This Is Not That Day

(Warning: Spoilers) In a comment below Gandhi pointed out the culturalist overtones in the newly completed Lord of the Rings trilogy, including an interesting interview with John Rhys-Davies, aka Gimli and Treebeard's voice. The aging actor pulls no punches about the film's applicability to our times, and becomes rather politically incorrect about it:

But if it involves the replacement of Western civilization with a different civilization with different cultural values, then it is something we really ought to discuss — because, [hang it all], I am for dead-white-male culture!”

Now, it is certainly not the case that Peter Jackson and Hollywood were making a pro-Bushite film. Rather, these overtones are left over from JRR Tolkien, and the cataclysm of World War II, when evil threatened an end to Western civilization. If you were a conspiracy theorist, you could think of Mordor as Nazi Germany and Isengard as militant Japan. Rohan would be the U.S., unwilling at first to enter a conflict until attacked by Saruman. Gondor, or England, lay under siege and was bombarded, with women and children dying along with the men. The First War of the Ring would be World War I, when Sauron (Germany) used a set of binding rings (a web of alliances) to bring the civilizations of Middle Earth to the brink of death. The Ring (Germany's power) was not destroyed, only taken by the West and lost. If you want to stretch the analogy to the edge of ridicule, Osgiliath is Dunkirk (near Ostend) and the Undead are the U.S.S.R., who are mighty powerful, but can't really be trusted and desert you immediately after the war. The Ring, of course, represents not the Bomb but power. It is that siren temptation, which "though I would use it for good, through me it would wield an evil too terrible to behold". Perhaps then it does represent the Bomb: a great force, which men supposed they could use for good but which - in Tolkien's world - was evil, pure evil, and in his world destroying our own weapon destroys the very enemy we fight.

In the current "clash of civilizations" (an ideology which rests on Huntington's oft-rebutted claim that "Arabs, Chinese and Westerners, however, are not part of any broader cultural entity"), some - including Rhys-Davies - would say that Sauron symbolizes oppressive, militant Islam, which seeks to overthrow Western power, change our culture and imprison our women. There is undoubtedly some truth in this comparison, especially as seen by non-Westerners, who wouldn't know political correctness from a hole in the wall. They see a clash of civilizations far more than we do, primarily because our civilization is winning, or so Huntington would argue.

However, the Lord of the Rings analogy breaks down pretty quickly against the current conflict. First of all, the white guys are powerful, not weak. Industrialism - which Tolkien hated - is the backbone of the West, not a tool of the Islamists. The similarities are mostly aesthetic, and have more to do with Tolkien and his readers' prejudices than any intention in the writing. Tolkien's friend C.S. Lewis also portrayed the "bad guys" as Arabs, just as Tolkien describes men from the south and east of Middle Earth as "swarthy barbarians". These European stereotypes - dating back as far as the wars between the Islamic Empire and the armies of medieval Christendom - are probably more of a subconscious accident; certainly Islam was no threat in the 1940's, and the men bombing London were tall, blonde Aryans. Perhaps the dehumanization of the enemy in the Lord of The Rings is a wishful thought, wishing that you could shoot the enemy without guilt, and bomb his country without killing innocent children. We of the 21st century must not be blinded by these wishes. If we could put the U.S. military in a room with Osama Bin Laden, we know who would emerge; rather we face the reality that Osama is more likely surrounded with innocent women and children than with blood-lusting warriors, and if we wish to kill some, we must soberly count the cost that we will undoubtedly incur on humanity, which is bigger than any civilization and binds us all together, from Kalamazoo to Kabul to Konigsberg to Kyoto.