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David Brin, que ya habló en su momento del amor por las tradiciones del pasado en Star Wars, se encara ahora con la Tierra Media. En «J.R.R. Tolkien — enemy of progress» habla de muchas cosas, especialmente de ese amor y defensa de las clases nobles del pasado y de como la chusma no tiene derecho a decidir su destino. Y claro, también comenta que después de todo la versión que se da en la historia es la escrita por los vencedores:

Ask yourself: «How would Sauron have described the situation?»

And then: «What might ‘really’ have happened?»

Now ponder something that comes through even the party-line demonization of a crushed enemy — this clear-cut and undeniable fact: Sauron’s army was the one that included every species and race on Middle Earth, including all the despised colors of humanity, and all the lower classes.

Hmm. Did they all leave their homes and march to war thinking, «Oh, goody, let’s go serve an evil Dark Lord»?

Or might they instead have thought they were the «good guys,» with a justifiable grievance worth fighting for, rebelling against an ancient, rigid, pyramid-shaped, feudal hierarchy topped by invader-alien elfs and their Numenorean-colonialist human lackeys?

Picture, for a moment, Sauron the Eternal Rebel, relentlessly maligned by the victors of the War of the Ring — the royalists who control the bards and scribes (and moviemakers). Sauron, champion of the common Middle Earthling! Vanquished but still revered by the innumerable poor and oppressed who sit in their squalid huts, wary of the royal secret police with their magical spy-eyes, yet continuing to whisper stories, secretly dreaming and hoping that someday he will return … bringing more rings.

(vía gTexts)