Are orcs actually evil?

[Animalmother]

Let a few thousand fantasy years pass, and everybody becomes soft on orcs.

Tolkien was not soft on orcs. His heroes Legolas and Gimli much resemble Mukai and Noda, the two Japanese officers in China in AD 1937 whose contest to be first to behead one-hundred Chinese soldiers won the admiration of the Tokyo newspapers.

Neither Gandalf nor others among the Wise ever said a word against the genocidal extermination of orcs. Implicitly, they approved it. Even the Ents and Huorns exterminated orcs.

Whether or not there's an ethical case to be made for the wartime slaying of whole classes of people as an act of political justice (e.g., the Royal Air Force's slaying of the inhabitants of Hamburg, Germany in AD 1943), Tolkien's coalition of the willing, the Free Peoples, went beyond mere lawless warfare all the way to genocide.