A/N: This story is related and heavily inspired by the FanFiction "With Strength of Steel Wings". It isn't fully tied to it since I disagree with some of more exotic magic there and some of the timeline doesn't match but I found the concept quite interesting and I even helped write some of the political parts towards the end of that story before the author stopped working on it, at least for the time being. Now years later, with a great deal more knowledge about current day politics I wish to delve into this scenario where the Muggles are capable of piecing things together, setting in a motion of series of events that will shake the world as we know it.
The dates are changed from cannon: Harry was born in the early 2000's in this story and modern technology plays a significant role.
I wish to give fair warning to anyone reading: This is going to involve a great deal of discussion on some recent political events since my main motivation with this story was to explore what would happen with the world if wizards were revealed in the modern age, although I will do my best to keep any personal biases out of here, and I am not American, British, Russian or Chinese before anyone wonders on national bias either. I'm also firm on being a political centrist, but I imagine it will be fairly difficult to avoid angering people. Just remember it's a story, and I am not fanboy of any side here written about here.
Finally this isn't a story about Harry or his closest friends, it's a story about the world and how it changes when wizards are revealed. The main reason I want to try writing this, despite my inexperience, is that I genuinely care about world events and want to delve in what ifs given the significance of magic. I also find it ridiculous about the Harry Potter world, a universe I very much care about, that it could be hidden away just like that. We're far past the point on a technological level for it to be feasible.
"The story of how the magical world came to light began with a boy by the name of Harry Potter. Already a legend due to his survival against Voldermort at a very young age, thanks in large part to a protection charm cast by his mother Lily Potter, Potter had been raised by his Aunt's family until at the age of 9 his magic manifested resulting in destruction of many of the family's electronics.
Enraged by such a costly affair Vernon Dursley took the young boy and abandoned him on the streets of London where he was found and raised by a seemingly kindly old man by the name of Gerald Steel, who took him and raised him alongside other orphans that he had given shelter too, somewhat illegally as he used the boys to work for him, but Mr. Steel, as the boys called him giving them a roof over their heads in exchange the work they did was considerably more then what others would have done. It was more then Potter's family had done, and one day once the old man passed way the boys would inherit the shop, or so they assumed.
However Mr Steel's motivation wasn't purely benevolent in taking care of the orphans, for although he cared for them as if they were his own family he had only started taking in orphans due to his work as part of the Hounds Group.
The Hounds Group , founded in 2002 by John "James" Fredericks, was a respected global non-profit that worked to recover missing children across most of the world. Although not well known by the general public it had gained a solid reputation among certain circles.
The public face of the group, which continues operating to this day, and it's work in recovering missing children was however all a mask for the true purpose of the organization. Namely revealing the magical world to the public.
Fredericks' brother, the true James, had once been a muggleborn student at Hogwarts before being forced out in his early years thank to a pureblood conspiracy. With his memory wiped and his magic stripped from him the young James committed suicide a few years. Embittered by the loss his brother John became "James" and launched a crusade against the wizard to throw them into the light.
He was joined by many others around the world: Parents who had lost their children without even knowing they had existed if not for technologies of the modern era. teachers who lost prized students and many others in similar situations. They were joined by victims of Voldermort's first crusade or those had to lost family, friends, loved ones to the Dark Lord along with a good score of scientists, businessmen or simple people like Gerald Steel who had connected the dots and found something very wrong. Something their own governments, democratic or otherwise, were likely hiding from them.
Although only a fraction of the Hounds Group membership these members under Fredericks and his aide Nathan worked to uncover the truths the wizards had so carefully hidden.
This is where Harry Potter truly comes in. The Hounds needed a way into the magical world, and few adult wizards would have even considered joining, let alone being able to do so given the capabilities of the various magical governments at tracking magic, but a child was another matter.
Discovering that tattoos would come to life if applied to any wizard, regardless of age, the Hounds had been trying to find a magical child among the orphans they helped that they then could use as a way to spy into the magical world. It was not without significant controversy among the group but there were few options and Fredericks was determined.
The effort had been seemingly without success until Harry Potter came along, and as a supposed reward had been given a tattoo of wings by Gerald Steel. Wings that then became real steel ones and confirmed him as a wizard.
After that Potter, who had already been told of magic by Gerald Steel and used to try and find magical artifacts around London during the night, willingly accepted the role the Hounds had for him, although he wasn't aware of the larger organization or their goals at this stage.
Using ancient, forbidden magic found in tomes the Hounds had been very lucky to recover Harry Potter delved into rune crafting, specifically blood runes that would forever change his life. It was thought by Mr. Steel that this would give him an advantage as he joined Hogwarts when he came of age.
In the early summer of 2010 Harry Potter, having not only managed to hide his magical wings but also the many runes he had applied to his body, was at last found by Albus Dumbledore using the Hogwarts Letter system. Forcefully taking him from his adopted family the Hogwarts Staff took him to the castle, something for which Harry would never forgive the Headmaster or Professor Snape for since they had wiped the memory of Gerald Steel in the process. The man who had raised the young Potter as his own son now had no memory of him, something which devastated the boy and only pushed him towards the path he was already on.
By 2014 with Harry Potter's help, who had convinced Sirius Black to work on research with the group, the Hounds using all their accumulated data were ready to begin revealing the magical world to the general public.
The did so on the 28th of June 2014 by revealing select information about the wizards, though this was initially dismissed by most of the world as nothing more then a prank until the Hounds posted the information they had collected on all the children who had gone missing over the years, information that few could so easily dismiss when it came from an organization such as theirs with a proven track record.
Still their so called "discovery" was ultimately ignored, the media determined that it was simply a grand hoax engineered by James Fredericks. World leaders barely even bothered to take note of it, at least publicly.
Privately intelligence agencies around world moved against the group but their initial response was slow, too slow, and Fredericks vanished as MI5 came for him. He had not wished to reveal the wizards fully just yet, but merely to make some begin to doubt.
One might wonder how any group, let alone a non-profit without significant parts of the public even knowing about them, could bring about the end of the modern world as we knew it. The answer lies in the situation at the time they had acted and how the countries reacted to it.
The governments of the world had known for certain about Wizards for close to half a century, since the Cold War and in large part thanks to the technological leaps at the time, but given the geopolitical conflict at the time the Great Powers decided to keep it quiet.
In the Soviet Union Stalin had wished to bring the wizards into the light but his attempts at doing so led to the Russian Ministry to assassinate him in exchange for a deal with his political opponents that every leader of the USSR kept to in order to maintain secrecy.
In Asia the Chinese had discovered the existence of the Oriental Ministry of Magic, which controlled almost every country in that part of the globe. They had then forced the Ministry out of China and taken control of their own magical population but had been unable to go any further despite continued attacks by the oriental wizards.
In Europe the governments of Eastern Europe followed the lead of the Soviets, while in Western Europe the devastated countries of post-WW2 had no desire to risk a major conflict, not with so many troops massed against each other as the Iron Curtain came into place.
Finally in the United States Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy came to the same conclusion, despite the wishes of American wizards to reveal the truth. The world was too fragile, the peace between East and West barely holding together.
So it was that the Great Powers, using their significant leverage around the world, kept the existence of wizardkind secret for the Cold War.
Then the global conflict ended. The greatest military stalemate in human history was over and the Soviet Union collapsed. The world began what appeared to be, at least for a few short years, as a golden age for humanity, a time when some called it "The End of History". A time of unprecedented global cooperation, peace and prosperity.
It seems hard to believe so many years down the line, but in 1992 when the largest and most powerful armies humanity as a whole had ever assembled stood down without firing a shoot, when democracy prevailed over communism, it really was a momentous occasion, a moment that had never occurred before. A moment that the leaders of the world should have used to the best of their abilities.
A moment that they completely and utterly squandered.
The success of the Hounds lies in that moment. The '90s seemed promising but many of the issues that would occurs years down the line had their roots in that decade.
Any kind of unified global order began to die the moment those planes slammed into the World Trade center on 9/11. An event that led that shook the world and led to America getting distracted by what would ultimately be pointless wars that sapped their strength.
Then there was the use of torture to extract information, followed shortly by the almost unilateral invasion of Iraq in 2003.
These acts resulted in America not only losing a great deal of their leverage but also any kind of good will the world had towards them, yet too many American politicians continued acting as if things had not changed, realizing too late the damage they had inflicted on themselves.
To top it all of the Great Recession hit in 2009. People began to lose faith in their governments, international relations frayed and the dream so many people, especially younger people that had been raised on the idea of a unified world, began to die.
It was at this time Barrack Obama was elected, the promised one that would fix many of these issues, that had campaigned on precisely that...and yet was found lacking. To be sure President Obama deserves a great deal of credit for many of his early economic policies, policies that stabilized the world's economy despite their political unpopularity, but his decisions in the aftermath of the 2010 mid-term elections left a great deal to be desired.
Obama had made the hard necessary decisions when they had to be made early on in his presidency, and had paid dearly for it in those elections. So he took a different route and engaged in political trench warfare from there on.
It was shortly after that he made the decision, with significant pressure from Prime Minister David Cameron of the UK and President Nicholas Sarkozy of France, to intervene in Libya.
Instead of listening to his National Security adviser Tom Donilon, Vice-President Joe Biden and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, all of whom were weary of getting involved in another war after the disaster of Iraq, President Obama instead sided with his U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice and Samantha Power who had also managed to persuade Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Obama would eventually realize the mistake he made, calling it the "worst decision of his presidency" but it was too late. NATO intervened in Libya and removed Gaddafi, but in doing so had left the military arsenals to be looted.
Al-Qaeda took advantage and conquered half of neighbor Mali with weapons from Libya, necessitating a French intervention, while thousands of militia members were shipped courtesy of NATO to fight in Syria through Turkey. The Syrian Civil war would then create the worst refugee crisis since World War II, destabilizing much of Europe as a result.
One key element in all of this is that that NATO intervention had been done through a U.N. vote, where Russia and China had crucially abstained in order to create a no-fly zone. A no-fly zone that was used as a pretext to give the rebels fighting Gaddafi NATO air power. China and Russia would not easily forgive this action, and ties frayed between the US and Russia in particular.
Then Crimea happened in 2014. Beyond anything that can be stated about it and the conflict that followed in Donbass it's worth noting the most important element: Russia had violated the entire post-WW2 European Order: That with only a few exceptions since the borders of Europe were not to be redrawn by force.
So it was that by the summer of 2014 the G8 became the G7 again, that intelligence agencies across the world were overburdened dealing with a myriads of threats with many of them, in particular western ones, having suffered due to budget cuts as a result of austerity policies.
In a world where the public had lost faith in their governments, where America had greatly angered everyone through one short sighted foreign policy decision after another, where Russia had started a proxy war in Ukraine, where Europe stood on the brink of political disaster and China was taking advantage that the Hounds acted.
The Hounds had many people among their ranks that aided in their effort: From construction workers to lawyers, scientists, CEOs, teachers, journalists, doctors, police and military. They had eyes and ears in many governments and businesses. Accusations even swirled that some members of the American Joint Chiefs had sympathies for their cause, never proven but still exist to this day.
Fredericks had chosen the date to reveal the first batch of data for a reason: It was the anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose death a century before had led to the Great War. Fredericks had every desire to start a global conflict that would shake the world.
Just like in 1914 the Great Powers tried to prevent it. Representatives from the major intelligence agencies met and tried to find a solution.
They failed.
Too many years, too many destabilizing conflicts, too much bad will between Russia and the US, too weak was Europe to stop it, too eager was China to reveal the wizards and take the fight directly to the Oriental Ministry. Some like India and Israel tried to step in but it was not enough.
None could possibly prevent the information from leaking to every citizen with access to the Internet, not for long, not forever. The Hounds had made every country aware of how thin the shield was from the knowledge; the Hounds had made every country aware of both the benefits, and the downsides, to such knowledge being known.
And suddenly it was made plain that the Hounds were only the sparks of a far larger fire; one that had been burning underground for years, decades, a century among the governments of the world. The Hounds could be stamped out; but the fire would continue to simmer until it met dry tinder again and burst into flame to be battled once more.
And those who battled the firestorm were no longer quite so willing to do so."
- Andrew Moore, The Hounds and the End of History.