Your secret is safe with my indifference.

[The Lord of the Rings] is simply the Aryan version of the origins of European civilization (which is “civilization” period). … What Tolkien has in effect done, then, is to project onto a fantasy earth the central racist myth of the last millennium: that all human culture comes from the whitest of white peoples, speaking the whitest of languages, and that non-whites are a threat to civilization, culture, and humanity. The “subcreation” of Middle-Earth which is his considerable accomplishment has to be taken out of its misleadingly individualist framework and seen, more illuminatingly, as part of the general European re-invention of the world: the “creation” of the Orient, of Africa, of the Negro. The contribution of Islam to preserving the knowledge of the Ancient World, the contribution of Egypt (if Bernal and other scholars are right) to creating that knowledge in the first place, are excised, and replaced by the vacant spaces of Rhun and Harad, and the history-less and culture-less orc. One could say, only half in jest, that The Lord of the Rings is a medievalist’s revenge on the unacknowledged and undesired ancestors of medieval Europe’s civilization. The literal genocide of the orcs with which the book concludes is in a sense of secondary importance to the cultural genocide that their creation signified in the first place. For the very fact that such a creation was at all possible is a sobering testimony to the completeness of European intellectual hegemony over the world, and its successful re-writing of history. Could there be a clearer indictment of the West’s willed ignorance of its own past, of the continued naturalness to its vision of racially-structured categorizations of personhood, than the fact that this book should have been hailed for nearly four decades for its moral insight and metaphysical truth? It is a blindness that precludes any genuine re-seeing of the orcs of the past—and present.

“Why should rich people pay more” because fuck ‘em