Death Eaters Issue ‘Political Document’ That Media Portray As Revision Of Anti-Muggle Ethos

While no section to that effect appears in the document, journalists, commentators, and political figures strove today to describe it as a fundamental change.

London, May 1 – Followers of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named put out a a statement today they termed a “political document” that sets down principles for an interim solution to wizard-muggle conflicts but does not specify an abandonment of murderous wizarding supremacy, a statement that most media outlets were quick to frame as a reformulation of You-Know-Who’s guiding philosophy that would accept the full rights and humanity of muggles and muggle-born wizards.

The Death Eaters issued their document this morning amid much media and diplomatic anticipation that it represents a hopeful shift in wizard-muggle relations toward dialogue and tolerance. While no section to that effect appears in the document, journalists, commentators, and political figures strove today to describe it as a fundamental change to a cornerstone Death Eater principle, namely that non-wizarding humans must be kept under the boot of the wizards, and can be toyed with and abused at will.

Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye, the Daily Prophet, Reuters, and other  media operations reported on the new document by means of terms such as “sea change,” “paradigm shift,” “softened stance,” and “newfound flexibility,” insisting that the statement heralds an altered, more tolerant approach to muggles than before. Prominent Death Eaters, in communications with other members of the organization, denied any shift in their underlying ethos, and averred that the only changes the document conveys are rhetorical in nature, for public relations purposes. Those remarks have received scant attention from the media, and have been downplayed when covered.

Experts predict the media and diplomatic worlds, especially in the West, will continue to interpret the document’s softer language as a retraction of the genocidal character of the Death Eaters’ original charter, despite it making no such move. “They need something hopeful to discuss, and a way of holding onto the prevailing narrative in the media of the organization representing resistance to oppression, as opposed to the totalitarian, discriminatory group that it is,” explained Remus Lupin, Professor Emeritus of Dark Arts at Hogwarts, who has studied the movement. “Most people, and this of course includes news organizations and Obama-Fudge-era diplomats, prefer to cling to their world views, which have become part of their identity, than to undergo the painful reexamination of core assumptions that have defined them until now. The idea that the Death Eaters represent the enemy of all the values they hold dear flies in the face of everything the media and the political milieu that was ascendant for the last several decades has inculcated in them.”

Lupin’s remarks were edited out of the New York Times story on the new document.

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