Witch Hunts in history led to the killings of tens of thousands of innocent people. People acted out of the irratinal belief in Satan and witches, and tortured and executed outsiders or simply people others with more influence disliked, for imagined crimes such as curses or natural disasters or plagues.

In Harry Potter, there are actual witches and wizards. Curses are real. And a sizeable portion of the magicals considers non-magicals as mere animals or vermin. They are routninely obliviated, and magically assaulting them is called "muggle baiting", indicating it's not on the same level as assaulting a magical. There's no indication that this was different in the past (See Salazar Slytherin's views).

It is quite likely that witch hunts missed the real culprits, but had real, logical reasons to start - witches and wizards who did a lot of the things that the innocent mundanes were burned for.

Why would the magicals let those hunts go on and kill innocents, back before there was a statute of secrecy, if they could have prosecuted the real culprits, or at least prove that the mundanes were innocent?

 

When you say "mundanes", I think you mean "Muggles".

 

Muggles, non-magicals, normal people, mundanes.

 

Damn it Sree, that's offensive to the mund-

[User was banned for this post.]

 

Not those fanon or 'borrowed' terms. Please. Also, Witch-Hunts did 't kil tens of thousands, I don't it killed ten thousand. Also, I really dislike this line of argument, 'why did wizards let the Holocaust/Coloanialism/Crusades/Republicans happen?"

That goes beyond fan-wanking, it's just not feasible argue about that outside of a story that deals with it.

 

It's not about the crusades, colonialism or the holocaust, it's about the witch hunts - an event mentioned in canon a few times. Witch burnings in the 14th century were mentioned by Binns.

I am wondering if, contrary to real with hunting, which accoridng to the wiki resulted in 40-60'000 deaths, the Harry Potter universe's witch hunts were not irrational but based on real crimes of magicals against normal people.

And I am wondering why - and that is canon HP - the magicals let witch-hunters burn innocents.

 

Invictus: while witch hunts weren't a massive genocide, they did rack up a good number of victims. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_hunts#Execution_statistics

35,000 executions total. But that's over all of Europe, spread across 300 years. So relative to population and spread over that time, it's not many at all.

 

Just like rl, its not happening to me or my people, why the fuck should I care?

Stupid muggles burning other muggles. Lol.

 

And yet witch-hunting is mentioned as one of the reasons the statute of wizarding secrecy was signed.

 

I don't think they did that to save Muggle lives. More like to save themselves from the hassle of being hated and reviled by 99.9% of the world's population.

 

I wonder why Hogwarts was established :|

 

So it did affect them. I wonder why they didn't stp them - or if they could.

And I wonder if the witch-hunts in Harry Potter were not so effective, but quite logical attempts by the population to defend themselves against magical atrocities. I also wonder why the wizards managed to make everyone forget about them, but couldn't manage to make everyone forget about hating them - unless of course they couldn't control those wizards among them who reveled in attacking and torturing normal people.

 

They did stop them - it's called the flame-freezing charm.

 

Well, in my defense I based from UK, Italy and France, where the Church was strong. Then comes the HRE and just wow. Now I understand better the 30 years war.

 

"Nudge"? I asked right away in the first post if the imaginary crimes Innocents were burned for as witches in the real world were actually comitted by witches and wizards in the Harry Potter world. Given how evil pureblood supremacists are shown to act in Harry Potter, I do consider it very likely that this was the case.

"Villainise"? Given the attitude even light wizards have towards non magicals, what is there to villainise that JKR didn't do already? She had even a canon hero like Ron mindcontrol a driving instructor to get what he want in the epilogue, and back in Harry's School time they were still debating whether a "Muggle Protection Act" should be passed.

 

In canon Harry Potter, normal people knew about magic until the statute of secrecy. Since Magic is real, witches are real, curses are real, and magic was known for thousands of years, I do not think witch-hunts happened for the same imagined reasons they happened in real life.

I am planning a story that will deal with the relations between mundane and magical britain, and I'd like to know more views about the witch-hunts. I would like a better explanation for the statute of secrecy than "We got annoyed with the muggles, and rather than ruling them as we easily could with our Magic, we chose to hide away because we are all good men and women and would never think of subjugating those animals."

Were the witch-hunts repsonsible for the statute? As just about the only law that's enforced world-wide and with fanatical vigor and a lot of manpower, it's interesting to consider.

Just about any urban fantasy story writer has to decide whether or not the supernatural world is hidden from the mundanes, or if Magic is known, and then decide what the consequences of either decision are, and how history of the real world would have been affected either way. Otherwise one runs the danger of making the whole story implausible, or fill it with plot holes.

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That is entirely up to you, but if you want to debate whether or not using compulsion charms to rape mundanes and then obliviate them afterwards is evil (given what we know of pureblood supremacists and their atrocities, and basic human nature and history, it's very very unlikely that dark wizards did not commit such acts regularily), that would best be discussed in a new thread. This thread is about witch-hunts in Harry Potter, the differences of Magic being real and known to the populace would cause to them, and their effcts on the magcal and mundane world.

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That is of course a logical way to escape getting burned. But I am thinking in broader Terms. If witch-hunts were triggered by crimes committed by dark wizards, would it have been possible to stop them by stopping dark wizards? Create a clear distinction between dark wizards and light wizards, and show there's no need to hunt all wizards?