Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Gitmo

[this entry has been edited. I added some more at the end and changed around a sentence or two.]

2003's Harry Potter and The Order of The Phoenix followed in the wake of the very dark turn at the conclusion of 2000's Goblet of Fire, but, released just a few months after the invasion of Iraq, seemed pregnant with meanings not present int the first four books. As the threat of terror loomed, the ministry of magic, attempting to stamp out criticism and dissent, installs a fascist dictator at the head of Hogwarts, whose rather brutal discipline inadvertently incites Harry and friends to surreptitiously organize a clandestine revolutionary organization, much like that which his older friends have created outside the school's walls to battle the "Death Eaters," bent on preserving and returning to the school's (and the nation's) idealized halcyon days. Ultimately, the state's attempts to suppress the threat posed by Voldemort and his Death Eaters collapses when the villains invade the Ministry itself in an attempt to procure the prophecy which says Harry and Voldemort have to fight eachother to the death. People die, shit gets crazy, state hegemony gets disrupted, nothing will ever be the same again. Etc.

In Half Blood Prince, the terrorist threat looms large over Britain. Explosions, assassinations, and torture are commonplace, and the Ministry of Magic, powerless to halt the reign of terror, instead arrests and imprisons innocents in ghastly centers of detainment and madness simply to produce the reassuring illusions of stability and progress. The new Minister of Magic wants Harry to be his "mascot," a silent, pliant Morale booster. Granted, in a David Horowitzian turn (or perhaps a Jon Butlerian one), teachers within the wizarding world's institution of social reproduction/higher education are frequently duplicitous and occasionally flat-out treacherous in their alliances with the forces of evil and use of forbidden magic. And Rowling's is clearly an overly sympathetic account of "the good guys," even as Harry spurns the ministry for their despotic tactics and seems to be gravitating towards Buffy-style "anarchism"

The figures of the tortured, and the unjustly imprisoned, as well as the spy and the double agent have been central to previous books in the series but have assumed a new centrality in Order and Half-Blood Prince, infused, perhaps, with the urgency and horror of the current predicament of articulating a (neo)liberal British nationalist fantasy in the era of "7/7," G8, infinite detention, and the spectre of Abu Ghraib. Yet theirs is a centrality of the marginal -- a palpable absence, but an inability to speak. There is no resolution here, either for the metaphor for Operation Whatever The Fuck It Is These Days or for the book itself, just a lot of death, and fear of what's to come.