by Manuel Miles

Hold on to your bottle of snake oil, friends, because I’m about to give it a shake: “Harry Potter” is crap.

Yes, you read it correctly; Harry Potter is crap!  The painfully boring book(s) is the most vapid, vacuous and inane bit of “children’s literature” since “The Bobsey Twins At The Beach”, and the dimwitted movie, despite its visual onslaught of special effects, has no more substance than the banal tome which spawned it.  No wonder the government-controlled media have been hyping this drivel so relentlessly--they are always eager to promote the insipid and the evil.  “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” manages to be both.  This is its only triumph.

I forced myself to read my friends’ daughter’s copy of the book prior to subjecting myself to the movie.  For once, bad as it was, the film was superior to the book.  However, that is not the most resounding accolade, as the book was utterly without imagination.

Fancy that--a book about wizards and witches and dragons that lacks imagination!  In this, its author, J.K. Rowling, has accomplished what nobody before her ever could, or wanted to.  Of course, in The Bad Old Days before political correctness assailed what was left of western culture, children’s literature was inspired, not motivated.  It was written by people who loved children just as they are, and who sought to delight them. 

New Age agitprop, on the other hand, is written by “children’s rights advocates” who loathe children and seek to destroy them physically while they are in the womb, and mentally and spiritually, if they get past the abortionist’s knife.  They “have an agenda”, and it is a nasty one.  Hence, the literary Ritalin of the tired hack, R.K. Rowling.

The single most salient feature of both the book and the movie is that none of the children, least of all Harry Potter, has a personality!  The only one who even came close was, in the film at least, the little girl who played the part of “Hermione”, and she was only a dreary stereotype of an “overly studious” girl, despite the best efforts of the talented little actress to overcome the insipid script.  No, in the movie, people don’t develop or achieve things, they are born to “greatness”.  Like the unbelievably lame Jar Jar Binks movie before it, Harry Potter depicts the fantasy of all the dull, unimaginative New Age bureaucratic types and their Soviet commissar and Nazi gestapo forbears in which an elite of persons has superior amounts of The Force in its collective DNA.  In this case, it manifests itself as a supposedly natural tendency to dabble in the unnatural.

Of course, Harry Potter and his clique only do good satanism, while those who oppose him are engaged in bad satanism.   Here we have the Wiccan view of the world; a struggle of good evil versus bad evil.  In case you missed that element, Kindly Professor Bumbledore (or whatever his silly name is) has a “good friend” who cheats death via a “philosopher’s stone” that makes not gold in its alchemy, but an “elixir of life”.  This undead necromancer, great pains are taken to point out to us, turned 665 years old last year.  Add this year to that total and you get what “magic” number, kids?  You see, Old Nick can’t be such a bad chap after all if he’s a pal of the good evildoers, now can he?

If you didn’t notice that, you can hardly have missed the “Christmas” that was devoid of any religious content, not even so much as a Father Christmas.  Of course, Halloween was a glorious, glamorous event, having been restored to its demonic pagan origins by Comrade Rowling.

The whole Harry Potter witch’s brew is pretend wish fulfillment for all the frustrated nonentities who are (much like Harry Potter, locked under the stairway of his aunt and uncle’s home) confined in their office cubicles while their inner greatness is unseen and unappreciated by the hateful, cretinous “Muggles” who engulf them.  But just you wait, they’ll get theirs!  When that day comes, the Muggles will wish they’d been nicer to the comrades, won’t they?!  That aspect of this sorcerers’ medicine show explains, no doubt, the conspicuous presence in the movie theatre of a very large number of middle aged feminazis and other New Age types. 

When literature is perverted to the uses of social and political crackpots, it is every bit as imaginative and enlightening as a Marxist propaganda tract.  It’s as phony as an old-time medicine show and as hollow as a politician’s promise.  There is lots of “flash” here, but no substance, no depth, no God (just Satan), no joy, no soul, and no fun.  That about sums up the entire New Age/New World Order “culture”.  And I say to hell with it.

December 8, 2001