When Sauron Rose Again
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it was hard to believe; it seemed astonishing the Cold War was over. Three decades later, while the West and much of the world were singing the praise of technology and the stock market, the Kremlin mountain was smoldering in the east.
Tolkien’s description of the years following Sauron’s first defeat by Isuldur was an interregnum similar to this one we just lived through — seemingly now passed. Isuldur had sliced the ring of power from Sauron’s finger and that was that, except it wasn’t. Had he destroyed the ring as Elrond the elf advised, a great deal of misery in Middle Earth would have been avoided, including Isuldur’s own murder when he and his sons were later ambushed and he lost the ring — Isuldur’s Bane — only for it to be rediscovered centuries later by Gollum. Tolkien was a master craftsman of the back story.
Contingency is what Steven Jay Gould would come to term the coincidental swerves that accompany evolution.
I’ve often thought of how Tolkien came to evolve his mythology — the one elaborated by The Silmarillion. If one were only to read Lord of the Rings, the usual impression is that Tolkien held a fantasy, black and white view of the real world. In fact, it was the opposite. Isuldur’s weakness for power was his own downfall, and he was one of the good guys.
Tolkien saw evil quite clearly. He fought in World War I trenches and served in World War II. One wonders what he witnessed at the battle for Somme, with a million killed or wounded. No fantasy there.
Evil he knew, and his most famous novel doesn’t translate to the simplistic fairytale some critics claim for Lord of the Rings. There are any number of object lessons running through his story contradicting this — beginning with Bilbo’s greedy relatives, the Sackville-Baggins, Frodo’s initial distrust of Strider, Boromir’s later attempt to steal the ring — and of course, Gollum’s duel personalities.
In the long interregnum following Isuldur’s victory over Sauron, few other than the elves any longer felt danger — being immortal, the elves held a longer view. But the hobbits and men paid scarce heed to rumblings to the ruined lands of Mordor. It took a near cataclysm to bring them to see the doom in front of them.
As it did France and England watching Hitler’s rise to power after WW I.
As did Europe after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
With Germany’s reunification, followed by Russia’s collection of vassal states breaking free, the European states thought mainly of their own economies and to a lesser extent inculcating democracy in post-Soviet Russia, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.
It seems Sauron has gotten loose again. Every generation or so, it happens.
The West’s best contribution to a new world order lies in the democratic principals we preach; contributions from capitalism seem a less clear benefit, exacerbated by weak to nonexistent democratic institutions. In the case of Russia, a country always ceding to strongmen at the top, democracy stood little chance of taking hold. The oligarchs absorbed the lessons of dog eat dog and threw away the rest — following the long, sad pattern of Russian history.
So a post-Soviet strongman replaced the Soviet strongmen, who took over from the Bolshevik thugs, who crushed the White Russians, who together murdered the Romanovs whose foreign policy had embroiled them in repeated wars of conquest, always with an eye on the throne. If the Romanovs had their Tiffany Eggs and beautiful neo-classical architecture in St. Petersburg, the more recent Russian oligarchs have their London townhouses, Manhattan condo towers and seaside villas along the Black Sea. To complete the miasma, now with communism gone, the Russian Orthodox Church has swung back in action.
The one hard lesson the Soviet leaders had taken from World War II was to buffer themselves with weaker countries around them, applying the same brutal methods from the days of the czars, the term, deriving from caesar, autocrats all.
While a good part of Europe stumbled toward democratic government before and after World War II, Russia was slumped in its vodka brooding, one wanna-be czar replacing another. One wonders what Marx and Engels would think of their political progeny.
Mind, Sauron’s minions are always about — pretending to be leaders of nations, presidents even, who let their self-imagined grandeur become them — Tolkien explained that too. His heroic characters were far from perfect — real heroes often are. Churchill wasn’t, he the alcoholic son of a syphilitic father and a social climbing mother from New York. How he rose to become one of Britain’s greatest prime ministers — and vastly superior to a shyster developer from Queens — is a worthy tale.
Tolkien knew about despots, however angelic they’d once been. Sauron was one of the highest spirits in the universe before he fell. Tolkien understood even wizards such as Saruman the White can be swayed by temptation.
By contrast, Putin is just a low life devil. Saying that doesn’t make Putin less venomous.
The Black Riders, wraiths who were originally human kings corrupted by the all-seeing Eye, slaughtered enough in Tolkien’s myth. So saying Putin isn’t the worst devil we’d dealt with means we can just go about our business like hobbits? How did that turn out? Even the old Sackville-Baggins hag had a change of heart about Saruman by the end of the tale.
And Lukashenka, Putin’s Belarusian sidekick, might want to reread the scene in Return of the King when Samwise, climbing to rescue Frodo in the tower of Cirith Ungol, comes on two greedy bands of Orcs attacking one other instead of guarding their prize. Honor among thieves is the real myth.
It is curious, looking back, how little the Europeans of the 20s and 30s heeded the fascist rants leading up to Hitler’s occupation of the demilitarized Rhineland following World War I. Had France attacked at that point, Hitler’s weakly armored army and non-existent air force would have been crushed. Nazism didn’t spring from a vacuum, yet the obvious danger never generated sufficient alarm to stop him. It was as if none of the European leaders read their own history — nor learned from what they did read. Churchill had read his.
You need to follow the math: the Crimean War of the mid 1800s was fought between the Russian, Ottoman, French and British Empires. World War I began 58 years later, followed by World War II 25 years after.
“The Crimean War [1853–1856] marked a turning point for the Russian Empire. The war weakened the Imperial Russian Army, drained the treasury and undermined Russia’s influence in Europe. The empire would take decades to recover. Russia’s humiliation forced its educated elites to identify its problems and to recognize the need for fundamental reforms. They saw rapid modernization as the sole way to recover the empire’s status as a European power.”
from Wikipedia article on the Crimean War.
“On 28 July, [1914] Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia; Russia came to Serbia’s defense and by 4 August, the conflict had expanded to include Germany, France and Britain, along with their respective colonial empires. In November, the Ottoman Empire, Germany and Austria formed the Central Powers, while in April 1915, Italy joined Britain, France, Russia and Serbia as the Allied Powers.”
from Wikipedia article on World War I
“World War II [1939–1945] is generally considered to have begun on 1 September 1939, when Nazi Germany, under Adolf Hitler, invaded Poland. The United Kingdom and France subsequently declared war on Germany on 3 September. Under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union had partitioned Poland and marked out their “spheres of influence” across Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Romania. From late 1939 to early 1941, in a series of campaigns and treaties, Germany conquered or controlled much of continental Europe, and formed the Axis alliance with Italy and Japan…”
from Wikipedia article on World War II
From 1856 until 1945, nearly one century of war ravaged Europe.
Vladimir Putin was born seven years after World War II ended, and lived a hard childhood in its aftermath. Yet he learned the wrong lesson.
“The Russian despot should know this as well as anyone. As a child, he grew up on a diet of stories about German atrocities and Russian bravery in the siege of Leningrad. He is now producing similar stories, but casting himself in the role of Hitler.”
from The Guardian article, Why Vladimir Putin has already lost this war by Yuval Noah Harari
Yuval Noah Harari is a historian and author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Will the whole of Europe fight one more land war in 2022? Provided the United States stands with them?
Russia stands alone in Putin’s present invasion of Ukraine. Even China pays but lip service to its once and future ally. How far does Putin intend to go — how can he stop now? Yet, as Harari insists, the West is cheering for the Ukrainians, hoping they’ll continue to refuse their new master and lord.
Putin might have proceeded before 2020 when he had an ally in the White House. Now, it’s too late. But consider: had Trump been reelected, how the world would have faced a far different future.
Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson don’t constitute more than a thin rogues gallery, and despite his assistance in Putin’s cause while president, Trump could hardly matter now. Once King Théoden shook off Grima Wormtongue, the small villain was of no more use to Saruman or Sauron.
I don’t expect Billy Joel will play another concert in Moscow too soon; he’ll need to rewrite his song, Leningrad. That lyric about practicing air raid drills sounded so familiar. Unlike what he did with Victor, Joel probably won’t be wanting to befriend Russian army veterans coming out of this present conflagration. The only Russian clown in this tale is named Vladimir.
