Brandon Smith has used the TV version of The Lord of the Rings, which goes totally woke, introducing all matters of diversity and gender non-binaries into the much-loved work. This is a symbol of the communist or cultural Marxist agenda, to deconstruct existing traditions. Feminism and transgenderism, for example were alien to the literary universe of J. R. R. Tolkien, but would fit in well with Game of Thrones, more a product of the present age of woke.
As with the Chinese cultural revolution, the present Leftist mania of wokeness, once called by the much better Maoist term, “political correctness,” aims to take apart traditional society and its values, and replace it with a communist alternative world view. Since the 1960s we have come a long way along this path, with things like feminism, homosexuality and transgenderism now normalised, and those opposed, on religious or philosophical grounds, being denounced as outlaws, racist and criminals. It is hard to see how this can all be addressed in the short term. Maybe over the course of the next 100 years, if civilisation survives, it will burn itself out, like a bushfire out of control eventually runs out of fuel.
https://alt-market.us/amazons-woke-lord-of-the-rings-is-the-death-rattle-of-social-justice-content/
“Modern social justice in all of its forms is communism. The political left doesn’t want to admit it openly, but there is no way around it and there is no debate. Some would call it “cultural Marxism,” but the bottom line is that there is no such thing as a legitimate social justice movement in the west because by law all people regardless of their ethnic circumstances are equally protected. You could say that SJWs are rebels without a cause, but I would point out that “social justice” is not their real cause. They aren’t really interested in equality, they are interested in control.
There is a classic playbook for communist sabotage of a target society, and one of the first tactics is always the destruction of that society’s history and symbols. When Mao Zedong announced the birth of the “Cultural Revolution” in China in 1966, his goal was to disrupt growing discontent among the Chinese people with the broken promises of the communist regime. Only 8 years earlier in 1958 Mao had initiated the “Great Leap Forward,” which was a purge of his political opponents as well as a massive population reduction program that used food as a weapon. After the deaths of over 65 million Chinese citizens, Mao sought to redirect public anger by scapegoating a supposed conspiracy of “capitalists and imperialists.”
The Cultural Revolution was essentially a nationwide witch hunt spearheaded by rabid and ignorant children; people easy for the government to manipulate and exploit. They scoured their own towns and cities as spies and enforcers for the CCP, looking for any signs that their neighbors were part of the conspiracy to disrupt the communist collective. They held tribunals and struggle sessions where anyone who said the wrong thing or who angered the wrong person was publicly humiliated or even murdered as “insurrectionists” by a mob of communist zealots.
Most importantly, the Cultural Revolution was used as a means to utterly destroy any remnants of Chinese history before the commies arrived on the scene. Museums and universities were raided and ancient artworks, documents, books and historical parchments were burned in pyres. Historians and people with knowledge of the Chinese heritage were marched up and down the streets and chastised as enemies of the people. Statues were torn down and entire buildings razed to the ground. The communist system cannot gain dominance without two things – Rule at the barrel of a gun, and complete control over cultural products and information.
The people cannot have a religion, they cannot have an unfiltered history, they cannot have a moral framework outside of communist law, and they cannot have any cultural expression that does not include communist propaganda. If they have these things, then the communists will always be battling for psychological supremacy over the masses. Competing ideas and interests are a danger to the collective. The existence of choice is like kryptonite to authoritarians.
And this is one of the great crimes of communism in general: Yes, they are the biggest mass murderers in history surpassing the Nazis many times over, but killing people is one thing; deliberately killing their memories, histories and their mythologies is another. It is akin to murdering the soul of an entire nation and poisoning the future.
It is important to remember this distinction when we talk about the current communist cultural revolution now happening in North America and parts of Europe under social justice. I often hear the argument that people are “overreacting” when social justice propaganda is implanted into a reboot or remake of a previous film or television work. It’s “just a movie,” they say. But some of these franchises represent the mythologies of our time. And, when SJW communists and their corporate partners implant their insane ideologies into these franchises their goal is not just to propagandize the public, it is also to destroy something the public loves, to erase our history and our heroes piece by piece and take a little bit of our national soul away each time.
It’s also vital to point out that the mass movement to stop social justice in media, also known as the “Culture War,” is often accused of being anti-equality and anti-representation whenever we criticize a woke production. We’re called racists and bigots by leftists, but we don’t have a problem with race or “representation,” we have a problem with the politicization of race and representation. We’re fine with black and brown and even gay people in movies and television as long as their presence makes sense historically and canonically. What we don’t like in our entertainment is COMMUNIST AGITPROP. This is what the conflict is really about. We want their communism out of our culture, forever.
The current social justice playbook in Hollywood has become so prevalent and mechanical since 2016 that it can be predicted down to specific plot points and character arcs. Almost everything these people make is the same.
One might note that SJWs rarely produce any original stories, and there is a good reason for this – They have no creativity or imagination. Leftist activists and corporate elites in the industry have openly admitted in the past that they prefer to reboot classic properties because they can exploit existing public love for an older movie or character. When they make something original with new characters the project always fails horribly and no one shows up to watch. When they reboot classic movies, they can use nostalgia to trick people into watching without thinking and implant their leftist brainwashing into the production.
Beyond trickery, though, I suspect that these activists are not even as interested in making money as they are interested in murdering our beloved characters and mythologies right in front of us. I think they take perverse joy in it. Why else would they continue spending billions of dollars on these productions and then lose billions more when their movies and TV shows inevitably tank? It makes no sense from a business standpoint, but it makes perfect sense from a militant communist standpoint. Again, the goal is to destroy the existing culture until there is nothing left.
And this brings us to one of the last major story properties that the elitists have yet to touch: The Lord of The Rings.
I would not consider myself a “superfan” steeped in every aspect of the lore of Middle Earth. I have read all the primary books and The Hobbit, and I have of course watched the Peter Jackson films dozens of times. I do find Tolkien’s works, much like the fictional works of C.S. Lewis, to go far beyond the fantasy worlds they are established in and reveal some innate truths about human nature and our eternal and internal struggles with the inborn archetypes of good and evil. They clarify what the fight is really about, what evil really is, and what sacrifices good people must be willing to make in order to defeat evil when the times demand it.
I often use the Lord of The Rings as a metaphor to describe core problems we face in the real world. For example, I can’t think of a better metaphor for government power than the One Ring. Everyone thinks that they are pure hearted or righteous enough to wield the ring, but the vast majority of them are not and would only sink into corruption as they tried to exploit it. The only people that can hold the ring at all are the people who don’t want it, the people who have no desire for power and the people that only want to subdue or destroy it. Like the One Ring, so too must we have the same wariness of government control.
Tolkien’s tale was also intended to act as a kind of early mythological history of ancient Britain. Because much of Britain’s ancient history was lost to wars and the destruction of documentation over centuries, Tolkien wanted to create an alternative mythology to represent the spirit of the region, borrowing elements of ancient stories while adding in his personal experiences. The Hobbits were based on the happy natured culture of rural English villages that he experienced in his youth. The horrors he witnessed during his service in WWI and the Battle of Somme are obvious to see in the conflict between Sauron and the heroes of Middle Earth.
Interestingly, ever since Amazon purchased the partial rights to portions of the Lord of The Rings in 2017, there has been an army of revisionist bloggers and media puppets trying to assert that Tolkien never intended his stories to be British or English in origin or relation. Clearly, the narrative is being adjusted so that Amazon can rationalize its diversity agenda within a story that was always meant to be set in a historically white country. Imagine if I went to Marvel and told them I want to reboot Black Panther but I think Wakanda needs less Africans and more whites and Asians? How well would that idea be received?
The bottom line is it makes no sense when we take the setting and the lore into account. But hey, it’s okay to do it with Lord of The Rings with Middle Earth as a proxy for ancient England because…well, no explanation for this hypocrisy is ever provided.
The idea that a trillion dollar monstrosity like Amazon with aspirations of cultural domination could ever successfully reboot or revise Tolkien’s books is laughable at best. The team of writers involved have very little previous work worth noting but they do have a predictable roster of social justice virtue signals and hot takes. They are pampered bubble babies; people that don’t have the life experiences needed to grasp the deeper concepts that an older wiser man like Tolkien was trying to address. Of course, if you do enough shoe licking (or other things) in Hollywood and have the right politics you can be a dumb kid with a BA in social sciences and still get a job writing on a billion dollar project.
It would appear that most of the LOTR fandom is in agreement as the trailer released this past week is being decimated by a flood of critical responses and the video has been ratioed into oblivion on YouTube. This was the exact reason why YouTube decided to remove the visibility of dislikes which can now only be seen with a special app; they want to protect the agenda by silencing dissent.
It’s not working.
As a long time enthusiast of film and popular media, I have to say that objectively and technically the trailer is terrible. It has to be one of the most boring trailers I have ever seen for an adventure based series, telling us absolutely nothing and building no emotional suspense. I have seen great trailers for very bad movies (the latest Matrix movie comes to mind), but Amazon’s only interest was to showcase the diversity hires within their new show, and that was it.
That said, one cannot overlook the communistic cancer wrapped around the arteries of this production. Every person involved and all the media coverage involved is steeped in social justice babble and made-up terminology. Usually leftists in Hollywood use a specific formula for marketing films that hides the propaganda until the content is released. They post a trailer which obscures their intentions, and often even makes it look like the show will be close to the source material. Once they have you hooked and get your money, they stab your heroes through the heart and replace them with narcissistic facsimiles that any sane person would hate.
This time Amazon has chosen to go full bore woke out of the gate and it’s not going well for them.
All of us already know exactly what will happen in the new series, we don’t even need to watch it to predict the outcome. Timelines are being compacted down to nothing so this gives Amazon leeway to sabotage popular characters by retconning the lore. The plot points will be oddly close to those in the Jackson films, but with a completely different set of characters and messages. All the male heroes will be replaced with the now tiresome trope of ‘Stronk Wahmen’ and Mary Sues that are good at everything despite having no backstory to justify their awesome-ness.
Expect Galadriel to be the new Aragorn. Expect the female hobbit in the trailer to be the next Frodo but better than Frodo. Expect to see 90 pound women tossing around 200 pound men in poorly choreographed fight scenes. Expect the female characters to act and talk like men while abandoning all femininity (feminists hate femininity more than they hate masculinity). Expect modern SJW language and millennial language to be insinuated into dialogue in the most awkward places. Expect sexual innuendo or sexual scenarios that are out of place in a fantasy story. Expect meaningless LGBT representation that adds nothing to the plot. Expect weak and ineffectual male characters that make stupid decisions. Expect modern race baiting to be prevalent when it comes to black characters. Expect a perfect pie chart of ethnicities in almost every crowd scene. And, as always, expect the villains to be painted as “misunderstood” and only destructive because “society” caused them to turn to the dark side. In other words, it’s all society’s fault that Sauron becomes a bad guy.
It’s an old gameplan for deconstructing beloved properties and marginalizing the values and realities they represent. The thing is, we’ve seen this so many times now that it’s no longer catching us off guard.
Race swapping elves and dwarves and ignoring the species lore and history of the books is really the least of the problems, it’s just a big flashing alarm that tells us what is to come in terms of political messaging. Anyone who needs to “see themselves” portrayed exactly in every film or show they watch in order to relate to the story is undoubtedly a narcissist. Relating to characters is about relating to the ideas and archetypes they symbolize; and if the lore of a story requires that those character be white, then this should not stop any normal black or brown person from embracing the ideals as long as those ideals are honest.
Peter Jackson is noted as saying that he had no interest in implanting his own issues into Tolkien’s stories. He was not interested in using them for his benefit, only in honoring Tolkien’s legacy. The stories are universal, which is why they have appealed to billions of people around the world for the past several decades. SJWs cannot fathom this. They demand that every single new media product contain their political message and represent today’s world of “inclusivity.”
One of the biggest mistakes conservative movements ever made was to ignore the culture war and dismiss entertainment media as not worthy of our attention. It’s just “nerd stuff,” right? This was idiocy on our part and it’s a failure we must now deal with. Today, the extreme left has invaded every facet of media and almost EVERYTHING we see and hear is designed to spread their cultism. Our entertainment is now a communist wasteland.
Luckily, the massive and aggressive backlash against Amazon among the Tolkien fandom gives me hope. It would seem Amazon messed with the wrong nerds. Never before have I witnessed such a unified response to an attempt by a major corporation to pervert a loved property. What this tells me is that the majority of people are starting to become wise to the agenda in media and they are finally taking action by letting these companies know they are not going to play the game. Neither politics nor culture are downstream from each other, they are parallel and equally vital. The fight for one must be taken as seriously as the fight for the other.
Amazon’s hubris has led to an epic mistake which has set fire to the Beacons of Gondor. Everyone knows and everyone is watching them. This may very well mean the death rattle of social justice in popular entertainment as even the normies begin to abandon these shows and movies that represent nothing more than public sacrifices to the social justice gods. Soon, no one will be watching.”
A very good response to the woke version of The Lord of the Rings was also presented by the Critical Drinker, without the cultural Marxist angle.