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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   44948 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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A neologism (or a new meaning for the word?) that I have begun to see everywhere and has really started to annoy me is 'anti-racism'.

The annoyance began when I noticed the term being used in places where it was anachronistic. Two instances that I remember were the Wikipedia pages of "Pepsi" and "J.R.R Tolkien". Pepsi's article describes Pepsi's early attempts to advertise to black people as an untapped market as an "anti-racism stance". Tolkien's article states that "scholars have noted... he was anti-racist." After some digging around in the edit history of Pepsi's article, I found that the term 'anti-racist' was only added to the Pepsi article in mid-2018, and to Tolkien's article in early 2021.

"Anti-racism" is a term popular within Critical Race Theory. It was particularly popularised and entered the public consciousness in large part due to Ibram X. Kendi's 2019 book How to be an Anti-Racist. Kendi defines "anti-racism" in that book as follows:

The opposite of “racist” isn’t “not racist.” It is “anti-racist.” What’s the difference? One endorses either the idea of a racial hierarchy as a racist, or racial equality as an antiracist. One either believes problems are rooted in groups of people, as a racist, or locates the roots of problems in power and policies, as an anti-racist. One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an antiracist. There is no in-between safe space of “not racist.” The claim of “not racist” neutrality is a mask for racism.

According to Kendi, any racial inequity, or anything that results in a racial inequity is by definition racist, and in order to be an "anti-racist" you must support racial equity (i.e. forcing equal outcomes) for everything. A similar quote is from Angela Davis: "In a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist.”

"Anti-racism" is a classic example of linguistic laundering/doubling, or linguistic motte-and-bailey, that is rife within woke/Critical Social Justice circles. The pattern is to take a word that has a plain meaning to the layman (anti-racist simply means against racism), and create a second specific, academic and ideological meaning for it. This second meaning is then smuggled into conversations and policy when the public naturally just assume the first, plain meaning. Ultimately, this is done for political and ideological ends. Manipulate people to get on board through the plain meaning (you're not a racist are you? You want to be an anti-racist!), then implement the ideological agenda, while maintain it is nothing usual because the word is the same. Other common words doubled in this way are the trio of diversity, equity, inclusion.

Critical Social Justice is the amalgamation of Neo-Marxism/Critical Theory, and Post-modernism/Post-Structuralism. Michel Foucault is the most cited scholar in history, and many other post-modernists, and Neo-Marxists top the list of most cited humanities scholars. It's hard to overstate how influential these ideas are currently in the humanities. Both Neo-Marxism but particularly post-modernism have an extreme focus on language. Language is the medium of power, and therefore, of oppression. It should not be surprising then that Critical Social Justice deliberately engages in such language manipulation as part of their political project, including engaging in historical revisionism to legitimise themselves.

With regards to Tolkien, the anti-racism thing has become a necessary defence because of people accusing him of anti-Semitism (the Dwarves are coded Jewish, you see, and only care about gold) and racism (the Orcs are black-coded, a thing I only read the other day). These people claim flat-out he was a racist (because old, white, Catholic, English guy who didn't write in trans queer BIPOC differently-abled characters in polyamorous gender-queer relationships, and I wish I was exaggerating greatly instead of only a little about that, See what Amazon thought would sell "The Rings of Power" to an audience with their English version of the superfans video. Would be a decent interview if all the references to 'representation' and 'queerness' were stripped out).

That's not even taking the quotes that we do see in the Selected Letters, which slightly better critics have used (the critics above just took a general statement that 'of course Tolkien is racist' and ran with it):

(1) From a letter of 1955:

I do think of the 'Dwarves' like Jews: at once native and alien in their habitations, speaking the languages of the country, but with an accent due to their own private tongue

See? He said the Dwarves were Jews (no, he didn't, but that doesn't stop the critics) and look what he says about Dwarves in "The Hobbit":

There it is: dwarves are not heroes, but calculating folk with a great idea of the value of money; some are tricky and treacherous and pretty bad lots; some are not, but are decent enough people like Thorin and Company, if you don't expect too much.

There you go: the stereotype of the Jews being money-grubbers! Anti-Semitism!

(2) From a 1958 letter about a proposed film of "The Lord of the Rings":

The Orcs are definitely stated to be corruptions of the 'human' form seen in Elves and Men. They are (or were) squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types.

That one will get you, whoever you are, into trouble. Is he saying that Orcs are Central/East Asians? No, but if someone reading that doesn't make allowances for "least lovely types", "to Europeans", and "degraded versions" of "corrupted human form", then they will get "Tolkien says Orcs are East Asians because East Asians are ugly slant-eyes". I honestly don't know where the "Orcs are black" thing came from, unless it's from the movie versions which are dark-skinned (some of them).

Racism simpliciter is also attributed to him because of the Haradrim and Easterlings: all the good guys are white, all the bad guys are black (or at least brown and yellow). We don't get any black or brown people on the side of the heroes. Never mind that he wrote a sharp letter to his publishers about a Swedish translator who was putting in his own interpretation of events everywhere:

From a letter of 1961

Here [in Mordor] rules the personification of satanic might Sauron (read perhaps in the same partial fashion [as other identifications Ohlmarks has made] Stalin).

There is no 'perhaps' about it. I utterly repudiate any such 'reading', which angers me. The situation was conceived long before the Russian revolution. Such allegory is entirely foreign to my thought. The placing of Mordor in the east was due to simple narrative and geographical necessity, within my 'mythology'. The original stronghold of Evil was (as traditionally) in the North; but as that had been destroyed, and was indeed under the sea, there had to be a new stronghold, far removed from the Valar, the Elves, and the sea-power of Númenor.

And from a letter of 1954

Some reviewers have called the whole thing simple-minded, just a plain fight between Good and Evil, with all the good just good, and the bad just bad. Pardonable, perhaps (though at least Boromir has been overlooked) in people in a hurry, and with only a fragment to read, and, of course, without the earlier written but unpublished Elvish histories. But the Elves are not wholly good or in the right. Not so much because they had flirted with Sauron; as because with or without his assistance they were 'embalmers'. They wanted to have their cake and eat it: to live in the mortal historical Middle-earth because they had become fond of it (and perhaps because they there had the advantages of a superior caste), and so tried to stop its change and history, stop its growth, keep it as a pleasaunce, even largely a desert, where they could be 'artists' – and they were overburdened with sadness and nostalgic regret. In their way the Men of Gondor were similar: a withering people whose only 'hallows' were their tombs. But in any case this is a tale about a war, and if war is allowed (at least as a topic and a setting) it is not much good complaining that all the people on one side are against those on the other. Not that I have made even this issue quite so simple: there are Saruman, and Denethor, and Boromir; and there are treacheries and strife even among the Orcs.

So was he a racist? By current 21st century progressive standards, yes (and sexist and homophobic, no doubt). Was he a racist by the standards of his day? I don't think so, but of course Bad Things Are Always Bad and there is no context, so he has been tried in the court of public opinion and found guilty. Hence the necessity to use the shibboleth of "anti-racist" when trying to defend, or at least be neutral about, him.

That one will get you, whoever you are, into trouble. Is he saying that Orcs are Central/East Asians? No, but if someone reading that doesn't make allowances for "least lovely types", "to Europeans", and "degraded versions" of "corrupted human form", then they will get "Tolkien says Orcs are East Asians because East Asians are ugly slant-eyes".

Well, there's a bit more to it when you remember that, for instance, the battle of the Pelennor Fields is at least to some degree modelled on the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains, a battle fought by the last remnants of the Western Roman Empire (Gondor) aided by Visigoths led by king Theodoric who dies on the battlefield (Rohan, led by Théoden, who does the same) against Attila's Huns, the prototypical Asian invader of Europe. It's not a complete match, but it's enough to say that there's some harkening to the idea of saving the Western civilization ("Men of the West!") from the threat of the invading Asians.

Sure, he definitely has references in other work to Wainriders who are reminiscent of the Huns. But there's a difference between using a model of an historical battle in your own fictional battle scene, and being full-on Yellow Peril.

But that's a difference that makes no difference, for the knuckleheads, so this is probably why whoever is editing the Tolkien Wikipedia article is forced back on "anti-racism".

Here's a piece of "I read it but I didn't understand it" from an academic:

Why do racists like Tolkien and Middle-Earth?

Tolkien made statements against Nazis and also apartheid, but this is not the same as being anti-racist or pro-equality. His condemnation of Hitler, he wrote in the same letter, was for

ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making forever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to preserve in its true light.

The comment shows that he believed that some people were essentially different to and better than others. This notion is foundational to racism.

See? Tolkien is a racist, or close to it. Because "Northern Spirit". Which our 'lecturer at Deakin University', a public university in Geelong, Australia which boasts "We're a progressive, innovative and open-minded university, with the highest student satisfaction in Victoria" can't seem to understand does not mean he was going "Yay Nordic supremacy, Asatru foreva!" while spinning his Viking Metal platters.

If you're not an anti-racist (like, say, a lady professor who wrote a whole book about Race and Popular Fantasy Literature: Habits of Whiteness ), then you a racist. No such thing as 'not a racist'. After all, her book uses as reference one Paul Firchow, who seems to have written quite a bit about how Tolkien is fascist.

Did you know Hobbits are Fascists? Oh yes.

…Not surprisingly, given the apparently pacific nature of hobbits, there have been practically no discussions of Tolkien's fiction that link it in any way, either positively or negatively, with fascism. …Yet I will in the course of this essay argue that certain social traits and/or ideas can and even should be looked at as fascist in tendency, specifically the idea that the group or community takes precedence over the individual or that certain groups or communities are innately or by nature superior to others, especially when headed by strong leaders, and that, further and most disturbing, the superior groups are justified in seeking to exterminate the inferior ones. …These ideas are also, as I hope to show, implicit in some of Tolkien's most popular work. Part of my argument in fact is that the very popularity of Tolkien's work suggests that his anti-democratic, elitist, and even genocidal stance reflects a similar outlook among his British readers and even in Western society in general, an outlook, however, which could only become popular when it was cloaked, as it were, by means of a ring of invisibility.

Now, for our lady lecturer who read it (or most likely, an extract) but didn't understand it, what did Tolkien say about Nordic Spirit?

Quotes below from various letters of the Selected Letters. Let's kick off with the one she mentioned:

I have spent most of my life, since I was your age, studying Germanic matters (in the general sense that includes England and Scandinavia). There is a great deal more force (and truth) than ignorant people imagine in the 'Germanic' ideal. I was much attracted by it as an undergraduate (when Hitler was, I suppose, dabbling in paint, and had not heard of it), in reaction against the 'Classics'. You have to understand the good in things, to detect the real evil. But no one ever calls on me to 'broadcast', or do a postscript! Yet I suppose I know better than most what is the truth about this 'Nordic' nonsense. Anyway, I have in this War a burning private grudge – which would probably make me a better soldier at 49 than I was at 22: against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler (for the odd thing about demonic inspiration and impetus is that it in no way enhances the purely intellectual stature: it chiefly affects the mere will). Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light. Nowhere, incidentally, was it nobler than in England, nor more early sanctified and Christianized

Jawohl, Ich thinken zer Nordics are zer superior race! NOT.

Middle-earth .... corresponds spiritually to Nordic Europe.

Not Nordic, please! A word I personally dislike; it is associated, though of French origin, with racialist theories. Geographically Northern is usually better. But examination will show that even this is inapplicable (geographically or spiritually) to 'Middle-earth'. This is an old word, not invented by me, as reference to a dictionary such as the Shorter Oxford will show. It meant the habitable lands of our world, set amid the surrounding Ocean. The action of the story takes place in the North-west of 'Middle-earth', equivalent in latitude to the coastlands of Europe and the north shores of the Mediterranean. But this is not a purely 'Nordic' area in any sense. If Hobbiton and Rivendell are taken (as intended) to be at about the latitude of Oxford, then Minas Tirith, 600 miles south, is at about the latitude of Florence. >The Mouths of Anduin and the ancient city of Pelargir are at about the latitude of ancient Troy.

Auden has asserted that for me 'the North is a sacred direction'. That is not true. The North-west of Europe, where I (and most of my ancestors) have lived, has my affection, as a man's home should. I love its atmosphere, and know more of its histories and languages than I do of other parts; but it is not 'sacred', nor does it exhaust my affections. I have, for instance, a particular love for the Latin language, and among its descendants for Spanish. That it is untrue for my story, a mere reading of the synopses should show. The North was the seat of the fortresses of the Devil. The progress of the tale ends in what is far more like the re-establishment of an effective Holy Roman Empire with its seat in Rome than anything that would be devised by a 'Nordic'.

Ja, Ich bin ein Fascist who loves zer racialist theories! NOT.

But the mythology (and associated languages) first began to take shape during the 1914-18 war. The Fall of Gondolin (and the birth of Eärendil) was written in hospital and on leave after surviving the Battle of the Somme in 1916. The kernel of the mythology, the matter of Lúthien Tinúviel and Beren, arose from a small woodland glade filled with 'hemlocks' (or other white umbellifers) near Roos on the Holderness peninsula – to which I occasionally went when free from regimental duties while in the Humber Garrison in 1918.

Achtung, when fighting zer German armies (which Ich should have been loving not fighting since Ich bin zer Nordic racialist, nich wahr?), Ich invented zer core of mein mythology out of which all mein books were written which was about - lovers dancing in a glade of hemlocks. Hm. Maybe Ich should have included some talk about how Ich loved zer Kaiser und zer Nordic spirit?

Having set myself a task, the arrogance of which I fully recognized and trembled at: being precisely to restore to the English an epic tradition and present them with a mythology of their own: it is a wonderful thing to be told that I have succeeded, at least with those who have still the undarkened heart and mind.

It has been a considerable labour, beginning really as soon as I was able to begin anything, but effectively beginning when I was an undergraduate and began to explore my own linguistic aesthetic in language-composition. It was just as the 1914 War burst on me that I made the discovery that 'legends' depend on the language to which they belong; but a living language depends equally on the 'legends' which it conveys by tradition. (For example, that the Greek mythology depends far more on the marvellous aesthetic of its language and so of its nomenclature of persons and places and less on its content than people realize, though of course it depends on both. And vice versa. Volapük, Esperanto, Ido, Novial, &c &c are dead, far deader than ancient unused languages, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legends.) So though being a philologist by nature and trade (yet one always primarily interested in the aesthetic rather than the functional aspects of language) I began with language, I found myself involved in inventing 'legends' of the same 'taste'. The early work was mostly done in camps and hospitals between 1915 and 1918 – when time allowed.

Blast, this is not sounding properly Nordic Supremacism, is it? Where is the denial of the individual or extermination of inferior groups by superior? Languages??? What have they got to do with being a Fascist Genocider?

Also – and here I hope I shall not sound absurd – I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found (as an ingredient) in legends of other lands. There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish (which greatly affected me); but nothing English, save impoverished chap-book stuff. Of course there was and is all the Arthurian world, but powerful as it is, it is imperfectly naturalized, associated with the soil of Britain but not with English; and does not replace what I felt to be missing.

Oh, come off it, where is the blood-thirst of the Anglo-Saxon colonialist? This is very weak tea for the propagator of an "anti-democratic, elitist, and even genocidal stance".

Parents, don't let your children grow up to be Fascists. Here's the easy way to prevent that: stamp out all interest in linguistics! Read below the sorry tale of the development of a not-racist-means-racist with underlying, if unconscious, fascist tendencies about racial superiority and hierarchy:

It has been always with me: the sensibility to linguistic pattern which affects me emotionally like colour or music; and the passionate love of growing things; and the deep response to legends (for lack of a better word) that have what I would call the North-western temper and temperature. In any case if you want to write a tale of this sort you must consult your roots, and a man of the North-west of the Old World will set his heart and the action of his tale in an imaginary world of that air, and that situation : with the Shoreless Sea of his innumerable ancestors to the West, and the endless lands (out of which enemies mostly come) to the East. Though, in addition, his heart may remember, even if he has been cut off from all oral tradition, the rumour all along the coasts of the Men out of the Sea.

I say this about the 'heart', for I have what some might call an Atlantis complex. Possibly inherited, though my parents died too young for me to know such things about them, and too young to transfer such things by words. Inherited from me (I suppose) by one only of my children, though I did not know that about my son until recently, and he did not know it about me. I mean the terrible recurrent dream (beginning with memory) of the Great Wave, towering up, and coming in ineluctably over the trees and green fields. (I bequeathed it to Faramir.) I don't think I have had it since I wrote the 'Downfall of Númenor' as the last of the legends of the First and Second Age.

I am a West-Midlander by blood (and took to early west-midland Middle English as a known tongue as soon as I set eyes on it), but perhaps a fact of my personal history may partly explain why the 'North-western air' appeals to me both as 'home' and as something discovered. I was actually born in Bloemfontein, and so those deeply implanted impressions, underlying memories that are still pictorially available for inspection, of first childhood are for me those of a hot parched country. My first Christmas memory is of blazing sun, drawn curtains and a drooping eucalyptus.

I am afraid this is becoming a dreadful bore, and going on too long, at any rate longer than 'this contemptible person before you' merits. But it is difficult to stop once roused on such an absorbing topic to oneself as oneself. As for the conditioning: I am chiefly aware of the linguistic conditioning. I went to King Edward's School and spent most of my time learning Latin and Greek; but I also learned English. Not English Literature! Except Shakespeare (which I disliked cordially), the chief contacts with poetry were when one was made to try and translate it into Latin. Not a bad mode of introduction, if a bit casual. I mean something of the English language and its history. I learned Anglo-Saxon at school (also Gothic, but that was an accident quite unconnected with the curriculum though decisive — I discovered in it not only modern historical philology, which appealed to the historical and scientific side, but for the first time the study of a language out of mere love: I mean for the acute aesthetic pleasure derived from a language for its own sake, not only free from being useful but free even from being the 'vehicle of a literature').

There are two strands, or three. A fascination that Welsh names had for me, even if only seen on coal-trucks, from childhood is another; though people only gave me books that were incomprehensible to a child when I asked for information. I did not learn any Welsh till I was an undergraduate, and found in it an abiding linguistic-aesthetic satisfaction. Spanish was another: my guardian was half Spanish, and in my early teens I used to pinch his books and try to learn it : the only Romance language that gives me the particular pleasure of which I am speaking - it is not quite the same as the mere perception of beauty: I feel the beauty of say Italian or for that matter of modern English (which is very remote from my personal taste): it is more like the appetite for a needed food. Most important, perhaps, after Gothic was the discovery in Exeter College library, when I was supposed to be reading for Honour Mods, of a Finnish Grammar. It was like discovering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me; and I gave up the attempt to invent an 'unrecorded' Germanic language, and my 'own language' – or series of invented languages – became heavily Finnicized in phonetic pattern and structure.

That is of course long past now. Linguistic taste changes like everything else, as time goes on; or oscillates between poles. Latin and the British type of Celtic have it now, with the beautifully co-ordinated and patterned (if simply patterned) Anglo-Saxon near at hand and further off the Old Norse with the neighbouring but alien Finnish. Roman-British might not one say? With a strong but more recent infusion from Scandinavia and the Baltic. Well, I daresay such linguistic tastes, with due allowance for school-overlay, are as good or better a test of ancestry as blood-groups.

All this only as background to the stories, though languages and names are for me inextricable from the stories. They are and were so to speak an attempt to give a background or a world in which my expressions of linguistic taste could have a function. The stories were comparatively late in coming.

The issue I had was the specific word choice of "anti-racist" and its ideological association. There are plenty of ways to word it without having to use the term "anti-racism", e.g. "he opposed racism," "condemned racist attitudes".

Prior to the changes to the page in 2021, that section on Tolkien just had examples of things he contemned, including his anger at the Nazis and his condemnation of the treatments of blacks in South Africa.

But I guess it might be some coded language. Maybe like another commenter suggested it was done by Amazon, maybe in an attempt to get activists of their back and signal to them "hey, we're on your side! Please don't attack us!"

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