Posted on 01/12/2003 10:54:58 AM PST by republicman
`Lord' of racism? Critics view trilogy as discriminatory `Two Towers' film reflects tone of book
Happily for fans of J.R.R. Tolkien, director Peter Jackson stayed true to the fantasy author's artistic vision in "Fellowship of the Ring," the first film in the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy.
Unhappily, in "The Two Towers," Jackson may reflect the "Rings'" racial view of the world as well.
(Excerpt) Read more at chicagotribune.com ...
Yeah and it doesn't do much good for our country either.
The problem for liberals is twofold
1) Their scapegoat belief system cannot survive without racism's existence
2) there really is very little real racism left.
Therefore the liberals have to search under every rock for it and even invent it where none exists, in order to preserve their screwy belief system.
"But" what?
If you aren't a supremacist, you aren't a supremacist. No disclaimer and/or explanation is needed. Explaning away that which you haven't been accused of opens the door to interpretation.
Birth of Tha SYNDICATE, the philosophical heir to William Lloyd Garrison.
101 things that the Mozilla browser can do that Internet Explorer cannot.
Many times Google will already have the article ready for viewing, too, and a snipped article can be reached if the exact article title can be used as the query. Such was NOT the case this time, but I did find an article possibly even dumber, using Lord of Racism as the query:
The Lord of the Rings rooted in racism: Academic
Shyam Bhatia in London
An American academic, who teaches at the Warwick University in the United Kingdom, has described J R R Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy as an 'epic rooted in racism'.
Dr Stephen Shapiro, an expert in cultural studies, race and slavery, said the author used his novels to present bigotry through a fantasy world.
Following the release in UK of the film The Two Towers, the second in the series, Dr Shapiro told rediff.com that the books represent anxieties about immigration in mid-1950s Britain.
He said: "Put simply, Tolkien's good guys are white and the bad guys are black, slant-eyed, unattractive, inarticulate and a psychologically undeveloped horde."
In the trilogy, a small group, the fellowship, is pitted against a foreign horde and this reflects long-standing Anglo-European anxieties about being overwhelmed by non-Europeans, he said.
This is consistent with Tolkien's Nordicist convictions. He thinks the Northern races had a culture and it was carried in the blood, Dr Shapiro said.
While Tolkien describes the Hobbits and Elves as amazingly white, ethnically pure clans, their antagonists, the Orcs, are a motley dark-skinned mass, akin to tribal Africans or aborigines. The recent films amplify a 'fear of a black planet' and exaggerate this difference by insisting on stark white-black colour codes, Dr Shapiro said.
He added: "Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings because he wanted to recreate a mythology for the English, which had been destroyed by foreign invasion. He felt the Normans had destroyed organic English culture. There is the notion that foreigners destroy culture and there was also a fantasy that there was a solid homogeneous English culture there to begin with, which was not the case because there were Celts and Vikings and a host of other groups.
"We have a pure village ideal, which is being threatened by new technologies and groups coming in. I think the film has picked up on this by colour coding the characters in very stark ways.
"For instance, the fellowship is portrayed as uber-Aryan, very white and there is the notion that they are a vanishing group under the advent of the other, evil ethnic groups.
"The Orcs are a black mass that doesn't speak the languages and are desecrating the cathedrals.
"For today's film fans, this older racial anxiety fuses with a current fear and hatred of Islam that supports a crusading war in the Middle East. The mass appeal of The Lord of the Rings, and the recent movies may well rest on racist codes."
Dr Shapiro said that the trilogy, which began in the 1930s and published in the 1950s, was written at the onset of de-colonisation, when the first immigrants from the Caribbean and Indian subcontinent came to Britain. The Midlands, Tolkien's model for the Shire, was becoming a multicultural region.
A spokesman for Harper Collins, publisher of the trilogy, accused Dr Shapiro of mixing up his dates: "The copyright for The Fellowship of the Ring, the first in the series, was 1954. Tolkien would have finished writing the book quite a bit before the mid-50s and certainly the idea would have come a number of years before, given the sheer size of the book. So I think the timing is out.
"A number of academics have commented on Tolkien's work and this is the first time anybody has ever seen these issues in it. Of course, if you look hard enough at many great epics, you can extrapolate what you like, particularly if you have academic kudos behind you.
"A number of people have said that they think The Lord of the Rings could be an allegory for the Second World War, or indeed the first, as Tolkien fought in it, but it was never a view that he agreed with. His great abiding passion and interest came from the Icelandic sagas and mythology, and this was his version of one of those sagas."
Richard Crawshaw, a trustee for the Tolkien Society, said: "There was definitely no racial intent in his work. He detested racism."
Oh, please. Grow up.
To the people who spend their nights agonizing over whether Tolkien is racist or not:
Get a life.
For years, Tolkien scholars have waged a fight on two fronts: against an academic establishment that for the most part refused to take the author's work seriously, and against white supremacists who have tried to claim the professor as one of their own.
The first controversy may be decided in Tolkien's favor once the present generation of literary critics passes from the scene (I admit some bias in this regard), but the second probably always will flare up whenever some skinheads read more into the "Rings" than really is there.
...Perhaps a more accurate statement would have been that the forces of evil have assembled an army "to destroy the world of civilized white men." Of course, Aragorn -- and the director Jackson -- cannot say this.
THat is so true. I just graduated college. At my school blacks said western culture is "racist", they said they had to have a "cultural center" or it was "racism", had to have separate dorms from whites or it was "racism"
Yet this is a school that lets blacks in over whites who had a .5 GPA higher and 100 point better SAT scores--but that's not racism. Of course not.
Obviously, "Dr." Shapiro has NOT read the trilogy, or he would know that the Orcs were originally Elves that had been corrupted by Sauron. Likewise, he is obviously unaware of Ghan-buri-Ghan's people's appearance in "Return of the King" as a TRUE analog "akin to tribal Africans or aborigines" but who had NOT been corrupted by Sauron.
As ole Bugs says: "What a maroon!!!"
Yeah but that doesn't count, the libs hate for Israel has taken Jews off the PC victim list and moved them to the oppressor list. You'll have to find another group. Sorry ;)
 Ring Ping!! |
Here we go again.
That is class, not only refusing the much-needed money, but taking an intelligent little jab at them that probably left them wondering what he meant :-)
Anyway racism is more in keeping with the views of Leftists, such as this idiot, since the Left identifies men according to what group they belong to, instead of by their value as individuals.
What's this term 'racially insensitive' mean? It sounds like pure meaningless cr*p to me. Why the h*ll do we have to be so damn sensitive -- the Mooslims and blacks certainly aren't too sensitive about Christians, Jews, Hindus, and whites.
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