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
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.
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
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
he was a man who could walk through some trees and see elves. yeah, the last gasp of the medieval mind.
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
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.
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.
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JRR Tolkeon: I quite like this Terry Pratchett fellow’s works
i’m not sure how much angrier he could get tbh
(See also Tolkien endorsing direct violent action as the only bright spot at the bottom, the rest is tolkien explaining anarcho-monarchism)
This last one is one of the most interesting tolkien letters imo bc it has this brief expression of hope that whatever the ussr does, it cant be worse than the west
All good vs evil stories of the absolute can and will be coopted by fascists. They simplify all conflict in a way that numbs critical thought and people’s ability to analyse. Everything is reduced to biological essentialism, that the enemy is ontologically evil and that’s that.
Even liberal bullshit like Harry Potter can be coopted by fascism simply by framing the enemy as whatever out-group you want them to be. Clearly to liberals they are fascists, but to fascists Voldemort can be anyone. You want him to be Netanyahu? Done. You want him to be Xi? Putin? Done. You want the Death Eaters to be the PSL central committee? Easy. Doesn’t matter.
Good vs evil stories all work with fascism. Conflict must be represented in a more complex way to avoid it.
LotR isnt absolute tho, and explicitly rejects the morals the fash take from it lol. The reality is the fash will take what they like and coopt it (if they even read the book—my impression is most right wing engagement is with the whitewashed jackson movies)
Tolkien actually has a letter talking about this absolutist interpretation and how untrue it is:
That second last sentence in particular is key: we do not see the civilians of the East or South, their regular people. We see their soldiers who are allied with Sauron to wage a war for global domination. We see, repeatedly, that some of these soldiers (orcs included) have mixed feelings—but not so much as to lead them to desert or question bad or evil orders; much like the western soldiers theyre based on.
When enemy soldiers flee, as after the battle at the black gate, they arent chased down and exterminated and, unlike the movies, they dont just dissolve into dust bc, in the books, they are people (albeit extremely warped people, like the British of today). With time for their society to not be a slave-military of sauron, they will likely change.
The closest thing to a pure good LotR has is the Ents (and even they can go rotten!). The closest to a pure evil is Sauron who, again, explicitly, did not start evil and is not “ontologically” evil; he is a powerful being who has chosen to amass power to himself and destroy nature, becoming evil, and constantly choosing to do evil.
Yeah, there’s the evil tree (or an ent who became a tree, or a tree becoming an ent) in the Old Forest. There’s evil even in the greatest strong hold of good like Bombadil’s realm.
Good vs evil stories all work with fascism. Conflict must be represented in a more complex way to avoid it.
Two exceptions come to mind, Wolfenstein and Avatar.
Chuds like the corporate colonizers from Avatar and think they’re cool.
I don’t think that would be alleviated by making them more sympathetic.
This is not a counter to Beanis Brain’s point. It would be if chuds identified with the Na’vi, and in that sense coopted the simple good vs evil story for their own narratives. Instead Avatar so clearly lays out the nature (
) of the players in the conflict that chuds can only look at it and say“RDA did nothing wrong!
”
In Harry Potter’s case, their cooption worked so well they even convinced the author to be a fascist!
they also do this with class struggle
Not going to comment on weather I think he was racist beyond being a product of his time(not to engage in moral relativism), see the ‘moral geography’ in LOTR although he makes a point to explain that not all Easterlings etc are evil
But one of his explicit goals was to actually create a new British mythology, as he believed that there was a lot of English mythology that had been lost, he was especially enraptured of Welsh mythology like the Mabinogion and Arthurian legends and strove to create/emulate something like that for England
So imo he’d have a mixed reaction probably proud his work had such influence and success but wouldn’t like the specific white supremacist/neo-nazi interpretation as it conflicts with his morals and politics derived from his Catholic Anarchist beliefs, and he would be aghast at the appropriation of concepts/names he came up with for tools of state oppression like Palantir and Andruil
Unrelated, but it pisses me off that published Soviet lotr fanfic is the lazy “what if sauron was the good guy tho???” instead of the more interesting “how did the orc-proletariat work against sauron in the belly of the beast to help ensure his fall”
oof this ain’t it
He’d get back into his magic dwarfen time machine and write a new book
“Shiiieeettt, I dunno, I’m just thinkin about elves n shiiieeettt.”
Basically this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T70-HTlKRXoI found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
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