by PaladinFeng

Speaking of the palantir, this is my third read through of the trilogy and this time around it really struck me how they are a perfect metaphor for social media and smart phones, the palantir show a selective view of reality and all the people who have power to make a difference are so busy doom scrolling on them that they end up losing all hope.

Edit: except for Aragon, who seems to be immune to all forms of social media

"Don't feed the trolls."
Aragorn, son of Arathorn

Edit: except for Aragorn, who seems to be immune to all forms of social media

2930 Arador slain by trolls.

He [ a 'nationalist', but see my footnote to explain Orwell's use of the word] spends part of his time in a fantasy world in which things happen as they should – in which, for example, the Spanish Armada was a success or the Russian Revolution was crushed in 1918 – and he will transfer fragments of this world to the history books whenever possible. Much of the propagandist writing of our time amounts to plain forgery. Material facts are suppressed, dates altered, quotations removed from their context and doctored so as to change their meaning. Events which, it is felt, ought not to have happened are left unmentioned and ultimately denied. ...

The primary aim of propaganda is, of course, to influence contemporary opinion, but those who rewrite history do probably believe with part of their minds that they are actually thrusting facts into the past. When one considers the elaborate forgeries that have been committed in order to show that Trotsky did not play a valuable part in the Russian civil war, it is difficult to feel that the people responsible are merely lying. More probably they feel that their own version was what happened in the sight of God, and that one is justified in rearranging the records accordingly. ...

Indifference to objective truth is encouraged by the sealing-off of one part of the world from another, which makes it harder and harder to discover what is actually happening. There can often be a genuine doubt about the most enormous events. For example, it is impossible to calculate within millions, perhaps even tens of millions, the number of deaths caused by the present war. The calamities that are constantly being reported – battles, massacres, famines, revolutions – tend to inspire in the average person a feeling of unreality. One has no way of verifying the facts, one is not even fully certain that they have happened, and one is always presented with totally different interpretations from different sources. What were the rights and wrongs of the Warsaw rising of August 1944? Is it true about the German gas ovens in Poland? Who was really to blame for the Bengal famine? Probably the truth is discoverable, but the facts will be so dishonestly set forth in almost any newspaper that the ordinary reader can be forgiven either for swallowing lies or failing to form an opinion. The general uncertainty as to what is really happening makes it easier to cling to lunatic beliefs. Since nothing is ever quite proved or disproved, the most unmistakable fact can be impudently denied. Moreover, although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge, the nationalist is often somewhat uninterested in what happens in the real world. What he wants is to feel that his own unit is getting the better of some other unit, and he can more easily do this by scoring off an adversary than by examining the facts to see whether they support him. All nationalist controversy is at the debating-society level. It is always entirely inconclusive, since each contestant invariably believes himself to have won the victory. Some nationalists are not far from schizophrenia, living quite happily amid dreams of power and conquest which have no connexion with the physical world.

Notes on Nationalism, George Orwell, 1945

[My footnote here to say that Orwell uses 'nationalist', 'nationalism' in a more general way than we might expect. He means it to go beyond the case of someone who thinks that (1) their own nation state is locked in a zero-sum struggle with other nation states, and (2) is the 'good' side and is therefore entitled to do anything for their own advancement: including things that are dastardly when the exact same thing is done by the other side. Orwell means any 'us' in a them-and-us system of thought with similar results, whether based on religion, race, nation states, politics etc. For a fuller but much longer definition of what he means, see the essay! ]

“However it is not possible to convey an impression of such a rare character, both a soldier and a poet, and a Christian convert. How unlike the Left – the ‘corduroy panzers’ who fled to America. (Auden among them who with his friends got R.C.'s works 'banned' by the Birmingham Town Council).

Letter 83

It incensed Campbell that poets and intellectuals in England and elsewhere romanticized the Republican cause [of the Spanish Civil War: this is NOT about American political parties] . In particular it was the “Auden Group,” as they were known, made up of Auden, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, and Cecil Day-Lewis, that he disdained, referring to them collectively as MacSpaunday, as they praised from a safe distance the men who murdered his confessors.

For that he was branded a fascist, though he denied the charge. At a poetry reading, Spender called Campbell just that. He walked up on stage and punched him. So pervasive was the label that on reputation he was offered a position in the British Union of Fascists. Campbell refused, saying he fought Red Fascism and was “ready to fight Brown or Black Fascism.” [This is about political colours not skin colour - see my footnote]

Though he never saw combat, Campbell enlisted to fight Germany while MacSpaunday, I’m paraphrasing because I can’t find the exact quote, “wrote from the safety of the fireside desks in remote country homes or far afield in North America,” about the moral necessity of taking the fight to Hitler. Meanwhile, whether accurate or not, the fascist label stuck with Campbell and his work was shunned, blacklisted from anthologies.

Tolkien listed, accurately but maybe naively, Campbell’s anti-fascist resume before concluding of the man on whom he partly based Aragorn, “However it is not possible to convey an impression of such a rare character, both a soldier and a poet, and a Christian convert. How unlike the Left – the ‘corduroy panzers’ who fled to America.”

MacSpaunday was unfair to Campbell.

References to America by Campbell and Tolkien were not-at-all veiled attacks on Auden, who moved to New York in January of 1939 as whispers in Europe grew louder.

Tolkien and Campbell were unfair to Auden.

For starters, Auden did spend time in Spain during the Civil War [he tried to become an ambulance driver, but was assigned to write propaganda instead and came back], and secondly, when war with Germany was declared, he offered to enlist but was told that from his age cohort, only those with specific skills were required.

He’s considered among the three greats, with Yeats and Eliot, of the twentieth century. Regular readers aghast that I didn’t say “four greats” and include Pound are simply impatient, because I would include Pound and think it’s a crime that everyone doesn’t. So when I say that the “corduroy panzer” charge followed him, I mean that it followed him in that it’s occasionally mentioned but overshadowed by his poetic achievements. He’s the inversion of Campbell in that regard.
It may be that the charge follows him due to the popularity of “September 1, 1939.”


POETS Day! WH Auden’s “September 1, 1939” by Ben Sears
[*At this distance from Campbell, Auden, Tolkien and the lot of them it might be worth saying that when 'Campbell refused, saying he fought Red Fascism and was “ready to fight Brown or Black Fascism.” we're talking about political colour or shirt colour not skin colour. Blackshirts - fascist goons of Mussolini and the British Union of Fascists. Brownshirts: Hilter's equivalent. Red Fascism: left-wing authoritarianism or its troops and enforcers, Red being the colour of choice of the political left, outside the USA.]

'And how it draws one to itself! Have I not felt it? Even now my heart desires to test my will upon it, to see if I could not wrench it from him and turn it where I would–to look across the wide seas of water and of time to Tirion the Fair, and perceive the unimaginable hand and mind of Fëanor at their work, while both the White Tree and the Golden were in flower!' He sighed and fell silent.

'I wish I had known all this before,' said Pippin. 'I had no notion of what I was doing.'

'Oh yes, you had,' said Gandalf. 'You knew you were behaving wrongly and foolishly; and you told yourself so, though you did not listen.'