In the interview linked to below, China Mieville claims that high fantasy is conservative, and that due to its prominence the fantasy genre in general is judged as conservative by critics. This seems pretty uncontroversial to me, but over at Monsters and Manuals this claim was disputed as a shallow interpretation of Tolkien and of high fantasy generally. It’s not just the 3 people I’ve been arguing with over there, either (hi guys!). Many people try to rescue Tolkien (or their other favourite high fantasy writers) from this claim, because they think that somehow being conservative means they shouldn’t be reading it (or that people think they shouldn’t be). But it doesn’t work. Tolkien’s books are fun but they are politically pretty obnoxious, and the same goes for high fantasy generally. I’m going to expand on Mieville’s throwaway points in that interview, and add in a few of my own, with examples. Then we’ll discuss the core issue of choices. It’s been a while since I read much high fantasy, so I hope my examples aren’t too off beam – and of course when i say “High Fantasy novels say that…” I don’t mean every novel shares every point. Just add a silent “in general” to my phrases. Let’s first look at the characteristics common to most high fantasy novels:
- Racial Essentialism: This is the main criticism of Tolkien, and it’s definitely a strong one. High Fantasy tends to divide the world into races with really clear essential characteristics, both physically and psychologically. The physical characteristics are exaggerated, and the psychological characteristics are really restrictive. Dwarves are stubborn and proud, elves are more intelligent and creative than anyone else, etc. This extends to the evil races too, which are clearly intellectually and socially inferior. The stereotypes of the evil races clearly relate to stereotypes of black people that were extant in the 30s, and in general the evil races also happen to be swarthy and kind of, well, blackish. If the humans ever have any racial diversity, this also follows strict characteristics – the “cruel haradrim”, for example. It doesn’t necessarily matter whether the races follow black/white colour lines, because the key conservative point is the essentialism. Races are different, and they shouldn’t mix, and when they do society degenerates. The model for Gondor and the mingling of High and Common Men is a clear reference to racial theory of the 30s. Wriggle as much as you like, but Tolkien is an established eugenicist and his writing doesn’t shy away from that. This trope is repeated in an awful lot of subsequent high fantasy – it’s a struggle to find any that doesn’t contain this idea, and this idea is a cornerstone of 20th century conservatism.
- Racial exclusion: almost all heroes in high fantasy are white. For more information about this – and for some example of what it means and has meant historically for non-white readers – I recommend this article, which I came to from Ursula le Guin’s website. This problem has been discussed extensively as well in the world of literary criticism, and as far as I can tell it’s not up for debate anymore. High Fantasy is white. Now, it may be that the authors only want to write about their own colour, but if that’s the only reason, it’s kind of an unfortunate coincidence that racial exclusionism also happens to be an essential element of much conservative politics.
- The male saviour: Most fantasy stories involve a male saviour rescuing a crumbling nation state from an external threat. The saviour is always male, and of course white. Harry Potter, Belgarath, Frodo (not to mention everyone else in that story), Eragon, the kid in the Robert Jordan series, Druss, Tanis Half-elven, Conan, whatever… they’re all male. When women enter high fantasy they do so as teachers or wise women, or occasionally in support roles.
- External threats and nation states: In LoTR, the world of men was crumbling through racial intermixing, and awaited a racially pure king to resurrect the nation state. In most High Fantasy there is an external threat which only a strong nation state can protect against, and the role of the hero is to uncover their puissance and take power over the nation state, guiding it again to greatness. Although the nation state was not a strong concept in Dragonlance, the external threat was (it was an evil god); but the presence of both together is prevalent throughout the genre. The enemy within is usually a nerdy, anti-war figure who accomodates the enemy out of fear and is used as a spy or traitor. Consider the Wheel of Time, that awful Terry Goodkind stuff, Stephen Donaldson, the Worm Ourouboros, Eragon, the Belgariad, Magician, etc. It’s a very common idea.
- Gender roles: sure, in modern High Fantasy there are sometimes female characters, but the world itself is continually recreated as a world in which women serve and men rule. It’s fantasy, anything goes, but for some reason women always are “goodwives” (shudder) or feisty aunts at best. And the female characters are not acually quite the feminist achievements one might expect – read this review of the Wheel of Time for a good description of how female characters often serve to reiterate classic stereotypes of feminine weakness, intransigence or triviality. Often as well the powerful ones get knocked down a peg or two before the end, and although women in general can’t rule in these worlds, they are often over-represented amongst the bad guys (e.g., there are two female characters in Dragonlance and one is evil). Harry Potter is a good example of this – Hermione is ostensibly a strong female character, but at every climax in the first novels she is knocked unconscious or otherwise unable to be an active participant in the plan she helped formulate, ultimately being rescued by the boys.
- Nuclear family: we know that in the middle ages Nuclear families were not the norm, and that this is a modern invention, as is childhood as a concept. Yet High Fantasy worlds – which are sticklers for the truth when it comes to the role of women in peasant societies – seem to be very good at ignoring the real family structures of their carefully reconstructed societies, and instead populating them with perfect nuclear families. The nuclear family is a touchstone conservative issue, and is reproduced out of time and place in almost all fantasy novels.
- Inherited Wealth: Not necessarily in the form of money, because in fantasy worlds money plays second fiddle to magic, which is usually inherited either as a talent or through attendance at a special school which it is only possible to enter through selection. Even though magic breaks the rules of conservation of matter, and therefore in principle enables High Fantasy worlds to be utopias like The Culture, magic is always hoarded by a powerful class who dispense it amongst their favourites. Harry Potter is a really good example of this – there is an elite world which he is allowed into by dint of his having inherited this form of wealth, and throughout the novels he is given for free things which only the very rich can afford. Free to those who can afford it, very expensive to those who can’t – a conservative trope, and well reproduced through the medium of magic.
- Heteronormative: do we know of any gay characters anywhere in High Fantasy? How coincidental, in a world of nuclear families…
- Glorification of war: having read the Silmarillion, I find it impossible to comprehend the claim that Tolkien doesn’t glorify war. That’s all his stories are about. I suppose you could excuse it because he’s british, but still… it’s also not the case that “glorifying war” means saying “yay! more people dying”. Literature which glorifies war always talks about the tragedy, the loss of youth, the hardship. It’s part of the admiration of muscular masculinity and discipline which is going on beneath this glorification. It’s a hard life to be a soldiering bloke, but how noble it is, etc. This is prevalent throughout fantasy too – in The Worm Ouroubouros, at the end of the novel the battles are over and they all go back to their homes to plan the next war because life without war is boring. The Sturm side story in Dragonlance is a classic example of this mixed glorification/tragedy complex. High Fantasy stories without war at their centre are rare.
- Genocide is cool: because of the glorification of war and the racial essentialism, it’s inevitable that the bad guys are going to be wiped out to a man. This has been discussed extensively as a criticism of D&D and it’s true – there is an unquestioning acceptance throughout High Fantasy that mass murder is acceptable. It’s worth noting that when the genre began, eugenics had taken over in anti-semitic literature, and extermination as the “final solution” was beginning to become an acceptable notion, because racial essentialism based on biology (rather than culture) demands it. You can read about this link in Hitler’s Willing Executioners (which is otherwise a pretty dodgy book). I don’t think anyone believes Tolkien supported genocide in reality, but the logic of High Fantasy demands it and that is essentially what was planned throughout the novels, by both sides. It has continued to be an acceptable act in subsequent iterations of the genre.
- Libertarian or authoritarian communities: High Fantasy tends to allow the good guys only two types of community. On the one hand we see small rural idylls run on generally libertarian or communitarian grounds, because life is so simple that they can be self-managed, and there is no racial mixing to cause crime; and on the other we see large kingdoms run by strong men, usually inheriting their position but sometimes voted in. The concept of a strong man appointed by popular election was popular in the interwar period, when liberalism and democracy were beginning to look a bit shonky, and it was supported by a much larger segment of the world than just Germany and Italy. In fact most of Europe was under this leadership, and many in England and America beyond Oswald Mosley were looking for the same thing. This is reflected in modern High Fantasy, whose origins lie in that turbulent time. In contrast, the bad guys often have a classless or semi-classless society, run by a strong man or sometimes anarchist, often with strong inter-racial mixing. Sounds a bit like a well-described conflict from that time…
We can’t help that the original stories were written in the interwar period when racial essentialism, nuclear families, eugenics and dictatorship were popular. But we can help the choices we make as modern authors. Why, for example, do modern authors decide to be meticulously careful in their reproduction of mediaeval gender roles for their fantasy society, but completely ignore the family structures of the time? In both cases, the result fits perfectly with a conservative project. Why do they go to great lengths to reproduce the poverty of that time, while sprinkling the world with a series of perpetual motion machines (i.e. magic) which could solve all economic problems overnight? Because they want to reproduce and intensify structures of inherited wealth, and present them as inevitable, objective facts even where the solution is freely available. This is why those early fantasy novels provided the means to ensure free health care to everyone (healing magic) but you never saw it in action – except when the king goes to war, and his soldiers go to the healing tent.
Many authors are no doubt reproducing these tropes without thought, but when you reproduce a conservative worldview without consideration, you are by definition being conservative. That’s what conservatives do. Some authors (such as Goodkind and Tolkien) are more actively using their work as a political screed in favour of conservatism. The beauty of the High Fantasy world is that it is fun, so you can reproduce these things without boring your readers’ socks off. But let’s not pretend that the world couldn’t be just as interesting without a few changes – women and men being equal, for example, or racial intermixing being positive instead of negative. And if you don’t want to do these things, you have to accept the conservative label which this kind of thoughtless reproduction of conservative politics will earn you.
Compromise and Conceit 
June 1, 2009 at 2:13 pm
[…] race, racialism, racism, rpg — jatori @ 3:13 pm There’s an excellent post on Conservatism and High Fantasy at Compromise and Conceit. I recommend that you go read […]
June 1, 2009 at 2:23 pm
I’ll write a response to this in my blog but I just want to point out that in no respect is Tolkien a eugenicist and (I think) you’re not clear about what eugenics actually is. Eugenics is the belief that a given population or the human species as a whole can be improved by selective breeding. Tolkien never advocated this, as far as I’m aware, and his anti-government libertarian views would most certainly set him dead against it. (It should be noted that many if not most proponents of eugenics were not political conservatives but “progressives”, liberals and Marxists.)
I think the charge that you’re levelling at him is that he was opposed to miscegenation, i.e. the mixing of races. In fact Tolkien never espoused such views. Indeed he famously wrote in a letter to a German correspondent during the 1930s that it was to his regret that he didn’t have any Jewish blood. Also, don’t forget that breeding between races is fairly common in his work and is often portrayed in a positive light (e.g. Elrond).
More generally, you seem to treat “conservative” like it’s a dirty word. Stop doing that. “Conservatism” is as respectable (or unrespectable) a position as is liberalism, and the number of conservatives who “reproduce a conservative worldview without consideration” is the same as the number of liberals who reproduce a liberal worldview without consideration; neither group is more respectable than the other. I could count on one hand the number of political liberals I’ve met who have a modicum of relexivity over their beliefs – and the number of idiotic blinkered liberals I’ve met could fill a bus station.
June 1, 2009 at 2:50 pm
I’m aware of what eugenics is, and it needs to be borne in mind when reading anything from the interwar period that eugenics was the backdrop against which enlightened scientists and political thinkers operated in that time. It was assumed, the way democracy is assumed now. He was definitely opposed to racial mixing, and his novels show a very strong and clear belief in racial determinism, an essential component of eugenics. It’s worth noting that a lot of people at the time who were pro-eugenic and anti racial mixing were also not anti-semitic, considering Jews to be a superior rather than an inferior race. This is why Tolkien wishe dhe had a bit of Jewish in him, because he wanted to be smarter, and this is why elrond is a good mix – because the elves civilise anyone they procreate with[1].
I don’t treat conservative as a dirty word, but conservatism is by definition the process of reproducing social relations as they stand now. The ingredients of conservatism which I describe in this post aren’t even necessarily all relevant to British or Australian conservatism as it stands now, since conservatism in our two countries has a strong liberal tradition. But in the interwar period, when the groundwork for High Fantasy was laid, these were the traits of conservatism, and to the extent that some of them are still held to be relevant now they remain strong aspects of conservatism[2], not liberalism. And please, don’t confuse liberalism and radicalism. The Australian conservative party is actually called “The Liberal Party”. Liberalism is neither reflexively radical nor blinkered – by definition. Mieville, for example, is not a liberal.
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fn1: incidentally, this aspect of eugenics – the belief that a superior race could civilise a lower race – was exactly the philosophy behind the 100 year genocide programme of “breeding out the colour” in Australian Aborigines, who were considered so ancient and genetically fragile that all the biologically determined negative traits of aboriginality could be bred away in just 2 generations. This is why in the interwar period the Australian government was stealing Aboriginal children from their parents and sending them to orphanages, and this is why I have included “genocide is cool” in my list of conservative traits, even though we know that the modern British and Australian conservative parties don’t support genocide (though they were happy to kill a million Iraqis).
fn2: because conservatism in the non-American English speaking world has moved forward in the last 20 years, the kind of conservatism you see enacted in High Fantasy now is beginning to look like a caricature of itself, the sort of thing that even a Tory Grandee would consider a bit backward and embarrassing. In that sense High Fantasy remains kind of entertaining, because the genre is drifting further away from reality even as it doesn’t change. But this doesn’t free it – or Tolkien, its progenitor – from the accusation of being conservative, at least until the last Tory Grandee is hanging from a lamp post[3]
fn3: which, just to be clear, is a joke, but depending on the results of the European elections maybe won’t be so funny next week
June 1, 2009 at 4:04 pm
It was assumed, the way democracy is assumed now.
Not by Tolkien. You’re going to have to provide evidence that the man ever espoused such views, because I’m not aware of any. It isn’t remotely fair or satisfactory to saying that eugenics was accepted between the wars by conservatives, Tolkien was a conservative, QED Tolkien supported it.
He was definitely opposed to racial mixing…
And yet not in the case of Jews or elves? This is very contradictory. Let’s not forget that it’s not only elves; there’s mixing between the Rohirrim (barbarians) and Gondorians (of high blood) portrayed in a positive light in the books.
Let’s also not forget that many of pure Numenorean blood are servants of Sauron in LOTR (the Corsairs and Black Numenoreans). That is, people who are purer Numenoreans than Dunedain (like Aragorn) end up supporting the Dark Lord.
And please, don’t confuse liberalism and radicalism. The Australian conservative party is actually called “The Liberal Party”. Liberalism is neither reflexively radical nor blinkered – by definition. Mieville, for example, is not a liberal.
I’m not confusing the terms, I’m point out that prominent liberals (Keynes, Wilson), Marxists (Stalin) and “progressives” (H. G. Wells) all supported eugenics. It wasn’t a conservative idea, but a baby of the centre and the whole political spectrum of the left. (In this and many other things, Nazism was a hard left ideology.)
I’m amused that you think liberalism is not radical or blinkered, by the way. Liberals can be as radical and blinkered as anybody, and often are. Just because liberalism is “milder” as an ideology than, say, fascism, and thus less noticeable when it is espoused in a radical and blinkered way, doesn’t mean it can’t be either of those things.
June 2, 2009 at 9:59 pm
I’m assuming that Tolkien supported eugenics because at the time most people of his age and status did. But it’s true I don’t have any support for that assumption. Note that being libertarian doesn’t preclude supporting eugenics – David Watson (of Watson and Crick fame) has a libertarian position on eugenics[1], for example. Also, I don’t think Tolkien was libertarian, because libertarianism didn’t really exist at the time he wrote LoTR. But I don’t know for sure about that…
The racial mixing between Rohirrim and Gondorians is portrayed in a bad light in the books, and particularly the Numenoreans are said to have weakened by inter-breeding. This is a direct reiteration of the Aryan model of history, popular in the interwar period[2]. Inter-breeding is good in this model for the lesser species and bad for the higher ones (on Earth: whites; in Middle Earth, Numenoreans).
While it’s true that there are black Numenoreans and evil Dunedain, they are a minority because these races are assumed to be inherently good. In LoTR, only black people (and their extension, monsters) are so simplistic as to have only one racially fixed morality. But the “higher” races have natural inclinations. This is determinism.
In this and many other things, Nazism was a hard left ideology – can we not even go into this little trope? Nazism went to war and destroyed itself in order to destroy the only hard left country on the globe. It was anti-union, anti-gay, anti-woman, it glorified war, its first victims were always the hard left, it was best mates with big business, and it had a complex about throwing society back to an 18th century Utopia. It was not in any sense hard left. This is a zombified cliche whose head needs to be cut off.
Also, eugenics was not just a baby of the centre and the left. It was commonly believed by people of all political flavours. There were some on the right and the soft left who opposed it practically, but they all bought into its basic premises. You might like to consider Churchill as an example. Eugenics was supported by pretty much all of “educated” or “civilised” society in every developed nation in the interwar period.
Finally, I think you’re confusing liberalism I’m talking of (as defined by Hume et al) with “liberalism”, the slur used by American “conservatives” to describe anyone who opposes war and killing abortion doctors[3]. All major political parties on both sides of politics in every commonwealth nation are liberal. It is not, therefore, a particularly blinkered politics.
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fn1: I can’t support this claim either except to say I saw him on an interview on the 7:30 Report in Australia about 5 years ago, giving some very nasty views about aborting gay children.
fn2: particularly with eugenicists, which is why I think Tolkien was and why even if he wasn’t his work is broadly supportive of this worldview
fn3: which doesn’t seem a particularly blinkered view either – most American “liberals” would be conservative by our lights.
June 2, 2009 at 10:49 pm
Well I’m glad that you admit that you simply assumed Tolkien was in favour of eugenics. I’d really recommend that you read the collection of his letters that was published a few years ago. I think you’d be surprised at the kind of man he was and the kind of beliefs he had. Libertarianism per se might not have existed in the 1930s but Tolkien was about as opposed to government as it’s possible to be – and since eugenics more or less requires an all pervasive leftist type of government in order to be implemented it’s pretty much impossible to imagine Tolkien supporting it.
While it’s true that there are black Numenoreans and evil Dunedain, they are a minority because these races are assumed to be inherently good. In LoTR, only black people (and their extension, monsters) are so simplistic as to have only one racially fixed morality. But the “higher” races have natural inclinations. This is determinism.
Okay, this is getting close to slander. There are no black people in LOTR – let’s get that absolutely clear – and there is no link between “monsters” and black people. Orcs in Middle Earth mythology are corrupted elves. Trolls are corrupted Ents. Other monsters (Dragons, vampires, werewolves) are probably corrupted Maiar (i.e. angels) and the Black Riders are Northerners (i.e. white men).
Tolkien doesn’t give exact figures, but there is good reason to believe that Black Numenoreans (black here doesn’t refer to skin colour) and Corsairs are the majority population who trace their ancestry to Numenor. Numenor, don’t forget, started out good but was turned to worship of Sauron by hubris – and in the Silmarillion it’s made clear that the “good” Numenoreans (from whom the Dunedain trace their ancestry) are a tiny minority of the survivors of that line.
The very fact that most of the Numenoreans turned to worship of Sauron also contradicts your assertion that the race is assumed to be “inherently good”.
can we not even go into this little trope? Nazism went to war and destroyed itself in order to destroy the only hard left country on the globe. It was anti-union, anti-gay, anti-woman, it glorified war, its first victims were always the hard left, it was best mates with big business, and it had a complex about throwing society back to an 18th century Utopia. It was not in any sense hard left.
You don’t think the Soviet Union was anti-gay and glorified war?
What were the domestic policies of the Nazis? A cornerstone of Nazism was that it was opposed to Capitalism, which was portrayed as a Jewish ideology. State control of all aspects of the economy was instituted under Nazi rule, including e.g. central planning of agriculture and industry. In many respects Nazism and Communism were identical when it came to domestic policy.
The main difference between Communism and Nazism was that the former was predicated on notions of race-war where the former was not. Even this distinction disappeared under Stalin when Jews, along with Central Asians, Don Cossacks and Ukrainians were portrayed as enemies of the revolution.
Finally, I think you’re confusing liberalism I’m talking of (as defined by Hume et al) with “liberalism”, the slur used by American “conservatives” to describe anyone who opposes war and killing abortion doctors[3]. All major political parties on both sides of politics in every commonwealth nation are liberal. It is not, therefore, a particularly blinkered politics.
You misunderstand. No form of politics is more blinkered than another, but the people who believe in a form of politics can be. This includes liberals as it does any person of any political stripe.
June 2, 2009 at 11:06 pm
Noisms! The haradrim are black. The easterlings are Asian. This isn’t slander, he wrote it. All the non-white people are evil – I think this counts as a link between colour and being a monster. There is also an obvious rhetoric of “white=good” and “black=bad”. We can all join the dots…
As for the Nazi thing, their economic policies were not “left”. They destroyed small businesses if they were unproductive but sold them onto medium-sized businesses as part of an economic productivity plan[1] in preparation for the war. It’s true that they planned a State controlled economy, but this is because they were planning a war, and at every stage in the process they stuck by a free-market ideology for as long as they were able. The Nazis were distinctly not opposed to capitalism. In fact, whenever any of the Nazi leadership showed any signs of moving towards hard left economic policies they were destroyed, with Ernst Rohm being the first and most obvious casualty of this (his homosexuality didn’t play a large part in his destruction)[2]. The Nazi Party, like Mussolini’s fascists, supported a model of capitalism based on large companies controlling production, because they believed it was productive and easily geared to war – a kind of zaibatsu for total war. Outside of economics, the Nazi’s first serious act of international aggression was against the anarchists and socialists of Spain, who were abandoned by the Soviets for being too “hard left”. In their rise to power the Nazis courted exclusively the conservatives, and their propaganda glorified the Kaiser and Frederick the Great. These are not the ideologies of a hard left party, and were most definitely not the beliefs of the communists in Germany at the time that they were exterminated by the Nazis. In fact, the supposedly “hard left” politics of the Nazis were so incomprehensible to the actual hard left that almost none of them joined up. How does that work?
Incidentally, I discovered in writing all this that the inventor of the term eugenics (Francis Galton) was Jewish. The past is indeed an alien country…
Also, I think the entry of nazism into this discussion means we’ve lost our way…
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fn1: see Architects of Annihilation for an interesting description of Nazi economic plans before the war – they were remarkably mixed.
fn2: this is well described in The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard J Evans.
June 3, 2009 at 11:41 am
For some reason I can’t reply to the latest comment.
The Haradrim aren’t black, they’re semitic, and they aren’t inherently evil – and nor are the Easterlings. (The ethnicity of the Easterlings is never described, by the way.) Groups of those races have been corrupted by Sauron, in the same way that most (white) Numenoreans were. The Dunlendings, a white race, are similarly corrupted (by Saruman) and fight with his forces at Helm’s Deep. Your portrayal of Tolkien just doesn’t stand up to a formalist reading of the text.
We can debate Nazism until the cows come home, but I feel it’s important to point out that we seem to have different signifiers of what “left” and “right” stand for. For me the political left is chiefly defined by state control and centralisation of the economy, and by ideas that human nature is malleable and can be shaped by political philosophies, culture and government. Nazism, like Bolshevism, ticks all of those boxes. It might be the case that Nazis believed that human nature could be improved by weeding out “weaker” races where Bolsheviks took a non-racial view (at least initially). But the principle idea – that human nature can be shaped and improved – is the same. As is the centralisation of the economy; the destruction of small businesses in Germany and/or their forced sales is state control of the economy – it is certainly not Capitalism! Small businesses are the cornerstone of what Capitalism is all about.
I’d argue that your other evidence – opposition to socialists and anarchists in Spain, destruction of German communists – was simply designed to prevent the spread of Bolshevism, which was functionally equivalent to the spread of Soviet power. Germany was gearing itself for a race-war against the Soviet Union, and in order to be successful it couldn’t have a fifth-column of communists at home, or a pro-Soviet Spain ready to attack it in the back.
The glorification of the Kaiser and Frederick the Great are indications of the (abhorrent) philosophy of improving the human race by making Aryans the masters of Europe, not of conservatism. You couldn’t get a less conservative world-view than that of the Nazis, as it involved the destruction of entire races and a reshaping of the world’s very racial, cultural and political structures.
June 3, 2009 at 6:06 pm
Oh well, if they’re semitic it must be fine – no hint of racial difference there. As for the Easterlings, my meticulously researched MERP manuals disagree with you and I think that might require some investigation. The Dunlendings are an aboriginal race, distinct from the Numenoreans and pushed out of their hereditary lands by the Rohirrim and Dunedain, in a nasty historical incident presented in a completely neutral tone in the appendices of the book. I think I will investigate this in more detail before I comment further, though.
The political left is a much broader definition than you present – modern liberalism is not necessarily particualrly in favour of state control of the economy, for example. The Hard Left of the interwar period was, but it was distinct from Nazism. The Nazis were pro free-market, which as I said in my previous comment led to the destruction of Ernst Rohm and the exclusion or subjugation of his SA cohorts. Nazi land reform plans were explicitly free market, involving the seizure of liebensraum and its division amongst white small-holders to farm as they saw fit. Nazi industrial policy was to maintain a mixed market, but when they came to power they realised that they had a large number of small businesses that were “intensive” not “extensive” – they only supported their owners, and didn’t add anything to the productive capacity of the economy. So they siezed these businesses, merged them and redistributed them to medium-sized businesses. Most of the small businesses were Jewish and the medium-sized ones were white. They required the businesses to submit a business plan indicating how they would be profitable, and had an office for doing this, but the result remained private. There are interesting parallels between the development of this policy – ultimately aimed at making the economy productive for war against the hard left, i.e. Russia – and the development of their exterminationist programme. Later, as war loomed, they started taking over the economy directly for centralised control – as did Great Britain, Canada, Australia and the USA. Centralised control at that time was not a marker of left vs. right, but a marker of planning for and/or involvement in the largest war the world has ever seen.
Interestingly, Margaret Thatcher believed in using economic levers to shape the human mind – she said herself that the goal of economic liberalisation was not just to change society but to reshape attitudes. It’s not just a marker of the political left that they believe the state can control individuals – look at the rabid “conservatives” in America who see the state as an instrument of social control to maintain a christian society, but reject any form of state intervention in the economy. I should point out too that until the 70s, most western societies were happy with the destruction of entire races and the reshaping of their racial and cultural structures – they did it to Aborigines in Australia and to Palestine, Pakistan and India, for example, over that time period.
In short, conservatism is a lot more into racial control than you think it is, and Nazism had much more in common with conservatism than with leftism. Which, as I said, is why the communists in Germany, in the early 30s, in areas where the Nazis were gaining significant popularity, didn’t switch sides.
June 6, 2009 at 3:06 pm
[…] politics, stupid stupid things, Tolkien | No Comments In response to the recent stoush over Tolkien, race and conservatism, I did a little more research on Tolkien’s racial theories and their similarities to other […]
June 17, 2009 at 9:16 pm
I don’t think Tolkien would have supported any extreme as liberalism and conservatism at the far ends both have their versions of political terror. But it is true that conservative ideals sometimes assert themselves — such as the belief that the old way was the better, more powerful, way.
All that said, I’ve found some excellent examples of liberalism in fantasy books as well. Ursula LeGuin, Marion Zimmer Bradley and Mercedes Lackey wrote some wonderful stories that seemed to have liberal values running through them.
Another, more recent find, is Luthiel’s Song which brings gender, religious and nature of good and evil conflicts directly into mythic fantasy in a beautiful manner. Even issues such as animal rights are addressed in small ways. The author, Robert Fanney, makes some beautiful allusions to history as well. For example, in the middle ages, foul weather and crop failures associated with the little ice age were blamed on witches. This is an underlying theme of his fantasy tale.
June 18, 2009 at 8:52 pm
Thanks for the comment Shelly. I agree about Tolkien’s political views, though my purpose in writing about his racial theories and conservatism is more to describe the political impact of his books than to interpret his own ideas. I certainly think he must have been conservative, though.
I’m a big fan of leGuin, though I haven’t read much Mercedes Lackey. I definitely think that there is a stream of high fantasy which is attempting to diversify the genre, but I think it’s in the minority and even some of the most liberal writers – such as leGuin – can sometimes be forced to adopt conservative elements by the genre (for example, Ursula le Guin is on record as regretting the implication in the first 3 books of Earthsea give a strong implication that only men can do magic, and she explicitly confronted this idea in the fourth book with a kind of late feminist reinterpretation of her own considerable contribution to the genre).
I shall give this Luthiel’s song a go… thanks for the recommendation.
July 8, 2009 at 3:31 pm
This argument has become confused by unclear use of the term RACE.
For one thing, racism is real. To not include it in something with such an epic scope would have been a mistake. The concept of races may be fanciful but it has existed throughout the history of human imagination (much like religion). The multitude of different types of people is part of the diversity of fantasy. Racial disharmony is NOT cast in a favorable light, which indeed would have been a HUGE mistake that Tolkien did not make regardless of how ethnocentric he may or may not have actually been.
However, the argument is over 2 things specifically: Elves, being light skinned in general, versus Orcs, being dark skinned in general; and the issue of one or more of the ethnicities of the opposing humans.
Elves are mythical creatures, in this case Nordic ones. Not all Tolkien’s elves were good. They have done nasty things to each other in the past. Many of them have bitterness towards humans. They are distinctly NOT HUMAN except in general appearance. If they represent any human group at all, it would be indigenous and/or druidic-type people of Europe’s ancient past, who would be considered “savage” by “conservative” standards.
Orcs are to Elves what demons are to angels, but even more tragic. Their corruption was INFLICTED on them. They are distinctly INHUMAN, or corruptions of elves, not “black” (brown) humans. Their “black” skin is distinctly inhuman, not that of “african” humans. The similarity is in the mind of the critic.
One or more of the human armies opposing the protagonists were dark skinned. However, they were ultimately pitied for having been on the wrong side politically, not racially. Other peoples mentioned throughout the history of Middle Earth have had various skin tones. I seem to recall more than one protagonist having “ruddy” or “swarthy” skin.
There was some clear use of symbolism to indicate that “light” does not always equal “good” and “dark” or “black” does not always equal “bad.” Several of the most corruptible individuals were also some of the most European of the bunch, including a few kings and Saruman the White Wizard.
If this were American literature, one could reasonably argue that some races were underrepresented in these works, and might incorrectly believe Orcs were meant to represent some race. If this is to be compared with works before and since, it is also fair to say that they are also underrepresented in the Sherlock Holmes and Brothers Grimm works, and that Northern Europeans are underrepresented in the Vedas or the Bible or various African or other legends, and so on.
Tolkien was not a racist, nor was he right-wing. I even hesitate to call him socially conservative or ethnocentric simply because he did try to cast many, many races in a positive light and even lamented the fall of everything that Melkor/Morgoth, Sauron, and Saruman corrupted.
July 8, 2009 at 5:34 pm
Thanks for commenting on my blog Grey. I think you should review your comments in view of my other post, though, on Tolkien’s racial theories, because some of your facts are not correct. Tolkien stated his intent to make the Orcs look mongoloid, for example, and the humans were on the wrong side racially – the racial theory is better explained in my other post.
Several people who have spoken/commented about this have made the mistake of thinking that the main criticism here is that orcs are “black” and elves “white”. This is not, as you suggest, the specific argument. The specific argument is that Tolkien’s work shows the conservative trait of racial essentialism. That is, regardless of the colour of the people, their moral differences are racially determined. It doesn’t matter if the elves are green and the orcs blue. This essentialism is given further relevance to real-life political theories of race by the racial correspondences of the world he created (see my other post about this).
Regarding the claim that elves also did evil, the issue here is not that the elves were able to choose to be evil but that the Orcs couldn’t choose to be good. No christian racialist[1] would claim that whites are better than blacks because they can’t do evil; rather they would argue it is easier for white people to do good and for black people to do evil (some argue this on the basis of biology, others have a religious theory behind this). Tolkien writes this very starkly – dark skinned people are biologically evil, while white-skinned people are biologically capable of free-will. Like “real” people are. Again, the argument here is 1) by racial essentialism, races shouldn’t mix because they’re morally different and 2) it just so happens that in this book the morally inferior races (the ones who can only do evil) are black or swarthy.
Finally, the issue is not primarily about whether Tolkien was conservative or not, it is whether or not the books he wrote (and others followed up on) have established a conservative and restrictive genre.
—
fn1: I don’t argue Tolkien is, this is just an example of one of many ways of thinking about race.
March 18, 2010 at 12:37 pm
[…] it would appear he had been working on a research theme similar to that which I’ve gathered here and here, about whether Tolkien is racist, racialist, or vulnerable to interpretation as such. The […]
September 24, 2010 at 11:34 am
[…] two comments also give support to some of my claims about the conservative appeal of high fantasy.Note as well that this stuff transcends any individual national interpretation of Tolkien – […]
October 24, 2010 at 12:22 am
[…] hope to escape the constrictions of the real world in such an environment. Is this because of the conservatism of high fantasy, is it inevitable when a large number of ordinary men do a hobby, or is the attitude in the gaming […]
December 20, 2010 at 11:29 am
[…] between censorship and being asked not to say bad things (or, as I have found in my theme on racism in fantasy, criticizing the things you love). I wonder how much this suspicion is to do with the origins of a […]
January 25, 2011 at 10:27 am
One question I have to ponder is this:
What would the impact be if Tolkien had made the Elves black? Would the story be drastically different?
For me, if the Elves were black that would simply indicate that they came from a hotter climate, and therefore were not from Middle Earth which appears to have a cool European climate.
Maybe I’m just nieve in the way I view race within stories.
Afterall isn’t LOTR telling us about the invasion of Middle Earth, not the Southern or Eastern provinces of the world. I’ve never read the Silmarilion but I would have thought should Tolkien write about Sauron’s invasion of the other provinces then we would see hero’s of different races and ethnicity rise up. Just as we see tales of the great hero’s of asian origin in Chinese and Japanese lore.
Personally it makes sense to me that the Last Alliance are primerily white due to the climate they come from. This isnt a time period where travelling to other parts of the world would be easy.
Just as those men Sauron calls to fight for him from the south and east represent darker skin tones. I imagine the equator is below Middle Earth.
Does that make sense?
January 25, 2011 at 11:02 am
Thanks for the comment, Nate. I think I said elsewhere that the skin colour of the protagonists and antagonists doesn’t fundamentally change the problem, which is one of racial determinism. Whether the elves are black or white, the issue still remains that the fundamental premise of the book is that peoples’ race determines their character and huge elements of their physical and intellectual abilities. The obvious similarities between the races in the book and in real life reinforce the image of the book as a set of racially deterministic stereotypes, and explain its appeal to fascists and others, but the problematic treatment of race as determining human characteristics – along with the corollary that the only solution for some races is their complete extermination – is independent of the allegorical nature of the particular races as written.
January 27, 2011 at 10:36 am
Ah ok, thanks for clearing that up faustusnotes =)
I see where you are coming from now and as you say there is allegorical logic to back up your argument. Though I’m not sure I personally get that from a reading of LOTR.
Actually I’ve just been reading an interesting article and discussion about race on another blog. It might be of interest to you:
http://thezoe-trope.blogspot.com/2011/01/wake-up-and-smell-real-world-diversity.html
Sorry the link is a little ugly =( Should really bit.ly it.
Hope you’re keeping well and having fun,
Nate
August 22, 2011 at 10:34 pm
Sorry for the thread necromancy, but this was linked from a CT thread: Tolkien would not remotely have supported eugenics. He was a conservative catholic, and catholics opposed the “progressive” policy of eugenics in the same breath as they opposed abortion and contraception. If Tolkien disagreed with the church on such a core political issue, I think we would have known it.
August 22, 2011 at 11:53 pm
Hi Harald, welcome… I think we’ve crossed swords over religion at deltoid before, maybe… and here at Compromise and Conceit we welcome necromancy in all its despicable forms, so no apologies necessary.
It does appear I accused Tolkien of being a eugenicist, doesn’t it? I clarified this line of thought later, to refer to him (and in these threads, “him” means “his work”) as a “scientific racist” which is what the racial essentialism is all about. You can be a scientific racist without being a eugenicist; in fact I don’t think it’s impossible to support eugenicist notions but oppose eugenics for religious reasons. Catholics can be opposed to eugenics for reasons of theology but support the underlying racist ideals (and of course, eugenics doesn’t necessarily have to be racist, but Catholics can still oppose it).
So using “eugenicist” here was sloppy. See the later threads on Tolkien (if you dare cludge through them) for a more carefully thought-out approach to his particular position in this conservative spectrum.
October 11, 2012 at 11:05 am
[…] according to many theorists, or at least Tolkien-derived fantasy […]
August 17, 2013 at 8:34 am
Reblogged this on Verdant Handshake.
August 17, 2020 at 4:48 am
This post makes me think you will enjoy it when you get around to de Camp’s Novarian Cycle: the political systems of the Twelve Cities of Novaria, the type of magic which the previously distressed damsel pulls out after hooking up with Joriam … like Poul Anderson, de Camp reacted to early 20th century racial theories by saying loudly and repeatedly “in my experience people from every land, race, and religion have the same proportion of geniuses and idiots, brave and cowardly, wise and foolish.” He was not so skeptical of his culture’s gender roles and not so keen on moving from words to actual policy changes, but he liked to use alternative forms of marriage etc. to show the human comedy in his stories.
August 17, 2020 at 12:07 pm
‘Incidentally, I discovered in writing all this that the inventor of the term eugenics (Francis Galton) was Jewish.’
You _what_?
Where are you getting that from?
If it were true, I can’t figure how it would have escaped mention when he was interviewed by _The Jewish Chronicle_:
Click to access Galton.Francis.1910.Eugenics_and_the_Jew.pdf
August 17, 2020 at 12:20 pm
J-D, I wrote this post 11 years ago (!) and I don’t remember where I found that “information”. Wikipedia says he was a quaker! Thanks for checking. Incidentally, though, that interview in the Jewish Chronicle starts with this:
So I guess the past really was an alien country…
Vagans, I haven’t read anything by de Camp except maybe something Conanesque he wrote. His approach sounds like a refreshing alternative to the conservatism that was common in earlier fantasy.
August 17, 2020 at 12:57 pm
Yes, I know. I wouldn’t have tried to restart such an old discussion on my own initiative, but once it happened, well …
(In The Dispossessed, the principal character composes a long letter to another scholar and then takes another look at the book he’s reacting to, reads the biographical note, and finds the author has been dead for six years.)
August 20, 2020 at 4:34 pm
Second the recommendation of de Camp’s Novaria series. They are a fun read – even if the author’s period shows through. de Camp’s friend Fletcher Pratt’s The Well of the Unicorn is amazingly nuanced about these matters (and also a good read).
Since we are updating an 11 year old post, good to know that fantasy has moved on since then. Even if much is still written in this way, it’s no longer as true in general as it was.
August 20, 2020 at 6:28 pm
If this discussion is going to come to life again (and, I repeat, I’m not the one who revived it), the other thing I’m going to seize on is this (even though the commenter responsible may have long since departed)–
–just so that I can respond: ‘No, it isn’t.’
August 20, 2020 at 7:31 pm
J-D
I think that commenter has moved on.
On the substance, I’m not sure that faustus’ argument holds up as literary criticism. Yes, high fantasy is ‘conservative’, yet the sources of that conservatism are not political but mythic. These were people brought up on Malory and Tennyson and Macauley’s Lays and the KJV, Virgil and the Iliad. And, in Tolkien’s and Eddison’s cases, Norse sagas and Anglo-Saxon poetry. Their conservatism is not for an immediate past, but a past that never was: Arthur is the ‘quondam rex futuresque’ – the once and future king, and the key duties of a king are war and justice, but both as the representative on earth of his people before god. A bad king brings misfortune, a good king blessings (that’s Hamlet’s problem – that Claudius’ sins endanger Denmark, just as Agamemnon’s endanger the Achaeans).
They (and Morris and the pre-Raphaelites and Dunsany) rejected modernity in all its forms, Tories and Liberals alike, in favour of a past they acknowledged as imaginary. Their quarrel was with the car and the gun more than with Baldwin or Attlee.
Tolkien’s essentialism was religious – the bad guys join Satan’s cause. I’ll concede the charge as levelled certainly stands for Eddison
August 22, 2020 at 12:08 pm
Peter Thomson, you always do this thing where you dismiss the obvious politics of the people you’re talking about by claiming it was grounded in some strange cultural phenomenon of its times, while ignoring the very mundane facts about the people involved. Dunsany, for example, was a hereditary peer and a supporter of imperialism in Ireland. He was the very personification of conservatism as it is correctly understood (I can’t access the whole article but consider this summary of his views, for example). The pre-Raphaelites had diverse politics and I’m not sure why you throw them into this mix. These people aren’t rejecting modernity in all its forms – they love the printing press! – and their conservatism is distinctly political. It’s also an empty statement to say that someone’s essential is religious – yes Tolkien was a christian, part of a religion that has an entire book devoted to genocide, racism and deep misogyny, that owned slaves for a large part of its history, and fought tooth and nail to keep political conservatism at the centre of the western world, including collaborating with Franco and Hitler. Saying someone’s conservatism or essentialism is religious when their religion is christianity is like saying that water is wet.
This is the problem of cultural criticism without class analysis and class consciousness. A genre that continually reproduces racial essentialism, sexism, imperialism and monarchy must be inherently conservative. This genre was started by white Oxford dons and peers of the realm and former officer-corps[1] leader types, and then dominated for decades by white men, who have obvious racial and class interests that are protected by conservative politics.
But I agree that there are likely to have been a lot of advances in fantasy over the past 11 years and hopefully now it is less conservative and more experimental than it was 10-15 years ago. I think we can certainly say that has been the case in YA fiction, and I hope it is the case too now in fantasy.
—
fn1: On another thread recently the idea arose that war and the experience of soldiery may have influenced the tone and content of these mens’ writings. But it’s worth remembering that most of these men were officers in the Imperial British Army, the vicious enforcers of the longest-running and most criminal enterprise (British colonialism) in modern history. It’s not unreasonable to suppose that they have class and racial interests that are closely aligned to the class and racial interests of the colonial enterprise they served. Now it might be the case that the specific war they had the misfortune to be entangled in was not an avowedly colonial enterprise[2][3], but that doesn’t mean that they weren’t motivated to become officers by their class interests.
At some point in the future – hopefully before I die – Britain’s colonial enterprise is going to be properly reassessed as one of the greatest crimes of the past 500 years, and people who signed up as officers in its army are going to be rightly viewed the same way as people who signed up to be officers in the Nazi army, or the SS. Certainly anyone who was active in the Boer war or in the continued repression of freedom in India or Ireland (and the starvation of their people) needs to be seen that way. If they happened to play a bit part in the Soviet Union’s comprehensive defeat of fascism then that will be a bright spot in their otherwise terrible legacy, but hopefully one day “signed up as an officer in XX corps of the British army” will not be seen as a mitigating factor in their art, but properly understood as strong evidence of their willingness to kill for the racial and class interests of the white British ruling class. Then, when those people write stories with titles like The Return of the King about a white man who is racially superior and destined by birth to lead inferior peoples, they will properly be understood as expressions of an ideological commitment to the empire whose army those men joined.
fn2: There’s a Marxist analysis of ww1 which sees it as an inevitable consequence of the colonialist ambitions of Europeans, and a war over the spoils of colonialism as the empires ran out of new lands to rob. That means officers participating in that war were fighting each other over the proceeds of a grand criminal enterprise, not “defending freedom” of nations that did not allow women or non-white people to vote
fn3: Dunsany was in the Boer war, which was an exterminationist colonialist enterprise, and anyone who was involved in that cannot possibly be described as rejecting modernity in all its forms – the dude helped with the invention of concentration camps, ffs, which is one of the vilest achievements of modernity!
August 22, 2020 at 7:55 pm
There probably is, but if there is it’s rubbish.
August 23, 2020 at 9:37 am
History is a catalogue of horrors, and all empires are built on bones. That the Brits were unusually successful does not make them better than anyone else, but it doesn’t make them worse either. They were, after all, competing with the Spanish, and then the French – and in India with the Marathas and Afghans (check the sack of Delhi by Nadir Shah or the Maratha habit of turning up and demanding all taxes since their last visit be handed over at once).
Nor does class analysis help much – all classes of Brit participated in the empire, and all benefited (unequally, of course). Marx was right that all complex societies are class societies, but that’s not the only tension in play. The Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm usefully remarked that ‘identities are not like hats – you can wear more than one at once’. In analysing someone’s writing, it helps to ask which one(s) are most salient at a given time.
J-D – the notion that WWI was triggered by the end of imperial expansion was put forward by more than marxists, and has some support – not least in the well-documented German obsession with building an empire in eastern Europe in order to compete with Russia, the US and Britain.
August 23, 2020 at 1:43 pm
It’s true that if you have instances, for example, of a person who has committed ten murders and another who has committed a hundred, that’s not an adequate basis for a conclusion that the person who committed a hundred murders is ten times worse than the person who committed ten. They may have had different opportunities and means. However, there is some basis for concluding that the murder of a hundred people is ten times worse than the murder of ten people. I’m not sure, however, that there’s much value in either kind of comparison. A more important kind of comparison, it seems to me, is a comparison between the different choices available to a person, whether that’s historically or right now. Choosing to commit murder is a bad choice, regardless of the number of victims. The history of every empire encompasses brigandage, looting, and massacre, and choosing to perpetrate brigandage, looting, and massacre is a bad choice, regardless of scale.
Austria-Hungary did not go to war in 1914 to expand a colonial empire. Belgium did not go to war in 1914 to expand a colonial empire. Bulgaria did not go to war in 1915 to expand a colonial empire. France did not go to war in 1914 to expand a colonial empire. Italy did not go to war in 1915 to expand a colonial empire. Montenegro did not go to war in 1914 to expand a colonial empire. Portugal did not go to war in 1916 to expand a colonial empire. Romania did not go to war in 1916 to expand a colonial empire. Serbia did not go to war in 1914 to expand a colonial empire. The United Kingdom did not go to war in 1914 to expand a colonial empire.
August 23, 2020 at 2:09 pm
And yet J-D, somehow France came out of the war with Cameroon, which was German at the beginning. As if it were a squabble over the spoils of empire!
August 23, 2020 at 4:27 pm
Peter, we are not here discussing whether the British were worse than the Spanish or the French, I am not interested in what the Afghans did or didn’t do. What we are discussing here is the role of conservative western men in the fantasy canon in influencing the subsequent conservatism of the western fantasy tradition, and the consequences of that for what we read today. We must necessarily establish that they were conservative white men. You want to argue that the religious nature of their conservatism means that they were not political conservatives, I guess in the interests of establishing the conservatism of the genre as aesthetic rather than political (a la scruton I guess – an explicitly political aestheticist, btw), or of suggesting it wasn’t part of some explicitly political program (I guess). But I have pointed out that religious basis for conservatism is not a defense in the christian west, since christian conservatism is an avowedly political project; and that it is not easy to maintain your idea of a reflexive and purely aesthetic conservatism when one takes into acccount the class and racial interests of the writers, their position in society, the fact that they voluntary became leaders in a ruthless, at times genocidal military machine that was explicitly deployed in the defense of a racist political project, and that at least one of the ones you cite as not interested in politics at all joined up in that genocidal machine to fight in a war of conquest that was the first war in which the modern conception of the concentration camp – the ultimate expression of the horrors of modernity that you claim these guys reject – was developed.
Central to the argument you seem to be making – and that certainly others have made – is that Tolkien’s conservatism was not a political conservatism based on the protection of his own class interests or a political ideology, but just a rejection of modernity. I don’t think there is much evidence of this when stacked up against it we have his specific class and racial interests as an Oxford don and his membership in the elite of a military machine that throughout the last 200 years of its history had been at the forefront of the modernist project[1]. Even the idea that he harks back to some bucolic agrarian society exemplified by the Shire is dodgy as hell. The last book of the series is called The Return of the King and is about a racially pre-determined inheritance of power as the fruition of a three volume history of a racially organized social order. Only the first 100 pages of the first book and the 30 pages of the last book concern the Shire, and mostly make it out as a small-minded and backwards society. In fact this satirization of rural life is so strong in the first part of the book – the silly names, the constant ridiculing of most of the hobbits for being inward looking and scared of travel, the construction of Frodo as the most sympathetic character in the book based on his yearning for something more, and Bilbo’s obvious spiritual growth connected to his having left the Shire – mark it out as completely out of character with the rest of the stories. It’s as if Tolkien started off writing a fantasy version of Cold Comfort Farm but decided to switch to a dark allegory of the consequences of upending the racial heirarchy 100 pages in, and somehow forgot to ditch the first draft before he sent it off to the publishers. He is mocking the agrarian ideal, not valorizing it. The social order he devotes most time to valorizing is the monarchy and racial heirarchy of Gondor and the Second Age. The idea that the book is a paean to a lost simpler world of rural peace isn’t born out by either an analysis of the text or a consideration of Tolkien’s role at the forefront of the very modern racial project of English colonialism. But a proper analysis of the text shows that he clearly idealizes a lost era of absolute monarchical rule where everyone knows their class and racial position, and disorder arises when people leave it. Not exactly surprising given he was writing at a time that the working class and women were gaining political representation, and the colonial project was coming to its end.
—
fn1: Even modern epidemiology owes its origins to the British colonial project, as do terror bombings, concentration camps, chemical warfare, demography, and much of the modern understanding of logistics
August 23, 2020 at 8:24 pm
New Zealand came out of the war with the part of Samoa which was German at the beginning; but New Zealand didn’t enter the war in order to seize that territory. Belgium came out of the war with Ruanda-Urundi, which was German at the beginning, but Belgium didn’t enter the war in order to obtain that territory. Once countries were at war, they conceived objectives which were no part of their reason for going to war in the first place. The United Kingdom and France came out of the war in possession of former territories of the Ottoman Empire; once the Ottoman Empire entered the war, it is unsurprising that the United Kingdom and France conceived the objective of taking territory from it, but that’s insufficient evidence to establish the conclusion that seizure of the territory was a pre-war aim, and in fact there’s no reason to think it was. From the point of view of France, the was was an opportunity to recover (in the event of victory) Alsace-Lorraine from Germany, an opportunity which surely would have been welcome in France at any time (since the loss of the territory), but that’s insufficient evidence to establish that France sought war specifically in 1914 to recover Alsace-Lorraine (which of course wasn’t, from the French point of view at least, colonial territory). If you genuinely believe that France sought war in 1914 in order to seize Cameroon from Germany, you haven’t made your case. It doesn’t strike me as at all plausible, and I’ve never known it to be argued in any discussion of the origins of the war.
You might with equal merit (or, rather, equal lack of merit) say that Woodrow Wilson came out of the war with the League of Nations, as if the war were a struggle for the establishment of an international organisation to keep the peace.
August 24, 2020 at 11:48 am
J-D, it must be a constant surprise to you that 17 years after they invaded Iraq, the “Coalition of the Willing” have still failed to find any WMDs, even though that was their stated reason for starting that war; and the coincidence that subsequent to that war the US became the world’s largest energy exporter must be a constant surprise to you? Also you must be really disappointed in the way western historians present the Japanese commencement of the Pacific war as wrong, when their stated aim was to free the people of Asia from the yoke of colonialism and establish an East Asian Co-prosperity sphere! How history has wronged them!
The stated aims that people use to go to war don’t always reflect their real aims, or the historical forces that drove them to war. Even the Wikipedia entry on the causes of the war has a special section on colonialism and cites some historians. I thought it was a uniquely marxist interpretation but apparently it’s mainstream!
Which just goes to show my point that if you were an officer in the UK military in that era you were a willing participant – and a leader – in an imperial project, and the horrors of the war you got thrown into notwithstanding, you were acting as an agent of colonial control. It’s likely that you supported those political ideals you were killing people in defense of!
August 24, 2020 at 8:01 pm
My point about the Brits being rivals with the Spanish and French was not a comparison of horrors but a note that seeking colonies and imperial expansion was not a national choice but a systemic compulsion. Just as in an RPG you do not get xp for running a good B&B in Fairyville but for going out and killing people, so the UK – and all other states at the time, everywhere – were locked into a system where it was be strong or go under. Poland, Saxony and a few other states went under – Napoleon extinguished Venice, Savoy and the Dutch Republic. Nor was it just Europeans – in the 18th century China invaded Tibet and smashed Mongolia, the Vietnamese did in Champa around the same time, and the Thais were dismembering the Khmer state when the French rescued it. And the Creeks were pushing the Cherokee back and so on…
Liberal and revolutionary as well as conservative regimes followed the same path. So it’s not useful to reason from this general practice to personal attitudes.
August 25, 2020 at 10:46 am
That’s not automatically true; it depends on the systems rules and on the GM.
That’s not true. The system at that time included some states with great strength, some with little strength, and some in between. It’s true that there were some instances in which weak states were conquered or partitioned by stronger neighbours, but there was not a uniform tendency for all weak states to be absorbed, leaving only strong ones.
I’m not sure what you mean by saying Saxony ‘went under’. It lost some of its territory, but the Kingdom of Saxony continued to exist until the downfall of all the German monarchies at the end of the First World War.
Savoy was extinguished only temporarily, being restored when Napoleon fell.
On the one hand, it’s true that when a state engages in a policy of aggression, it’s wrong to conclude that all its people must have been aggressors or supporters of aggression. On the other hand, obviously, if a state engages in a policy of aggression, there must be people who support that policy, including, obviously, those who hold power in the state.
But in any case, the fact that a practice is common or widespread is no justification for it, and this includes the practice of state aggression.
August 25, 2020 at 12:34 pm
Peter, although it may have been a systemic compulsion there was significant opposition to the British colonial project both within and outside British society. We know this because the British army spent much of the 100 years leading up to ww2 killing people who opposed colonialism – in Iraq, India, Ireland and Africa especially – and because the various paramilitary arms of colonialism spent 300 years exterminating opponents of colonialism in the New World. The fact that people like Tolkien weren’t listening to these widespread voices opposing the racial politics of the time doesn’t mean they weren’t being raised. Indeed, Dunsany – who you said didn’t care about modernity – signed up for the Boer war, where he worked to help exterminate people who opposed the British government, and benefited from landholdings in Ireland, which fought a war of independence against the UK. He might have noticed, don’t you think, that some people didn’t agree with his supposedly non-political conservatism, given that he was helping round them up in concentration camps? You say that Tolkien hearkened back to some pre-modern era on aesthetic or religious grounds, not political, but he was also an officer in the army that had just 50 years earlier destroyed the Old Summer Palace in China in what is generally accepted to have been a terrible act of cultural vandalism. Still, Tolkien didn’t seem to object to the army’s history when he signed up. Was it a systemic compulsion that drove Tolkien to ignore the army’s history of destroying the past when he signed up, or was it a commitment to an imperial project?
Marx and his comrades in the communist international had been writing about the evils of colonialism for 50 years by the time Dunsany signed up for the Boer war, and while Tolkien was an officer in the British army (and before he wrote LoTR) there was a communist uprising in Russia by anti-imperialists that helped end the war that he supposedly despised. Yet there is no evidence he ever bothered to listen to them or take on board their criticisms of the imperial system that had made him a professor of English. Was it a systemic compulsion that made him not listen to these people before, during and after his service as an agent of empire, or was it because his class and racial interests were implacably opposed to theirs?
While it’s true that the past was a different country, we cannot argue that these people were ignorant of the criticisms of the system they worked to uphold. They knew about the pleas of those in the colonial rim for freedom, and saw them enacted in Ireland at the time they were serving in the army. They chose to ignore those please because they came from non-white subjects of empire (e.g. the Indians or Aboriginal people) or from communists. i.e., they ignored those pleas because it was in their class and racial interest to do so. They then went on to write fantasy that is deeply conservative in a way that reflects exactly the ideology they served at war. This isn’t a systemic compulsion – they upheld the ideology that benefited them. They were political conservatives committed to the conservative causes of their time, and they wrote and acted accordingly.
August 25, 2020 at 8:21 pm
faustus – you might check Marx – he generally approved of imperialism, as dragging people from Asiatic barbarism and backwardness into the modern age. Note also that the opponents of imperialism in Russia opposed the imperialism of Britain and France. They were quite ok with Russian imperialism.
In any event, lumping all this under one banner does not help us distinguish Tolkien and Dunsany (one kind of conservative) from the very different ‘conservatives’ of mid C20 Germany and Italy and others (ultra-high modernists), or the reactionary vandalism of the Republican Party.
August 25, 2020 at 10:46 pm
Agreed that J.R.R. Tolkien was a different kind of conservative than a Churchill, and that the conclusions he draw from early 20th century racial theories were different than those a Woodrow Wilson drew.
I think its a bit rich assuming that if Tolkien joined the British Army in WW I, he was an imperialist at heart or indoctrinated into imperialism. There were not a lot of alternatives for someone of his class and age and religion in 1915 (and if he had chosen to be a conscientious objector, its unlikely that he would have become professor Tolkien and someone any of us have heard of). In terms of class, professors were respectable but I don’t think the Tolkiens had any money until J.R.R.’s trade books took off. That does not mean they were poor (he had a university education in the Edwardian age) but talking about class interests is complicated.
August 26, 2020 at 11:08 am
Vagans, in replying to me you make a perfect elucidation of the connection between Tolkien’s class interests and his service in the war: “if he had chosen to be a conscientious objector, its unlikely that he would have become professor Tolkien”. Conscientious objectors were either pacifists or socialists and he was neither: not a pacifist because his racial interests are defended by violence, perpetrated in large part by the army he took a leadership role in; and not a socialist because his class interests meant he had no common cause with working men in other countries, and his class interests were better served by killing them than by uniting with them. Had he expressed or acted on any of these ideas with any force he would have risked losing some of the benefits of his own class (e.g. being a professor) so he chose to go along with them. Also, on this blog before people have tried to pass off being a professor as some kind of lower middle class pursuit, it isn’t now and it definitely wasn’t then. See my series on the book War without Mercy for some thoughts on the important role humanities academics play in constructing the ideology of the ruling class. Tolkien was no exception. I also don’t think that big a gap separated Tolkien and Churchill – there is nothing much in his letters to suggest he disapproved of Churchill, and he certainly agreed with him about Franco. Yes talking about class interests is complicated – Tolkien was a Catholic, so at odds with most of those in his class on religion – and race is an important modifier of class (this is why we have intersectionalism now!) but we can talk about it despite this complexity. There is no evidence that Tolkien ever did anything at odds with his class or racial interests. We don’t even know if he refused to bow to Nazi racial science to get The Hobbit published in Germany.
Peter, Lenin and Marx wrote of imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism, but not approvingly, and Lenin saw international socialism as a means to end imperialism. I think Italy’s fascists (the originators of the term) were futurists, not modernists, seeing fascism and war as an opportunity to sweep away what they saw as a decrepit society and replace it with something new (I’m sure I wrote a review of this on my blog but I can’t find it now). I think it’s better to see Tolkien as a reformist modernist, or a reluctant modernist, very much in keeping with modern little Englanders and the Brexit movement, who wants to enjoy the benefits of his race and class in an ideal vision of England, frozen in time. That puts him very much in the mainstream of modern British conservative thought, and if we trace his objection to the United Kingdom through the next 80 years since he wrote about it in his letters, we can see some echoes of it in the willingness of the brexiters to tear the UK apart in order to leave the EU.
Yes, he is different in some sense from the reactionary vandalism of the modern Republican party, but who’s to say their conservatism isn’t the ultimate expression of the close-mindedness and reactionary ideas required to believe what Tolkien believes? There are questions to be asked about why the entire conservative movement has stuck by the Republicans even as they have moved to world-destroying madness, and given there is no great discontinuity in conservative thought from Hume to Trump, perhaps Tolkien has some responsibility, along with his conservative peers? In any case, Republican vandals don’t write fantasy novels, and neither do fascists: Tolkien and his peers did, they started the modern genre, and so they are the conservatives we need to study.
August 26, 2020 at 6:20 pm
“it isn’t now and it definitely wasn’t then.” My understanding is that if you look at the hard facts of salaries and working conditions, before WW II professors were often just that: lower middle class. They were not wearing out their bodies in a coal mine or a mill, and they had good job security for the era. Its in the postwar period, as governments pour money into universities and research and faculty unionize, that salaries for senior professors bloomed (but in 1915 Tolkien was not any kind of professor, he was a new graduate). If we want to take this further, give me some data on the salary of junior faculty at Oxbridge in the 1920s and 1930s compared to contemporary British salaries in general.
I have no idea how one could decide whether joining the army in 1915 was part of anyone’s class interest, but joining the army was ‘in’ in Britain that year.
The idea that a white person could never be a pacifist in the early 20th century because of their “racial interests” is unworthy of serious reply, and insulting to the many religious minorities who fled their home countries to my country because, among other reasons, we did not have universal conscription with no exemptions for conscience. So is the idea that someone with a bachelor’s degree from a poor but pretentious family in 1915 could never be a socialist.
Could you give me some examples that “the entire conservative movement has stuck by the (US federal) Republicans”?
“Conservative” is not a term I find useful, because it includes both the moderate kind and the violent radicals who just use an imagined past instead of an imagined future to justify their radical program. There are important differences between people who want to keep society the way it is (which just so happens to be good for them and their family) and people with a radical program to harness the power of the state to restructure society in a way which just so happens to seem good in the short term for them and their family and their sponsors.
August 26, 2020 at 9:27 pm
My understanding is that in 1914 the Tolkiens had the habitus and the family connections to be “gentle”, but not the capital to live a life of leisure. They were the kind of people whose men needed to get some kind of job, but it would not be a killing job and ideally it would be enough to support their family and a servant or two and let them retire at some point. In 1914, that probably put them in the top fifth of society by income, but an Athenian would have called them poor because they still had to work for a living. I think we need to talk about the social sides and the financial sides to understand their place in society and their options in 1914.
One reason why labels like “conservative” or “middle class” are not very helpful is that they mean different things to different people.
August 26, 2020 at 10:36 pm
Regarding Tolkien’s class: the UK used the Registrar’s Social Class Scheme from about 1913 to about 2011, and professors would have been in class I, the highest class. In his letters he talks of needing to rent accomodation at the university because his home was too big. You also really don’t want to read his letters about dining at the “high table” and how agreeable he found it, if you think he was a man of the people! Furthermore, in his letters in 1919 he speaks of a professor position being “downgraded” to a “readership” and paying 500 pounds per annum. At that time in the UK an able seaman earned about 60 pounds a year, a tram driver 75, and a labourer about 60 pounds. It was probably about 4 times the average (not median) annual salary in the UK, which would be the equivalent of 100,000 pounds today – and Tolkien earnt more than that. I don’t think you’re going to make a lot of progress suggesting that a man who earned more than 10 times a labourer’s salary and more than 4x the average salary was not upper class.
I did not say that a white person could never be a pacifist in the early 20th century, I said that pacifism was against the racial interests of white British people. These are not logically the same thing. I stated that Tolkien was acting in accordance with his class and racial interests – that doesn’t mean he expressed it that way. I also did not say that someone with a bachelor’s degree in 1915 couldn’t be a socialist. Please pay attention to what I wrote, not what you think I’m writing. Class analysis of the kind I’m doing here does not mean reading people’s minds, it simply means identifying how their actions are consistent with or opposed to their class interests. Had Tolkien refused to join the army he may have done so out of simple cowardice or pragmatism, but his actions would also not have aligned with his class interests, which were to defend the competitive imperialist world order and to win while doing so (which is what Britain did). I’m also not able to argue about the racial interests of religious minorities fleeing their home countries, it’s not my place and I wouldn’t have the knowledge. My grandfather fled Spain for the UK in 1939 and he most assuredly did so because he spent the past 3 years defending his class interests violently. Probably he was acting against his racial interests, since had he sided with Franco he would have been able to continue enjoying the benefits of Spanish possessions in Africa. But I don’t have to interrogate that question here because we’re talking about Tolkien, an upper class white man in the world’s pre-eminent bandit nation, who had class and racial interests aligned with that banditry and who – notwithstanding his occasional criticisms of the commonwealth and the united kingdom, and imperialism in East Asia – joined the British army to fight for its imperialist cause in world war 1, and supported Churchill against the ordinary people of Spain in the lead-up to world war 2.
I’m not interested in re-litigating the definition of conservative here, it’s been done to death and we all know what we mean when we discuss it in regards to this post. I don’t think I should have to show you how conservatives have stood by the US Republicans, it’s obvious and largely irrelevant to this post (no one cares what Tolkien would have thought of Trump; we’re interested in whether and how he was conservative back then and what impact it had on the genre). That speculation on my part was irrelevant to the topic so please ignore it.
August 28, 2020 at 1:24 pm
I wonder whether something I wrote got under your skin in some way and whether that’s what impelled you to start telling lies about me. Maybe not and there’s some other explanation. Either way I know you can do better.
Yes, it quotes two historians who disagree on this point, one of them rejecting the view of the other about the role of colonialism in bringing about the war, which is hardly surprising given that historians have disagreed with each other about the causes of the First World War from the time it began until now.
Without regarding them as infallible, I do respect the professional expertise of historians, but even after paying due respect to expertise none of us can escape from drawing our own conclusions. On the subject of the origins of the First World War and the reasons countries entered it I have drawn my own conclusions, which I am prepared to defend, and they are conclusions which are supported by at least some historians. I’ll put them in another comment, though. You will see that I have concluded that several countries entered the war after its outbreak principally in the expectation of making territorial gains, but the territories they hoped to gain were in general bordering territories with which they had historical ties and whose populations were culturally linked with their own: even if those motives could be considered imperialistic they weren’t colonialist.
There was one country which entered the war primarily in the expectation colonial gains; and another which entered the war primarily to guard its existing colonial position. You can read the next comment to see which countries (I say that) those were.
The countries which started the war, however, although they sought territorial gains (or most of them did) once the war had started, or at any rate once victory had been attained, did not have such gains as their primary motive at the beginning, and if you want to know why (as I interpret the facts) they went to war in that case, you can read the next comment.
August 28, 2020 at 1:25 pm
1. Austria-Hungary
In the early twentieth century, the people who held power in Austria-Hungary feared (almost certainly correctly) the potential for the power and stability of the Dual Monarchy to be undermined, probably to the extent of threatening its very existence, by increasing nationalist and separatist minority sentiment, particularly among the southern Slavic peoples. It was convenient for them to place most or all of the blame for southern Slavic hostility to the rule of the Dual Monarchy on external stimulation of that hostility by the Kingdom of Serbia. When the heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne was assassinated, there was evidence that the assassins had received assistance from Serbia. The decision for the Dual Monarchy to go to war in 1914 was taken as an effort to resolve a mortal threat to its existence, or so it was understood by the people who made that decision.
2. Serbia
The decision for Serbia to go to war in 1914 was taken to resist aggression by Austria-Hungary which was perceived (almost certainly correctly) as a threat to the country’s independent existence.
3. Germany
In the early twentieth century, the people who held power in Germany were conscious of how it was militarily and economically the strongest country in Europe. They were eager to maintain and extend that superiority. They were confident, and they had some justification, in the belief that it was within the bounds of Germany’s power even to defeat its two strongest neighbours, France and Russia, if they combined against it. The political influential German military prepared detailed plans for that purpose, plans in which speed of response was critical. When Russia placed itself in opposition to pressure being exerted by (Germany’s ally) Austria-Hungary against Serbia in the July Crisis which followed the assassination of the heir presumptive to the throne of the Dual Monarchy, some people in Germany felt that this was an opportunity to put the war plans into action and thereby secure and extend Germany’s dominance within Europe, whereas Germany’s position would be weakened if Russian pressure was not countered and Austria-Hungary backed down (or was perceived to have done so). This feeling increased and became more urgent when the Russian army was mobilised, an action which was interpreted (probably correctly) as indicating Russian willingness to exert pressure by military force if it was unable to deter Austro-Hungarian action against Serbia by non-military means. The decision for Germany to go to war in 1914 was taken as being the best way to make use of the opportunity to secure and extend a dominant position for Germany within Europe and as being necessary (probably or certainly) to avoid undermining of Germany’s superior position.
4. Russia
In the decades before the First World War, trade passing through the Turkish Straits became progressively more important to the Russian economy. As a result, the people who held power in Russia remained concerned with ensuring that no hostile power could control those straits and with maintaining their own ability to exert influence there. As a corollary of this, they considered (perhaps correctly) that Russia’s position would be weakened or threatened if another European power gained increased influence over the small powers of the Balkans, and that it was important for Russia to maintain or increase its influence there. When Austria-Hungary exerted pressure against Serbia in the July Crisis which followed the assassination of the heir presumptive to the throne of the Dual Monarchy, and then resorted to military action, people who held power in Russia perceived that (perhaps correctly) as a threat to Russia’s position. Russia attempted to forestall Austro-Hungarian action, and the Russian army was mobilised as part of that attempt even though it risked war, which did in fact follow when declared by Germany. The decision for Russia to go to war in 1914 was made as a continuation of a decision to resist (by military force if non-military means were ineffective) German-supported Austro-Hungarian aggression against Serbia, a decision which in turn was taken because that aggression was perceived (perhaps correctly) as a serious indirect threat to Russia.
5. Belgium
The decision for Belgium to go to war in 1914 was taken to resist German violation of Belgian neutrality because any Belgian acquiescence in violation of that neutrality was considered (perhaps correctly) likely to be to the lasting detriment of the maintenance of Belgian independence.
6. France
The decision for France to go to war in 1914 was taken to resist German aggression. German war plans requiring an attack on France as soon as war with Russia began were based at least partly on a calculation, perhaps correct, that France was in any case likely or certain to attack Germany in the event of a German war with Russia, and once the war began people in power in France welcomed it as an opportunity to check the rise of German power and improve France’s position as a power in Europe, but the need for an explicit decision to this effect was removed by the German attack.
7. United Kingdom
The decision for the United Kingdom to go to war in 1914 was taken to resist German aggression partly because people in power in the United Kingdom considered (perhaps correctly) that failure to honour the treaty obligation to uphold Belgian neutrality would be damaging and partly because people in power in the United Kingdom considered (again perhaps correctly) that if German aggression against Belgium and France succeeded the security of the United Kingdom would be negatively affected. Even if Belgian neutrality had not been violated, it is possible that the United Kingdom would have gone to war (either at its outbreak or at a later date) to prevent a German defeat of France, but the violation of Belgian neutrality made the question moot.
8. Montenegro
The decision for Montenegro to go to war in 1914 was taken out of a sense of historical solidarity with Serbia and as a response to a pattern of aggression by Austria-Hungary which was likely to threaten Montenegro in the same way that Serbia was threatened.
9. Japan
The decision for Japan to go to war in 1914 was taken to seize the opportunity of acquiring territory from Germany in the Pacific.
10. Ottoman Empire
The decision for the Ottoman Empire to go to war in 1914 was taken as a result of calculations that the empire was in a position where it could not maintain itself without the support of a major European power and that alliance with Germany, even at the cost of involvement in the European war, offered the most advantageous terms.
11. Italy
The decision for Italy to go to war in 1915 was taken in the expectation of territorial gains at the expense of Austria-Hungary.
12. Bulgaria
The decision for Bulgaria to go to war in 1915 was taken in the expectation of territorial gains at the expense of Serbia.
13. Portugal
The decision for Portugal to go to war in 1916 was taken as a result of a calculation that cooperation with the United Kingdom was most likely to safeguard Portugal’s possession of its colonial territories.
14. Romania
The decision for Romania to go to war in 1916 was taken in the expectation of territorial gains at the expense of Austria-Hungary.
15. USA
The decision for the United States to go to war in 1917 was taken partly in response to the German decision to resume a use of submarines which included sinking American merchant ships, despite a previous US announcement that it would go to war in such a case, and partly out of a belief that the war would not be justly settled without US participation, fighting against the Central Powers because they were perceived (with some justification) as the aggressors.
16. Greece
The decision for Greece to go to war in 1917 was taken in the expectation of territorial gains.
August 28, 2020 at 6:07 pm
J-D, these are good reasons but I don’t think you’ve interrogated all of them enough. For example about Germany you write:
What does this mean? What was the value of being militarily and economically strong, why did they need to “maintain and extend that superiority”? To what end? What geo-political projects did destroying France achieve for them? Had they gone to war with France and won, what would they have expected from teh settlement? Do you think they had a conception of what that settlement would be, which made them “eager to … extend that superiority”? What would it concern?
For some nations you have stated a territorial grab explicitly, but for others you have given a means, not an end. Military and economic strength is not a goal in itself, in the context of great power rivalry. It serves to defend, protect or extend power, but to what end? Those ends are the reason that Germany went to war, and presumably the end in question was not the status quo. So what was it?
[We may have moved past this topic to the issue of how rich Tolkien was, so feel free to drop it if it bores you!]
August 29, 2020 at 7:23 am
I’m not clear on how generally accepted this is, but in any case I’m not sure how it matters: just because something is in fact generally accepted it doesn’t follow that it should be generally accepted.
The Summer Palace was destroyed as a penalty for the commission of crimes against humanity, crimes of a kind which in the twentieth century would have brought the death penalty. The destruction of the Summer Palace was a lesser penalty than capital punishment, something which (in any case) the Anglo-French Expeditionary Force was not in a position to inflict on the perpetrators.
August 29, 2020 at 7:35 am
The communist uprising in Russia did not help to end the First World War, but even if it had that wouldn’t necessarily be a justification.
The Bolsheviks did succeed in extricating Russia from the war, but they did so by surrendering on terms imposed by the Germans. It’s always or nearly always possible to end a war by surrender on the enemy’s terms, but that doesn’t mean it’s always justified to do so. The Allies could have ended the Second World War much earlier by surrendering unconditionally to the Axis: good thing they didn’t!
August 29, 2020 at 7:42 am
Do we not? When I use ‘Tolkien Hobbit Germany’ as my search terms, the first hit I get is this:
https://www.good.is/articles/jrr-rolkien-nazi-letter
Second hit is this:
https://flashbak.com/jrr-tolkien-letter-nazi-the-hobbit-1938-429966/
Third hit is this:
https://www.newsweek.com/hobbit-how-tolkien-sunk-german-anti-semitic-inquiry-his-race-1132744
Further hits appear to be similar.
Do you have some reason to doubt these reports?
August 29, 2020 at 10:54 am
J-D, I’m familiar with the “letter” that Tolkien is said to have “sent” to the Nazis in response to their queries. Unfortunately the reports you link to are not correct, and a good example of how Tolkien’s defenders (and historiographers of Britain’s response to Nazi Germany until 1939 more generally) cannot be trusted. I have the book of Tolkien’s letters, which includes the “letter” you link to, and in fact it is not a letter that was sent: it is one of two drafts that Tolkien gave to his publisher, leaving it to their discretion which they would use, and it is likely that the letter quoted in your links, which the first one describes as a “classic clapback” was not actually sent, which is why it is still in the archive of his letters. In my version it is letter 30 and starts with this explanation (I transcribe from my kindle):
The “that” in the second sentence is clearly a reference to letter 30, since they have no copy of the draft that Allen & Unwin sent. And just in case that isn’t clear enough, letter 29 in the files is Tolkien’s response to the English publisher when they explain the situation, and in the last sentence of that letter he writes
It seems pretty likely to me from this sentence that what actually happened is Tolkien left the choice of whether to tell the Germans to fuck off to his publisher, since he could not refuse publication without their consent. So they kept the fuck off letter and sent the “I’m Aryan” letter. But Tolkien’s defenders always omit what he actually wrote in the previous letter, and never mention that the one they’re citing is an unsent draft, when they try to claim he rejected the Germans.
The presentation of this “letter” is extremely dishonest, and a really good example of how so much of the defense of Tolkien is built on extremely dubious misrepresentation of basic facts. For other examples of it on this blog, see commenter Noisms telling me I’m misremembering the book and that the Haradrim weren’t black (followed by me citing the book to show he’s wrong); or vagans and a previous commenter (about 10 years ago) trying to prove Tolkien was not wealthy or upper class. I’ve no doubt 10 years from now someone else will drive by this post and repeat one of these three misrepresentations, either honestly (as you and vagans have done) or dishonestly (as the people reporting in the links you provide have done). This is how hagiography works, and it’s sad to see it operating in real time on my blog!
Also, destroying the summer palace is not a punishment for human rights abuses, and the idea that the British at that time cared about human rights is … well, there are no words really. It’s a direct act of colonial vandalism and to suggest anything else is to be a defender of colonialism. The British in that era were no better than the Taliban or ISIS. Don’t defend them!
August 29, 2020 at 5:50 pm
You think I should have written more? I thought out more than I wrote, so if you want me to write more I’ll write more.
When a country is powerful, it doesn’t always or even typically make the lives of people in those countries better than the lives of people in small countries with little military or economic strength. Today, for example, the greater power of the USA doesn’t make the lives of its people better than the lives of the people of Luxembourg. (What do I mean by ‘better lives’? I mean people being better nourished, better sheltered, more physically secure, more comfortable, more leisured, better entertained, physically and mentally healthier, better satisfied with the opportunities they have for spending their time, happier.) This observation would suggest that there’s no good reason for people to be concerned with maintaining or increasing the power of their countries. Despite this, good reasons or no, many people do concern themselves with this. It’s commonest and most marked among national leaders, but many ordinary subjects and citizens seem to feel the same way, at least to some extent, however unreasonable it is for them to do so. It’s a strange thing (or at least it is to me), but there it is: national greatness is important to many people, it makes them feel good. It’s not even clear that increased national power improves the lives of the national leaders who most concern themselves with it. There’s a discussion between the soldiers in All Quiet On The Western Front in which, as I recall it, one of them observes that the Kaiser needs a victorious war to improve his position in the history books, and that kind of consideration may in fact have influenced the actions of the Kaiser and the other leaders of Germany and the other belligerent powers, but I’m blessed if I know what good being in the history books did them.
Consider, as a contemporary exemplification of the same phenomenon, all the people who rally to the slogan ‘Make America Great Again’. Again, I’m blessed if I know what good American greatness has done them, or does them, or will do them. Yet, evidently, the idea makes them feel good, no matter how strange, unreasonable, or plain silly that seems to me (or to you).
Those are questions which it is easier to interpret more specifically and therefore for which it is easier to provide more specific answers.
In 1870 and 1871, in the Franco-Prussian War, the Germans defeated the French and were able to impose a settlement of their choosing. The terms were a transfer of territory from France to Germany (metropolitan European territory, no colonial territory) and an indemnity paid in gold. However, it doesn’t automatically follow that the reason Germany went to war was specifically to obtain the territory and the indemnity. For one thing, it was France which declared war; for another, Bismarck had other aims. However, if you fight a war while inspired by notions (however unreasonable) of national greatness, it becomes difficult to renounce any material gains if you are victorious. Consider the experience of Louis XV of France. In the peace settlement at the end of the War of the Austrian Succession, he surrendered the territory which had been conquered by the victorious French armies. Perhaps he thought it irreligious to acquire property by force; perhaps he thought retaining the conquered territory would be a source of continued grievance against France, reducing rather than increasing its security; perhaps it was both. His decision, however, won him no sympathy from the French people, who adopted the expression ‘as stupid as the Peace’; also, eight years later war broke out again.
So I conclude that if Germany had defeated France in the First World War, they would almost certainly have required the payment of another indemnity and the cession of additional territory. Germany was certainly counting on the indemnity as a means of paying its own costs of fighting the war; other provision had not been made, which is why Germany faced budgetary crisis after the war, being obliged to pay its bills without assistance from a French indemnity. It’s possible that the territorial claims would have included (as was not the case after the Franco-Prussian War) the transfer of colonies from France to Germany. However, it doesn’t automatically follow that Germany went to war specifically to obtain specific additional territory, still less that it was colonial territory that was its particular motive. In September 1914 a shopping list of plans for after the victory was drawn up, but note that this happened after the war had already started; it wasn’t part of a plan made in anticipation of the war.
Conversely, consider the case of the territory transferred from France to Germany after the Franco-Prussian War. At the end of the First World War it was transferred (back) from Germany to France. With France victorious and Germany defeated, there was no chance this would not happen. If France had defeated Germany in a war any time between 1871 and 1914, it would have insisted on its claim on this territory; but France did not start a war with Germany for this territory any time betwen 1871 and 1914. It is equally no the case that France started the First World War in order to (re)claim that territory, and the fact that the territory was in fact transferred after the war is insufficient to demonstrate otherwise.
Indeed I have, but you can observe that every one of those countries joined a war already in progress, treating it as an existing phenomenon, not one to be initiated, and in that context sizing up the opportunities it offered, a different sort of calculation from the ones made by the initial belligerents.
You can also observe that only one of the countries which entered the war for the sake of explicit territorial aims was aiming at colonial territories, and that country not a European one.
This is not to say that no war is ever initiated in pursuit of specific territorial gains. Frederick the Great went to war in 1740 with the specific aim of seizing control of Silesia, for example, and there are plenty of others. The case that the First World War was one of them is not made out.
Not to you, I take it, and not to me, and not, in my view and perhaps yours, to any person of sense.
Alas, people are not always sensible! Witness, again, the MAGA hat!
August 29, 2020 at 6:58 pm
faustus: thanks for the salary data. I think I will add the printed edition of Tolkien’s letters to my toread list.
You said that “T. was not a pacifist because his racial interests are defended by violence … and not a socialist because his class interests meant he had no common cause with working men in other countries.” Those are really strong claims about cause and effect. You could as well say that he was not a pacifist because he was an intellectually-minded Catholic and Catholic theology has Just War theory, and not a socialist because of his romantic, nostalgic temperament or because of the circles he had grown up in.
August 29, 2020 at 8:08 pm
With a few quibbles, J-D’s account of the origins of WWI would accord with the main thrust of modern historiography (there are a lot of older accounts still floating around). One point in amplification is that the decision-makers in Berlian and, to a lesser extent, Austria-Hungary, went to war with two broad aims: to curtail the power of Russia (Berlin envisaged a satellite Poland and maybe also a satellite Ukraine) and to regain enough internal support to strike against social democracy.
Where does the figure of 500 pounds come from? It seems high for a junior university member in that era.
August 30, 2020 at 8:37 am
The problem with class analysis along faustus’ lines is that it does not take into account the many other intersecting interests involved. As Marx sometimes acknowledged, any complex cooperative enterprise (whether imperialism or just making widgets) involves a large degree of arbitrariness in the division of the product. That does not mean that all the spoils go to the rich, or that the lower rungs have no interest in the enterprise.
The Roman housewife, looking around at her new, larger farm and seeing her new house-slave hard at work, certainly appreciates Roman imperialism. So too did the Clydeside worker building a battleship or the farmer making a go in the colonies or the seaman employed in Britain’s ever-larger merchant fleet. We think their choices wrong, but can’t convincingly argue that they were victims.
August 30, 2020 at 11:24 am
Peter, the figure of 500 pounds comes from Tolkien’s letters, reporting a conversation with a friend, and it’s for what would now be considered an Associate Professorship, not junior faculty.
J-D’s account of the origins of the war is fine but it misses the original purpose of military and economic strength, and his further comment doesn’t clarify. For example, in 17xx the French helped the Americans overthrow British rule in the colonies (I know this because I watched Magua do it in Last of the Mohicans). They did this to confound British imperial goals, to secure their own, and to weaken Britain in Europe. They could not have done this if they did not possess a certain level of military, economic and political strength, but doing it was important because they were already in conflict with Britain for possession of large stretches of the new world (i.e. modern Canada). Even the American revolution was part of an ongoing land grab by the continental powers! So it’s impossible to disconnect the goals J-D talks about from imperial goals, and though the imperial powers may not have explicitly stated that they were aiming to take each other’s territorial possession they obviously intended to, because that was part of their calculations for all of their military and political enterprises at that time. With the loss of accessible new lands, they needed to start taking each others’, and that’s exactly what they did after WW1.
Peter, I’m aware (as I keep saying!) that there are non-class reasons why people do things. Sometimes (as in “Tolkien’s a catholic”) people’s class and religious interests can overlap. Other times, their racial and class interests can be in conflict. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t balancing and considering those interests, and it doesn’t mean they’re right when they act one way over another. For example, I don’t think I have said that working class britons of that time were “victims” of imperialism – they were obviously beneficiaries. Thus their racial interests aligned with imperialism. But they would always also be victims of the ruling classes of that imperial order (as working classes are) and their class interests lay in overthrowing imperialism through an international movement of working class solidarity, which Marx and Lenin aimed to build. It’s difficult to get working class Britons to overlook their racial interests in favour of their class interests, because for a long time they were beneficiaries of empire, and this is often cited as the reason there was no revolution in England – the workers were bought off with the profits of empire. WW1 started to change this calculus for working class people because a) the war was such a profligate waste of young working class lives and b) they saw alternatives to imperialism in Eastern Europe and the international movement of working class solidarity that was building. The result of this awakening of class interests in previously non-radical states was the reason for the growth of authoritarianism in Europe, which ultimately led to Fascism – a reaction against socialism that binds the working class to an ever more radical vision of their racial interests and explicitly racializes the working class’s interests in order to mobilize all of society against the international movement of worker’s solidarity (which is also achieved by casting this as a plot against the racial workers by a racialized parasite class). Of course Marx and Lenin were themselves too racist (and Marx too deceived by the limits of his own class’s vision) to understand the strong pull of racism over class solidarity in Europe. But none of this is relevant, because we’re talking about Tolkien, and everything he did in his life was consistent with his racial and class interests which, as a member of the British ruling class, very carefully aligned around a repressive imperialist movement that he was willing to work for, and unwilling to threaten the benefits of, even when some of those benefits flowed from its most extreme and violent expression (Nazism) in 1938.
vagans, the “because” in those sentences is not intended to express a strict cause-and-effect relationship. We’re in blog comments here so I’m not always writing 100% carefully. I should more carefully say “T.’s non-pacifism is consistent with the need to defend his racial interests by violence, and his not being a socialist is consistent with his class interests”. I don’t know the inner workings of his mind. But let’s say that the reason he’s not a socialist is his catholic love of monarchy: that is still 100% consistent with his class interests. Obviously if he was a working class Irish catholic he would have a very very different view of the relative importance of monarchy and global workers’ solidarity. Lenin would tell you that all this stuff about romantic nostalgic temperament and religion is guff, an intellectual cover for his naked class interests. I wouldn’t go that far, but it would have to be the most unsurprising coincidence on this earth that a rich white professor in 1930s England was opposed to socialism, supported monarchy, believed everything Churchill said about Franco, and joined the British army as an officer. Why would I bother adding anything about his “romantic, nostalgic temperament” to explain what is basically inevitable in a man of his class and race?
August 30, 2020 at 8:49 pm
*Ghost of H.G. Wells looks up* “Hey Bertie, someone on those electronic tubes is calling for you with a question about socialism before the Great War.”
*Ghost of Bertrand Russell* “Sorry old chap, the internet is like this library of all the books that have ever been written, if you let yourself notice every time someone says something ill-considered about you you will never have a moment’s peace. I have just been working through some treatises on geometry from Roman Syria and …”
August 30, 2020 at 8:51 pm
I could see from the sources I linked to that Tolkien wrote two letters and left it to the publisher to decide which one to send, and also that the one whose text was reproduced was not the one that was sent. So when you tell me the same thing, you are telling me nothing I did not already know from the sources I found (by a simple Web search), and it’s not true that you’re telling me something that otherwise goes unreported.
I understand that Tolkien did not insist on his publisher sending the letter whose text survives. Nevertheless, he did write it and provide it to the publisher to be used if the publisher saw fit, and that means that it expresses views which Tolkien would have been content to have communicated.
Moreover, if the text of the letter actually sent does not survive then, obviously, we don’t know what it communicated to the German publisher: but we do know that whatever the content of that letter, the German publisher did not bring out a German edition of The Hobbit and that none appeared until after the fall of the Nazis. How much (or how little) the content of the letter sent by Tolkien’s British publisher had to do with that outcome we can’t say.
If I never know what Tolkien’s personal thoughts and feelings on this and related topics were I will be untroubled; my interest in his personal exoneration or inculpation is strictly limited. He’s long dead, and it can’t make any difference either way. It’s the content, the implications, and the influence of his books which continues important.
Of interest to me here is the appearance of tremendous confidence with which you make your assertions despite the uncertainty of their justification.
Also of interest is the point about Tolkien’s service in the British armed forces because of the way it exemplifies the larger issue of how to evaluate anybody’s decision to serve in the armed forces.
Both in peacetime and in wartime there are many different reasons why people serve in the armed forces, and in some cases people have more than one reason.
Many people serve in the armed forces because they are conscripted to do so. In wartime this is by far the commonest reason in most wars, even apparently highly ideological civil wars. Even people who are conscripted have a choice, however; some people choose to resist the draft, and therefore it’s reasonable to say that every serving conscript has made a choice not to do so. On the other hand, it’s reasonable to suggest that a decision not to resist the draft should be evaluated differently from a decision to volunteer. In some cases, just for example, resisting the draft can bring down punishment not only on the draft resister but on family members as well.
It’s also reasonable to evaluate differently decisions to volunteer for the armed forces in peacetime and decisions to volunteer in wartime. For many people who volunteer in wartime, it appears to be a sufficient motive to say ‘My country is at war, and I will fight for my country’. I don’t consider that a sufficient reason, but it’s different from other kinds of reasons and therefore merits separate evaluations.
If it is accepted (as I accept) that there can be cases where there are good reasons to fight in a war, then, as it has to be accepted that people who choose to fight in wars (whether as conscripts or as volunteers) do so for various reasons, it has to follow that a person might be fighting in a war for a good reason as part of an army which other people have joined for different and possibly inadequate reasons. Also, in a context such as the typical modern one where armed forces have a continuing existence covering both wartime and peacetime, a person may have a good reason to join the armed forces in order to fight a particular war, even though those same armed forces have a record of misdeeds and perhaps even atrocities in peacetime (for that matter, the fact that atrocities are extremely likely to be committed by all sides in wartime is not by itself a sufficient basis for evaluating a person’s decision to fight in a war). For example, a decision to join the armed forces of the Allies in the Second World War (like the decision made by my own late father) could be thoroughly justified, even though the record of those armed forces included use as tools of oppression in peacetime and perpetration of atrocities in wartime. The armed forces of the Allies in the Second World War did not have clean records (in that war or before it), but they were nevertheless the only tools available to stop the Axis, and a decision to do what had to be done to stop the Axis was a justified decision.
In the same way, the armed forces of the Allies in the First World War did not have clean records (in that war or before it), but they were nevertheless the only tools available to stop the aggression of the Central Powers which started that war (even if the Allies also bore some lesser share of the responsibility), and a decision to do what had to be done to defeat the Central Powers was a justified decision. That’s true regardless of the fact that many people chose to fight for the Allies for other reasons, some of them bad ones.
You missed the most decisive quote, from ‘The Battle Of The Pelennor Fields’, Chapter Six, Book Five: ‘Gothmog the lieutenant of Morgul had flung them into the fray; Easterlings with axes, and Variags of Khand, Southrons in scarlet, and out of Far Harad black men like half-trolls with white eyes and red tongues …’
On my reading, the natural interpretation, given the map as well as the text, is that Harad represents Africa, with Near Harad representing North Africa and Far Harad sub-Saharan Africa, so that most of the Haradrim appearing in the text, being from Near Harad, are coloured in a broad sense of that term but not black in a narrow sense of that term. The racism of the quoted description of the black men of Far Harad is strong. (It’s one thing to suggest that some individuals actually are half troll or half orc, with their inhuman characteristics arising from the fictional non-human ancestry; it’s another to suggest that some men (some black men), with no fictional non-human ancestry, are like half-trolls. I suspect some would argue that this is supposed to convey how they appeared to the Gondorians and their allies, but I don’t think that, although possibly true as far as it goes, is an adequate excuse.)
I don’t suggest that people in the nineteenth century used terms like ‘human rights abuses’ or ‘crimes against humanity’, and I don’t even argue that they had similar concepts under other names. Maybe they did and maybe they didn’t; I simply don’t know. However, they did recognise deliberate wanton torture as an atrocious crime, and they were right to do so. If you argue that they had other motives for destroying the Summer Palace as well as penalising atrocities, I am inclined to think you are likely to be right; also, if you argue that they weren’t consistent in penalising atrocities, I would have no doubt that you are right. However, it is grossly implausible to suggest that when they announced that the destruction of the Summer Palace was a punishment for what they correctly recognised as an atrocity, it was purely and solely a lie to cover some other motive for that action, while they never had any intention of punishing the atrocity which had in fact been committed.
Also, if you want to argue that it was not a justified or appropriate penaly for the atrocity, you might have a case; I’m not sure how to judge that and therefore take no view, which means I’m not offering a defence. I’m not arguing in particular that they were right to punish crime in that way, only that punishing crime was what they were doing (even if it may not have been all they were doing). There’s lots of instances of punishments for crime which are indefensible. I don’t know that there’s a defence for this one: maybe there is and maybe there isn’t.
August 30, 2020 at 9:26 pm
J-D: That quote from “Return of the King” is interesting because its not ancient or early medieval imagery. It reminds me of some of the art in early Tintin books and in Asterix and Obelisk. The dominant theory is that 20th century European ideas about blackness go back to around the 17th century and the rise of the Atlantic slave trade, although there are outliers like Geraldine Heng who see them earlier. So that is the kind of passage where you can say its Tolkien’s environment getting the better of him, you can’t blame it on the sources he is imitating.
August 31, 2020 at 10:21 am
J-D, from the first link you gave me:
This is a straight lie. We don’t know whether he provided a draft that sidestepped the question, and the ’30s-style classy clap-back was not sent. The source you cite lied.
The second link you give me states “which one the Germans received is unknown” but this is also a lie, since the collection of letters this draft is taken from states that it is probable they received the other one.
The third link you cite says it is unclear which of the letters was sent, again directly misrepresenting the editors of the volume of letters it is taken from.
All three links you cite try very hard to imply (two) or openly state (one) that the remaining draft is the one that was sent, when the editors of the letter compilation state the opposite, and the clear implication of simple facts about how letters are handled says that it is very likely the less forceful letter was sent. Furthermore we know that although Tolkien gave two drafts he made clear he wanted his publisher to decide which one to send – he specifically abrogated his responsibility to deny the Nazis. But these links you cite try very hard to hide this fact. This is how hagiography is done!
The fact that the Hobbit wasn’t published in Germany until 1957 doesn’t mean Tolkien sent a forceful letter. There are many reasons in 1937 Germany that a children’s book would not be published. Maybe they had a MAGA idea about children’s books! Maybe one of the censors higher up the chain realized that Tolkien’s dwarves are allegories for Jews and thought it gave the Jews too positive a depiction. Maybe the Aryan ancestry condition is the very minimum condition for publication and there are many more after that. Maybe the children’s publishing industry basically shut down as the war approached. It’s disingenuous at best for these links to suggest it was because Tolkien sent an aggressive letter when he explicitly told his publishers that the decision of whether to interfere in German publishing was theirs not his.
Yes there are many reasons for an upper class man in 1915 to join the officer corps of the Imperial British Army, but we shouldn’t try to interrogate them from our post-war perspective. Remember in 1915 everyone thought the war would be a jolly thrill, and what we know now was not known to them. What we do know, as objective fact, was that everything Tolkien did at that time was consistent with his racial and class interests.
I don’t think you’ll get far in the modern world with the idea that destroying priceless cultural relics en masse is an appropriate response to a crime against people. That’s not how civilized people behave, it’s how ISIS and the Taliban work. Even the people who did it knew what they were doing was terrible. It was indefensible and there’s no point in quibbling about it. But even if it wasn’t indefensible at the time, Tolkien was supposedly some romantic aesthete who wanted to go back to a simpler time of purity and great art or something, so why did he join the military force that was responsible for one of the greatest acts of cultural vandalism in modern history? Presumably, because he didn’t think it was a big deal, and some other consideration was more important to him. What would that other consideration be, for a rich white man, that could be balanced positively against the destruction of a huge cache of Asian art and treasures? Hmmm, I wonder …
September 1, 2020 at 10:14 am
The original purpose of military strength is hidden too far back in prehistory for anybody to know what it was.
Of the eight initial belligerents of the First World War, three (Belgium, France, and Serbia) went to war for the simple reason that they were being attacked. Two more (Montenegro and the United Kingdom) went to war because other countries were being attacked: they felt a sense of obligation to support the (particular) victims of (this particular) aggression and also feared becoming targets of attack in the future. The case of Russia is slightly more complicated: Russia did not declare war on Germany and Austria-Hungary, Germany and Austria-Hungary declared war on Russia, but Russia had taken the decision to mobilise its armed forces before war was declared. A key underlying factor for Russia was a specific concern with the concrete material damage it feared in the event of a hostile power being able to cut Russia off from trade through the Turkish Straits (and the war in fact demonstrated just how severe that damage could be). Austria-Hungary went to war because of a fear that South Slavic nationalism was a material threat to the very existence of the Dual Monarchy (also a realistic fear).
Only Germany went to war in 1914 because of a concern with an abstract position of military and economic superiority which it wanted to maintain, protect, and extend, and also to demonstrate and give concrete form to; at least, that’s the explanation I offered. What’s your specific explanation of why Germany went to war in 1914? (Do you think I’m wrong about any of the other belligerents?)
France made no attempt to regain its lost territory in Canada during the American Revolutionary War. An American invasion of Quebec failed in 1775 before France ever entered the war (in 1778). In the peace settlement in 1783 France made only a few minor territorial gains, gains whose material value was vastly outweighed by the enormous financial cost of the war to France, a financial cost which only a few years later caused a complete financial collapse and the utter ruin of the people who, holding power in France, made the decision for war in 1778.
This is not to the point, though. I didn’t suggest that no country ever goes to war to make territorial gains. I know that’s something that has often happened, and I’ve mentioned some examples myself, including some of the belligerents in the First World War. What I argued was that the First World War was not caused by conflict over colonial territories. I’m fairly confident that if I checked I could find some examples of wars caused by conflict over colonial territories. The First World War wasn’t one of them.
It is also worth noting that in a war caused by one country trying to seize territory from another, the decisions of the belligerents are not symmetrical and should not be evaluated symmetrically; also, that different people can have different reasons for fighting for the same side in the same war, reasons which can be evaluated differently.
The final conclusion being this: it’s not right to say that anybody who fought in the British Army in the First World War was fighting for colonialism. (I am more interested in this general point than I am in specific questions about Tolkien.)
September 1, 2020 at 11:19 am
J-D, this is facetious:
We have a good idea of why nations in 19th and 20th century Europe needed to be militarily and economically strong, and to pretend that there is some mystery to this buried in prehistory is missing the point.
Again, you rely on the stated reasons nations given by nations, related to the specific treaty obligations that came into play in 1914, but an analysis of the reasons for the war needs to go beyond the specific triggering incident and look at the full historical lead up. No one would take seriously an analysis of the Pacific War in which people said America went to war with Japan because of Pearl Harbour – there was an enormous amount of political confrontation over 20 years that led up to the events of Pearl Harbour, and a lot of that involved colonial ambitions of multiple countries, as well as alliances and geo-political considerations and attempts to contain Asian powers. Yet here you are trying to pretend that WW1 happened in a vacuum, with events in 1914.
I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that when you join up to the British Army – the primary tool of colonial violence for several hundred years – you were fighting for colonialism even if the specific proximal cause of the war you were fighting in was some other bullshit your leaders were concerned about. This is especially true if you signed up for the officer corps, i.e. to be a leader in the British Army. It’s no different today with the US army: you can’t sign up for that force and pretend you aren’t working for the cutting edge of an imperialist blade. Sure, you might personally have done it so you can get access to reliable healthcare, but you are working for the force that did Abu Ghraib and Fallujah, and you can’t get out of that by saying you didn’t personally intend to kill people and steal their stuff. That’s your job! And that was Tolkien’s job in 1915.
September 1, 2020 at 7:47 pm
Some nations in 19th and 20th century Europe were militarily and economically strong; but some were not, so it wasn’t a necessity.
No.
No, I don’t.
That is not correct.
I make no reference to their statements of their reasons.
Since you mention it, though, you’re also wrong about what those statements were.
The United Kingdom explicitly invoked treaty obligations–specifically, obligations under the 1839 Treaty of London to guarantee Belgian independence and neutrality–but other belligerents did not.
Historians are bound to ask the question ‘Why did Japan attack Pearl Harbour?’, but that doesn’t change the fact that ‘Because of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour’ is the correct answer to the question ‘Why did America go to war in 1941?’
Incorrect, again.
That’s not what I have done.
I have attributed the Austro-Hungarian decision to go to war to fear of the effects of South Slav nationalism on the survival of the Dual Monarchy, a fear going back well before 1914.
I have attributed Russia’s preparedness to go to war to concern about the continuation of commerce through the Turkish Straits, and the implications of political and military developments in the Balkans for control of those straits, a concern also going back well before 1914.
I have attributed the German decision to go to war to considerations of the military balance which also go back well before 1914.
You don’t; I do.
Obviously soldiers fighting for the British Army in the British colonies against the colonised populations were fighting for colonialism (although that wasn’t for all of them the reason why they were fighting–many of them were fighting for colonialism for no other reason than because they were being paid to do so), but soldiers fighting for the British Army in France and Belgium against German aggression in the First World War were not fighting for colonialism. The British Army remained a tool of colonial violence after the First World War, and into, through, and out of the period of the Second World War, but does that mean that everybody who fought for the British Army in the Second World War was fighting for colonialism? No!
It’s the job of all soldiers in all armies and in all wars to kill people! (At least, it’s part of their job: there are specialist support troops whose primary function is not killing people. I can’t help thinking of my own father, who was a medical orderly in the RAAF; as a medical orderly, it was mostly his job to help care for the injured and the sick, but I don’t deny that his function was to assist the performance of the RAAF, which was prinicipally concerned with killing people and blowing stuff up, and I wouldn’t argue that he had no share in the responsibility for that just because it wasn’t what he personally was doing. It was absolutely essential and right to defeat the Axis, and that couldn’t be done without killing people!) There is an argument to be made for total pacifism and non-violence; I don’t accept it, but I can respect it (or some forms of it). However, if that’s the argument you’re making, you haven’t been clear about it. On the other hand, if that’s not the argument you’re making, then you’re conceding that violence, and even lethal violence, is sometimes necessary and justified. That’s my position. Yes, the British Army was in France and Belgium (during the First World War) to kill people, and that was justified, because German aggression had to be stopped and there was no way to stop it without killing people.
September 1, 2020 at 8:23 pm
I understand the argument you are making, and it is an argument well worth making, but it is not an argument about what Tolkien did, it is an argument about what other people, writing about Tolkien, have done.
Those are good points. It is evident that there are people who would prefer to believe that Tolkien told the Nazis where they could get off because they find that more emotionally satisfying, and it would not be surprising if they drew that conclusion without sufficient justification. I don’t. As it happens, I don’t much care what the facts of that specific case were, not feeling an emotional stake in it. But are you aware that you create the appearance of having an emotional stake of your own and of drawing a (different) conclusion of your own that may also be inadequately justified?
No, it was not true in 1915 that everybody thought the war would be a jolly thrill. It wasn’t even true that everybody thought that in 1914, still less that everybody thought that in 1915. Some people thought that, or something like that; others did not.
I’m not sure what you mean by writing that you don’t think I’ll ‘get far’. Do you perhaps mean that you think most people would disagree with me? Even if that were true, it’s not evidence that I’m wrong.
Here are some of the positions which people might take now, and might have taken then (in 1860, when the Summer Palace was destroyed).
1. The stories about the atrocity perpetrated by the Chinese are false in substance.
2. The stories are true in substance but the actions taken did not constitute an atrocity.
3. There was an atrocity, but that doesn’t justify the Anglo-French Expeditionary Force in taking punitive action (in form).
4. There was an atrocity, and it did justify punitive action, but unfortunately the only forms of punitive action that might have been justified were not within the power of the Anglo-French Expeditionary Force to carry out.
5. There was a different form of punitive action which the Anglo-French Expeditionary Force would have been justified in carrying out, rather than the destruction of the Summer Palace.
6. The destruction of the Summer Palace was justified as punitive action for the atrocity perpetrated by the Chinese.
That list may not exhaust the possibilities, but in any case I don’t know what your position is.
My position is this: punitive action was certainly justified, but I am not sufficiently well informed to judge whether there was some other form of punitive action which could and should have been preferred to the destruction of the Summer Palace. I’m not saying the action was justified; I’m saying that I don’t know.
Anybody who thought in 1914 that basing a decision on whether to join the British Army in 1914 should be based on the situation in 1914 and not on the history of what the British Army had done 50 or 100 or 500 years earlier would have been absolutely correct.
September 1, 2020 at 9:42 pm
J-D, I’m aware that right now on CT you’re engaged in an argument about white privilege. Do you think maybe the efforts of multiple newspapers to find the best possible explanation for Tolkien’s letter to the Nazis, when they’ve all read the volume the letter is from, and thus know that he never sent the letter and in fact told his publishers “I leave the decision up to you” might not be a perfect example of white privilege in action? Do you think that the gazillions of people coming on here to argue Tolkien wasn’t a racist despite what’s in his writing because a) he was a Catholic (wtf),b) he wasn’t rich, c) the book never called Haradrim black, d) everyone though colonialism was okay back then, e) he told the Nazis to fuck off (when he didn’t), f) whatever else, might possibly be extending a bucketload of white privilege to this dude? I mean, he wrote a book based entirely on the idea that immutable racial traits define your morality, with a final volume about a racially determined leader restoring a monarchy that ruled over lesser men who were lesser because of their race, he was an officer in the British army when it was still a colonial powerhouse, he was a white South African professor, at Oxford, in pre-war Britain, and people will actually go out of their way to misread the text by the author they say they love to prove he wasn’t racist, or will try to distort historical facts to argue white professors at Oxford in 1920 weren’t rich, or will wilfully misread his own fucking letters to say he wrote a nasty letter to the Nazis when he obviously didn’t, all to prove he wasn’t the racist his books obviously say he was. Do you think that might be a touch of white privilege?
Yes, I have an emotional stake in this: I think that we should be honest about the past, and about the artistic and cultural artifacts of that past that influence our present. Tolkien is the single biggest influence on the hobby I love and the nerd culture I participate in, and people are absolutely going out of their way to deny his work is racist so that they can avoid facing the simple fact that the hobby we love has some pretty dubious origins. The correct approach to that is to face it and deal with it. The wrong approach is to deliberately misread his work, his letters and his own opinions so we can pretend it isn’t happening and continue to do nothing about it.
Incidentally, have you read the Murderbot Diaries? I think you might really like the character called ART.
September 2, 2020 at 1:23 pm
I think I mentioned in an earlier comment that I have strictly limited interest in the specific applications of the questions under discussion to the particular case of Tolkien personally.
I hope you understand that I don’t mean that you are wrong to care about Tolkien more than I do. I’m just trying to explain that what I’m doing (or at any rate trying to do, or at any rate mostly) is discussing more general issues. I am not attempting to argue that you are wrong in your conclusions about Tolkien in particular, or about his books.
I think I also mentioned above that I accept you have made some important points which absolutely merit being taken into account.
I have not read the Murderbot Diaries. Indeed, I have never even heard of the Murderbot Diaries. But I’ll look them up.
September 2, 2020 at 1:30 pm
Look them up, they’re awesome.
I’m not especially interested in Tolkien’s personal commitment to colonialism either! But this whole thing arises from attempts to argue he isn’t a man steeped in the politics of his time. This is all a consequence of Peter T saying that “the sources of that [old fantasy authors’] conservatism are not political but mythic”. All of this is simply an attempt to point out that these dudes had plenty of reasons to be politically conservative, and accepting they were political creatures of their class and time is the simpler explanation here, in the absence of any strong contrary evidence. Peter even mentioned Dunsany as one of these “mythic” conservatives when Dunsany wrote and fought in favour of empire (in the Boer war).
This “mythic not political” thing has been cited repeatedly around here (Nosims of “liberalism and conservatism are equally respectable” fame did the same). It’s one of the multiple defenses of Tolkien (along with Orcs weren’t black, he didn’t have the class interests of a rich man, and he wasn’t really conservative coz he was a Catholic) that get repeatedly put forward here, and it’s terrible. Note that following this chain of argument left you, J-D, arguing in defense of a wanton act of cultural vandalism that puts ISIS to shame.
All of this to defend one man! And none of it about the actual content of the text I have been discussing!
September 3, 2020 at 11:09 am
I’m sure that if you go back through this discussion you will see that I have agreed with you about the merit of some of the points you have made. I absolutely agree with you about the importance of the point that people’s opinions and attitudes are influenced by the backgrounds in which they grew up and lived their lives. It’s wrong to deny that somebody like Tolkien (for example) must have been influenced in his opinions and his attitudes by his Englishness and his class position and all the other characteristics of his background (which I am insufficiently interested to read up on in detail). If I write more about the points on which I disagree with you, it’s not because I think they’re more important.
Since you describe me as having defended the destruction of the Summer Palace, I repeat that I’m not defending it. My opinion as presently informed (and I’m no expert on the subject and can easily imagine having my opinion changed by new information) is that Elgin had a difficult decision to make and I can’t feel confident saying the decision he made was wrong, although I also can’t feel confident saying it was right. What different decision do you think he should have made? If you think the destruction of the Summer Palace was not an appropriate response to the murder of Thomas Bowlby (among others), what do you think would have been an appropriate response? I don’t think it’s an easy question to answer, and so I hesitate to pass any kind of judgement. What I am clear on is that it’s not right to leave the murders out of the story.
September 3, 2020 at 11:19 am
Remember Elgin was the dude who stole the Elgin marbles. He was a vandal. He found an excuse for vandalism. Fortunately, he came to a bad end in Delhi.
What he should have done was just let it go, and accepted that the destruction of irreplaceable history is a greater crime than the murder of a few colonial apparatchiks. He didn’t, and the world is much poorer for the loss of the summer palace than for the loss of a few of Queen Vic’s lackeys.
September 3, 2020 at 8:18 pm
I have no wish to defend Lord Elgin, or the destruction of the Summer Palace (or the palace at Kumasi). It does not put Elgin on the same level as ISIS, who destroy both the Islamic and non-Islamic heritage with the same zeal Protestants wrecked medieval churches. It was an act done in the calculation that it would impress upon the Chinese the awful consequences of resisting the western powers (of course it had the opposite effect).
To say someone acts as the generality of their class does is not to say anything interesting, or particularly relevant to their literature (there are exceptions, but the literature resulting is usually uninteresting). Nor is the label ‘conservative’ really useful here. A good many fantasies (Tolkien and CS Lewis here included) look back to a past – monarchic, ordered by status and in that sense conservative. Eddison is avowedly martial (but not militaristic), and a good many are blind to the true evils of war. In these writings all will be well if the rightful king rules justly – a thoroughly medieval sentiment and one that runs through literature since the dawn of writing.
What is it to rule justly? It includes concern for the common welfare, a willingness to lead and die in defence of the realm, impartial judgment tempered with mercy – all things we might agree as good. It does not have to include seeking glory in aggressive war, and is a far cry from the modern right. So it’s conservative in the sense of harking back and picking up old themes without examining how they fit our modern circumstances, and ignoring (at best) our feelings about equality. The presentation of power is usually simplistic, and all too often veers between un-examined nostrums and an unreal free-for-all.
Can something be salvaged from this? Environmentalism is conservative in many of the same senses. The insistence that power comes with obligations, the more the heavier. What else?
September 3, 2020 at 8:19 pm
Well for a starters I think it’s more positive than grimdark!
September 3, 2020 at 8:21 pm
btw, I agree with faustus. Relevant fact – in 1941, the Soviets evacuated millions of people and thousands of factories ahead of the German advance. People noticed one rail car had a collection of furniture and such, not desperate refugees. When they were told it was the Turgenev museum that stood back.
September 4, 2020 at 9:42 am
Nope! Different Elgin. Check your homework!
Ah, well now at least we have identified a clear difference in our normative positions.
In my view, torturing people to death is a worse crime than the destruction of material objects. I share the moral attitude of the fictional character who would have ground every monument in the world to powder to save the sanity of a single human soul.
This is not, I should add, a sufficient basis to justify Elgin’s action, since the destruction of the Summer Palace could not, obviously, save the lives of those who had already been tortured to death. However, that is an issue which affects any decision about whether to impose any punishment for any murder. Given that the victims of murder cannot be restored to life, what is an appropriate response to murder? This is part of the reason why in my judgement the particular question under discussion remains a difficult one to which I don’t have the answer! I still can’t say Elgin was right, but I still can’t say he was wrong. What I can say is that if he was wrong, it wasn’t because the Summer Palace was worth more than the lives of the people who were tortured to death. It wasn’t. It was worth less. I’m clear about that part. If your judgement of the relative values is different from mine, I don’t know of any way we can resolve that disagreement.
September 4, 2020 at 10:03 am
Near the end of Lewis’s The Horse And His Boy, the King of Archenland says this to his son and heir apparent: ‘For this is what it means to be a king: to be first in every desperate attack and last in every desperate retreat, and when there’s hunger in the land (as must be now and then in bad years) to wear finer clothes and laugh louder over a scantier meal than any man in your land.’
It is a grotesque distortion to suppose that when Lewis wrote that he was looking back to any past. There is no past in which a king ate scantier meals than anybody in the land. What Lewis is doing is adopting and endorsing an utterly fictitious and historically baseless idea of a king.
I prefer these words of a different writer of fantasy:
September 4, 2020 at 10:09 am
If I decide to give up my space on the train to make room for museum pieces, that’s fine: that’s my choice. If you decide to give up space for the museum pieces, that’s your choice, and also fine. If somebody calls for volunteers to give up their space for the museum pieces, that’s still fine. But if some people decide to make space for the museum pieces by denying that space to other people no matter whether they like it, that’s tantamount to murder.
September 4, 2020 at 10:39 am
J-D – no, Lewis is depicting the ideal of a good king. Plato.
Further, monarchy covers a lot of ground. Is the Patrician a monarch? – no he’s a self-admitted tyrant – one who rules without formal restraint. Is that preferable to a king who takes oath to rule with the advice of council (as many medieval monarchs did), or to rule only in accord with law and custom, as again many monarchs did? Or elected kings (Poland, the Empire, Anglo-Saxon England and many others)?
The train managers are trying to save a people as a whole, not as many individuals as they can. They also had to give space to machines (and, eg, to factory workers rather than the old). And they had to manage – a job that means making that kind of decision. A process that is inescapable in any complex society. Somebody decided that the Turgenev museum was significant enough to the Russian people as a whole to be allocated space – and the crowd on the platform collectively agreed.
September 4, 2020 at 12:09 pm
I agree with J-D that these visions of Kings that are described by these conservative writers are not an invocation of past history. They’re a complete fantasy of what a king actually is, the kind of fantasy Henry VIII would have scoffed at. This is an expressly political project, to reimagine the monarchy as a noble and valuable institution rather than a corrupt mess. This is not a look back to a past but a reimagining of the past – which is what fantasy should do – but it’s just as conservative a project as the grimdark model of human society as fundamentally debased and in need of tyrannical rulers to control human brutality. I don’t see any need to describe it as anything except a political form of conservatism. So I guess all 3 of us are in agreement about this.
J-D, sorry I didn’t realize it was a different Elgin. Anyway we killed the right one! Maybe I should do another Compromise and Conceit campaign where some Chinese PCs kill the other one.
Your problem is here, when you write:
That may be your view, but it wasn’t the view of the colonial Britons, who thought torturing people to death was completely cool. They were happy to do it to the natives of many lands they conquered, and also support transportation, the death penalty, hard labour, and many other forms of cruelty. THey had no problem killing people in their thousands for material gain, and no problem squandering the lives of their own citizens in order to steal land or material objects from others. So the idea that they were in any way bothered by China’s acts for moral reasons is just ludicrous. China did what the British happily do. The only problem was that it was done to British citizens, against whom the British state reserved the exclusive right of inflicting pain, suffering and death for its own ends. So, the destruction of the summer palace was a purely political act, and needs to be seen as such, not as a misguided act of justice.
You’re participating in a thread at CT on white privilege, and here you are extending that privilege to Elgin, assuming he acted out of pure motives of some higher moral kind, when he was exercising naked power. Flashman describes him as conflicted over the act, but why bother? He smashed some people’s shit because they dared to assert their own sovereignty, and used the lives of British citizens as an excuse.
You may “share the moral attitude of the fictional character who would have ground every monument in the world to powder to save the sanity of a single human soul”, but no one in the colonial British leadership did. They rather shared the idea that they would grind every single non-British soul to powder if it could get them one more monument. Things make a lot more sense if you see them in their proper light, as vandals, thieves and murderers, and stop judging their actions by your moral code. You might believe this stuff about objects over people, but they didn’t.
September 4, 2020 at 2:34 pm
IIRC, Elgin was conflicted. His instructions were to wreak a proportionate retribution upon the Chinese, and several places were put forward. In the end he decided on the Summer Palace, as the least objectionable. It was a political act – and Elgin acted as instructed by his political masters
The British record – like most – is mixed. The Raj did found and fund the Archaeological Survey of India, which protects and restores heritage sites – including significant Hindu and Muslim sites. They were largely – officially – past the ‘destroy heathen idols’ stage (unlike the Spanish), while noting that Brit missionaries were often zealous in trying to obliterate the past.
‘Vandals, thieves and murderers’? That’s every conqueror since the dawn of time. Up to recently this made you a hero – think of all the rulers who have been called ‘Great’.
September 4, 2020 at 3:27 pm
The distinction (if there is one) between Lord Vetinari and a monarch is not that he ruled without formal restraint; there have been many kings (and emperors, rajahs, emirs, and otherwise variously titled monarchs) who have ruled without formal restraint.
There is a distinction between those whose rule is subject to formal restraints and those whose rule is not. I am dubious about the value of an oath as a form of formal restraint, but if a monarch’s rule is in fact subject to constraint by the advice of a council or by law and custom (as opposed to merely being sworn to be so constrained), it makes a difference. How much better it is for the monarch to be constrained by the advice of a council or by law and custom depends on what the advice of the council is or what the law and custom are.
I suppose, if there’s going to be a monarch, it’s better for that monarch to be elected, but it may only be marginally better. The position of President of the United States is acquired by election, but the fact of having been elected in the past may act as little or no constraint on the action of a President in the present. A much more important and valuable constraint on a holder of powerful office is the ease (practically and not just formally) of removal from office. With monarchs it’s usually extremely difficult.
Precisely because I consider the preservation of life as being of high importance, I also regard the preservation of the material requirements of supporting life as being of high importance. By this logic, I hold that a much more atrocious misdeed than the destruction of the Summer Palace would have been the destruction of homes which Chinese people were dependent on for shelter or the destruction of farms or of grain stores which Chinese people were dependent on for food.
I accept that the train managers had horribly difficult decisions to make about priorities, the kind of decisions which I am glad not to have to make; but sometimes they do have to be made, and when you are in the position of having to make those decisions there is no virtue in vacillation, and no virtue in pretending that you aren’t faced with the necessity of making a difficult decision. I’m not trying to hide from that and I accept that those train managers were better informed than I can be about the relative priority to be placed on machinery and on people. Museum pieces, however, don’t contribute to the material support of life.
You can see that in my earlier comment I accepted people’s right to choose what priority to put on their own lives. If it’s true that the people on the platform accepted the sacrifice of what might otherwise have been their own places to the Turgenev Museum (it’s a story that needs verification, because it’s the kind of story people love to make up, but it’s also the sort of story that might be true), that does much more work to justify the decision than does the view of priorities taken by the holders of power. The point I’m asserting is not that it would have been an impossible decision to justify, but about the way in which justification might work.
September 4, 2020 at 7:42 pm
Your ‘Compromise and Conceit’ account includes a specific reference to the 7th Earl of Elgin. That’s the one who removed the eponymous marbles from the Parthenon. But in 1857, the 7th Earl of Elgin was long dead. That is, the historical 7th Earl was; in the world of ‘Compromise and Conceit’, obviously I can’t say. The historical 8th Earl of Elgin wasn’t in India in 1857 either.
I mentioned in an earlier comment that I agree the British weren’t consistent about penalising atrocities. I agree also that the British government and the British army (in the period under discussion) were guilty of atrocities, atrocities which it would never have occurred to them should have been penalised.
But consider this. The Allies who held the war crimes trials after the Second World War were themselves guilty of atrocities, both before and during that war; there were senior Allied political and military figures who could plausibly have stood in the dock themselves (I mean, the charges would have been plausible; the idea that the Allies would have allowed such a thing is not). They weren’t being consistent in applying their supposed principles; and yet, the principles were themselves valid, and any guilt of Allied leaders does nothing to exculpate the Axis defendants.
If you’re trying to decide whether a court’s judgement (or the sentence it imposed) was correct, it makes no difference whether judge, jury, prosecutors, police, or court officers were themselves criminals.
Since I’m not so much interested in evaluating Elgin’s motives for the destruction of the Summer Palace as I am in evaluating the act itself, noting British (and French) crimes gets me no closer to a resolution than I was before. I already know that the British Empire was a colossal and sustained piece of brigandage, and I know how to judge that without evaluating the destruction of the Summer Palace. In fact, on reflection I suppose that might be a more important point: when the people of entire continents were dispossessed, why focus on the destruction of one pleasure resort? (From that point of view, it may perhaps be worth adding that the Summer Palace was not a publicly accessible museum, gallery, exhibition park, or pleasure garden or resort; it was created for the pleasure of the Emperor and his court, so it’s not clear that its destruction was a loss to the ordinary people of China, the oppressed and exploited masses from whom the labour and resources required to creat the Summer Palace were extorted without benefit to themselves.)
September 5, 2020 at 2:55 pm
J-D I’m very sure that I prepared for that C&C carefully (I always do!) so if I said it was the 7th it was the 7th! Unfortunately I didn’t write anything in my notes about his background (my notes were shit and I made a lot of the details of the adventures up on the fly) but I have a vague memory of imagining he was using magic items to prolong his life (he entered the battle with the PCs wearing a Maori cloak of invincibility, after all). I guess that’s why he stole so much stuff! Anyway, he died in his magic wagon, so all’s well that ends well.
Incidentally, regarding the summer palace being unavailable to the locals, that’s true but I’m pretty confident that after the communist revolution it would have been turned into a museum, and those goods would have bee available for all Chinese (and ultimately all the world) to see and admire in their original setting. But that’s beside the point: destroying cultural heritage to punish your enemies is well-acknowledged now as a bad thing to do. Otherwise we wouldn’t think what the Taliban did to those Buddhas was bad, just misguided. Anyway, I don’t think we’re going to make any headway towards agreeing on this issue!
September 5, 2020 at 4:15 pm
Yes, I figured that magic life extension could easily be a thing in C&C.
I also don’t think we’re going to get any closer to agreement than we already are, but since you’ve made another couple of points I’d like to make clear my response to them. I think when evaluating a decision that somebody has made, you have to take into account the consequences to the extent that they were foreseeable, but of course this is complicated by the difficulty of judging how much was foreseeable. If it was foreseeable in 1860 that one day China might come under Communist rule (and then perhaps the Summer Palace would become a public exhibition and pleasure-ground), then maybe that should have influenced people’s decisions then, but isn’t it a bit of a stretch to regard the chance of that outcome as foreseeable in 1860? If it was, then maybe people should have been attached weight a fortiori to the less specific prospect of the empire being overthrown, and then perhaps it would have been reasonable to attach some weight to the consideration that destroying the Summer Palace might contribute to the undermining of the imperial mystique and therefore hasten the collapse of the empire. I’m not affirming definitely that it is what happened, or that Elgin was including it in his calculations: what I’m saying is that these are more of the imponderables which make it hard for me to judge the issue. When you say the decision was wrong and bad, I’m not saying I take the opposite view, I’m only saying that I can’t tell. But I repeat myself, so I’ll turn to the other point I really want to emphasise, which is this: I do agree with you that destruction of precious artefacts such as the Summer Palace is a bad thing. However, penalties of all kinds are bad things by definition. Locking people up or restricting their liberty is a bad thing. Taking people’s property without compensation is a bad thing. Forcing people into tasks not of their choosing without compensation is a bad thing. Yet these things are done as penalties for crimes, under names such as imprisonment, detention, fines, and community service orders: unless crimes are to go completely unpenalised, they can only be penalised by doing bad things to people. I am prepared to acknowledge the arguments some people might make that allowing crimes to go unpenalised is exactly what should happen, but on the other hand I am also prepared to acknowledge the argument that some other people might make that allowing crimes to go unpenalised is itself a bad thing. For anybody who agrees that punishing people is a bad thing and also that allowing crimes to go unpunished is a bad thing, there’s no escaping the necessity of sometimes choosing a bad thing. (Have you ever been in the position in a game where all the choices look bad but you still have to choose one of them?)
September 5, 2020 at 6:16 pm
What Elgin could have assumed in his calculations, since it already existed: he could have stolen a bunch of stuff from the palace to put in the British Museum and told the Chinese authorities they’d get it back when they handed over the killers. But he didn’t. He destroyed it instead. I’m not sure why we therefore think his intention was to achieve justice, and not simply to do what British colonialists love doing best: vandalism.
September 6, 2020 at 10:52 am
You’re right! I hadn’t thought of that. Taking valuable stuff away would have been a better thing to do than destroying it, and it is totally just to say that Elgin should have been able to think of this.
I think I may have mentioned before that I’m not so much interested in evaluating Elgin’s actual personal motives, but the larger question of motivation must be more complex than you suggest. Obviously many people (not just colonialists) derive satisfaction from vandalism (if this were not so, there wouldn’t be so much of it), so I am confident (without actually checking for other specific examples) that British colonial rulers must have perpetrated vandalism, but it is also obviously the case that they didn’t systematically vandalise all the architectural, artistic, and heritage treasures that they could have: just to take the most obvious example that springs to my mind, they didn’t systematically destroy the Taj Mahal.
September 6, 2020 at 1:51 pm
Maybe they vandalized shit they didn’t like, stole shit they did like, or left it in place if they liked it and it was too big to vandalize? Or maybe they vandalized shit in places they couldn’t completely control (Greece, Egypt and China) and didn’t vandalize shit in places they did control (e.g. India)? Vandals are also often thieves, after all. Even among vandals, for example, tagging street art is considered poor form (because they like street art!) but tagging blank walls isn’t (because they don’t care about blank walls).
I’m reading an interesting book called Buried about an uprising of slaves in Egypt (haven’t got to that part yet). At the moment the author is writing from the perspective of living in Egypt in the 2011 revolution. He talks about the history of desecration of Egyptian antiquities, and breaks it down something like this: people who took stuff in antiquity were “looters”; people who took stuff in 19th century Egypt were “the first archaeologists”; then after Britain left and Egypt became independent, stuff was taken by “looters” and now it’s archaeologists again. Of course the 19th century “archaeologists” were white. But we know they were just looting the place. The difference in tone I think the author doesn’t even notice. This stuff has been so normalized it’s amazing.
September 7, 2020 at 10:23 am
The British did loot the Summer Palace – or at least the soldiery grabbed whatever was portable. The British were in India as partners (senior partners, but still partners), and as heirs to the Mughals. They participated in Indian culture (adopted the food, learned the languages, had themselves painted in court dress, built Indo-Saracenic style, held durbars…).
Archaeology rescued a lot of stuff that the locals were busy destroying (old buildings are good quarries for squared stone, and in Egypt convenient sources of limestone for making cement). AFAIK, the only monuments the British deliberately destroyed as political gestures were the palace at Kumasi and the Summer Palace.
If we were a different species, then no doubt I would not be writing this in English or live in Australia – heir to very successful colonialism. Maybe not writing at all, given that all complex societies are built on blood.
September 7, 2020 at 10:43 am
Peter T, I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but back in the time that the British were “rescuing” stuff that the locals in Egypt were destroying, British tourists were carving chunks off the stones at Avebury and taking them home as souvenirs. One stone is so disfigured by this that it has been named after it. The British had no respect for their own historical monuments at that time, they weren’t “rescuing” anything from other countries, they were stealing it. You’re no doubt also aware of the green bans in Sydney, which protected some of its colonial-era architectural heritage from rapacious developers (and in the process of which, one woman was murdered by developers). Yet now Aussies abroad will complain that other countries haven’t saved their historical architecture … something we only barely managed to do ourselves!
When I went to the UK from Japan in 2008 I was asked by the priest of an Inari Shrine in Matsue to go to a museum in Oxford to say yoroshiku for the shrine master and look at some scrolls that had been donated by the shrine to the museum via Lafcadio Hearne (who became Koizumi Yakumo and lived in Matsue for 18 months). When I got there nobody knew where they were and ultimately we had to dig through drawers looking through relics from 1000 cultures until we found some scrolls. These items, lovingly cared for over 500 years by the Japanese, had been donated 100 years ago as a token of goodwill and for better intercultural understanding, and the museum’s keepers had thrown them unlabeled in a drawer. There was no catalogue of any of this stuff in the museum and the computer database had failed because it was just too much work. A previous Japanese visitor from Matsue had failed to rectify this (which was probably why I was asked to pay a visit). That museum was an utter disaster of colonialist disrespect. In the 20th century British scientists have developed a better mode of archaeology and now treat the places they visit with respect but it’s important to remember that this is a very recent development.
It’s probably a good idea to assume that the British were very good at destroying minor things that were in their way back in the colonial era. If they couldn’t treat their own ancient monuments with respect, why would they care about others’?
September 7, 2020 at 9:20 pm
faustus – when I was in India I reproved some local youth who were carving their names into the plaster of a medieval palace. The pyramids have graffiti dating back thousands of years notched into them, as do many ancient temples. These pastimes are hardly peculiar to the British. Until the 19th century practically nobody treated monuments with respect, apart from some special ones (the Taj, some churches and shrines). People built tombs, dynasties fell, the tombs sank into rubble – Delhi is dotted with aristocratic tombs going back to the Qutb Shahs, most overgrown.
September 7, 2020 at 10:03 pm
Yes, and the British were having parties at Stonehenge until the 1980s. So no, they weren’t rescuing anyone else’s treasures!
September 8, 2020 at 1:06 pm
Some they were, some they weren’t. The Archaeological Survey of India was founded in 1861. The first legislation on British monuments was 1882.
We picnicked at Stonehenge in 1959, and were free to run around as we pleased.
September 8, 2020 at 3:08 pm
Luck you! Earlier you said
But there’s no reason to be negative about this. In a different history we would still be writing in English, but it would be because the Aboriginal language you grew up with is different to mine, and in any case as a british migrant to Australia I didn’t learn the Aboriginal language of my area fluently, and prefer to write in English still. In that world Australia wasn’t invaded but was a result of mutually agreed settlement.
Of course for that to happen we need two conditions: a) the compromise and conceit world exists and b) my theories about the relative impact of foreign diseases and foreign guns are correct.
September 9, 2020 at 10:06 am
In my view the world was more interesting when it was more mixed up – when a city might have three or four ethnicities and everyone spoke a few languages. And the human ecosystem was better balanced than the current set of monocultures. It wasn’t free of rivalry, pogroms and other nastiness.Mutually agreed settlement is an occasional thing – but very occasional (medieval Hungary and early modern Thailand welcomed diversity – but were also very oppressive societies).
What are the rules in the c&c world? In my (literary) world, the land itself limits human exploitation, plus magic is a great equaliser. I’d live to visit, but have not yet found the portal…
September 9, 2020 at 10:10 pm
Some parts of the world are still like this.
September 13, 2020 at 8:49 am
J-D – There are and i like them very much.
On the original point of the post, I think Adam Roberts’ comment #13 at Crooked Timber’s current post on Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is very much on point – that older fantasy pushed back against the materialist (‘disenchanted’) modern world in a way that makes Tolkien’s Catholicism very relevant.
September 13, 2020 at 12:17 pm
I wonder about the idea that Tolkien was really against a materialist (“disenchanted”) world when the model for racial co-existence in his worldview is entirely materialist – it’s a scientific racism model that was very much a product of the post-Galton scientific world. Of course it was melded to older, more romantic ideals of leadership (ie white men in charge of everything without question or any considerations of governance) but the actual model of racial interactions is completely modern.
I would also remind you of the possibility that his depiction of the shire is not actually positive, but quite satirical and negative. I might have to reread that and think over a blogpost on it…
September 13, 2020 at 9:18 pm
Tolkien’s racialism is essentialist – but that’s a position that goes back through Aquinas to Aristotle, and is still very much a folk belief. It’s expressed in the question ‘what is it (or are they) really?’, when biology and sociology are clear that there is no ‘real’ there – that the question does not admit a useful answer. Natural kinds. Very Catholic.
If you look at the biographies of the Inklings, they all had the same ‘heritage’ view of England – an England very like the Shire, of good beer and green fields and hedgerows, watermills and copses, no trains, no cars, no satanic mills – the sort of England Constable painted. They were lesser gentry and academics, constructing their fictions in reaction to all they found distasteful in modern life.