I finally got around to watching this Lord of the Rings movie everyone talks about. I ended up shaking with rage during most of it. This movie is so thoroughly racist, and contains so many thinly veiled allusions to the war on "terror", that it can hardly be a concidence that mr Tolkien decided to release this movie three months before the Iraq war.

I didn't watch the first movie in this series, (and there's a third coming out next month), but the story goes something like this: There are these hobbits, who are extremely kind, goodhearted people. The hobbits have a powerful ring they're trying to take somewhere. To help them with this there are a wizard, a man, an elf and a dwarf. All of them just happen to be white, and to underscore this point for the dull-witted, the wizard is referred to as "Gandalf the White". He even dresses in all white clothes! (All that's missing is the hood.) The man, Aragorn, is some kind of übermensch, a descendant of the superior Dunedain "race". He's 87 years old, we're told, but looks half his age - thanks to his "superior" genes, no doubt.

Working hard to foil the plans of these good, decent white folks are the "evil" Saruman, and the even more "evil" Sauron, rulers of two countries called Isengard and Mordor. Both are portrayed as near-demonic in their hatred of our white heroes. Sauron is no more than a big, red eye, hovering in the air, clearly implying that he's some kind of "Devil". Both have massive armies at their disposal, consisting entirely of filthy, ugly monsters that happen to be black, every single one of them.

The allegory to America's crusade in the Middle East is obvious, complete with a Good, white country (Israel) surrounded by "evil" darkies (Arabs): The human enclave of Rohan and Gondor, (a shining "white" city), nudged as it is in between Isengard and Mordor. It is clearly on the brink of being wiped out - the exact same defense used by Israel to justify its occupation of Arab soil. Every trick in the book is employed to dehumanize the enemy. Saruman's forces are shown committing "terrorism" against a small village, as if that's somehow the very definition of "evil". And the most effective way to dehumanize someone is of course to show them not as human at all. The enemy forces in Two Towers are literally subhuman, and most of the "heroes" are literally superhuman.

The ring is clearly a metaphor for the nuclear bomb. The good guys have it, and everyone's fine with that, but when the "bad" guys want the same power, that somehow makes them evil. Hypocrisy, anyone? Iraq, anyone?

But, I hear the skeptical reader protest, this is just a movie. You're not supposed to take it seriously. Does everything have to be about politics? Can't we just enjoy a movie like this for what it is, four hours of mindless entertainment? But that is naive. In the current climate, there is no such thing as an apolitical movie, or even an apolitical statement. Politics is all around us, in the air we breathe, in all we do and say. And in this case, the political undertones reek like the breath of one the Saruman's "urukhai" monsters. In one scene, for instance, one of the evil characters, a diplomat from Isengard, mocks the good guys for being "warmongers". And the good king of Rohan, formerly fooled into negotiating with the all-evil Saruman, is told, upon regaining his senses(!), that perhaps he'll feel better "with a sword in your hand". Lets try rewriting that in modern terms: A man coming out of a deep psychological trauma is handed a gun by the doctor who healed him, and is told "maybe you'll feel better with a gun in your hand". Tolkien isn't a right-wing gun nut, he's a right-wing sword nut! Same shit, different century.

And it gets worse. Consider: Almost all the major characters in the movie are male. Most of the women are weak and childlike background characters, who must be stashed away and protected from the "evil" darkies by the brave, heroic males. The two female side characters are both passive and weak, good for nothing but to cook (badly!) for the men.

And in a callous endorsement of the American practice of sending teenage boys to fight the president's dirty wars in faraway countries, the heroes of Two Towers order even male children to take part in the big battle at the end. One of the kids gets a lesson in sword fighting from the übermensch Aragorn himself. And there's no ambiguity! No hint that it may be wrong to send children to fight the petty wars of their tyrannic leaders. Note also that there are no women fighting - only male children. In Tolkien's universe, even boys outrank adult women.

And there is of course no hint whatsoever that perhaps the other side isn't evil at all, that perhaps it too has its reasons for acting the way it does. Has anyone ever tried talking to Saruman and Sauron? Perhaps they too have grievances. Perhaps if everyone just sat down around a table and talked it all out, some acceptable compromise could be worked out between the white people and the black people. Perhaps they could share this ring between them? It's clearly more than powerful enough for one group alone to monopolize. But no, the conflict can only be resolved, it would seem, by slaughtering all the black people, while heroic music pumps out of the loudspeakers.

Look beneath the fairy tale wrapping. Every scene in this movie screams out the outdated idea that the world can be divided into us, who are good, and them, who are evil. This bipolar worldview is typical of the real life Gandalf and Aragorn - George W. Bush and Tony Blair. The Two Towers - funded by big Hollywood corporations with known Zionist connections - can thus only be seen as an elaborate propaganda spectacle aimed at Bush skeptics at home and abroad. And we Europeans, sadly, are falling for it. Another battle lost to the evil forces of neo-imperialism.

Well actually, J. R. R. Tolkien is dead...and the story Tolkien told was supposedly (although I have always thought it was a stretch of the imagiation) a takeoff on World War II. Regardless it is rather myopic to just deconstruct the text into a racist diatribe. It is a story of imagination and wonder, of good and bad, of trust and betrayal. And a good story, I feel, in the end. I don't know how the new movie is but plan on seeing it.

To fall into the the whole postmodernist reinterpretative mode also is to mimic and extend the teachings of Paul De Man, the founder of deconstructive postmodernist theory, who was also a notorious Nazi symapathizer.

Then again, the symbology of the film is troubling at times, but not so much as that in the other consumerist and patriotic trash out there IMHO.

Your analysis, although with some truth, is full of holes. First of all, the tale is based off of Nordic (i.e. Norwegian) folk stories and mythology. Therefore, since heavy migration of people of culture was non-existent in Norway during those ancient times, it can in no way be expected for there to just appear people of color. Second, the stories were written long before a real knowledge of the Ku Klux Klan existed, so the white robe of Gandalf has absolutely nothing to do with the KKK. Furthermore, the story has absolutely NO relevance to the politics that you speak of. The political nature of the film is that of an anti-industrial nature. For instance, Sarumon is the destroyer of all that is green, frequently cutting down trees and replacing the natural world with a metallic industry. This is very evident, especially in the part of the story involving the Ents (the talking trees). Any conclusions drawn about the story representing George Bush, etc. is purely a delusion of the mind, since these people did not even exist when the stories were written. Not only that, but the popular anti-war, anti-bush, blah blah blah rhetoric going around in the liberal left is clearly less important than the ongoing war that humans call CIVILIZATION. READ ABOUT IT!




There is validity in your statements with the movie, however. Nowhere in the actual book does it describe Sarumon's army as being black skinned with dreadlocks, and to me that is bullshit. The director obviously IS a racist fucker, maybe without even realizing it. Also, the issue about the few women who are represented in the story, yes, it is a very patriarchical viewpoint, and also deserves scorn. Fuck Hollywood in the Face, of course.

Your analysis, although with some truth, is full of holes. First of all, the tale is based off of Nordic (i.e. Norwegian) folk stories and mythology. Therefore, since heavy migration of people of culture was non-existent in Norway during those ancient times, it can in no way be expected for there to just appear people of color. Second, the stories were written long before a real knowledge of the Ku Klux Klan existed, so the white robe of Gandalf has absolutely nothing to do with the KKK. Furthermore, the story has absolutely NO relevance to the politics that you speak of. The political nature of the film is that of an anti-industrial nature. For instance, Sarumon is the destroyer of all that is green, frequently cutting down trees and replacing the natural world with a metallic industry. This is very evident, especially in the part of the story involving the Ents (the talking trees). Any conclusions drawn about the story representing George Bush, etc. is purely a delusion of the mind, since these people did not even exist when the stories were written. Not only that, but the popular anti-war, anti-bush, blah blah blah rhetoric going around in the liberal left is clearly less important than the ongoing war that humans call CIVILIZATION. READ ABOUT IT!
There is validity in your statements with the movie, however. Nowhere in the actual book does it describe Sarumon's army as being black skinned with dreadlocks, and to me that is bullshit. The director obviously IS a racist fucker, maybe without even realizing it. Also, the issue about the few women who are represented in the story, yes, it is a very patriarchical viewpoint, and also deserves scorn. Fuck Hollywood in the Face, of course.

Jesus, what a bunch of wankers.

...just don't get satire.

Sad, really.

At this point can we all finally agree that SOMe people on the far left are simply idiots?

Exactly the type of morons who are the exact equals to their mpronic counterparts on the right who thought the teletubbies were gay and subversive.

Beyond the fact that the writer doesn't even know what the hell he's taljing about with regard to the actual story, characters or history of the trilogy, his notion that it was released "by Tolkien" just prior to Iraq is simply a joke.

Excellent EV though.

sheesh! What a putz.

I thought these books were written in the 40s. People sure as hell knew what the Klan were then because it was their second heyday -- they had some power in some areas, and it wasn't yet illegal to be a white terrorist. etc - you are ignorant.

Perhaps the movie seems to mirror "reality" because "reality" is being manipulated to serve the needs of war. How do we know anything about Iraq at all, except through the media.

I've never been to Iraq. I am not in contact with anyone in Iraq. I am not there. I am not a soldier. All we have to go on are the stories. The stories, at least from the people pushing for war, are going to discuss the world in terms of good and evil, light and dark, because it'll make sense to us.

Maybe the movie isn't propaganda for this war, but for war in general.

..you remain a simpleton.

...composed of a mixture of good and evil, of light and dark.

Not everything is a shade of gray. Evil exists and walks the earth.

People are able to be unbelievably selfless and generous. A man drowns while saving the life of a stranger. A woman donates a kidney to her neighbor. Rescue crews work hours to free a puppy trapped in a pipe.

Conversely, people are capable of unmitigated, blackest evil. Mass graves. Raping a woman in front of her children. Forcing a torture victim to eat his own eyeball or testicle. Driving an airliner into a building full of people.

Denying that good and evil exist, that there are only shades of gray, both denies the human capacity for great good and gives those who commit great evil free reign. You can try to "uderstand root causes" all you want, but it will not change the fact that there simply are evil people in the world.

Fortunately, the vast majority of humanity falls somewhere between, hopefully nearer the "good"side. The best of us are almost angelic; the worst of us are the stuff of nightmares.

Did you copy that from somewhere ??

That's really profound. Your politics are somewhere to the right of Atilla the Hun yet you can come up with someting like this.....

Nonanarchist misinterpreted me. He implies that I said that the world does *not* contain good and evil. What I said is that we don't know what's happening in the war, and that the reality is being shoehorned into a story about good and evil. Thus, when we see that *fictional* story about good and evil, it recalls the "real" story of this war. (Two completely separate ideas.)

In my first paragraph, I referred to the KKK. I called them terrorists. That seems like a declaration that the KKK is evil. Is there any doubt?

I believe that if we really knew what was going on there, we'd find numerous instances of good, and numerous instances of evil. I am pretty certain we're killing a lot of civilian children, if only because we've always killed them (as have all wars). I am also certain that many oppressed people are experiencing freedom for the first time.

Reality is complicated, so we spin stories. During times of war, the main stories that are spun are by the leaders, on both sides, who need to drum up support for the war. They will dissemble and lie. They always have, and I assume, always will. The simplified stories become not only the story of the war, but the its justification, and while the veterans are alive, the history of the war.

Later, as the veterans pass away, the horror stories come out, because they want to exorcise their demons: the mass graves, the children massacred, the starvation, body parts taken as souveniers, gang rapes, prostitutes, slavery in prison, torture. They say "war is hell" and then keel over and die.

In that moment, that's the truth. It's in the twilight of life when people remember their lives, and wonder if it's all been worth it. The stories come out, God seems more real, and fear of damnation becomes a real fear.

When was the last good war? The Spanish American War? WW1? WW2? Korea? Vietnam? Laos? Cambodia? El Salvador? Guatemala? Nicaragua? Colombia? Gulf War 1? Afghanistan? Gulf War 2?

I think it's Greneda, the bullshit war. Probably, there wasn't much horror to go around, and I don't expect any deathbed confessions from the veterans of Greneda.

It's all mine. Thanks; I appreciate it.

more rational: Sorry I misunderstood you.

Note to all: I posted the original article. The place I found it had linked to it as a pice of satire.

Apparently, it was a little too close to some peoples' feelings.

But I did not post the comment. Another impersonator did. Perhaps you.

I don't feel any need to compliment myself under someone else's name.

Thanks, then, are due to the ML imposter.

I did think the "right of Atilla the Hun" bit was funny, too.

The orcs are in complete armor, you can't tell what color they are. Concivlby they could have been pale since they are mutilated Elves. Tolkien used good examples of gender role reversal. Eowynthe sheild maiden who wants to fight in the war and does so under the sutberfudge of Dernhelm and Faramir the man who wants to end the warr then hole up with a book. Really just read the book.