Monster to Boss

The Heroic Visons of J.R.R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard by James LaFond

Most people are nothing more than propaganda clay.
-Gina C.

The drive to extinguish heroism from what remains of human culture, in its washed-out mongrelized form is an actual obsession with the media and academia, the two mind control strands which serve the power elite. As a counter to this we might consider the strands of heroism and which strand is most unacceptable to the Leviathan Polity and which strand is relatively abundant, in order to deduce the fear of the collective beast that dines upon our scattered souls.

Robert E. Howard and J.R.R. Tolkien were the two greatest fantasy writers of the 20th century, Edgar Rice Boroughs being the third. I place Boroughs third, despite his superior output, due to his relative reluctance to paint human superstructures as evil. He was a nationalist, who did what he could to place the villain as an aberrant or even alien force. Tolkien painted the picture of power itself as a morally corruptible force. Howard, likewise, depicts virtually every ruler, prince, lord and priest as a monster in the making, with civilization itself sketched as the very womb of evil. So, despite their very different approaches to heroism Howard and Tolkien paint political power with a black brush.

The Hero King

The quintessential Tolkien hero is Aragorn, the scion of the returning blood line, a hero who spends all of his time slaughtering the nameless minions of his evil counterpart, a hero never able to lay hold of the Dark Lord, unassailable in Mordor, a man who is nothing but a piece on the chessboard of strife, not the player. It is significant that Aragorn never even has a showdown with the Lord of the Nazgul, rather he is slain by a girl, and that the Dark Lord himself may only be defeated by a hairy-footed child. In medieval terms, Aragorn is a knight who never slays his evil equal—he is a living symbol of a restoration, a moral beacon, not a direct actionist in the fight against his evil opposite.

Today, the Lord of the Rings franchise in print, video and gaming outsells the combined works of Howard by billions of dollars. Furthermore, the chief pastime of young men, video gaming, is dominated by the convention of the “Boss,” the idea that many levels of the combat ladder [a frustrated effigy for the social ladder, so inaccessible to the honorable actionist] must be ascended until finally a showdown with the boss villain is the reward for learning the game. A video game is essentially a restorative Lord of the Rings, where Aragorn finally gets to fight the Dark Lord.

The Usurper

Of all of the Howard characters, Conan is the quintessential king, a more brutally crafted figure than his literary predecessor Kull, also a barbarian hero king come to the throne of a preeminent state via the violence of his own bloody hands. Most of the Conan adventures are set before his kingship, with only three treating with the barbarian monarch’s trouble holding his heroically gotten throne. Where Aragorn is the benighted heir of a right upheld by the hands of others, Conan is a pure heroic force who has carved his own place in life and must hold on in like fashion, with nothing but the loyalty to him imbued by his own heroism and good deeds to buoy his continued claim. This is well illustrated in The Hour of the Dragon, the only Conan novel.

Rather than a collectively toxic right, Conan has might. The other striking aspect of the Conan series in terms of heroism, is it is a return to ancient epic poetry, hero sagas of figures such as Gilgamesh, Enkidu, Achilles, Odysseus, Herakles and Beowulf who all go directly for the throat of evil by accessing the chief villain and puppet master directly. This is only reflected in modern and postmodern media by the Lone Wolf hero, such as Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name and the various very popular adventure films starring his more muscular heirs to the movie throne.

For the above reasons I prefer man against machine stories and movies for boys, and am against video games and suggest that table top gaming follow the direct actionist in the Howard tradition, rather than the compromised heroes of Tolkien. I prefer the Tolkien mythos in many ways, but in terms of media for modeling the inner mind of men, Howard’s hero—which is to say the traditional Aryan hero—who confronts evil directly rater than through its proxy minions, is an entire level above the slavish king of Tolkien’s mind’s eye.

Note from Lynn:  James asked for a picture of a CEO and an evil wizard to illustrate this piece, but this was the best I could come up with, an evil CEO and President Frothy Latte:

(c) 2018 James LaFond

The Scale of Warfare; Q&A with James LaFond

Masculine Revival in the Face of the Machine State: From the Peace of Westphalia to the Marseilles Soccer Hooligan Clash and the Baltimore Riots

Note to reader: If you haven't read James LaFond's post "No Small Beer," or seen the related video, you should go there first.

The video is an hour long and well worth watching, but the gist of it is that there is a growing movement of Soccer Hooliganism in Russia. Young men are training and fighting one another in groups, and in 2016, around 200 of these Hooligans went to Marseilles during the World Cup and attacked their English counterparts. English Hooliganism has seen better days and they were unaware and unprepared for the battle. The video was put out by the BBC and has the predictable biases.

LL: James, you have observed that the Peace of Westphalia marked the beginning of "national machine warfare." Relatedly, Nassim Taleb has proposed, also citing the Peace of Westphalia, in "Antifragile," that the existence of nation-states, as opposed to city-states, feudal and tribal groups, led to the pattern of war of the twentieth century, with large scale conflict, and has left the world with far greater danger of catastrophic war than ever in history. This contrary to the popular view (from Steven Pinker) that violence, including warfare, is on the decline world wide. Taleb's point is that having numerous local skirmishes is much safer than having large powers in constant tension, and we won't know how bad it could get until it does.

JL:  Lynn, first, violence within society continues to increase, counter to law enforcement data. Society is now more violent per foot space than it ever was. However, since our intellectuals deal in violence per 100,000 , an intrinsically dehumanized scale, we, like the wildebeest, are seen as rarely preyed upon. Medieval studies of violence show a high per-capita rate of violence. However, per-capita notions are artificial. What is important is violence per foot. How dangerous is the place where you live if you removed everybody but yourself and the predators? That is the psychologically impactive view, what produces alcoholism, drug addiction, suicide, ennui, decadence…

Furthermore, if we go along with the misleading and fundamentally flawed FBI notion of macro-data qualified violence we see the following when compared with my first hand survey:

In 1996, only 25% of violence came to the attention of law enforcement.

In 2016, only 5% of violence came to the attention of law enforcement.

During this 20 year period law enforcement has made a multi-layered commitment to reclassifying violence down, with home invasions becoming destruction of property, muggings becoming theft, etc.

Beyond this is the fact that most aggression does not result in legally definable aggression. Me following you to your car and then walking on by because your husband happens to be sitting in the car, when if he hadn’t I would have attacked you, is not definable by law enforcement.

Also, where murders may remain stagnant, with handgun killings staying steady nationwide and stabbing perhaps doubling, blunt force attacks, as the admittance of clubbing and beating victims do not trigger law enforcement responses as do gunshot, stabbing and rape admittances, have greatly increased, with cagey criminals averse to prison time switching to blunt force away from firearms and edged weapons.

Taking the above factors, from Baltimore City, into account, how can anyone look at a marginal decrease in overall killing stats across the nation, or a reduction of robbery stats [which are heavily massaged by reporting methods] and see a less violent world, where it is at least three times as violent.

A better way to rate aggression would be to track the sale and installation of plexi-glass counter shields at retail outlets and aggregate them, meaning the bulletproof counter installed on North and Maryland 40 years ago is still in use, and all of those built since, at an accelerating rate, actually amount to a manifold doubling of hostile points of aggression and predation across the real physical landscape rather than in the contrived theoretic landscape of the FBI macro stats.

As for the Peace of Westphalia, which traditionally dates the rise of the nation state, projecting force with conscription-based armies over kingdoms and republics employing feudal obligations and mercenary employment for force projection, here are my immediate thoughts.

The defeat of the Spanish tericos [combined arms regiments loyal to the king of Spain] that led to the Peace of Westphalia, killed whatever connection to warfare that heroism had, that is whatever the brutal 30 years war had not already erased. In a very real sense, that war, from 1618 to 1648 was when God was killed on the battlefield along with the divine right of kingship. Kings would now increasingly become a class of managerial despot compromised by their advisors. That war also saw the first WMD, the Hell-Burner of Antwerp. The Spanish were as evil as the rest of the players. But their soldiery still held to notions of heroism that would soon only find expression in dueling and prize fighting, which emerged at this very time as a plague on the officer class. We see honorable violence being pushed downward into society as the first modern slave armies [they emptied the prisons and whore houses to fill the ranks] sterilized war of meaning as it became a collective expedient.

LL:  James, do you think the Russian Soccer Hooligans represent a return to tribal warfare? You point out in the comments to that article that these firms fight one another for practice. By fighting firm vs. firm, they signal the safety of their towns, and by joining up to fight the English, they can also signal national strength.

JL:  The fact is that these hooligans are engaging in warrior pursuits with meaning as only a few hundred men of any nation can engage in meaningful warrior activity in the machine-minded armed services. Once you get below the special operations types you just have a welfare state-prison-school-system in uniform.

LL:  I have mixed feelings about what they did in Marseilles, but I wonder if there aren't a few English and French who would think twice now about going to war with Russia?

JL:  Such notions as national will for war are really obsolete. War is now a machined wraith of its former self, a form of macro-policing by globalists and doomed resistance by nationalists, and has been such since 1948. This Marseilles clash was about the Russians using the occasion to assert their masculine humanity over the decadent Brits, in essence saying, “We will remain Russians and men, as you are thrown on the scrap heap of humanity by the soulless system that your grandfathers fought to erect, which has now begun eating its own, reducing you to neither men or Englishmen, but a shadow without a ghost—you revolted against Modernity and sank into sloth and we carry on.”

The Russians are letting the British and the dying West know that they have all become like Tolkien’s ring wraiths—terminally, amorally domesticated ciphers.

LL:  Looking back over this I have left out what I really wanted to talk about which is your idea about outsourcing violence.

We have seen that an individual man has the right to risk his own body in the violent endeavors of his choosing. You have made your life's work out of sharing your violent experiences, and we learned about some of the physical consequences last week.

By joining firms, these young Russian men compromise themselves to a group, albeit a small and highly accountable one. The leaders of the group are fighting alongside the recruits and we saw that the fighting and the leading are inextricably linked when Vasily indicated that he had retired from fighting and firm leadership, without distinguishing between the two. Moving up the scale any further removes the warrior role from the leaders who are responsible for disposing of their lives.

JL:  Lynn, you have just described a real—if circumscribed within the confines of modernity—a real, actualized return to the hero bands of primal antiquity. Vasily and his men are Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Odysseus and his Crew, Jason and his Argonauts, Achilles and his Myrmidons and Beowulf and his dozen heroes. As strange as it seems Russian soccer Holliganism is a protest against outsourced aggression-based society and an expressed yearning for a return to a primal lifestyle.

LL:  Thank you James.

‘No Small Beer’ - jameslafond.com

‘The European Age’ - jameslafond.com

jameslafond.com

(c) 2017 James LaFond & Lynn Lockhart

Pondering on Weathertop

Impressions of J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Fellowship of the Ring," Revisited via the movie.

The reader should be familiar with the movies based on Tolkien's iconic trilogy; if he is not, having read the trilogy twice, this reader found no contradiction between the movies and the novels they were based upon. The movies are faithful enough to the text and seem to harbor less Hollywood poison than any other film adaptation, that when I feel moved to revisit the story, I choose the expedient of the movie. For this viewing, I sat with a companion who had never seen the movies, nor completed the trilogy, but had read "The Hobbit."

Her initial thought was to view them according to the story chronology with "The Hobbit" first. However, having viewed all three of the Hobbit movies, I informed her that unlike "The Lord of the Rings," the three-part screen adaptation of "The Hobbit" had progressively demonstrated the onset of the Hollywood cancer. Filmed at a video game pace, "The Hobbit" movies surrendered to the most virulent politically correct tropes; nordic negroes, a killer heroine flying through the air, slaying armies of armored giants, and a completely inserted subplot involving an interracial love affair between an elf princess who rejects her heritage and a doomed martyr dwarf. By the end of the last movie, I was so disgusted and had developed such a vicarious hatred for dwarves and elves that I embarrassed my son by cheering gutturally with a fist of power to every stroke delivered by the only masculine figures fighting for their heritage--the orc chieftains played by modern Maori stunt men. The message of Tolkien's "The Fellowship of the Ring," so keenly preserved in the movie, with Orcs representing the evils of industrialism and mass mongrelized society, was so twisted out of all shape by the same production group a mere ten years later that the only thing left representing a shred of Tolkien's metaphor was the depiction of the defiant Orc chieftain battling against all odds, against the greed of men and elves and dwarves, in a doomed fight to preserve his tribe.

I revisited The Fellowship of the Ring from a mythic, masculine perspective, the only passion I have left to me. I find myself identifying with the ring wraiths in this way. I identify the following themes:

1. The inevitable corruptibility of Men in Power,
2. The innocence and hope of children,
3. The damnation of the elite,
4. The industrialization of life,
5. The primacy of nature,
6. The alchemy of knowledge,
7. Intercession.

We'll come back to these as they appear in the story line.

First, we want to cover some plot elements. The persistent foibles of two of the hobbits, Merry and Pippin, seem to represent the stupidity and utility of common people who exist purely in the temporal sphere, who have no inkling of the transcendent. While the two lesser hobbits get the fellowship in plenty of trouble, demonstrating little or no forethought, their survivability reflected in their knack for navigating the violence of the physical world, is crucial to the quest. These commoner hobbits both facilitate Frodo's escape from the forces of evil as well as assuring that the evil forces are aware of the quest.

Frodo and Sam represent incorruptibility and honor, elements which rise up enough in the course of human affairs to frustrate the drive toward the dark side. They are, however, shown to be too trusting and direct, and certainly too few to be able to survive without the assistance of baser types of their kind, i.e., Merry and Pippin. Taken together, the four hobbits represent a synergy of honor, purity, criminality and recklessness necessary to frustrate any systemic effort to eradicate the human spirit. Each pair of hobbits make a whole as well as the two pairs together.

As a general note, Tolkien stands out as a philologist, a folklorist, and a mythologist. His story-telling skills when compared to commercial fiction writers, from contemporaries like Edgar Rice Burroughs down to writers of suspense, like Robert Ludlum and Eric von Lustbader [creator and inheriting author of the "Bourne" adventure series], are fairly pedestrian. Tolkien could never write a whodunit or a mystery novel. He relies on stupid mistakes as do authors of modern horror scripts and relies on improbable resurrections as do authors of religious texts. Tolkien's genius is in the texture of his world and the composition of its moral fabric.

The sacrifice of Gandalf in the ultimate cause results in the breaking of the fellowship that had been formed toward that same ultimate goal. In order for Tolkien's themes to be played out, the breaking of the fellowship was necessary in terms of the plot, so necessary, that it is indicated in the title, with the different characters, separating but still committed to the same goal, we have a story that evokes the Grail romances in "The Life of Arthur" by Mallory.

Theme One: The Inevitable Corruptibility of Men in Power

The central theme of the trilogy is clearly the ring, as indicated by the Title. The ring of power is a mythic artifact representing the corruption of power or the dictum that power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. This represents the gravity or the moral weight that affects all of the lesser thematic elements of the story.

Theme Two: The Innocence and Hope of Children

The characters, Frodo and Sam, represent innocence and hope respectively. As the element of innocence, Frodo supplies resistance to corruption. As the element of Hope, Sam represents the courage and commitment to honor necessary for the persistence of the purity embodied in Frodo. If this were a modern, more concise tale, Frodo and Sam would be the conflicting elements of one character.

Theme Three: The Damnation of the Elite

This is represented by the conference in Rivendell and embodied by the person of Boromir, the son of the steward of the great kingdom of Gondor. Boromir wears the trappings of the hero and when in combat, acts heroically, but he is in fact a representative of the intrinsically corrupt elite class and can barely keep his hands off of the ring for the entirety of the fellowship's quest. As a character, Boromir annoys the viewer every bit as much as the politician annoys the voter, for both the viewer and the voter are compelled to back the representative in his struggle, knowing full well that he will betray the cause. The lady, Galadriel, and Boromir's deep dread of her in the meeting, recall the politicians fleeting realization that he lacks the character of his ancestral counterpart, the hero.

Theme Four: The Industrialization of Life

Saruman, the wizard, Lord of Isengard, represents the industrialist and the modern nation state, his Orcs representing the soldier of machine warfare,--the warrior debased to a cipher—nameless and without identity. Saruman's campaign to industrialize his formerly sacred fiefdom was very strongly represented in the film, possibly inspired by Tolkien's experience in World War I.

Theme Five: The Primacy of Nature

This is best illustrated, in Tolkien's hands, by the unnatural ring wraiths, the nine dark riders that oppose the nine members of the fellowship. The wraiths, "were once kings of men," and so they appear the shadowed outline of what once might have been a hero king. These are the corrupt leaders of industrialized mankind. Interestingly, they appear unable to travel except by road, and the members of the fellowship fall into deepest peril at their hands when they gather in a town and when they seek the shelter of the ancient fortress turret now known as Weathertop, the most powerful and therefore most corrupt, and they only apply their power along the well-trodden axis of man's technological development. This is most tellingly illustrated when they attempt to cross a river with a diminished flow, only to be washed away by a torrent, called down by the elf princess.

Theme Six: The Alchemy of Knowledge

In The Lord of the Rings, there are only a handful of wizards. Foremost among these are Gandalf and Saruman. These two characters offer a dualistic study of light and dark sorcery, sorcery being the use of knowledge to affect the course of events, with the character of Saruman representing the corruption of humanity which occurs when knowledge is bent to serve power. Gandalf represents the sacrifice necessary to use knowledge as a means of thwarting the accrual of power in corrupt hands.

Theme Seven: Intercession

The character of Aragorn represents the reluctant hero who fears taking on the powers of kingship from the knowledge that kings, most clearly exemplified by his corruptible ancestor, are often corrupted by their assumption of power. Conversely, Aragorn represents the hope of common people for an intercessor, a supra-elite being who possesses enough power in his office that he is above the corrupting pursuit of power that typifies the twisted souls such as Borimor, and might check that corruptible pursuit. Consider again the scene at Weathertop, where Aragorn, the man who would reluctantly accept kingship, fights off all nine of the undead ring wraiths, who have through their pursuit of power degenerated from his heroic form to a state of empty predation. Aragorn represents to the ring wraiths what they once might have been and so they fear him, just as they represent what he might become, and so he drives them off like figments of a nightmare. This is the scene, midway through the first of the three novels comprising the trilogy, that predicts the third novel and names it, "The Return of the King."

Taken as a whole, "The Fellowship of the Ring" is a study of the hero in various forms, striving to survive a system contrived to make him an impossibility. In this sense, as long as there is a hero, there's hope.

A Well of Heroes

(c) 2017 James LaFond