Connections: Assef and Bellatrix Lestrange

The Taliban, a key player in Afghani history and the book, The Kite Runner, are an extreme Islamic group who caused the deaths of thousands over their seven year reign. The death eaters, characters in the Harry Potter books, are a ruthless group who would go to any lengths to please their master, Voldemort, and to cause the most destruction among the wizarding world. These two may seem very unrelated, but they're more alike than they seem...

In Amir's journey back to Afghanistan in The Kite Runner to adopt his nephew, he encounters the Taliban in a soccer stadium. During halftime at the match, they publicly stone a man and a woman to death for adultery. Later on, Amir has to deal personally with Assef, a Talib and childhood enemy. Assef describes how he enjoys causing pain and "ethnically cleansing" Afghanistan of those he and his organization have deemed unworthy of the title of Afghanis. As I read this, my mind jumped to the Harry Potter books and how the death eaters, especially Bellatrix Lestrange, want to get rid of mud-bloods and blood-traitors and others who "dirty the name of pure-blood wizards".

The similarities between Assef and Bellatrix are uncanny: both are individuals acting on the orders of others above them, yet they are natural leaders and hold a certain power over those they associate with. They both strive to be the most devoted to their causes and they are capable of more sadistic actions than the majority of the people they intimidate.

Now, to get down to the roots of their actions. Assef was born to a privileged family in Afghanistan. His father was Afghani and his mother was German, and all the neighbors knew him as a handsome, respectable boy. He was slightly psychopathic as a child and became a rapist at an unusually young age. He seemed to enjoy hurting people because he liked the way they cowered to him. He idolized Hitler and the Nazis, yet he was able to come across perfectly when he was around adults. Similarly, Bellatrix was born to a family of purebloods, giving her a sense of entitlement that she held above others. This ultimately caused her to follow in the paths of many of her kin and become a death eater. She aged and spent time in Azkaban, and by the time she broke out of prison, she wanted nothing more than to be in Voldemort's service once again. She enjoyed torturing Neville Longbottom's parents into madness and made a sport of killing muggles and wizards alike. And despite the terror she'd inflicted, her parents and most of her extended family were proud of her accomplishments.

Obviously, the situations in which these two characters became the way they are anything but similar; Assef grew up in a country where fighting had been a way of life for centuries and Bellatrix lives in a fictional world where the limits of one‘s imagination are tested. What I find most interesting is that such different situations can breed such similar results. It seems that no matter the time, place, or circumstance, there will always be self-righteous people who are willing to cause pain and kill others to make themselves feel like god.

And now we’re led into that dreaded debate of nature versus nurture. The results of this comparison seem to suggest that nature is the cause of such atrocities in the world as genocide and holocaust. But culture and environment can be a contributing factor, illustrated by the similarities in Assef and Bellatrix’s childhoods. Personally, I think counting nature and nurture as mutually exclusive occurrences is naïve, that they are both necessary to breed the types of villains we read about in books and watch in movies. And then there are those who say that we’ll never know the real reason behind why people are the way they are. But the thing I think is most important to remember is that no matter how they come about, people capable of horrific deeds will undoubtedly affect our lives forever.