Compromise and Conceit

Infernal adventuring…

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An Australian statistician and role-player living in Japan, interested in the theory and practice of role-playing…

  • current Viewing: A Bittersweet Life

    Every girls favourite gangster...
    Every girl's favourite gangster…

    My partner has discovered something of a fascination with Korean actors recently, so we have been through a bit of a spree of Korean movies (i.e. 3), two of which were gangster movies by the same director. This movie, A Bittersweet Life, stars the same stunning actor as The Good, The Bad, The Wierd, in a similarly besuited style of ruthless gangster.

    In this movie, Lee Byung-Hun plays Sunwoo, a loyal gangster who is given the task of spying on his boss’s young lover. He catches her flagrante delicto but, showing a sudden and uncharacteristic moment of compassion, lets her and her boyfriend live. His boss discovers this and unleashes the full fury of his gang on the now dishonoured Sunwoo. However, Sunwoo is no wimp, and manages to survive a fiendish round of tortures and humiliations to wreak his revenge on the whole superbly dressed gang. The movie also involves a rival mob, their boss, one of their brothers, and a gang overlord, all of whom descend on the same place in the climactic scene. This is a similar plot device to The Good, the Bad The Wierd; except it’s a little harder to work out who is who in this one.

    The violence and fighting is mostly very smooth and fluid, but brutal rather than comedic – this movie is quite brutal. There is a continual elegance about the gangsters too, which distinguishes them from the brutal gangsters of a lot of Western crime movies. Lee Byung-Hun is particularly stylish and elegant – even the way he counts to three before he kills someone is simultaneously feminine and threatening. The action is fast-pace and the plot believable, if a tad confusing, and some of the bad guys, even though quite stylish, come across as very deranged and unpleasant individuals. The cinematography is at times very beautiful and, in some sense I can’t quite put my finger on, very East Asian. Overall, I strongly recommend this movie, and I think Korean gangster movies in general could be well worth investigating.

  • Current Viewing: Hanjo and Hellscreen

    I’m not a theatre buff but it seems I’ve been seeing a little more than usual! Last week I went to see a pair of plays based on the works of two Japanese authors. The link suggests that these plays were based on the work of Yukio Mishima, famous gay fascist author who committed suicide; but in fact the second play, Hellscreen, was based on the work of Akutagawa Ryunosuke. It would appear there was a small error here…

    … anyway, the two plays are very interesting, with quite beautiful language (they were in English). However, the acting was quite ordinary. I am such a phillistine that I didn’t notice – I just thought “why do people always have to be so wooden in plays?” but in fact, apparently, according to my ever-so-knowledgeable friends, the acting was “amateur”. To me all theatre is amateur. Haven’t these guys seen Home and Away? In the first one the hammy acting was bearable; in the second, not so much. But the stories and language were nice and it only cost me 6 pounds. I recommend it for those interested in seeing some very nice Japanese work brought to life. But I should warn you, gentle reader – the subject matter is murder and sadism. You go warned!

  • Current playing: Exalted

    I started playing in an Exalted game yesterday. Until yesterday I didn’t really know much about Exalted or the World of Darkness games, which are apparently related to it, and I had heard rumours that it is a little too complex to be played sensibly. However, I like the basic idea for the world, which has the characters playing mortals who have been exalted to semi-godlike status. I also like the world itself, which feels like something between Hyboria and Atlan.

    We are playing in the far East, in a city which is built around a huge alabaster bridge over a river and a gigantic waterfall. Our characters consist currently of a mad, shaggy priest/martial artist, a thief called “Dark-eyed Mouser” and me, his barbarian comrade “Ellgan”. The latter two characters are based on Fafrhd and the Grey Mouser, which is fun. We have strange memories from past lives and, being quite new to exaltation, are visiting an ancient ziggurat to see if it can teach us something about our new situation. In game terms we are one Zenith, one Dawn and one Moon caste character (I think).

    My character is essentially a destroyer, with few skills except cutting stuff up, which he seems to do very well. Choosing what he can do is a little bit challenging, because he has about 12 different “charms” with which he can break people, and a complex system of assigning points to them, and an even more complex system for combat resolution. The system is cluttered and clumsy, with too many dice (a big problem with dice pool systems, obviously) and lots of things to remember at every stage. However, it seems to be coherent so once one comes to terms with the way it’s done it should be fairly easy to adapt to new situations. There are grumblings that missile weapons are broken, but we’ll see… we are still learning after all.

    The one session we played produced very vivid images of the setting and the combat. This may be partly the DM’s fault, with well-prepared descriptions and an interesting setting; but I think it may be the careful attention to detail in the background, the names of every aspect of the character traits and skills (so the character sheet is not just a technical document), and the sense of heroism imbued in the game. Plus it encourages stunts, which we saw in Feng Shui encourages descriptiveness and engagement on the part of the players. So far I’ve been having fun with this game despite its complexities and occasional heavihandedness.

  • Compromise and Conceit 13: Abortive revolution

    Diary entry: Father David Cantrus, September 1755

    Written by one of my players (and regular commenter), Paul.

    Dear Diary…

    We returned to Albany after killing the messenger to find that Washington’s followers had taken over part of the town and were being hemmed in by our followers and the English. They controlled access to the downstream river and were going to get reinforcements in about 2 days. Washington had been leading repeated attempts to break through to the docks, where he would have expected the amulets to be. This is in contrast to the were they actually were – being worn by our colonial allies and their families. After a comparatively short planning session we let Russell attempt to convince the English leader to assist with a plan (largely on the basis of we thought that convincing the inbred idiot wouldn’t work anyway). The result was a resounding success (a roll of 00) and talk of field promotions for Russell.

    The plan was duly implemented, English feigning a retreat to allow Washington to pass before cutting behind him to remove his allies. Most of us were lurking in secret around Washington’s presumed target, save Russell drinking in the middle of the street. After several hours of fighting occurring in the distance, we managed to notice that the sky had been turning an Infernal red for several hours, right before Washington, his sidekick Williamson and his little dog were upon us. Battle was joined with huge amounts of firepower being poured onto Washington’s dog by everyone, on the basis that Russell was toast if this didn’t happen. Despite an excellent start in getting rid of Old Yella via ranged attacks and summoned demons, we were blindsided by a hidden Madam Custis, who inflicted the second de-arming on the group by successfully targeting Brian, removing him from the fight. We rallied and expressed our outrage at this offence by first having fellow one-arm Cantrus channel his hatred of that spell into stunning the heartless woman, then having David Black graphically demonstrate how, if cutting people into parts, you can do it thoroughly with a sneak attack that left the b*tch scattered across upper western Albany.

    With some measure of revenge extracted for the inferior quality booze we were served at her party, we rounded back onto Washington and Williamson. Despite some heavy performance enhancing drug usage (giving her 2 attacks a round and immunity to fatigue), Anna LaBruce was unable to rip any villain’s arm from them. In the chaos of the melee around the dog, Russell seized the opportunity to move towards Washington to engage him directly. This stage of the fight ended when we caught a break with Fr Cantrus exposing himself to the remaining blackguards and stunning them (“Reveal the Spirit” has now been renamed to “Hung like a Horse”).

    As we prepared for the celebratory slaughter of helpless foes and the now standard healing of Brian, Washington surprised us by vanishing from sight. Black’s rapid mind reading of the overwhelmed Williamson didn’t point to his location and we started to make alternative plans to track him (after killing Williamson). To the parties great fortune (though not Anna LaBrousse’s), Washington had not gone far and re-emerged from hiding to attempt to gank Anna. Fortune favoured the beautiful over the bold though as he inflicted only minor damage and Anna snatched breathing space by summoning a demon to engage him. Meanwhile the rest of the party made haste to engage the cur and Fr David sent an (immediately dismissed) Angel of Death to attempt to gather Washington up.

    The final round of combat saw us facing Washington on a leaky fishing smack, 5 party members (sans Brian) against Washington and his re-summoned b*tch. Some inconclusive exchanges later, Anna abandoned trying to rip Washington apart and simply sent him to dream with Morpheus. 1 action later David Black re-routed Washington’s course to a form of more permanent sleep and our greatest adversary was naught but assembled body parts under heavy guard (to prevent any attempted resurrection) or hungry mouth (we wanted to get Brian’s health back up).

    Even with the foe laid low we still faced the darkening of the skies, so made away to a Church to endeavour to parley with Washington’s departed soul. The unctuous priest there was unable to assist, reporting that dear George’s soul was held in the depths of Hell and would not be yielded up for the answers we sought to tear from him.

    Hope seemly gone we left the church to find a familiar, dinner jacketed man (he’s a man of wealth and taste) riding a man o’ war up the river, firing indiscriminately onto all in sight, even as a dark mass of foul spirits massed outside town and began to fatally flow through all ranks un-protected by our stolen amulets. In a last roll of the dice we took ship and directed our trajector to target for the stone so wisely given to the evil opposing us and two true shots ended the water bore villainy. Simultaneously, allied Indians returned to Albany, immune to the dark spirits’ touch of death and ripping native justice through the unnatural night’s black magic. Magua and the Prophet saved the remnants of the British and Washington-allied colonials.

    After that, assorted mopping up occurred, including marvelling over Washington’s equipment and stats, David Black donning a dinner jacket and taking a stand at the bow of the man o’ war (so it’s true that evil is eternal) and hearing reports that the death spirits had attacked across the continent, but been repelled by Indian forces, who had established their place as the greatest power in the land. Apparently the “ghost dance” they had departed to engage in some weeks earlier had been preparation for this very battle, showing in deed the truth of The Prophet’s name, and perhaps indicating that he had seen a use for the characters since the very beginning…

  • Notes on British racist politics 1

    This is a complete departure from normal programming on this blog, for which I apologise unreservedly, but it seems coherent with recent posts (which are on topic) and, as an Australian of British descent living in the heart of “multicultural” london, I feel I actually do have something to say on the topic of why, exactly, the British Labour Party is in meltdown and the far right (as represented by UKIP and their odious little brother the BNP) are doing so well.

    And the BNP is doing well:

    • In percentage and absolute terms, the BNP share of the vote has increased, from 800000 votes in 2004 to 1 million in 2009
    • Their vote increased despite lower turnout, which requires some real mental gymnastics to justify away
    • The right in England now controls 45% of the popular vote, with half of that being the loony racist right
    • This has occurred at the expense of labour, not the Tories[1]

    This means that now the BNP has European Parliament representation, European parliament money, airtime on the BBC, and a public face for their leader, who is clearly a bastard but is not an idiot.  The theory that once elected they will shoot themselves in the foot and convince voters they can’t be trusted no longer holds – they have over 50 council seats and their vote held up in areas where they had previously won these seats. It also means that Nick Griffin’s policy of keeping the fascist sentiments very quiet is justified, which means that the old street-fighting-skinhead faction will be less likely to betray the party, something I think too many in mainstream politics were assuming would happen.

    So the period of post-war British history when one could laugh at the far right and gather round to cheerfully watch their self-immolation is past. Sniffing huffily at these “ruddy ignoramuses” is no longer an option. The mainstream parties have to confront the BNP properly, and they need to do it successfully before the general election. This is particularly the responsibility of the British Labour Party, because the BNP vote has increased in Labour heartland areas, which are suffering from industrial decline and recession at a time when labour has been in power and immigration has been increasing. Labour needs to confront the consequences of this head-on, but instead they have been dog-whistling past their own graveyard.

    In short, Britain needs to come to a racial settlement, much as Australia did in the 70s  when it  introduced the government policy of multiculturalism. The Labour party needs to enter into a direct conversation with the electorate about immigration and race, which means that:

    • The British left needs to admit that Britain is racist: There is a lot of racism in Britain, much more than in Australia or Japan[2]. This racism is more prevalent in the working class, and it needs to be understood and confronted. Pretending that it’s not there, or that Britain’s famous “tolerance”[3] is the same as non-racism is just ignorant and naive. The BNP and UKIP understand this sentiment, and they are exploiting it very nicely
    • The left needs to get real about immigration: I see the leaders of all 3 parties claiming that the people who voted BNP aren’t racist, but I don’t see them talking clearly about immigration. If the British people aren’t racist, then it should be easy to explain clearly and directly why immigration is good; if they are racist, then either immigration policy needs to change to match the desires of the British public, or the explanation of its benefits needs to be made even more urgently. And the left needs to recognise that immigration is generally at least perceived to be a problem in this country, and that it is at the centre of peoples’ fears in a recession.
    • The Labour party needs to confront anti-immigration sentiment: and either agree to the bulk of UKIP’s demands, or debate them clearly and show why the current policies  are better. They also need to show leadership[4], and take a clear stand against racism and anti-immigration sentiment.
    • The war on terror has to end: Nick Griffin can only talk about “terror in Salford” and terrorist immigrants because of the war. War is not the best bedfellow of tolerance, particularly when half the population thinks that the other half wants to blow them up. The war on terror is singularly unpopular in the UK, and after 8 years it hasn’t achieved anything. Ending this war and bringing the troops home will take the wind out of a lot of right-wing sails
    • The Labour party needs to get real about education: British education is crap[5]. British people don’t understand their own language very well and they don’t speak other languages well. They have to compete with Europeans for jobs in Britain but they don’t have the language skills to compete for jobs in Europe, which pretty much knocks for six any claim that Europe is good for British workers, except that very small group of Oxbridge graduates who can go anywhere. In my experience, British job applicants aren’t very well qualified in post-graduate, numerate degrees either. If the labour party is serious about Europe they need to find a way to have an education policy for Europe, not for a parochial light-manufacturing England of the 70s.
    • The British need to have a serious conversation about class: which is at the heart of all their problems, and is killing the country[6]. With limited social mobility and a managerial class who don’t care about the working class, the “opportunities” and economic growth that Europe and immigration offer the lowest classes can’t be grasped. So, knowing they can’t fix the class system (and seeing now that Labour won’t try), is it any surprise that instead they kick out against their foreign competitors?

    Labour also, obviously, needs to start looking at the infrastructure and social cohesion of its heartland. Instead they’re paralysed, like a rabbit in the headlights of the oncoming general election juggernaut. It’s guaranteed that the Tories are going to win that election; Labour need to struggle now to ensure that the far right don’t become a permanent fixture of British domestic politics – and the way to do that is not to steal their politics, but to smash it. If UKIP become a serious fixture in parliament, and the Tories have the BNP snapping at their heels and no serious competition from the left, the national culture will take a significant, permanent step to the right, and at the very least the European project will be dead.

    —

    fn1: It’s true that the Tory vote didn’t increase, but it didn’t decrease. The labour vote collapsed.

    fn2: It’s true that in Japan you can still advertise flats and jobs explicitly for the Japanese, but overall I’ve seen much less racism there than here. There are laws to prevent that sort of thing in the UK, and if they weren’t in place you can bet that British landlords and employers would be using the same methods vigorously

    fn3: I don’t think the British are tolerant anyway; they’re just reserved. This is why people tolerate things (like brawling in public, really nasty behaviour by other peoples’ children, and really nasty language by adults) that are really quite intolerable. I think being reserved is nice; but confusing it with Tolerance doesn’t help.

    fn4: We elect our leaders to show leadership. When this issue was live in Australia, the political parties of both stripes confronted it and had a strong debate about it. The result was the policy of multiculturalism, which has been supported by leaders of both mainstream parties ever since. As Paul Keating said, when you change the government you change the country, and if Labour and the Tories don’t change to a more open opposition of anti-European and racist sentiment, the country will change.

    fn5: Disagree? Then why is the Sun the top-selling British newspaper?

    fn6: Literally. Class determines life expectancy in the UK; the difference in life expectancy between social class 5 and social class 1 males is 70% of the difference between white and Aboriginal Australians – this is our national shame, but a similar difference affecting a great many more people is barely remarked upon in Britain.

  • Notes on the militarisation of action scenes

    Terminator: Salvation was a fun movie but, as I observed in my review, the director had changed the nature of the resistance subtly so that they were more militaristic and much, much more heavily armed. This militarisation is a two-fold thing, and in both of its aspects it annoys me. I think there has been a creeping militarisation of action movies over the last 10 or 15 years, and I think it represents primarily a failure of imagination, though there are (of course!) some political reasons, I think.

    Some of it, of course, is just because directors have to find something new to do; but this militaristic stuff is hardly new anymore. Movies like Mad Max, Terminator 1, even Predator didn’t really have a very militaristic feel to them[1]; while more modern movies like Transformers, Terminator: Salvation, the latest Star Trek, had a real military flavour. Sometimes it’s only the bad guys, or its done with a twist like in The Hulk. But I think it’s there. Now, I like shit blowing up and bad-arse jets and tanks as much as the next nerd, but I don’t like it when they come with a big associated package of throbbing pre-teen dick-slapping macho, and I don’t like it when they are put into movies in place of actual tension ‘n thinking ‘n stuff, and I really really hate the speeches that go with it. What really bothers me is the possibility that the militaristic macho crap will spill over from the war scenes and into other genres – particularly fantasy and horror – and spoil their particular characteristics. So, here are my two explanations and why they shit me.

    1. We’re at war. There’s a war on folks, and often when there’s a war on culture tends to turn a bit militaristic. Can’t be helped, it’s just part of the backdrop. In this case, though, we’ve got cgi and big movie budgets and experience, so it’s easy to put militarism where it wasn’t before. Even if the soldiering is low-key, the temptation for macho posturing is there. It’ll pass, it’s annoying to be reminded that we’re in a war of choice that I think is completely wrong and pointless, but hey! It’s better that I’m being reminded of it than being in it (or worse still, being bombed by it)[2].

    2. Militarism is an easy option for crap directors. I think it’s really easy for crap directors to think “this conflict doesn’t have dramatic tension, I’ll throw in some explosions”. Particularly if – because they’re  crap directors – the characters, plot and setting are all crap, so you have nothing invested in the final conflict. The best cover for this is to make the fight bigger. It’s been happening for years, but the availability of cheap cgi has led to a blown’-shit-up death march, where the military scenes just keep getting bigger and more action-y. But they aren’t real action: real action is the intense, believable conflict between a small number of unique and named antagonists, who feverishly try to outwit and/or kill one another. This is why the end of Star Wars doesn’t seem very militaristic at all, because it’s really just a tense chess match between DV and Skywalker. But when Lucas’s directing went to shit we got Return of the Jedi, where he threw 88000 more ships at the final battle, to hide the fact that he’s not a very good director. But in that case they were the backdrop for the real battle, between DV and Skywalker, in whose final confrontation we already had a great deal of emotional energy invested.

    Number 2 bothers me a lot more than number 1, because number 1 doesn’t have to hamper good directing, but number 2 does. The temptation to cut corners is huge. I think it happened in Terminator:Salvation, which would have been a different, more intense personal conflict between a man and a machine if the screen wasn’t being stuffed full of jets, submarines, jeeps, helicopters, rocket launchers and soldiers being given rousing speeches. And the Terminator series is fundamentally not about stuff blowing up (though there is an obligatory scene where the machine rises from an explosion) – it’s about a greek tragedy, where a mortal strives against fate knowing he’ll fail. It’s about a desperate skinny guy from the future against a big, nasty machine. It’s hard to get the feeling of that when you’re too busy watching the jet fighters blow up the massive hovercraft. And it’s particularly hard to get the feeling for that when the guy who directed it probably wasn’t up for the task, and threw in all those heavy battle scenes to keep you from noticing that you didn’t really care that much about why John Connor was doing what he was doing.

    It’s also  frustrating when you get this feeling like the only reason you are meant to have any sympathy with a group of characters is that they are soldiers. This is what happened to me in Transformers. I knew the soldiers were good guys and I should want them to live, but why? Simply because they were soldiers. I knew Mad Max was a good guy who needed to live because Mel Gibson made  me believe it. I don’t like it when movie directors leverage military conflict opportunities to achieve low-cost emotional outcomes. i.e. when they use my residual feelings for the rightness of guys in uniform to make me believe that otherwise cardboard characters deserve my emotional attention. It’s not the soldiers’ fault, I just wish the Director would try to make a good movie[3]. It would be less insulting.

    —

    fn1: Wierd, I know, but Predator was basically just a bunch of guys hanging out in the jungle and getting shat on by a beast; even their interactions were more like a bunch of mates than the army, and they were pretty low-tech compared to your average futuristic rebels.

    fn2: with or without my attempt at being self-effacing, this paragraph makes me sound like a right little snot. Too bad, I didn’t ask for this war and, like most of the rest of the world, I knew it would go pear-shaped and I didn’t want the people (of either side) who are there to be there. So I think it’s fair enough that just once in public I complain about it infecting my entertainment choices.

    fn3: Not that I didn’t like any of these movies, but I could have liked them a lot more.

  • Tolkien’s Racial Theories

    In response to the recent stoush over Tolkien, race and conservatism, I did a little more  research on Tolkien’s racial theories and their similarities to other eugenic and racial theories floating about in the interwar period. I don’t have my primary or secondary sources with me, because my Tolkien Bestiary is in a box in Australia, I returned the MERP books to my mate, and I don’t have copies of the original books, but there are two online resources – the Tolkien Gateway and the Encyclopaedia of Arda – which I am going to use to provide some context and better research to my theories. In this post I am going to give more detail about the human races in Middle Earth, describe Tolkien’s racial mixing theories in more detail, compare them to the Aryan Invasion Theory of history, which was still popular when he wrote, and draw a few conclusions, some of which aren’t so pretty.

    It’s my thesis that, independent of Tolkien’s actual political views, his books are a model of interwar racial theory, which holds that whites are superior to blacks, that when whites interbreed with blacks they civilise them but dilute the “good qualities” of whites, and that in general race determines psychological as well as physical traits, and racial mixing is bad. This doesn’t change the significance of Tolkien’s work, but it has ramifications for the political position of the genre it spawned.

    Tolkien’s races

    Noisms at Monsters and Manuals suggested in comments that a “formalist” reading of Tolkien is necessary to properly understand how the races in Middle Earth might reflect real racial differences. Others online have suggested that Tolkien didn’t give any formal characteristics to his races – that he never said elves are white and Haradrim are black – and that subsequent racially-specified images of them reflect the readers’ prejudices.  But reading Tolkien doesn’t support the view that his races weren’t racialised. For example, here is the first Haradrim we meet:

    “…a man fell, crashing through the slender trees, nearly on top of them. He came to rest in the fern a few feet away, face downward, green arrow-feathers sticking from his neck below a golden collar. His scarlet robes were tattered, his corslet of overlapping brazen plates was rent and hewn, his black plaits of hair braided with gold were drenched with blood. His brown hand still clutched the hilt of a broken sword…“

    We’re talking here about a race with brown skin and black braided hair, which lives in the Jungles and deserts of a hot Southern land, and which rides elephants. I don’t think the racial symbolism of this accidental. They were in the thrall of Sauron and fought for him, so also therefore presumably evil.

    There is very little about the physical nature of Easterlings in the descriptions in the novels, because they don’t play a big part; but their most famous contingent are the Wainriders, who pretty clearly represent the mongol hordes. The Easterlings are clearly also allied with Sauron, and are evil. As we will see in the next section, Easterlings were of a different racial stock to the Men of the West. Whether they were physically distinguishable, they were clearly racially distinct.

    Tolkien himself described the Orcs as

    …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

    and some Orcs are black-skinned. They are clearly racially distinct from humans and elves, and by definition evil. He also clearly associated the Dwarves with Jews in one of his letters. Details of this controversy over race in LoTR are given a very balanced exposition at the Tolkien Gateway.

    Tolkien’s racial theories

    Tolkien obviously construed the Elves as superior to Men and Dwarves. He also clearly constructed a racially deterministic world, where some races (Orcs, Haradrim and Easterlings) were evil and some (Mixed and High Men, Elves and Dwarves) were good but flawed. While his good races were capable of doing evil, his evil races were incapable of doing good, or at the very least were so vulnerable to the thrall of evil that they were for all intents and purposes racially evil. But of particular interest here is his division of humans into two racial kinds – Wild Men and Middle or High Men. Wild Men are explicitly under the thrall of evil – they were corrupted from their genesis. On the other hand, the Edain escaped from Morkoth and were contacted by the elves, who gave them special gifts (of long life and magic) which ennobled them. They then returned to Beleriand, and settled in the western half where they slowly intermingled with the Middle Men, and diluted their special gifts. Some of these Middle Men (such as the Dunlendings) are described as swarthy, and were oppressed by the Edain.

    The strongest and most obvious example of this racial theory in action in the books is Aragorn. Racially pure, he has retained the gifts of High Men and so has special rights to command his undead ancestors, to use the special magical devices of his old people, and to use magic no-one else knows. Some of these properties are drawn from his noble lineage, but some are a consequence of his racial purity. Noble lineage in the third age is, of course, associated with racial purity, and with nobler traits.

    Aryan Racial Theory

    The Aryan Invasion Theory is a theory of classical history, used to describe the civilisations of the Indus valley particularly, which posits that a bunch of horse-riding nomads destroyed or captured the peaceful civilisations of the Indus Valley and subsequently learnt the culture of the Indus valley, before writing the greatest religious texts of India. The original theory is mildly neutral or pro-Indian, suggesting that the Aryans were barbarians who were civilised through contact with the Indus valley; but subsequent incarnations of this theory in the interwar period held the Aryans to be a superior Norse race who civilised the Indians. There is no evidence that any of this history ever really happened, and the theory is roundly hated by Indians for its obvious racist overtones.

    There is evidence in Tolkien’s letters that he at least knew of Aryan racial theory, and subscribed to it, because he had the singular misfortune of having to argue with Nazi publishers over his books, which would not be published in German unless he could prove he was Aryan. He appeared to subscribe to elements of this theory:

    I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-Iranian; as far as I am aware noone (sic) of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects.

    though his letters make it pretty clear he doesn’t like Nazi racial theory, at least as it pertains to Jews. Like most scholars of his time, he probably believed the then-mainstream theories about racial history which pervaded the academy, but whether he extended this to his perceptions of the relative superiority of whites over blacks or asians at the time is not known, nor to be assumed.

    Tolkien’s novels seem to contain a kernel of this racial theory, in that the most superior race ennobles the Edain, who then ennoble the mixed men they encounter, but are in turn brought low by interbreeding with them. It’s clear that the most noble races are white and the least noble (Orcs and Haradrim) are swarthy or black – there is a colour spectrum here. This pattern follows the pattern of the more racist incarnations of Aryan theory extant when he wrote – particularly those of Abbe Dubois, which were translated in 1897, and the archaeologists who uncovered “evidence” of western influence in the Indus in the early 20th century. It also follows some other theories floating about then about the influence of Nordic culture on the “inferior” slavic and Eastern races, the development of which can be read about in any good (or bad!) text about the antecedents of Nazi racial theory. While these theories are discredited today, they were not at all unpopular or disputed at the time that Tolkien wrote.

    Aryan Racial Theory and Fascism

    Hitler loved Aryan Racial Theory, which became the cornerstone of Nazi demography, social science, biology and history. Some of the theories on racial mixing – particularly about Jews – propounded by the Nazis can be read online at the Calvin University Nazi Propaganda archive, which is a fascinating way to pass an afternoon. Hitler also took up the Aryan Invasion Theory and ran with it, as part of his two-pronged mission of retaking Europe and founding Nazi colonies overseas. The Nazis believed that Western culture owed all its best properties to the Nordic races, and all its worst properties to the “untermenschen” of the East and South. Any model of racial history which supported this belief was imported and adapted, particularly if it supported any claim to lost homelands in the East or overseas.

    Aryan Racial Theory is also very popular with modern Nazis. David Duke (to whom I will not put a link) has a very telling essay on his webpage about the Aryan invasion of India and the effects of inter-breeding with the locals on the morality of the paler Aryan overlords. Modern and WW2-era Nazis both believe strongly that races shouldn’t mix – the Nazis presented the Japanese as racially superior because their island nation had prevented “mixing” with degenerated mongols, for example, while the whites of the US were degenerate through association with Jews and blacks.

    Tolkien’s politics

    Tolkien clearly objected to the Nazis’ anti-semitism, and plainly thought their race laws silly. He opposed apartheid and didn’t believe language and literature should be held apart. He didn’t like the treatment of colour in South Africa, though it’s possible he did think that blacks were degenerate, or at least that white South Africans were persuasive:

    The treatment of colour nearly always horrifies anyone going out from Britain, & not only in South Africa. Unfort[unately], not many retain that generous sentiment for long.”[1]

    Tolkien was willing for his books not to be published in Germany rather than be subjected to silly German laws about racial purity, but he also strongly and openly believed that Nordic society had done much good for the world, but had been ruined by the Nazis:

    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.

    This quote again suggests an Aryan racial theory for Europe, which has been ennobled by the “supreme contribution” of the Nordic races.

    Tolkien is also known to have supported Franco, on the basis of some rumours about Republican atrocities in Spanish churches[2]. His letters and stated opinions suggest a man with politics very similar to most upper class white members of the Commonwealth at the time – racial isolationism, tinged with a strong hatred of Nazism drawn from a class bias against National Socialism (“that ruddy ignoramus”, Hitler) and a conservative distrust of radical politics. But like most members of that class at the time, he didn’t necessarily strongly oppose or even disagree with the racial and political theories at the heart of apartheid or Nazism. In the 30s, particularly, Hitler’s theories were much admired in the West, and their philosophical basis had not yet been discredited. Though we don’t have clear evidence either way in the case of Tolkien, it’s difficult to read his letters and get a clear indication of a man swimming against the current of his time.

    Tolkien and British Nationalism

    Tolkien ended up required reading for the Youth Wing of the BNP, on the basis of its raical theory and lauding of western ideals over eastern savagery. His inclusion may have been subsequent to the movies, which are rather popular amongst people who like watching dark-skinned people getting butchered; but it is no coincidence that the far right associates his work with their message on racial identity. Fascism and racialist nationalism hasn’t moved its racial theories on from the 30s when Tolkien wrote, and there is a lot of concordance between the racial essentialism of his world and the kind of racially segregated world that the modern BNP would like to see.

    What this does and doesn’t mean

    It’s unsurprising that an upper class academic from South Africa, writing in the 30s and 40s, should subscribe to a racial model for the creation of his imaginary world. It’s also not surprising that his racial theories would be consistent with Nazi-era racial theories or modern nationalist writing, since all three are drawn from the same source and people at that time were generally supportive of some portion of racial theories of history.

    This has obvious consequences for that stream of “High Fantasy” which is highly derivative of Tolkien’s work. Tolkien’s worlds aren’t necessarily popular because of this racial essentialism, but much of the derivative work carries these ideas with it. Some of these notions are comforting for modern writers, some are just easy, and some are fun to play with. But copied whole, they project into the modern literary world a view of race relations which is anachronistic and highly consistent with mainstream conservative views of 60 years ago. They are also congruent with modern fascist politics, which of course holds racial essentialism at its core.

    This doesn’t mean that Tolkien’s work is more or less admirable. The timeless appeal of Tolkien’s work as a whole is not due to its political-racial content, but the powerful story elements, the myth-making and the characters. For these elements to maintain Tolkien’s popularity even as the politics underlying the stories becomes anachronistic, they must indeed be very well crafted. This is the miracle of literature – a story whose fundamental social and political basis is no longer valid can still appeal to us, as Shakespeare does, through the power of its non-political elements.

    It also doesn’t mean that Tolkien was a fascist or a racist, at least no more than any other upper class man of his time. But most people alive today would  consider the politics of an upper class man writing in the 40s to be quite repulsive, and its no surprise that some of Tolkien’s racial theories fit this category. But being a racial isolationist or believing that mongols were inherently inferior doesn’t make Tolkien a fascist, nor does it invalidate his work or even make him a bad person. However, it also doesn’t liberate his work from the obvious criticisms : it promotes a divisive vision of racial separatism and essentialism; and as an influential work in the genre, it has been essential in the reproduction of conservatism in High Fantasy. Critical reinterpretation of this work can liberate modern High Fantasy from the racialist and fascist origins of the genre, without necessarily leading to its political debasement or politically correct caricatures. Just as Tolkien can write an inspiring and great novel with odious racial politics, modern genre writers should be able to liberate the genre from this type of conservatism and still write inspiring and great novels.

    —

    fn1: A lot of people quote the first half of this sentence approvingly as evidence that Tolkien was opposed to apartheid. The second part makes me think that, while he opposed apartheid, he didn’t necessarily oppose the racial stereotypes underlying it.

    fn2: which were certainly known to have occurred, but also exaggerated in a viciously anti-Republican western press. See, for example, Antony Beevor’s work on the Spanish Civil War.

  • Current Viewing: Terminator Salvation

    Obviously I had to watch this Terminator movie, because it stars Christian Bale and, well, it’s a Terminator movie. It was fun, but it definitely didn’t have the intensity of purpose or the cleanliness of plot of the first two. The plot is messy, and has holes you can drive a truck through. But it was fun watching the world of the future, particularly to see Terminators in their element and to see the resistance in action. I have waited a long time to see the post-apocalyptic world of Terminator (though not so long that I watched T3), and it was fun. Stuff blew up. Big machines didn’t blow up. People ran very fast away from them and then died.

    Also, the directors did that classic derivative Terminator movie thing where scenes from the previous movies were repeated almost verbatim but with different actors and context. In this case scenes from T1 and T2 were included. This was fun, and I was waiting for this. Some were quite subtle, too, and some were flipped so that the machine did it to the people. I really like this aspect of the Terminator movies.

    However, I had two major presentation gripes about this movie that didn’t quite spoil it for me:

    • I didn’t like the militarisation of the resistance. They had jets and helicopters and submarines. I remember vividly the scenes from T1 in the future – guys with small rifles hiding in the ruins, sharing a single jeep with a machine gun on, while massive machines crunched their way over a landscape of skulls. Where did those guys get their jets and subs? Kyle Rees was not a product of a military machine, but a desperate man on a one-way mission from hell.
    • Kyle Rees said that the Terminator “absolutely will not stop” and “doesn’t feel remorse”. But the terminator in this movie had John Connor by the throat, and it paused long enough for him to get away. Twice. This really gives me the shits. If you can’t choreograph a fight scene so that your guy doesn’t have to be saved by his remorseless enemy’s remorsefulness, get a different job.

    Things got a bit weird halfway through the movie – there is a “good” terminator who doesn’t quite work in my opinion, and the explanation for whose presence gets a bit flaky, and at this point the plot also starts to get those crises of motive believability (“I don’t think he would do that”) which can spoil an otherwise enjoyable movie. But then some more shit blows up, and everything is okay again.

    But the ending was infuriatingly bad. Silly silly directors!

    Anyway, go watch it. The first half an hour is like Halo with terminators. After that there’s another half hour  of really intense chase and combat scenes. Then it got a bit flaky for half an hour, there was the obligatory (not very good) inspirational speech which you can’t really believe will influence anyone, another half hour of intense fighting, and then the end. That’s an hour and a half of terminators hitting things or being hit. Well worth the effort!

  • Current viewing: Let the Right One In

    I saw this last week, and I liked it. It’s a Swedish Vampire movie set in 60s Sweden, so it has a simple and  old-fashioned feeling to it, with that sense of slight poverty that movies set in that time tend to have. Like most Vampire movies it is a love story, but this one involves 12 year old children and so mixes in an interesting element of pubescent self-discovery. There is no kiddy sex[1] but there is kiddy horror, which I always find a bit disturbing. There are only 1 or 2 real special effects moments in the movie, with most of the horror being done through creepy sounds and implication, in the best tradition of low-budget and/or Japanese horror movies – this one has a lot in common with the Ring for its low-key methods. For example, when the Vampire girl gets hungry the noise she makes is a mixture of doves cooing and a dog growling, which is very effective[2], and when she is hungry she starts to smell funny.

    It’s difficult to say anything about the plot of this movie without giving a lot away. The ending is, of course, tragic, but  not in the sense one would expect at all. The key to the success of this movie is the simple and believable nature of the relationships as they become increasingly entangled in – or distant from – the central, slightly pathetic figure of the Vampire. A very interesting reinterpretation of the classic vampire mythos.

    —

    fn1: though I don’t object to kiddy self-discovery movies which imply or investigate this. e.g His Dark Materials…

    fn2: particularly for Yours Truly, who was pooed on today by a pigeon.

  • Conservatism and High Fantasy

    In the interview linked to below, China Mieville claims that high fantasy is conservative, and that due to its prominence the fantasy genre in general is judged as conservative by critics. This seems pretty uncontroversial to me, but over at Monsters and Manuals this claim was disputed as a shallow interpretation of Tolkien and of high fantasy generally. It’s not just the 3 people I’ve been arguing with over there, either (hi guys!). Many people try to rescue Tolkien (or their other favourite high fantasy writers) from this claim, because they think that somehow being conservative means they shouldn’t be reading it  (or that people think they shouldn’t be). But it doesn’t work. Tolkien’s books are fun but they are politically pretty obnoxious, and the same goes for high fantasy generally. I’m going to expand on Mieville’s throwaway points in that interview, and add in a few of my own, with examples. Then we’ll discuss the core issue of choices. It’s been a while since I read much high fantasy, so I hope my examples aren’t too off beam – and of course when i say “High Fantasy novels say that…” I don’t mean every novel shares every point. Just add a silent “in general” to my phrases. Let’s first look at the characteristics common to most high fantasy novels:

    • Racial Essentialism: This is the main criticism of Tolkien, and it’s definitely a strong one. High Fantasy tends to divide the world into races with really clear essential characteristics, both physically and psychologically. The physical characteristics are exaggerated, and the psychological characteristics are really restrictive. Dwarves are stubborn and proud, elves are more intelligent and creative than anyone else, etc. This extends to the evil races too, which are clearly intellectually and socially inferior. The stereotypes of the evil races clearly relate to stereotypes of black people that were extant in the 30s, and in general the evil races also happen to be swarthy and kind of, well, blackish. If the humans ever have any racial diversity, this also follows strict characteristics – the “cruel haradrim”, for example. It doesn’t necessarily matter whether the races follow black/white colour lines, because the key conservative point is the essentialism. Races are different, and they shouldn’t mix, and when they do society degenerates. The model for Gondor and the mingling of High and Common Men is a clear reference to racial theory of the 30s. Wriggle as much as you like, but Tolkien is an established eugenicist and his writing doesn’t shy away from that. This trope is repeated in an awful lot of subsequent high fantasy – it’s a struggle to find any that doesn’t contain this idea, and this idea is a cornerstone of 20th century conservatism.
    • Racial exclusion: almost all heroes in high fantasy are white. For more information about this – and for some example of what it means and has meant historically for non-white readers – I recommend this article, which I came to from Ursula le Guin’s website. This problem has been discussed extensively as well in the world of literary criticism, and as far as I can tell it’s not up for debate anymore. High Fantasy is white. Now, it may be that the authors only want to write about their own colour, but if that’s the only reason, it’s kind of an unfortunate coincidence that racial exclusionism also happens to be an essential element of much conservative politics.
    • The male saviour: Most fantasy stories involve a male saviour rescuing a crumbling nation state from an external threat. The saviour is always male, and of course white. Harry Potter, Belgarath, Frodo (not to mention everyone else in that story), Eragon, the kid in the Robert Jordan series, Druss, Tanis Half-elven, Conan, whatever… they’re all male. When women enter high fantasy they do so as teachers or wise women, or occasionally in support roles.
    • External threats and nation states: In LoTR, the world of men was crumbling through racial intermixing, and awaited a racially pure king to resurrect the nation state. In most High Fantasy there is an external threat which only a strong nation state can protect against, and the role of the hero is to uncover their puissance and take power over the nation state, guiding it again to greatness. Although the nation state was not a strong concept in Dragonlance, the external threat was (it was an evil god); but the presence of both together is prevalent throughout the genre. The enemy within is usually a nerdy, anti-war figure who accomodates the enemy out of fear and is used as a spy or traitor. Consider the Wheel of Time, that awful Terry Goodkind stuff, Stephen Donaldson, the Worm Ourouboros, Eragon, the Belgariad, Magician, etc. It’s a very common idea.
    • Gender roles: sure, in modern High Fantasy there are sometimes female characters, but the world itself is continually recreated as a world in which women serve and men rule. It’s fantasy, anything goes, but for some reason women always are “goodwives” (shudder) or feisty aunts at best. And the female characters are not acually quite the feminist achievements one might expect – read this review of the Wheel of Time for a good description of how female characters often serve to reiterate classic stereotypes of feminine weakness, intransigence or triviality. Often as well the powerful ones get knocked down a peg or two before the end, and although women in general can’t rule in these worlds, they are often over-represented amongst the bad guys (e.g., there are two female characters in Dragonlance and one is evil). Harry Potter is a good example of this – Hermione is ostensibly a strong female character, but at every climax in the first novels she is knocked unconscious or otherwise unable to be an active participant in the plan she helped formulate, ultimately being rescued by the boys.
    • Nuclear family: we know that in the middle ages Nuclear families were not the norm, and that this is a modern invention, as is childhood as a concept. Yet High Fantasy worlds – which are sticklers for the truth when it comes to the role of women in peasant societies – seem to be very good at ignoring the real family structures of their carefully reconstructed societies, and instead populating them with perfect nuclear families. The nuclear family is a touchstone conservative issue, and is reproduced out of time and place in almost all fantasy novels.
    • Inherited Wealth: Not necessarily in the form of money, because in fantasy worlds money plays second fiddle to magic, which is usually inherited either as a talent or through attendance at a special school which it is only possible to enter through selection. Even though magic breaks the rules of conservation of matter, and therefore in principle enables High Fantasy worlds to be utopias like The Culture, magic is always hoarded by a powerful class who dispense it amongst their favourites. Harry Potter is a really good example of this – there is an elite world which he is allowed into by dint of his having inherited this form of wealth, and throughout the novels he is given for free things which only the very rich can afford. Free to those who can afford it, very expensive to those who can’t – a conservative trope, and well reproduced through the medium of magic.
    • Heteronormative: do we know of any gay characters anywhere in High Fantasy? How coincidental, in a world of nuclear families…
    • Glorification of war: having read the Silmarillion, I find it impossible to comprehend the claim that Tolkien doesn’t glorify war. That’s all his stories are about. I  suppose you could excuse it because he’s british, but still… it’s also not the case that “glorifying war” means saying “yay! more people dying”. Literature which glorifies war always talks about the tragedy, the loss of youth, the hardship. It’s part of the admiration of muscular masculinity and discipline which is going on beneath this glorification. It’s a hard life to be a soldiering bloke, but how noble it is, etc. This is prevalent throughout fantasy too – in The Worm Ouroubouros, at the end of the novel the battles are over and they all go back to their homes to plan the next war because life without war is boring. The Sturm side story in Dragonlance is a classic example of this mixed glorification/tragedy complex. High Fantasy stories without war at their centre are rare.
    • Genocide is cool: because of the glorification of war and the racial essentialism, it’s inevitable that the bad guys are going to be wiped out to a man. This has been discussed extensively as a criticism of D&D and it’s true – there is an unquestioning acceptance throughout High Fantasy that mass murder is acceptable. It’s worth noting that when the genre began, eugenics had taken over in anti-semitic literature, and extermination as the “final solution” was beginning to become an acceptable notion, because racial essentialism based on biology (rather than culture) demands it. You can read about this link in Hitler’s Willing Executioners (which is otherwise a pretty dodgy book). I don’t think anyone believes Tolkien supported genocide in reality, but the logic of High Fantasy demands it and that is essentially what was planned throughout the novels, by both sides. It has continued to be an acceptable act in subsequent iterations of the genre.
    • Libertarian or authoritarian communities: High Fantasy tends to allow the good guys only two types of community. On the one hand we see small rural idylls run on generally libertarian or communitarian grounds,  because life is so simple that they can be self-managed, and there is no racial mixing to cause crime; and on the other we see large kingdoms run by strong men, usually inheriting their position but sometimes voted in. The concept of a strong man appointed by popular election was popular in the interwar period, when liberalism and democracy were beginning to look a bit shonky, and it was supported by a much larger segment of the world than  just Germany and Italy. In fact most of Europe was under this leadership, and many in England and America beyond Oswald Mosley were looking for the same thing. This is reflected in modern High Fantasy, whose origins lie in that turbulent time. In contrast, the bad guys often have a classless or semi-classless society, run by a strong man or sometimes anarchist, often with strong inter-racial mixing. Sounds a bit like a well-described conflict from that time…

    We can’t help that the original stories were written in the interwar period when racial essentialism, nuclear families, eugenics and dictatorship were popular. But we can help the choices we make as modern authors. Why, for example, do modern authors decide to be meticulously careful in their reproduction of mediaeval gender roles for their fantasy society, but completely ignore the family structures of the time? In both cases, the result fits perfectly with a conservative project. Why do they go to great lengths to reproduce the poverty of that time, while sprinkling the world with a series of perpetual motion machines (i.e. magic) which could solve all economic problems overnight? Because they want to reproduce and intensify structures of inherited wealth, and present them as inevitable, objective facts even where the solution is freely available. This is why those early fantasy novels provided the means to ensure free health care to everyone (healing magic) but you never saw it in action – except when the king goes to war, and his soldiers go to the healing tent.

    Many authors are no doubt reproducing these tropes without thought, but when you reproduce a conservative worldview without consideration, you are by definition being conservative. That’s what conservatives do. Some authors (such as Goodkind and Tolkien) are more actively using their work as a political screed in favour of conservatism. The beauty of the High Fantasy world is that it is fun, so you can reproduce these things without boring your readers’ socks off. But let’s not pretend that the world couldn’t be just as interesting without a few changes – women and men being equal, for example,  or racial intermixing being positive instead of negative. And if you don’t want to do these things, you have to accept the conservative label which this kind of thoughtless reproduction of conservative politics will earn you.