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Notes -
The Two Towers
It is trivial, with the current "very online right" and with the benefit of a (relatively recent) era that didn’t require "diversity", to impose a reactionary reading on the movie trilogy the Lord of the Rings. Having just finished watching the (otherwise pedestrian, at least in relation to the sublime Fellowship of the Ring) Two Towers, the analogies are almost too on the nose. We have a technocratic leader ("a mind of metal and wheels") who leads a rabid horde of third-worlders in a takeover of a 100% white, peaceful, free nation. In the books, the technocratic leader’s "new" cloak is literally rainbow hued. The free nation just wants to be left alone, but is eventually forced into battle. The leaders pine for a simpler, easier time; where valor, honor, and renown were attainable.
Of course, so do all who live to see such times. The folk in the old tales had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. One of Tolkien’s motifs is how easy evil is to defeat: all good has to do is stand up to it. The Ents think that they go to their doom, before utterly decimating Isengard. The Hobbits cower initially during the scouring of the Shire, then win an almost trivial victory. One of my favorite lines from the book is when Theoden decides to go into battle himself, at which Aragorn proclaims, "Then even the defeat of Rohan will be glorious in song!". This is echoed in the movie during the "Forth Eorlingas" last charge. Yet the only thing in the Lord of the Rings that risks genuine defeat is passivity. Ultimately, Theoden’s death in Return of the King is one through which he does win lasting glory: the great Witch king is forever destroyed. Not only will he have no shame in the halls of his fathers, he has a prominent position in their company.
My grandfather served in WWII but never fought. If it wasn’t for the dropping of the Atom bombs in Japan, he would have been in the invading ground force. Given the casualty estimates of a ground invasion, there is a solid chance that his 5 children, his 20+ grandchildren, and his 40+ great-grandchildren would never have been born. He felt some pride in his service, but also regret and shame. Others fought and died. He didn’t.
Two generations removed from WWII, the very thought of storming Iwo Jima or Normandy is unthinkable; both at the national level as well as the individual level. Watch Saving Private Ryan and try to imagine yourself in that scene. My grandfather felt shame, but I can’t even muster that emotion. When I imagine myself in those boats approaching the beach, the only emotion I feel is terror. I am a product of my time, where even the "good" guys lack ambition and will. The world’s richest man trolls on X. The world’s most powerful man trolls on Truth Social.
Another great movie, the Dark Knight, features the iconic (and ironic) line "You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain". As I stare at the beige walls of my cubicle, were that those were my options! We live in an age where everything is flattened. There is great evil but without an obvious source. There are many who live upright lives, but without valor or victory. Our present evil is the insidious slow drip of poison that seeps into us through our surrounding milieu.
The great project of the "online right" is to identify this evil, to name it, and to then fight it. Yet this evil remains amorphous and elusive. Each "influencer" thinks they have the "correct" answer. These answers are typically mutually contradictory. In the face of this hydra, some have returned to recommending the basics: reproduce, guard your family, stay in shape, weather the storm. This is sound advice. But as long as the evil permeates are society, our children and our spouses risk defecting. The halls of power rot even as their power becomes more entrenched, threatening lives and livelihood. What can men do against such reckless hate? The one option that is certainly not available to us moderns is to ride out and meet it.
This is a pretty weird reading of LOTR but not uncommon.
If anything, I'd say that LOTR - both the books and the films - shows the weaknesses and failures of Evil(tm), and ascribes great narrative power and importance to the small, weak, stupid nobodies who think themselves powerless.
In the films, Saruman is killed by his own lackey in an impulsive movement of hatred. In both the films and book, the One Ring is only destroyed in a mad scramble to claim it, not because anyone set out to intentionally destroy it. In addition, it is a key plot point that Sauron has a poor model of Good and therefore fails to anticipate where the Ring is going. To me, the key heart of the LOTR books is a statement on the nature and characteristics of evil. The methods and tools of Evil cannot be used for Good; it will turn Good to its purpose. Evil explicitly cannot be defeated by strength of arms, but by small acts of bravery and courage and the willingness of characters to sacrifice for each other.
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The "online right" is a false friend. It's a total disunited shitshow. Essentially none of these "influencers" have a solid community, wife and family. They are surrounded by hangers on and a rotating scene of BPD groupies. They will not save you.
That's the only way to win though. There were proto wokes in the 60s arguing for exactly what we have now and they won because they were willing to keep endlessly pushing even though for most of the past 60 years they were despised or irrelevant to most of America. But what is it you actually want? To be left alone in a mostly white area? You can move to small town South Dakota and I doubt anyone will much bother you. To go someplace the government isn't woke well all of Eastern Europe is open and Russia just made a visa for people just like you. I found this post well written and evocative but also vague you want to strike back at "evil?" what does that mean exactly?
And we can still do stuff with the right stimulation WWII was entirely different than our current imperial wars of choice. Defending America from conquering great powers is entirely different than propping up some corrupt government in a shithole country. Why should Americans die for that?
Survivalship bias.
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First it was Thielbux, and now it's BPD groupies. Where do I sign up for all these benefits of being an online right extremist?
Well first you need to create a mediocre podcasts.
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Any attempt at establishing sometihng like this, that ensures it can't just be taken from you when convenient, is deliberately attacked.
Maybe Russia. Most of Eastern Europe is just a few years behind the program.
I can give you a list of examples, but surely you understand that a question like "what is evil, exactly?" is a bit unreasonable?
I wasn't suggesting the OP try to set up an explicitly white nationalist town, just that it's not hard to find an almost 100% white conservative town in America. And yet as your article shows most white American conservatives aren't actually white Nationalists, the people who ran Craig Cobb out of that North Dakota town, are statistically going to be mostly Trump voters.
Which is why I asked OP about the "evil" he wants to contain. I maybe should have phrased my question a bit better. A better question maybe would have been what does he want to change about society? Because if it's wanting to be left alone as a white conservative well that's easy to enough to achieve, if you want to seize control of the culture well that's something different. And your probably right about Eastern Europe but that just adds another layer, which is that the "program" is basically the post Christian religion of white countries the only countries effectively resisting it are non white countries, especially Islamic ones. Russia is but only by repression a democratic Russia would see St. Petersburg draped in rainbow flags pretty quick. There's a lot of tension in wanting a white society not part of the current program.
It was just an example, if you tried setting up an exclusive religious community, you'd be treated largely the same way. Like I said the core issue is being able to ensure that the community stays the way you want it to be, and that the powers that be can't just come over and pull the rug from under you. I get that you can find communities that are ~100% aligned ethnically, religiously, or whatever to your liking in America, but lots of these communities have been deliberately uprooted by the state and federal government shenanigans in the past, and there's no indication the situation will change any time soon. You might say "but there are still a lot of these communities left", but I don't think reasonable to demand that people who just want to be left alone, are also told to move periodically - and that's without taking into account the fact that they'll obviously run out of places to move to at some point.
If you're reading this thread, you've surely seen the kind of things people are upset about - being extremely lenient to criminals, while being punitive toward people who defend themselves from them; using the public school system to indoctrinate children into bizarre ideologies that demand they self-flagellate for the way they are born; the medical establishment performing undisclosed gender-experiments on their children, and outright lying to ensure the parents' compliance; public schools helping to facilitate these experiments in secret from their parents... The list goes on, and I'm sure you've already seen most of these complaints.
It's not actually easy to be left alone. All the things I mentioned are imposed top-down, even on conservative localities.
You're acting like these rainbow flags are put up organically, like the English flags in the UK, and aren't put their by paid NGO mercenaries, backed by it's own apparatus of repression.
I disagree with this America has tons of exclusive religious communities and is probably the best place to do that. The Amish, the Hasidics, Scientology, Polygamist Mormons, dozens and dozens of New Age type cults and compounds in California. America is probably the best place in the world. The ones who I can think were deliberately uprooted were the FLDs and Branch Davidians but they were both violating Federal Law. No illegal guns and no underage brides and they would have been left alone. The US is full of of autonomous religious communities outside the mainstream and the Federal government has not destroyed them.
Sure once they've won they can get repressive but they definitely have enough woke lib Russians in St. Petersberg to hang up some rainbow flags organically. As for the NGO cadre, they function a lot more like missionaries then mercenaries. All throughout the FSU (even in the Muslim countries) there are earnest young liberals who want nothing more than for their countries to become Western Europe and are eager to take money from the West to spread their message.
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There would be no shortage of organic ones, and likely a few NGOs. The demand for Russia's tradbasedness vastly outstrips the supply, and while many Russians are not exactly the ones chafing to go "in this house we believe" if only the laws allow it, the active opposition to the LGBT flags number few, and are likely sponsored.
You don't need tradbasdness to not have rainbow flags, you need progwokenwss to have them. Even in the west, with people sympathetic to wokeness, the amount of in your face symbolism would go down by 10x, if it wasn't artificially propped up, simply because people have better shit to do.
In fact, this already happened, between when the Floydening ended and the "Kamala is for they/them" ad hit home.
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In my estimation, Russia (at the very least St. Petersburg, the capital of Russian artsy progressives) does not lack progwokes. And unlike Western progwokes who gassed themselves out on their victory lap, there's still a lot of winning for Russian progwokes.
What's "artificially propped up"? Sure, I'll agree that near-mandatory sensitivity consulting corporations are probably the central example of artificial propping-up. In the case of a manager of a small coffee shop deciding to put up rainbow flags during June, I wouldn't agree that it's artificial. There wouldn't be specific laws against "propagandizing the LGBT community" if no one really wanted to propagandize the LGBT community. As you say, just the lack of mandating the LGBT propaganda would be enough.
LGBT is almost always unpopular among the common people because smarmy effeminate weirdos tend to be their public face. Banning 'LGBT propaganda' doesn't mean that there's lots of people eager to spread LGBT; it means that the government wants to show that it listens to the common people more than it wants to show it cares about tolerance/expanding human rights.
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It's all the money that goes into all the orgs that put up all these flags, organize all the marches, etc.
You think this was put up by a small coffee shop?
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I would dispute calling Two Towers pedestrian. It contains, by my estimation and experience, the greatest fantasy battle ever put to film with the Battle of the Hornberg. I can quibble with some of Peter Jacksons deviations from the book telling, but it is still a masterpiece in building tension, demonstrating the overwhelming odds of the army set against the defenders, demonstrating the heroic feats of our heroes, etc.
There are certainly great scenes.
Taken as a standalone movie, there is uneven pacing, a terrible addition of a Warg battle that eats into runtime with no purpose, and a cringy elf-reinforcement.
But the Two Tower's biggest flaw is how it fails to set up the Return of the King. Very little happens in the movie. By the end of the book, Gandalf and Pippen were on their way to Minas Tirith. Frodo had gotten through Shelob's lair. In the movie Frodo has gone maybe 20 miles and is no closer to Mordor than when the movie started. Isengard is defeated but it was a comparative gadfly next to Mordor.
An inordinate amount of screentime was spent on Rohan and it's plight. We had the sub-plot with the two kids riding to Edoras. We had the Warg battle. We have the "10K Uruk hai are going to destroy the world of men" resulting in an (admittedly epic) battle that feels disproportionate relative to the weight of Sauron's forces in the next movie. We even have Aragorn telling a kid that there is always hope.
In ROTK we don't feel as strongly for Gondor as we do for Rohan. Gondor is not given as much room to breath. There are no sub-plots. Pippen doesn't meet Beregond's son, which would have given us characters to invest in. The activities after Shelob's lair are rushed, with Gondor's army teleporting to the Black Gate and Frodo and Sam covering 50 miles of Mordor in a couple of scenes. Aragorn is never seen speaking to anyone from Gondor in the entire ROTK...because all the time for such conversations was monopolized by TTT.
The trilogy would have been much stronger had the Two Towers been more competently managed.
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I don't think this is remotely true. I'd argue evil is so pervasive, it's a target rich environment. Just because people identify different evils doesn't mean they are all wrong. They can all be right!
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Needs more continental philosophy.
Joseph de Maistre wrote 'La contre-revolucion n'est pas une revolucion contraire, mais sur le contraire de la revolucion'. An important line, but incomplete by itself- de Maistre left his philosophy on reacting to the French revolution incomplete, because the reactionary impulse, by itself, is simply a leg of a Hegelian dialectic which will synthesize into a less extreme version of the revolution. Which is exactly what happened in France.
By itself, opposition to revolution is merely driving the speed limit. What is needed is a paradigm shift to escape the revolutionary paradigm. And central planning does not have a good historical record for constructing a paradigm.
I notice you talking about guarding your family and weathering the storm. What you don't talk about is forming a community with likeminded families. You must network, man is a social animal. Your children will defect if they don't have friends. They will defect if your subculture does not offer a pathway to becoming an adult. You need other families for this. And out of that group a paradigm will arise organically, a very similar paradigm to the pre-revolution, but not exactly the same because it's a different world. And a different paradigm will naturally tend to form independent institutions, which grow slowly, over generations, until you eat the revolution itself.
Finding a like-minded community that is in my same socio-economic class, age, and willingness to be "apart" from the world is difficult, especially since my wife is more liberal than I. I like what https://becomingnoble.substack.com/ and https://blog.exitgroup.us/ are trying to do, but I think those are too "right-wing" coded for my family.
You will need to conform yourself to a group- what did you think ‘community’ meant, thoughts, presentations, essays? Band together.
Of course, you could also simply be out of luck. An unwillingness to abandon individualism won’t get you anywhere. But civilization defining ideas shared with other families might, because the future belongs to those who show up. You can as part of a group influence the next generation. You cannot do it on your own. Yes this entails making compromises on your preferences. But the alternative is to forfeit the field.
It's damnation both ways. Hold to individualism and forfeit the field to nothing. Discard it and forfeit it to whoever the leaders are. Only actual winning move is to become the leader, and there's precious few slots available.
So? What's wrong with having a leader setting the field?
Nothing, if you're the leader. Otherwise, you're just a tool.
You mean a follower? Again, what's wrong with that?
What's wrong with living, working, and existing for the benefit of someone else's vision? If you don't see it, I'll never be able to show it to you.
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I can speak French, I live in Quebec, I am used to people randomly switching languages in mid-conversation, and even I think using a French quote untranslated while speaking English is pretentious.
As if the rest of that comment isn’t?
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I mean, they also love battle, drove the Dunlendings out of their (the Dunlendings') ancestral lands, and literally hunted Ghan-buri-Ghan's folk "like beasts". The Rohirrim may be white and free, but peaceful?
I could definitely have been more clear on this point :). In the books they are essentially Vikings on horses who have "settled down" in recent decades but still have an ornery pillaging streak. In the movies they are made to seem more passive, though not pacifist.
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In modern parlance this is mostly peaceful
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Perfectly peaceful. Extremely peaceful! Just need to kill their enemies first.
As Tacitus said: "They make a desert and call it peace"
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Mostly peaceful.
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This is fundamentally wrong. The whole point of the LoTR world is that things keep getting worse and, although you may win the day, in the long run everything is cooked, as it were. Evil keeps coming back, it gets defeated every time one way or another, but things are worse off than they used to be despite the ""victory"". Restoration is impossible. We can never make things as good as our fathers had it. The elves wither and go to the uttermost West. The race of hobbits fails. The dwarves die in their mines. The ents disappear. Lorien dies.
Hard disagree. Evil keeps coming back because the Elves give up on Middle Earth. But even as evil comes back it is less potent: Morgoth was the true baddy, Sauron is but a servant. Saruman becomes a lesser version of his former greatness when he turns to evil, and even his voice fails him. He becomes a mean beggar by the end.
Nonsense. The elves had already fought several wars against evil by the time LotR happens.
The elves give up on middle earth because the cost of defeating sauron was the destruction of the rings, which destroyed the elvish realms and power. The choice of the elves was to leave middle earth or fade into wraiths. None of this is a matter of opinion, it's literally what Tolkein wrote.
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I think the vanishing of the elves and all of that was more to express the author's nostalgia for a preindustrialized past or some such. It's not so much that the world becomes darker over time, but more that the magic goes away. This could also be seen as reflective of childhood nostalgia, perhaps, a theme that was popular in Victorian fiction and which Tolkien was probably influenced by. Of course, these ideas interact with the themes about good vs. evil in certain ways, but I would say that the overall idea presented is more nuanced and indefinite than 'the world becomes increasingly evil'. One of the story points is that while good becomes increasingly degraded, evil does as well, with Sauron being much weaker than Morgoth and so forth. It's an arc from fantasy to mundanity, until evil is represented by your bland cubicle boss.
This is probably more true for the fate of the hobbits than that of the elves.
Of course, Arda has literally gotten darker since the days of the two lamps.
It's not just the magic going away - the dwarves and the hobbits are also gone. Numenor is under the seas and middle Earth kind of sucks compared to numenor.
It doesn't become increasingly evil. Nevertheless, it becomes ineffably worse.
The Elves in LOTR are just a standard tale of hubris. It is their desire to recreate Valinor in Middle-Earth without being forced to subject themselves to the authority of the Valar that caused the entire mess with the Rings. Celebrimbor's pride is what led to him helping Sauron, despite Galadriel and the other Wise being suspicious.
They were supposed to either stay and fade or leave, passing the world to Men. It was pride and a desire to stop the inevitable that made them make the rings.
Passivity isn't the problem. It's rejecting hope in God's plan. The world is degenerating and becoming disenchanted, but Eru is still at work (Numenor's destruction is actually hopeful in one way because it's clear evidence that Sauron is wrong: Eru has not abandoned the world and isn't some inert deist god) and is supposed to make it right at some point. Evil will not triumph in the end but you have to trust (and fight). It doesn't matter if you're worse off than before you fought, not fighting would be even worse.
Most everyone who becomes corrupted or grievously fails in some way rejects hope in that plan and creates problems. Celebrimbor decides he knows better, Saruman decides to bandwagon because he sees no rational path to victory, Denethor won't join Sauron but simply gives up out of despair and tries to kill himself like a "heathen king", the Valar themselves arguably fail by refusing to confront Morgoth early enough to stop him corrupting everything (which is why the Elves fade so fast in Middle Earth) for fear of destroying Arda despite knowing that Eru proclaimed Morgoth could never triumph...
Because people have free will, they fuck things up. But it's not over until it's over.
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I'd say the earlier era seem to have had greater contrasts, so that while Numenor and such have died off, so to have all the evil dragons and whatever that demon in Moria was. Good and evil were more distinct and individually potent, embodied by externalized creatures, whereas, as Middle Earth evolves towards the recognizable world, they collapse more towards a unitary point embodied by individual men (e.g. Boromir and Denethor). That is the main thrust of the matter I perceive, as far as its tendency towards one state or the other.
And if Middle Earth is literally darker, it is because it represents the world as an adult perceives it and not a little boy.
Which makes sense because eyesight literally becomes much weaker with age. Far fewer photons reach the retina. When a middle aged or older person feels the world is getting darker and darker, there's structural basis for that.
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With the march of the ents, "doom" should be interpreted to mean their destiny, not necessarily their destruction.
That is not how it reads:
"Of course, it is likely enough, my friends," he said slowly, "likely enough that we are going to our doom: the last march of the Ents. But if we stayed home and did nothing, doom would find us anyway, sooner or later. That thought has long been growing in our hearts; and that is why we are marching now. It was not a hasty resolve. Now at least the last march of the Ents may be worth a song."
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