CMC's quotations

[Rita Winston]

CMC posted both the URL for the 1956 W.H.Auden review of ROTK:
http://www.nytimes.com/1956/01/22/books/tolkien-king.html
and that for a National Review interview with John Rhys-Davis:
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/beard200312170849.asp

I loved the Auden review, I even forwarded to a friend of mine who 
thinks LOTR is second-rate literature because it doesn't have sex (I 
have never understood that reasoning; I have never had any problem 
seeing sex in stories whether the author put it there or not).

I am pretty cynical about the "Hilaire Belloc in his 1938 book
The Great Heresies" quote provided by CMC in his same post as the 
Rhys-Davis interview:

<< Since religion is at the root of all political movements and
changes >>

Chinese Communism? The various nationalist rebellions against
colonial powers? The widespread 1968 protests against various
national governments? In a 1938 book, he must have explained why he 
thinks religion was at the root of Soviet Communism and of Fascism
in its various names in Germany, Italy, and Spain, and of the American 
and French revolutions...

Anyway, back to Rhys-Davis, who said:
<< [Tolkien] knew what he was fighting for in World War I. >>

To defend his country from foreign conquest, i.e. to defend English 
women from being beaten and raped by German soldiers, and English 
workers from being exploited by German conquerors, so that they could 
continue to be beaten and raped and exploited by English husbands and 
employers respectively.

I'm being sarcastic, but World War I is a very bad example: Altho' it 
was sold to the American public as defense against territorial expansion 
conquest by the German Empire, I am under the impression that historians 
generally agree that it happened by accident ... a lunatic shot an 
archduke (itself just about an accident, see Rebecca West) and 
Austria-Hungary had to 'punish' the Serbian nationalists and every 
nation had treaties to come to the defense of each other when attacked 
and for some reason they obeyed their treaty obligations and joined the 
war...

World War II is a much better example of a war against evil (Hitler, 
genocide). But Allies = Good is marred even for conservatives by the 
presence of Stalin among the allies --- he murdered more people than 
Hitler did.

IIRC Auden was in WWII and wrote poems about it, and his book review 
says: << I observe, all too often, men in conflict with each other,
wars and hatreds, but seldom, if ever, a clear-cut issue between Good
on the one side and Evil on the other, though I also observe that both 
sides usually describe it as such. >>

Belloc: <<our sons or our grandsons would see the renewal of that 
tremendous struggle between the Christian culture and what has been
for more than a thousand years its greatest opponent.... >>

By 'greatest opponent', Belloc meant Islam, not science, the 
heliocentric theory, and the theory of evolution. I am under the 
impression that both the Kaiser and Hitler claimed that they were 
fighting to defend Christianity against its enemies -- in the case of 
Hitler, the alleged enemies were atheist communists, Jews, and 
'degenerates'. I don't know who the Kaiser said was attacking Christianity.

For that matter, the slave-owners leading up to USA Civil War said they 
were defending Christianity from the abolitionists, specifically that 
abolitionism was an enemy of The Bible because The Bible said there 
should be slavery. Around 20 years ago, a friend of mine received a book 
for review titled: "War, Women, Slavery, and Sabbath", which was from a 
Fundamentalist theologian writing the history of Fundamentalist versus 
Fundamentalist debate over what the Bible commands about those four 
issues. One of the great things about the debate over Abolitionism is 
that it is *over*.
-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------
R ighteous
A ttractive
V ictorious
E rudite
N atural
C lassic
L ovable
A dept
W ise
------------------------------------------------------------------

           /\ /\                                          ___  ___
            + +     Mews and views                       ( @ \/ @ )
          >> = <<         from Rita Prince Winston        \ @  @ /
                                                           \ () /
                      ("`-''-/").___..--''"`-._             \  /
                      `6_ 6  )   `-.  (     ).`-.__.`)       \/
                      (_Y_.)'  ._   )  `._ `. ``-..-'
                     _..`--'_..-_/ /--'_.' ,'
                    ((('   (((-(((''  ((((