Here's an interesting fact about the social justice movement that's been in play since before many of my readers were even born: In order for it to succeed, it first needs to deconstruct and eliminate Western culture. This means that if a thing is integral to the definition of Western culture, it has to be destroyed.
You know the most popular ones. Christianity, capitalism, the constitutional republic, and even brands and corporations that exemplify Western ingenuity and excellence. Do you think it's any mystery that Disney, for instance, fell so hard and so far over the past decade?
That's because at the top of the list of things needing to be deconstructed are our stories. Tales of heroes and villains are important because these heroes typically represent the moral and virtuous man and woman, and the villains represent things that Western values oppose. If you can corrupt these stories, you can corrupt the values of future generations of Westerners.
It's no accident that many of our stories are being warped and perverted. As I write this, Netflix and Barbie director Greta Gerwig are creating a retelling of C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia with more "modern" sensibilities, including making Aslan a lioness instead of a male lion. Amazon has been reframing J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings with its prequel series The Rings of Power, which is loosely (and I do mean loosely) based on The Silmarillion.
Tolkien has been of particular importance to the left because The Lord of the Rings embodies Western values better than almost any other book series in existence. The attacks against Tolkien and his work have been relentless and ongoing for many years, ramping up significantly during the release of the first season of Rings of Power.
Once again, the attacks are underway. According to the Daily Mail, the University of Nottingham is attempting to "decolonize" Tolkien and point out that The Lord of the Rings is racist because the evil races within it are stand-ins for dark-skinned races in real life:
A history module called Decolonising Tolkien et al, taught at the University of Nottingham, uses a text that says orcs and other dark-skinned characters in the best-selling trilogy are the victims of 'ethnic chauvinism'.
The historian who leads the module, Dr Onyeka Nubia, argues that eastern races in the fantasy novel are depicted as evil while fairer-skinned peoples of the west are shown as virtuous.
In academia, 'decolonising' usually refers to moving away from from a white, Western-centric world view.
In the module's key text, Dr Onyeka writes that maligned peoples include Easterlings, Southrons and men from Harad.
The trilogy also features the dark-skinned orcs, evil creatures that do the bidding of Sauron, known as the 'Dark Lord'.
It adds that Tolkien's treatment of the fictional races participates in a tradition of 'anti-African antipathy', in which people from Africa are depicted as 'the natural enemy of the white man'.
Once again, we're seeing that whatever we're paying for higher education is far too much.
I think some things need to be set for the record, starting with the fact that Tolkien was no racist. He was famously anti-Nazi and not fond of racism. As Newsweek reported, a letter sent by Tolkien to a German publisher asking after his Aryan ancestry highlights a man who had no desire to participate in racism:
"Thank you for your letter. I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by arisch. I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-Iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects.
"But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people. My great-great-grandfather came to England in the eighteenth century from Germany: the main part of my descent is therefore purely English, and I am an English subject—which should be sufficient.
I have been accustomed, nonetheless, to regard my German name with pride, and continued to do so throughout the period of the late regrettable war, in which I served in the English army. I cannot, however, forbear to comment that if impertinent and irrelevant inquiries of this sort are to become the rule in matters of literature, then the time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source of pride.
Tolkien's reply was a very polite but unmistakable rejection of the Nazi ideal that Aryan ancestry made someone better than any other race.
The thing is, it's not hard to find this information. It's readily available online, and it's been reported on endlessly. Again, the point isn't the truth; it's to villainize a Western hero and his story.
But in doing so, the left only exposes how racist they themselves are.
If Tolkien didn't intend for the races in his books to mimic any in real life, then the only people in the room making those connections are on the left, and that prompts the question of "who are the real racists in the room?"
If the left sees an orc and says, "this represents the black man," while it obviously is a metaphor for great evil and not a specific race, then the only people in the room calling the black community "evil" are the race baiters on the left.
While everyone else is dealing in higher concepts, the left can't seem to quit its race-based obsession, making one wonder why we need to ponder over leftist philosophies at all.
