← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · il ragno
Thread ID: 3924 | Posts: 11 | Started: 2002-12-09
2002-12-09 10:59 | User Profile
[url=http://film.guardian.co.uk/lordoftherings/news/0,11016,852217,00.html]http://film.guardian.co.uk/lordoftherings/...,852217,00.html[/url]
Wraiths and race
What with the dark skin, broad faces and dreadlocks, it's a wonder Tolkien didn't give his baddies a natural sense of rhythm, says John Yatt, examining Middle Earth's suspect racial undertones
Monday December 2, 2002
It was the same with The Phantom Menace - I had no choice. When part of your childhood is playing down the road on a big screen with surround sound and popcorn, there's no escape. But as the wonder of discovering that there was more to New Zealand than sheep wore off, something began to worry me. Maybe it was the way that all the baddies were dressed in black, or maybe it was the way that the fighting uruk-hai had dreadlocks, but I began to suspect that there was something rotten in the state of Middle Earth.
Perhaps Dubya's war on terror is making me a bit uneasy, or maybe it's just good old-fashioned Guardian-reading imperial guilt, but there was something about watching a bunch of pale faces setting off into the east to hack some guys with dark faces into little bits that made me feel a little queasy.
When I got home I dug out my copy of The Lord of the Rings from a box somewhere - okay, so I pulled it straight off the shelf - and found there was worse to come. The Two Towers is the story of the battle between Isengard and Rohan. In the good corner, the riders of Rohan, aka the "Whiteskins": "Yellow is their hair, and bright are their spears. Their leader is very tall." In the evil corner, the orcs of Isengard: "A grim, dark band... swart, slant-eyed" and the "dark" wild men of the hills. So the good guys are white and the bad guys are, erm... black.
This genetic determinism drives the plot in the most brutal manner. White men are good, "dark" men are bad, orcs are worst of all. While 10,000 orcs are massacred with a kind of Dungeons and Dragons version of biological warfare, the wild men left standing at the end of the battle are packed off back to their homes with nothing more than slapped wrists.
We also get a sneak preview of the army that's going to be representing the forces of darkness in part three. Guess what: "Dark faces... black eyes and long black hair, and gold rings in their ears... very cruel wicked men they look". They come from the east and the south. They wield scimitars and ride elephants.
**Perhaps I'd better come right out and say it. The Lord of the Rings is racist. It is soaked in the logic that race determines behaviour. Orcs are bred to be bad, they have no choice. The evil wizard Saruman even tells us that they are screwed-up elves. Elves made bad by a kind of devilish genetic modification programme. They deserve no mercy.
To cap it all, the races that Tolkien has put on the side of evil are then given a rag-bag of non-white characteristics that could have been copied straight from a BNP leaflet. Dark, slant-eyed, swarthy, broad-faced - it's amazing he doesn't go the whole hog and give them a natural sense of rhythm.
Scratch the surface of Tolkien's world and you'll find a curiously 20th-century myth. Begun in the 1930s, published in the 1950s, it's shot through with the preoccupations and prejudices of its time. This is no clash of noble adversaries like the Iliad, no story of our common humanity like the Epic of Gilgamesh. It's a fake, a forgery, a dodgy copy. Strip away the archaic turns of phrase and you find a set of basic assumptions that are frankly unacceptable in 21st-century Britain.**
But it's the same with The Attack of the Clones - I've got no choice. Maybe the fizzy pop will go to my head, maybe the Pearl and Dean music will be able to work its magic, but I'm worried that the popcorn is going to taste a bit wrong - I'm worried that childhood isn't going to be quite so much fun the second time around.
This is no clash of noble adversaries like the Iliad, no story of our common humanity like the Epic of Gilgamesh. It's a fake, a forgery, a dodgy copy. Strip away the archaic turns of phrase and you find a set of basic assumptions that are frankly unacceptable in 21st-century Britain.
*Unacceptable to the Instant Englishmen who yesterday were denizens of their native pestholes, he means! Interesting also how, without any prompting, Mr Yatt the Fearless Racism Fighter naturally cites Gilgamesh as a 'good' myth, no doubt seeing Enkidu as the miracle of affirmative action made flesh (with an big-booty assist going to the inevitable race-mixing ho, Shamhat).
As with all these 'enlightened' types, Mr Yatt's point seems to be - if we'll just open our hearts - we can lure out the White Man hidden inside every darker-hued savage. The dark man's exposure to our civilization will uplift him even as our acclimation to his animal sacrifices, bestial rutting habits and stick-on-a-can 'music' will....y'know....loosen us up and give us a li'l much-needed natural rhythm. It's all part of, uh, nature's, umm, eternal cycle an' stuff!
Do these nitwits ever consider the fact that seeing a potential human-resources administrator in every bushman and untouchable just might be, err......racist? That logic dictates if acclimating the Third World to Western life is good for them, our 'accepting' their Third World customs is fatal to us? - if the West represents something worth abandoning their homelands for, that validating their clinging to their old ways is simply going to create two uninhabitable hellholes where previously there was only one? Or that maybe the most degrading fate you can force upon someone alien to Western ways is to mold them in John Yatt's snivelling image?*
2002-12-09 14:12 | User Profile
Those Orcs did make me think of the Blacks, Wetbacks and Mongols who are all around us and wating to kill us. Sick ugly monsters just like the ones around us!
*Orcs are bred to be bad, they have no choice. The evil wizard Saruman even tells us that they are screwed-up elves. Elves made bad by a kind of devilish genetic modification programme. They deserve no mercy.
To cap it all, the races that Tolkien has put on the side of evil are then given a rag-bag of non-white characteristics that could have been copied straight from a BNP leaflet. Dark, slant-eyed, swarthy, broad-faced - it's amazing he doesn't go the whole hog and give them a natural sense of rhythm.
Scratch the surface of Tolkien's world and you'll find a curiously 20th-century myth. Begun in the 1930s, published in the 1950s, it's shot through with the preoccupations and prejudices of its time... Strip away the archaic turns of phrase and you find a set of basic assumptions that are frankly unacceptable in 21st-century Britain.*
Down with Orcs!!! :P :P
2002-12-09 21:02 | User Profile
Originally posted by Faust@Dec 9 2002, 08:12 *Down with Orcs!!!* :P :P
Let's have an Orcface party!
I wonder, though, if Tolkien's races were in correspondence with real human and humanoid races. The orcs are clearly negroes (or perhaps more of a negro-asian mixture), and I always thought the dwarves seemed vaguely like jews (minus the cultural-parasite aspect). The whites in the books seem derived from Norsemen, and hobbits from Britons. Where do the elves fit in all of this? Celts?
2002-12-09 21:12 | User Profile
Originally posted by Drakmal@Dec 9 2002, 15:02 Where do the elves fit in all of this?
American Southrons
2002-12-09 23:42 | User Profile
Originally posted by Drakmal@Dec 9 2002, 16:02 Where do the elves fit in all of this? Celts?
Probably a retelling of the myths of historical godlike folk who once walked the mist of early Europe. The Celts believed in the Tir-Na-Nog, etc.
BTW, I've been rereading the Two Towers, getting ready for the movie next week. A common theme run through it is the sadness at the passing away of noble peoples and noble cultures. In Tolkien's day, the dirty smokestacks of British industrialism were tearing up the old pastoral life (and had been making inroads for a couple of hundred years) and smaller ethnicities (like the Bretons in France and the Basques in Spain) were being swallowed up and their old folkways lost. It was a bitter pill, this progress. But I think the book plays even better today when the "Whiteskins" are more in peril than ever. But don't forget Britishers recently voted the LOTR the best story of the 20th Century.
2002-12-10 06:07 | User Profile
Yes! Down with orcs!!
I remember reading a description of the orcs when I was a teenager, and instantly recognizing that they were closely drawn from various non-caucasian races, particularly blacks. Their skin was "dark as that of a man of the south (obviously not referring to Dixie)" their arms were long like an ape's -and their behaviour speaks for itself. At the time I felt vaguely uncomfortable with these similarities. But, heck yeah, Tolkien, like every other educated person of the past until very recently, was a racist, deal with it!
2002-12-10 10:15 | User Profile
It's good that leftist p-ssies like Yatt are howling about Tolkien's racism just before the big premiere - it helps the slower-witted viewers who're just looking for an exciting adventure film see the parallels between Middle Earth and our White nations endangered by real life Orcs with their "wide, snuffling nostrils".
God, I can't wait for next week.....
2002-12-12 18:51 | User Profile
The orcs are demonic figures in contradistinction to the elves, who are demi-angelic. They're killed, not for racial purity as Yatt seems to think, but because there's no dealing with demons in a Christian worldview. You either cast them out, or you become enslaved to them.
The Hobbits, as someone else pointed out, are English (NOT British), the Roharrim are part Germanic and part Indian (feathers, not dots)--Tolkein was fascinated with James Fenimoore Cooper's The Leatherstocking Tales. Gondor is analogous to the Holy Roman Empire, with the stewards paralleling the arrangement Charlemagne's father was in. Minas Tirith is analogous to the city of Rome with seven circles instead of seven hills. The return of Aragorn to throne of Gondor was what Tolkein wished the Holy Roman Empire could have been, as opposed to what it was, a place that neither Holy, Roman or an empire.
The humans in the story from the east (Rhun) and the south (Harad) resemble the threats medieval Europe faced: The Huns and the Saracens, who allowed themselves, in Tolkein's view, to be seduced by evil through following false religions.
In short, Tolkein wasn't using a racial template from the 1930s, but a religious one from the 730s.
Best, P
2002-12-13 14:19 | User Profile
More on Tolkien
[url=http://www.spearhead-uk.com/0208-sg.html]http://www.spearhead-uk.com/0208-sg.html[/url]
The Mythos of J. R. R. Tolkien Stephen Goodson explores the sympathies of the author of The Lord of the Rings
According to a survey by the Folio Society in 1997, as well as a poll by Waterstone's, the booksellers, in January of that year, The Lord of the Rings was voted readers' "favourite book of all time." The recent filming of the book has popularised it once more, and stimulated speculation as to what fuelled this extraordinary work.
While many aficionados are content to treat The Lord of the Rings as an epic fantasy, some have detected an underlying repugnance for the industrialisation of the countryside and the damage of total war.
In June 1997, Ross Shimmon, chief executive of the Library Association, commented:-
?It's astonishing that The Lord of the Rings has this impact. The idea of a parallel world... I wonder whether it's something to do with trying to make sense of the world around us.?
Candour reader A 20-year subscription to the patriotic journal Candour and a faithful preservation of its 24 volumes, may well provide some clues as to what were Tolkien's innermost thoughts, ideas and beliefs.
Candour was founded by A. K. Chesterton, a cousin of G. K. Chesterton, as a successor to Truth magazine, of which he had previously been Deputy Editor. Chesterton, a distinguished veteran of two world wars, had earlier edited Oswald Mosley's publications in the 'Thirties. In 1954 he established the League of Empire Loyalists, whose antics and interventions at Tory meetings proved to be a constant source of irritation and embarrassment to both Eden and Macmillan. In 1967 the League merged with the old British National Party (not to be confused with the present party of the same name) and the Racial Preservation Society to form the National Front, with the Greater Britain Movement joining the merger a short time later. Chesterton assumed the role of leader.
In 1973, Tolkien's copies of Candour were sold out of his estate for ã10. In 1997, I inherited these newsletters from Chesterton's secretary Moyna Traill-Smith. The quotations from Candour which follow have all been underlined by Tolkien with a red biro.
Empire tragedy The dissolution of the British Empire was viewed by Tolkien as a tragedy, which would have permanent negative consequences for its indigenous populations:-
?Africa is not peopled by Black Europeans, but it is a continent full of tribes mentally and morally at the dawn of history.
?Self-government does not mean democracy - Liberia and Abyssinia are two warning lights. African hegemony would lead to the suicide of the White community in East and Central Africa and to the ruin of African hopes of sustained progress.? (3/10 August 1956, page 44)
Tolkien was disillusioned about the effectiveness of modern democracy, and considered both the media and high finance to be inimical to its success:-
?The concentration of the power of the Press has long since made a mockery of whatever degree of informed democracy we may have once known...? (10 February 1956, page 50)
?The true equation is ?democracy? = government by world financiers.?
?The main mark of modern governments is that we do not know who governs, de facto any more than de jure. We see the politician and not his backer; still less the backer of the backer; or, what is most important of all, the banker of the backer.
?Throned above all, in a manner without parallel in all past, is the veiled prophet of finance, swaying all men living by a sort of magic, and delivering oracles in a language not understood of the people.? (13 July 1956, page 12)
Monetary reformer It was in the field of monetary reform that Tolkien displayed his most passionate concern. His indignation about the evil of usury - the creation of money out of nothing and then lending it out at interest - is reflected repeatedly:-
?There should only be one source of money: one fountainhead from which flows the nation's blood to vitalise commerce and industry, ensure economic equity and justice and safeguard the welfare of the people... In other words, it has always been and still is our contention that the prerogative of creating and issuing the money of the nation should be restored to the State.? (3/10 August 1956, page 48)
Utilising the above background, a brief exegesis of The Lord of the Rings may be attempted. The centre of all evil is the Dark Lord Sauron, who has enslaved the people of Middle Earth through the rings of power. There are seven rings for the dwarf lords, five for the elven kings, nine for mortal men, and one to rule and bind them all in darkness and slavery forever. These gold rings were ?forged? in the fires of Mount Doom and are symbolic of the central banks and their monopolistic powers, which enable them to create money out of nothing and lend it out at interest to the gullible people. With their unlimited financial power, they are able to control the mass media and spellbind the general public with their propaganda. Eventually good prevails over evil and the Ringwraiths, the Orcs and Uruk Hai monsters are defeated.
Background So who was John Ronald Reuel Tolkien? Did he support the NF? Probably not in any meaningful way, but indisputably he was sympathetic to its anti-immigration and anti-Common Market policies, having endorsed Chesterton's views over two decades.
There is little doubt that Tolkien was a patriot, and that his conviction that the civilising effects of the British Empire were a blessing to be enjoyed by all has been proven correct. The torment of death, debt and destruction, which Africa has subsequently endured, bears regrettable testimony to that fact.
Above everything else Tolkien may be judged as an ardent supporter of monetary reform. He understood that money is not a form of wealth, but a medium for the exchange of goods and services. He sought social justice through the adoption of an honest money system, which would distribute the benefits of the technological age to all mankind, and provide a secure basis for a future of progress and prosperity.
Tolkien could have written a treatise on political economy, and, if published, it would in all likelihood have achieved only a limited circulation. By employing a powerful allegory, he has subconsciously embraced and influenced the minds of untold millions with his mythos.
Stephen Goodson is leader of the Abolition of Income Tax, and Usury Party in South Africa, information about which can be obtained from its website at www.abolishtax.org.za.
Related threads:
Tolkien's Politics [url=http://forum.originaldissent.com/index.php?act=ST&f=10&t=2749&hl=tolkien]http://forum.originaldissent.com/index.php...2749&hl=tolkien[/url]
Lord Of The Rings [url=http://forum.originaldissent.com/index.php?act=ST&f=10&t=814&hl=tolkien]http://forum.originaldissent.com/index.php...=814&hl=tolkien[/url]
2002-12-13 17:53 | User Profile
Candour reader A 20-year subscription to the patriotic journal Candour and a faithful preservation of its 24 volumes, may well provide some clues as to what were Tolkien's innermost thoughts, ideas and beliefs.
Better still, are the notes and commentaries he wrote himself, along with the testimony of those who discussed the book as it was being developed, chiefly C.S. Lewis and the other "Inklings," a group of anti-modernist literati at Oxford. It is important to look at these magazines, but they have to be put into context. They were largely published and written well after LOTR had been completed. They give us evidence into the what Tolkein may have been thinking in the 50s,60s and 70s, but they do not tell us directly what he was thinking when he wrote the Ring Trilogy.
Utilising the above background, a brief exegesis of The Lord of the Rings may be attempted. The centre of all evil is the Dark Lord Sauron, who has enslaved the people of Middle Earth through the rings of power. There are seven rings for the dwarf lords, five for the elven kings, nine for mortal men, and one to rule and bind them all in darkness and slavery forever. These gold rings were ?forged? in the fires of Mount Doom and are symbolic of the central banks and their monopolistic powers, which enable them to create money out of nothing and lend it out at interest to the gullible people. With their unlimited financial power, they are able to control the mass media and spellbind the general public with their propaganda. Eventually good prevails over evil and the Ringwraiths, the Orcs and Uruk Hai monsters are defeated.
A bit prosaic, Tolkein rejected such direct allegories being applied to his work. The Ring comes from Plato's Republic in I believe the second book where the "Ring of Gyges" is introduced. It made it's wearer invisible, and thus exempted him from suffering the normal consequences of moral failure. The Ring, according to Tolkein's scheme, summed up the ill-effects of the scientific revolution. Man used mechanization to "free" himself of nature's constraints, yet in doing so he became a greater slave to his machine, and, in the mix, lost the habit of being virtuous. It works on something of a Platonic scheme. Morgoth's evil descends upon Sauron, who is a weak shadow of his superior, and Sauron's evil descends upon Saruman, who is a weaker shadow twice removed.
This doesn't exclude the idea of central finance and concentrated media, by the way. I think Tolkein would find this an appropriate application of his work; i.e. he would say that Big Finance works like the Ring, but he would reject the idea that his Ring was an allegory based on finance; that is, to reverse the terms and say the Ring works like Big Finance. Remember, he wrote his books as myth: they were intended to explain the world, not be explained by it.
The points the author makes about democracy and immigration are generally correct. Tolkein's Hobbits didn't really practice democracy; they lived in an anarchical society with little to no government. The catch was that it could also be a very conformist society. Bilbo's ancestors, the Tooks, were looked down on for their weird behavior, as was Bilbo himself. There are also a few lines in LOTR that descry the idea of immigration. I think in the Fellowship there's a mention of the danger of allowing refugees coming up the "Greenway" from the troubled regions in the south to settle in Bree and the Shire.
To the blacks in Africa. I'm not sure if your reason for posting this was refutation of my argument, but I think worth repeating anyhow that Tolkein did not see the Orcs as being Negroes. The word Orc means "demon" in old Anglo-Saxon, and that is what Tolkein saw them as being. In the Hobbit, where Bilbo and the Dwarves are captured by Goblins/Orcs, Tolkein describes the Orcs as being clever, inventive and hardworking. He intimates, in a mythological way, that they are the ones who invented the machines of war. This hardly fits a 1930s view of Negroes, which generally holds that they are mentally slow and shiftless.
Best, P
2002-12-13 22:27 | User Profile
"This doesn't exclude the idea of central finance and concentrated media, by the way. I think Tolkein would find this an appropriate application of his work; i.e. he would say that Big Finance works like the Ring, but he would reject the idea that his Ring was an allegory based on finance; that is, to reverse the terms and say the Ring works like Big Finance. Remember, he wrote his books as myth: they were intended to explain the world, not be explained by it." -P
Yes. myth to some extent...albeit real, (and yes in its biological impacts on us is already also that), or imagined...keeps us from jumping into one another's bed to stick the knife in the windpipe... It's sort of like, if, can you imagine if everyone believed Alan Greenspan was the bum, nextdoor? Of course he is, but big finance, & myth remove his arse... I suppose... elsewhere... So "P" is on target... myth explains our world...