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universal smallness and humility, but universal greatness and pride, till some Orc gets hold of a ring of power – and then we get and are getting slavery’ (Letters, p. 246). In other words, he could see that the ideals of democracy are all too rarely achieved. Those elected may abuse the power they gain in the interests of themselves or their friends, or for various reasons may not represent the population as a whole but only a part of it – great landowners, or those with inherited wealth or political connections.

      Tolkien loved *England and applauded true patriotism, but was against any form of imperialism or colonialism, whether political or cultural. In a letter to *Christopher Wiseman on 16 November 1914, not long after the beginning of the First World War, he discussed matters that he felt to be of supreme importance, including ‘the duty of patriotism and a fierce belief in nationalism’. He concluded: ‘I am not of course a militarist. I no longer defend the Boer War! I am a more & more convinced Home Ruler …. I don’t defend “Deutschland über alles” but certainly do the Norwegian “alt for Norge” which translates itself (if I have it right?)’ (Tolkien Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford). On 9 December 1943 he wrote to his son Christopher: ‘I love England (not Great Britain and certainly not the British Commonwealth (grr!)), and if I was of military age, I should, I fancy, be grousing away in a fighting service, and willing to go on to the bitter end …’ (Letters, p. 65). On 29 May 1945, after the end of the war in Europe but while it continued in the Far East, he wrote to Christopher: ‘As I know nothing about British or American imperialism in the Far East that does not fill me with regret and disgust, I am afraid I am not even supported by a glimmer of patriotism in this remaining war. I would not subscribe a penny to it, let alone a son, were I a free man. It can only benefit America or Russia: prob[ably] the latter’ (Letters, p. 115).

      He was patriotic but not blindly so – patriotic to his country but not necessarily to its government’s policies or propaganda. He expressed this in historical terms in another letter to Christopher, on 31 July 1944:

      I should have hated the Roman Empire in its day (as I do), and remained a patriotic Roman citizen, while preferring a free Gaul and seeing good in Carthaginians. Delenda est Carthago [Plutarch, ‘Carthage must be destroyed’]. We hear rather a lot of that nowadays. I was actually taught at school that that was a fine saying; and I ‘reacted’ … at once. There lies still some hope that, at least in our beloved land of England, propaganda defeats itself, and even produces the opposite effect. [Letters, p. 89]

      Tolkien recognized that *good and evil are not all on one side, even if he felt that perhaps there was more evil, or more evil men, in the Second World War among the Germans and Japanese. When he read an article in a local paper ‘seriously advocating systematic exterminating of the entire German nation as the only proper course after military victory: because, if you please, they are rattlesnakes, and don’t the difference between good and evil!’ he wondered if the writer himself knew the difference, and commented to Christopher: ‘The Germans have just as much right to declare the Poles and Jews exterminable vermin, subhuman, as we have to select Germans: in other words, no right, whatever they have done. Of course there is still a difference here. The article was answered, and the answer printed’ (23–5 September 1944, Letters, p. 93). In the same letter he objected to propaganda on the BBC and in newspapers, which he supposed was produced by the Ministry of Information,

      that the German troops are a motley collection of sutlers and broken men, while yet recording the bitterest defence against the finest and best equipped armies … that have ever taken the field. The English pride themselves, or used to, on ‘sportsmanship’ (which included ‘giving the devil his due’) …. But it is distressing to see the press grovelling in the gutter as low as [Nazi propagandist Joseph] Goebbels in his prime, shrieking that any German commander who holds out in a desperate situation … is a drunkard, and a besotted fanatic. [Letters, p. 93]

      It has been alleged that Tolkien was not interested in current affairs, and hardly ever read a newspaper. He told Henry Resnik in an interview in 1966, however, that he and his wife took three newspapers, and ‘I read them when I’m interested. I take a strong interest in what is going on, both in the university and in the country and in the world’ (‘An Interview with Tolkien’, Niekas 18 (Spring 1967), p. 39). The sinister picture of *Númenor under the influence of Sauron in *The Lost Road (written ?1936–?1937), for instance, almost certainly reflects knowledge of the contemporary rise of Nazi Germany. This includes, as Christopher Tolkien comments,

      the withdrawal of the besotted and aging king from the public view, the unexplained disappearance of people unpopular with the ‘government’, informers, prisons, torture, secrecy, fear of the night; propaganda in the form of the ‘rewriting of history’…; the multiplication of weapons of war, the purpose of which is concealed but guessed at …. The teaching of Sauron has led to the invention of ships of metal that traverse the seas without sails …; to the building of grim fortresses and unlovely towers; and to missiles that pass with a noise like thunder to strike their targets many miles away. Moreover, Númenor is seen by the young as over-populous, boring, ‘over-known’ … and this cause of discontent is used, it seems, by Sauron to further the policy of ‘imperial’ expansion and ambition that he presses on the king. When at this time my father reached back to the world of the first man to bear the name ‘Elf-friend’ he found there an image of what he most condemned and feared in his own. [*The Lost Road and Other Writings, p. 77]

      That Tolkien was well aware of anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany (*Prejudice and racism) is shown by his reaction to a request by the proposed publisher of a German translation of The Hobbit, for a declaration of Tolkien’s ‘arisch’ origin. He pointed out the correct meaning of Aryan and regretted that he had no Jewish blood. In addition, Christopher Tolkien remembers *Father Vincent Reade visiting his father in Oxford not long before the Second World War and describing the maltreatment of Jews in Germany, which he had recently visited (correspondence with the authors).

      In the mid-1950s Tolkien made references in letters comparing the disintegration of Frodo’s will under the influence of the Ring in *The Lord of the Rings to brainwashing, and though he did not specify, presumably to the treatment of prisoners of war in North Korea. In a draft letter to Michael Straight at the end of 1955, he said that Frodo did indeed fail at the end of his *quest, and one correspondent had said that Frodo should have been executed as a traitor. ‘Believe me, it was not until I read this that I had myself any idea how “topical” such a situation might appear …. I did not foresee that before the tale was published we should enter a dark age in which the technique of torture and disruption of personality would rival that of Mordor and the Ring and present us with the practical problem of honest men of good will broken down into apostates and traitors’ (Letters, p. 234). In a draft to Miss J. Burn on 26 July 1956 he wrote: ‘In the case of those who now issue from prison “brainwashed”, broken, or insane, praising their torturers, no such immediate deliverance is as a rule to be seen. But we can at least judge them by the will and intentions with which they entered the Sammath Naur; and not demand impossible feats of will, which could only happen in stories unconcerned with real moral and mental probability’ (Letters, p. 252).

      He also objected to cultural ‘colonialism’ and the standardization that often follows, regretting the loss of diversity, including diversity of language with the spread of English:

      The bigger things get the smaller and duller or flatter the globe gets. It is getting to be all one blasted little provincial suburb. When they have introduced American sanitation, morale-pep, feminism, and mass production throughout the Near East, Middle East, Far East, U.S.S.R., the Pampas, el Gran Chaco, the Danubian Basin, Equatorial Africa, Hither Further and Inner Mumbo-land, Gondhwanaland, Lhasa, and the villages of darkest Berkshire, how happy we shall be. At any rate it ought to cut down travel. There will be nowhere to go. So people will (I opine) go all the faster. Col. [Collie] Knox says ⅛ of the world’s population speaks ‘English’, and that is the biggest language group. If true, damn shame – say I. May the curse of Babel strike all their tongues till they can only say ‘baa baa’. It would mean much the same. I think I shall have to refuse to speak anything but old Mercian.

      But seriously: I do find this Americo-cosmopolitanism

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