The Racist Subtext of LOTR

I have serious problems with the racial coding of the Lord of the Rings films, ie. Orcs and Uruk-Hai being played by Maori actors, the black and brown armies from the East, etc.

Peter Jackson took his casting cues from the underlying racism of his source material. In Tolkien's books, all of the humans who side with Sauron are people of color; Haradrim are Arabs, Easterlings are Asians, and the Southerns of Far Haradrim are Africans. (There is a passage in The Return of the King that refers to the men of Far Harad, i.e. Africa, as being "black men like half-trolls with white eyes and red tongues." I've hated Tolkien since noticing this during my second reading of LOTR at age 11.)

The people of middle earth are all white, with the Gondoreans being the whitest and accordingly, in Tolkien's view, the most noble. But Aragorn, the King, is of a still whiter meta-human group called "The Dúnedain of the North." They originated outside of Middle Earth on an island of whiter-than-the-whitest-Scandinavian white men, called Númenor. The Númenors in Tolkien's milieu are dead ringers for the Hyperboreans of early Nazi mythology.

LOTR's is all about how far the men of middle earth have fallen from that purest white state. This is why Aragorn is so significant. Not only is he of Númenorean blood, but he has Elven (whiter still) ancestry (via Lúthien Tinúviel) and even divine ancestry (via Melian). His eventual marriage to Arwen Evenstar is meant to purify the Whiteness of the Gondorean royal line and bring about a golden age. It's all racist clap-trap

What I find interesting is that Hitler believed in a very similar mythology. Hitler, who was heavily influenced by Madame Blavatsky's Thule Society, believed that the once pure Aryan blood of the German people had been diluted through interbreeding central Europeans, Slavs and Jews. He tried to bring them into a whiter, more Aryan, state by eugenic means, specifically the forced breeding of Norwegian women in Aryan baby factories by German officers. This was Hitler's Lebensborn program. The Norwegians and Swedes were the Gondorean's of Hitlers philosophy. Also, Hitler supposedly believed that the lost city of Atlantis (Thule/Hyperborea) existed and had been home to the super white "aryan" race that spawned all northern Europeans. This is a direct and obvious parallel to Tolkien's Númenor (or rather Tolkien's mythology was a direct parallel to it.)

For those who haven't read "The Silmarilion" (Tolkien's magnus opus,) Númenor was the island from which Aragorn's ancestors came. It was not of middle earth, being in the far west, halfway between middle earth and and Aman (Aman is a heaven on earth were gods, who are never mentioned in LOTR, live. It is these gods, The Valar, who sent the Istari--wizards, of which Gandalf is one--to Middle-earth.) The Númenoreans eventually tried to make war on Aman, seeking to become immortal themselves. The Valar responded by sinking Númenor beneath the sea (Sound familiar?). What was left of the Númenoreans sailed to middle earth and founded the Northern Kingdoms of Arnor and Gondor. Gradually as their Númenorean blood was diluted the fortunes of these kingdoms fell. In the end Mr. Whiter-than-the-whitest-White-man, Aragorn, reunited both northern kingdoms, purified his Númenorean bloodline by marrying his distant half-elven cousin, Arwen Undómiel and lived happily ever after. This is exactly what the real life Aragorn, Adolph Hitler, wanted to do in the real life Middle-earth, Europe.