<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:<HR> I totally agree with all this stuff about Tolkien not being rascist- it distresses me when rascists use the material and turn it for their 'cause'. They forget what Sam says, you know, the bit where he wonders whether that foreigner really was evil, or whether he was just forced to come along etc etc. I read an interview with this mother and her two daughters. The mother is a white supremist and her daughters are being brought up to be that too...which is really sad in itself...but what got me was the mother said she found the book extremely racial. But then I suppose you see what your eyes want you to see. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE><P>I think the last sentence in this post is the key one. I don't know that anyone would accuse LOTR as being an implicitly racist book or Tolkien as a racist author. Or nearly no-one at least.<P>I do not think that by reading Tolkien you could adopt a racist viewpoint however many of the people who advocate the white supremacy viewpoint and produce LOTR as a text to support this already are racist before they read the book. And like it or not a book is an individual experience to each person that reads it. The experience you get out of a book may well be coloured by your life experience, your perceptions, your viewpoints.<P>So the questions is really this. If someone who already is a white supremacist reads LOTR could they find material to fit with their world view.<P>Now unfortunately, whatever the arguments about LOTR being a mythology for England may be, the book does contain material that can fit with a racists viewpoint.<P>Many white supremacists preach a dogma that states that the white race is under attack, under threat if you will, from the numerically superior "foreigners". People with a different skin colour, people with a different culture, people who speak differently, any number of things can mark them as "different".<P>Now could a racist read LOTR and find text to support that view? Unfortunately the fact remains that they could. It is a fact that the LOTR does present a world in which the good people are almost 100% white and the bad guys are almost 100% of a different ethnic type. Not only that but the races that are wholly evil, Orcs and Trolls, also have dark skin. Tolkien also implies that they share features with the men of the south when he compares men of Harad to trolls. Now this is not to say that Tolkien is being racist but we have to say.....could this appeal to someone who is already a racist?<BR>The answer I think is yes.<P>Another popular theory with racists is that the white racist is inherently superior and that their blood should not be "diluted" with that of lesser men. This theory was a firm favourite of Hitler and Himmler, so much so that the Nazi's funded a great deal of research into the Atlantis myth. They saw the Aryan race as being decended from Atlanteans and that this race was superior but had been "reduced" by mixing with lesser men.<P>Again could the words of Tolkien be used to support this view? And again the answer is yes. In fact they support it very closely and one does not have to look very hard to find it. Indeed, Atlantis is the common theme.<P>The men of Numenor are "higher" than lesser men and Tolkien makes it clear that in those in whom the blood runs true, are to be found the most noble of men. Not only that but they appear "fairer" and live longer than lesser men.<BR>Again I doubt the intent was racist but it is very possible that racists will latch onto it.<P>Now none of this implies that Tolkien was a racist or that the LOTR is a racist work but I do think it a little naive if we were to think that the LOTR contains nothing that could be construed as racist by someone who is already firmly entrenched in that opinion.
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