Like if you’d told him that some turbodweeb would name his automated gestapo machine Palantir without a shred of irony, or some other dweeb naming a weapons company Anduril

  • huf [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    56·
    3 days ago

    agony-shivering

    he had his extremely weird brainworms but this would’ve hit him hard by all that i’ve read on his politics and relation to central government. he already hated industrialization, you can imagine what he would’ve thought of whatever the fuck this is that we’re doing now.

    • ComradeRat [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      40·
      3 days ago

      Yeah tolkien, for all his catholic and aristocratic brainworms, was a relentless hater of central government, industrialisation and empire in general

      Like, theres letters where he calls british soldiers orcs, compares them to the nazis says many civilians are similarly orclike. He was also opposed to the spread of English at the expense of native languages, and expressed consistent hatred for the British Empire

      • ComradeRat [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        29·
        3 days ago

        These two have interesting aspects of both his brainworms and his hatred of empire, industrialism, homogenisation, etc

        He’s basically the last gasp of old school reaction (feudalism reacting to and rejecting capitalism) in the west imo, modern reactionaries dont have any opposition to the capitalist project

        • huf [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
          25·
          3 days ago

          he was a man who could walk through some trees and see elves. yeah, the last gasp of the medieval mind.

          • newacctidk [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
            15·
            3 days ago

            And not only that, he used to be able to walk through those trees without being exhausted and ill as a result of a stroll. Losing that because of WW1 made him value that sense of magic so so deeply

        • FortifiedAttack [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
          15·
          3 days ago

          God I relate to that first section a lot. There’s no place to escape the same tired discussions, no place where these stupid endless problems are solved. There is no escape from this hell.

      • BeanisBrain [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        9·
        3 days ago

        I can’t think of Tolkien without thinking of Marx’ writings on “feudal socialism”:

        In order to arouse sympathy, the aristocracy was obliged to lose sight, apparently, of its own interests, and to formulate their indictment against the bourgeoisie in the interest of the exploited working class alone. Thus, the aristocracy took their revenge by singing lampoons on their new masters and whispering in his ears sinister prophesies of coming catastrophe.

        In this way arose feudal Socialism: half lamentation, half lampoon; half an echo of the past, half menace of the future; at times, by its bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart’s core; but always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history.

        The aristocracy, in order to rally the people to them, waved the proletarian alms-bag in front for a banner. But the people, so often as it joined them, saw on their hindquarters the old feudal coats of arms, and deserted with loud and irreverent laughter.

        One section of the French Legitimists and “Young England” exhibited this spectacle.

        In pointing out that their mode of exploitation was different to that of the bourgeoisie, the feudalists forget that they exploited under circumstances and conditions that were quite different and that are now antiquated. In showing that, under their rule, the modern proletariat never existed, they forget that the modern bourgeoisie is the necessary offspring of their own form of society.

        For the rest, so little do they conceal the reactionary character of their criticism that their chief accusation against the bourgeois amounts to this, that under the bourgeois régime a class is being developed which is destined to cut up root and branch the old order of society.

        What they upbraid the bourgeoisie with is not so much that it creates a proletariat as that it creates a revolutionary proletariat.

        In political practice, therefore, they join in all coercive measures against the working class; and in ordinary life, despite their high-falutin phrases, they stoop to pick up the golden apples dropped from the tree of industry, and to barter truth, love, and honour, for traffic in wool, beetroot-sugar, and potato spirits.

        As the parson has ever gone hand in hand with the landlord, so has Clerical Socialism with Feudal Socialism.

        Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist tinge. Has not Christianity declaimed against private property, against marriage, against the State? Has it not preached in the place of these, charity and poverty, celibacy and mortification of the flesh, monastic life and Mother Church? Christian Socialism is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat.