Despots, old and new

[Ibrîniðilpathânezel]

My feeling is that it is both easy and difficult to draw parallels between fiction and the real world when the fiction half is very strongly influenced by the archetypes of myth and legend. Mythical Good and Evil can be absolute; it can be drawn in black and white, whereas reality is full of myriad shades of gray. Myth is the distillate of the two components of gray, and thus one can find a lot of partial parallels between what is real and what is invented. For instance, one can look at Sauron's militaristic regime and equate it with Rome, but the Romans distracted the general populace with what we now call "bread and circuses," hoping that so long as the people felt their creature comforts, needs, and entertainments were being adequately maintained, they wouldn't notice how the wars and the costs of spreading the Empire were getting out of hand. Nowhere does Sauron use this tactic -- though we can sure find it in our modern world. It seems that Sauron's idea of appeasing the masses is by tricking them into things that will directly benefit him: handing out rings of power to ensnare those he would otherwise have had a hard time subjugating, establishing Melkor worship in Numenor, where he as the chief high priest of the religion would get the king under his thumb and thus become a very potent power behind an impotent throne. Oh yes, there are many aspects of many real despots and despotic regimes in Sauron and Melkor, but as they are symbols of the root of all evils in the world, they cannot, I think, be truly equated with any single person or government. Some degree of what they are as a distilled form of Evil is in all persons and policies that seek to control and subjugate others. IMHO, of course.