear them. There are people who have personally torn out parts of other people's bodies, while the others were alive, and stood their own children up and made them look to learn how enemies should be dealt with. There are battles in which the dying dragged themselves by their broken hands just to be able to bite the throat of their enemies. And there is something else, something even worse. Hidden away in the mountains of data presented by Schwicowister (page 263, forty-first line), and confirmed by MacCambridge in an end-note (no.44), there is a statistic that says that between 46% and 53% of violent deaths in the Hammering did not take place in battle. Think about it, Harry. It means that one in two violent deaths were private murders. It means that those battles on which our textbooks concentrate, the ebb and flow of military action, were little more than the surface, the symptoms, the public face as it were, of a disease that struck men in their most basic relationships, of a cancer of society so deep and abyssal that it would not rest until throats were being cut and stomachs ripped, not for any greater cause, but for private hate and greed.

Part of the illness may well have been that they had only read of wars, never known what they were; and stories of wars are only written by those who survived. When you read of the heroine of the Decian War who built her power by having pureblood wizards sacrificed on her altar, you do not identify with the hundreds of wizards who died at her hands, but with her; that is, you identify with the exception, not the rule. In wizarding wars, survivors are the exception; and they write the books. Many wizards lived in a sort of book-induced hallucination that told them that if they started killing people, soon more people would become their followers, as if cutting a wizard's throat would cause two obedient wizards to spring from the ground; as if the first requirement of a leader were to be a killer. And it worked, Harry, it worked! Those who survived the war had been either lucky, cowardly, or criminal, or even a mixture of the three.

No wonder that the reaction to the end of these horrors was a general desire to forget. I honestly think, Harry, that the unwholesome, one might say megalomaniac, attitudes that swept over European wizard-kind in the twentieth century is to a very large extent a neurotic reaction to the shame, even more than the horror, of the Hammering. It is a displacement: it is not really we who have to live with the horror of what our own kin have done to each other - it is always those damned Muggles, somehow. It helped that, after the long peace of the late nineteenth century, Muggles have indeed fallen into a series of increasingly murderous wars (Here Hermione inserted and then deleted a long list of wars, beginning with the Chinese-Japanese war of 1895 and ending with the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-1991 and the Rwandan civil war of 1994). Yes, many of these wars killed people by the hundred thousand, or by the million. The worst - the Russian Civil War (1917-1924), the World War (1937-1945), the Chinese Civil War (from the 1920s to 1949) killed from ten to fifty or more million each. But horrendous though it may sound - and in spite of what I said about the horror of counting numbers as though it wasn't human pain and death that we are speaking about - we do have to make proportions. The horrible Russian civil war cost maybe ten million dead; the ghastly and long-lived tyranny that followed, from fifty to sixty million more, over about seventy years. Yes, but it was in a country whose population, during that period, grew from 150 to 260 million. In other words, even at the moment of worst horror and savagery, only a small minority of the population was actually killed. The world war, which began in 1937 in Asia, in 1939 in Europe, and in 1941 in America, cost more than fifty million people; yes, but it was fought among nations that counted from one to two billion inhabitants. We must remember that, with the exception of Spain and a few minor countries, every nation in Europe fought and fielded large armies; and beside Europe, the nations that went to war included India, China, Japan, the Asian and African colonies of the British Empire, the United States, Brazil, Canada and Australia. If a war of such dimensions had swept the wizarding world, it is easy to expect that similar numbers would have died - out of a population that barely reaches eighty million in all the countries concerned.

I do not want to make Muggles out to be saints, Harry. The reason why their wars kill so few people is that they do not have the power to do worse. And that refers not only to the need for Muggle violence to be organized in order to be effective; we have all met with that concept in Muggle Studies (at least, I have), and it is not as though it did not apply to the wizarding world. It is rather that Muggles rely on each other to an extent unknown and to a large extent incomprehensible to Wizards. A Wizard, even the most thoroughly incompetent, can do by him or herself anything that is needed to survive; a Muggle needs the work of the rest of Muggle society, day after day, for food, clothes, housing, water, warmth, and the removal of dirt and excrement. It is therefore impossible that even the worst convulsion of violence should literally annihilate a society; even the maddest Muggle wants a farmer to raise his food, a tailor to make his clothes, a miner to get his coal, a water-worker to get his water. Some Muggle convulsions in this century have reached such a pitch of insanity that this obvious fact has been ignored: famines and societal collapses have been deliberately engineered in Russia in 1930, in China in 1958 and 1967, in Cambodia in 1976-79 and in Ethiopia in 1984 - all, strangely enough, by emanations of the same political movement; and none of them, equally strangely, in time of war. The purpose was the complete destruction of society as it had existed till then, to reshape it in a form more pleasing to the ideas of this political movement; but at any rate a society was supposed to be re-formed after the destruction. No Muggle political movement has ever had as its goal the complete destruction of society; but such phenomena are hardly unknown in wizarding wars. The Muggle political movement most known for insensate violence and murder for its own sake, the Nazis, went into some of their conquered countries - Poland and Russia in particular - with the stated intent of destroying their societal leaderships and deprive them of any form - reduce them (the word that was used) to "rubble"; only to discover that even the worst of oppressors simply cannot govern a country in those terms, and to go back to accepting some sort of subservient societal leadership (when it already was too late and the hatred their actions had engendered was leading to their complete defeat). Among Muggles, complete societal destruction is not an option; among wizards, it is. And as it is an option, some have taken it. To judge by the Muggle phenomena I just quoted, if societal destruction were an option to Muggles, they would take to it just as gleefully as wizards do. Muggles who dream of the complete annihilation of the society they live in are hardly rare.

My point, Harry, is that, in view of these horrors, wizarding arrogance and contempt for Muggles is so obviously an aberrant, irrational phenomenon, that I wonder why its absurdity has never been noticed. The whole of the Western wizarding world is in denial about its own behaviour, its own nature, its own status - something which can only be explained with the sheer horror of what the Hammering really was. You cannot even say "war". I am against war, Harry. But War is only an attempt to rationalize, to regulate, to control, the violence that would otherwise devour us all. Our instinct, the instinct of the wizarding tribe, was right in not calling the Hammering a war; in giving it one or two names that belong to nothing else, Die Katastrophe, The Hammering; for it was not a war. What it was, is something that the wizarding world does not want to contemplate; and the ludicrously excessive nature of its claims is simply a symptom of the fragility of its psychic state, that does not feel it can achieve any sort of balance except by discovering supposed inferiors and treating them with the loathing that would otherwise strike our ancestors, and perhaps ourselves.

We are only students, Harry; we are not allowed to express this sort of thoughts, and would pay dearly for them if we did - as I already warned you. But one day, someone is going to have to tell the truth to the wizarding community; for the sleep of reason - however bitter and painful - is already producing monsters. What, if not the wizarding disdain for Muggles - that insane arrogance that is in my view only the symptom of the buried guilt over wizarding violence - has powered the rise of Grindelwald, who wanted to rule them, and then of Voldemort, who wants to destroy them? However opposite their goals, both of them are or were driven by sheer anti-Muggle prejudice of the most rabid kind. And the result was that the wizarding community was nearly driven into another war - Albus Dumbledore saved us from a Grindelwald War - and is now seeing the beginnings of another.

This is something that we simply cannot afford, Harry. Even only from a practical, political point of view, the Western wizarding world could not afford another prolonged bout of violence. Three countries have been disenchanted - so far, permanently - by the last one; and it is still a wizarding commonplace from Tromsø to Lampedusa that pureblood families are nearly extinct, desperately scarce. Nobody bothers to say what it was that put an end to so many of them. Another war might wipe us out, or reduce us to such an extent that we would never recover. We cannot afford this crazed self-regard, especially given the violence that smoulders in its corners - the hatred for Muggles, the abiding resentments. It is a fire on which monsters feed. It is a fire that could conume us. The wizarding mind has to be faced with the truth, whatever it costs; the alternative is too terrible to contemplate.

Yours ever,

HERMIONE.

P.S: when you come to Diagon Alley, could you please take your copy of The monster book of monsters with you? Mine has poisoned itself after chewing some plastic sheeting, and I need to check some references. Thank you. H.