“Our English sources of information about Russia come from a peculiar people who suffer from peculiar grievances.”
H. G. Wells, “Russia and England,” Harper’s Weekly (April 11, 1914)*
With age came insomnia, and with insomnia the need to fill the small hours with pastimes that do not wake the house. Writing Orthosphere posts is one of my mouse-like nocturnal pastimes, fossicking through the dross and diamonds of on-line libraries is the other. It is as if the Head Librarian at the Bodleian handed me the keys before she went home for the night.
The sandman having once again forgotten me last night, I had plenty of time to roam virtual stacks and fossick literary dross in search of verbal diamonds. The quote at the head of this post was a pretty good find.
Wells had gone to Russia expecting to find it sad and dour and savage. When he returned, he told readers it was nothing of the sort. Not paradise, to be sure, but no inferno of Cossack atrocities, either. The quote is timeless and not merely topical because most of what we read is written by people with an ax to grind. They write to make their enemies our enemies, their aspirations our aspirations, their grievances our grievances.
They want to spend our money and perhaps spill our blood—and they want us to take their word for it.
This is of course true of what we today read about current events on the Pontic Steppe and in the Levant. We read wheedling words by peculiar people who suffer from peculiar grievances they would like us to share.
* * * * *
I was led to the Wells quote by an old book by an American historian who specialized in Russia, and who in 1932 spent some time in the Levant. The cultural clash between Levantine colonists and natives has certainly evolved since 1932, but this historian also said something that is timeless and not just topical. It takes us to the root of the problem with enrichment by cultural diversity.
“When, later, I asked the grand mufti of Jerusalem if he would not recognize that the Jews had brought certain cultural values, he caustically asked if I had in mind the public necking which one had to see in Tel Aviv—particularly on Zion Square, the movie and restaurant center in Jerusalem.”**
That public necking was, by the way, an American export. Suddenly there was Coney Island on the beach at Tel Aviv, and the grand mufti of Jerusalem was not amused. He was no fool and rightly saw public necking as an act of cultural war. No town is big enough for public necking and a grand mufti. In the long run, you can have one or the other, but not both.
* * * * *
I found this last diamond in the small hours of Thursday morning. It is from the speech by Gandalf that I quoted in yesterday’s post. The wizard is addressing the prices of the West after the Battle of the Pelinnor Fields, and his words, you will recall, are from an early draft of the Lord of the Rings and not the published edition.
Probably written in the 1930s, these lwords strike me as prophetic of the fate of the fading West of this world. Speaking through Gandalf, Tolkien foretells a future of infertility, decolonization, and the vain hope of being left in peace behind stout walls.
“The people of the West are diminished, far and wide the lands lie empty. And it is long since your rule retreated and left the wild people to themselves, and they do not know you; and [they] will come seeking new lands to dwell in. Now were it a matter of war between Men, such as has been for many ages, I would say: You are now too few to march East, either in wrath or in friendship, to subdue or to teach. Yet you might take thought together and make such boundaries, and such forts and strongholds, as could long be maintained and restrain the gathering tide [or perhaps “wild”].”***
But, Gandalf [Tolkien] explains, the “wild people” who would, unopposed, overwhelm the West, are only instruments in the hands of a greater power that has poisoned and programmed these “wild people” with insidious lies—perhaps told them that plunder is “justice” and “reparation.”
But your war is not only against numbers, and swords and spears, and untamed peoples. You have an Enemy of great power and malice, and he grows, and he it is that fills the hearts of the wild people with hate, and directs and governs that hatred, and so they become no longer like waves that may roll at whiles against your battlements, to be withstood with valor and defeated with forethought. They are rising in a great tide to engulf you. What then shall you do?”***
Good question.
*) H. G. Wells, “Russia and England,” Harper’s Weekly (April 11, 1914), pp. 6-7.
**) Samuel N. Harper, The Russia I Believe in: the Memoirs of Samuel N. Harper, 1902-1911, ed. Paul V. Harper (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1945), p. 188.
***) J. R. R. Tolkien, The History of the Lord of the Rings, part 3: The War of the Ring, ed. Christopher Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990), p. 400.
The Orthosphere 
“The Jewish idea was and is a curious combination of theological breadth and an intense racial patriotism. The Jews looked for a special saviour, a Messiah, who was to redeem mankind by the agreeable process of restoring the fabulous glories of David and Solomon, and bringing the whole world at last under the benevolent but firm Jewish heel”
H.G. Wells, The Outline of History
People lower the moral tone and then criticize you for noticing. In America, that is under the guise of the Bill of Rights Freedoms that such people wield while undermining the very essence of the document. Why those people were not called out and ridiculed in town squares, Russian and otherwise, and elsewhere has been a travesty.
Is the “peculiar people” with “peculiar grievances” of whom Wells speaks the same one of whom readers like myself are likely to be thinking?
You betcha!
Amateur philologists will note that repeated applications of Grimm’s Law in reverse to the utterance ‘You Betcha’ eventually lead back to the Proto Indo-European roots: *Fo *Shoah.
“. . . and he it is that fills the hearts of the wild people with hate, and directs and governs that hatred . . .”
How that “Eye of Soros” meme triggered certain folks so!
Well done for isolating those passages from Tolkien’s drafts! – I had read them before, but not with sufficient attention and thought.
It is a recurrent theme of Tolkien’s, and one of great relevance to The West Now, that the sub-fertility of a people or race was an index of spiritual corruption.
Note: High fertility of a group is not necessarily a virtue (e.g. orcs multiply quickly, as well as the evil Men of the East and South) – but chosen sub-fertility of a civilization is always a vice.
The high fertility of the Men of Rohan indicates their fundamentally greater spiritual health than Gondor. Neither do the Men of Rohan cling to life, nor do they fear death when in a good cause – as contrasted with the besetting sin of the Men of Numenorean descent.
So, despite their far greater level of civilization and literacy; I think there is a definite sense in which Tolkien regards the illiterate and semi-barbarian Men of Rohan as superior to the Gondorians – certainly more hope-full.
Thus the corruption of Numenor and later Gondor were both associated with multi-generational sub-fertility; as were their downfalls. Because sub-fertility is civilizational suicide, and an indicator of ultimate despair – which indicates lack of faith.
This is why I regard the chosen sub-fertility of The Modern West as probably the most important index of our Godless self-hatred and self-destruction.
And (to link to Bonald’s post about death) it is why so many modern Men do not want (indeed are utterly uninterested by) resurrection into Heaven; and instead actually *desire* self-annihilation at their deaths.
As you know, there are several lines about the infertility of men in the published edition. Population decline is also implied by the many desolate landscapes of ruins. I think Gondor is described as having empty, abandoned houses (and no suburbs). Frodo and Bilbo are childless, but the other hobbits are fruitful and multiply.
” Frodo and Bilbo are childless, but the other hobbits are fruitful and multiply.”
– Yes, indeed. B and F are legitimate celibate exceptions, of whom there will and should always be some — in ways analogous to priests or ancient scholars.
The doomed other free-races of elves, dwarves and ents are all represented as having sub-optimal reproduction; and among Men it is the most elvish who have the weakest reproductive motivations.
This is representative of the fatal spiritual problem of the elves (despite all their many and great virtues) – the tendency to disengage into detached contemplation, live in memory, and become permanently sad at the losses and corruption of the temporary world of Middle Earth.
Back in our world, and now; I have often said that if a Martian Biologist studied the human species in the past century, he would be astonished to discover that we *chose* slow (albeit accelerating) extinction while living in conditions of unprecedented prosperity, security and comfort – and the healthier and longer lived the lower the reproduction.
I think the Martian might conclude that something went *very* wrong with the environment of late 20th century Man; that something vital must be missing – something which has always and everywhere been present before, and upon which the species depended for its sustenance – but was now absent.
He would be right: what was incrementally-deleted from the human environment was the primacy of Religion, including the spiritual-including world-view. Since Man had evolved biologically in a Religious environment, when this was removed then his instincts began to destroy the species — as sometimes happens with captive animals in an alien environment (zoo, farm etc) for which they are not instinctually equipped.
I agree. Secularism is a death cult over a couple of centuries. In theory, there should be hard selection for philoprogenitive traits, but philoprogenitive instincts are in most cases crushed by a culture of voluntary sterility. In a couple of centuries there may be savages poking a fire in Trafalgar Square, speculating that an extinct race of giants built the ruins around them.