Louis, by the grace of God, King of France and Navarre, to all present and to come, greeting from the year 1708:

Elves and Ringwraiths, Hobbits and Orcs, Gandalf and Saruman, Aragorn and Sauron, Peace and War, Light and Darkness, White and Black - that's the world of The Lord of the Rings, written more than two centuries after my death. Nevertheless, I read it last week - as what you call an eBook. Downloading such a huge oeuvre into the 18th century with a steam-powered computer is a pain in the ass - but it was worth it.

Personally, I love this book. It's very creative and rich, one of the best stories I've ever read. It's basically kind of a huge fairytale (or "literary legend" if you prefer this expression).

But that's the point: It's a fairytale. In a fairytale, it's natural to have "Good" fighting against "Evil". In a fairytale, Good and Evil are not question of behaviour, not a question of ethics, but a question of nature. Elves are good by nature, Orcs are evil by nature. Gandalf and Aragorn are good by nature, Sauron and the Nazgûl are evil by nature. As in this kind of story, good guys naturally ally with other good guys against evil guys, good and evil become also a question of sides:

Good = Us, Evil = Them

The good guys are good because they kill the evil guys, and the evil guys are evil because they kill the good guys. A very simple and clear principle. This is how fairytales work.

But what about reality? Can this conception of "Good" and "Evil" be transferred into real life? Would Gandalf be "good" in a world where goodness is - or should be - measured by ethics? Maybe not. He manipulates people. He is friends with fanatic racist Aragorn who kills orcs just for being orcs. He tortures Gollum to retrieve information. He abandons his "friends" always when they need him most. He may be even a liar. (Mister Gandalf, if you were really held prisoner on the top of Isengard, how did you get your wand back?) And power-hungry as he is, he goes far beyond his orders to "help and assist" and becomes the leader of the alliance against Sauron. (Gandalf - ripped out of the fairytale context - makes me believe that there is only one thing worse than a fanatic who pretends being sent by the gods : a fanatic who really is.)

In fact, Gandalf reminds me a real-world person who also wears a beard, a dress, and a funny hat, who feels also he has been send by some divinity, who also is full of hatred on what he considers the "Empire of Evil", and who also sends naïve innocents on suicide missions to destroy what's most precious to his enemies :



As said, this is only under the hypothesis that Gandalf would be torn out of the "fairytale" context. As character in The Lord of the Rings, I like and admire Gandalf.

But I'm digressing. The point is, you can't transfer the "Good vs. Evil" schema from The Lord of the Rings to reality. In reality, "Good" is not a question of what flag you are fighting under, it's a question of ethics, of behaviour. If you define "Good = Us, Evil = Them", you are applying exactly the same logic as Al-Qaeda.

When you run over some creature with a green face in Middle Earth, you can assume that it is evil, and kill it the most cruel way that comes to your mind; it will be okay. But you can't do the same in reality. Here's a photo of a real person with a green face:



His name is Omar Khadr, he is 15. His face is green because he just got shot into the back by a US soldier, twice. He is more or less what you call a "child soldier", and his only sin was that he maybe did what soldiers are supposed to do: kill enemy soldiers. The shooting left him blind in one eye. And as he lies there, his life is just about to become worse: he will be sent to Guantanamo, and, among other humiliations, be used as a human mop to clean urine on the floor..

Jesus said: "What you did to the least of my brothers, you have done to me." (Matthew 25:40) Think about it. I'm pretty sure that when it comes to the Last Judgment, having used Jesus as human mop will not speak in favour of the jailors of Guantanamo.

That's not how I treat my prisoners of war, and I would have executed every officer of mine who treated prisoners this way. Don't these jailors have any honour? Why do they treat their prisoners like human scum, even children? The answer why they do so is, maybe, in one of the first responses to the article I mentioned:

Frightening. That's exactly the attitude that led me to the writing of this article. We are not in LotR - this is reality. And in reality, "good" and "bad" are not questions of sides, but of ethics. And using a prisoner of war as a human mop to clean urine on the floor is not what I call an ethical behaviour.

(Oh, and by the way: Renaming "prisoners of war" into "enemy combatants" to avoid written or unwritten conventions about the treatment of prisoners of war does not help anything.)

Don't misunderstand me: I'm not telling you to turn your swords into ploughshares. I'm not telling you to make peace, not war. Wars have ever existed and will ever exist. I'm currently making war against Austrian Habsbourg and their allies.

But please, please, stop claiming that you are fighting because you are the good guys and they are the bad guys. They are your enemies, but they are not evil for being your enemies. I have probably made more wars than most of you, and I can tell you this: since the dawn of mankind, no war has ever been made for ethics. Wars are made for politics, ideology, territory and such. There is no such thing as a "good vs. evil" war.

Pardon? You don't agree? The War of Secession, to free the poor slaves? Nonsense. This war will be fought to save the Union, not to free the slaves.

Abraham Lincoln will write in 1862:

That's what was (will be) behind this war - everything else is war propaganda. In fact, every time someone tells you that you are the good guys and that he wants you to fight the evil guys, you can be pretty sure that it's war propaganda. Bin Laden tells the same thing to his people.

I feel that you still don't agree. I feel that you will object that I'm not well informed down here in 1708, that in your time, at least one intervention of America was a "Good vs. Evil" fight: The intervention in WW2, as it stopped a genocide. I agree that it did stop the genocide - but this was not the reason, it was a side-effect. America didn't intervene because Hitler was slaughtering the Jews - it intervened because he was taking over Europe. If the Allies would have wanted to stop the genocide, they would have bombarded the railroad to Auschwitz with their flying machines, but they didn't. So, stopping the "Evil" was not a priority. Stopping the growth of a rival superpower in Europe was. It wasn't about ethics, it was about politics. As always.

You see, I'm not that uninformed. I might live in 1708, but I've got Internet. However, with a terrible bandwidth.

That's why I think that the meaning of the words "Good" and "Evil" in The Lord of the Rings are not the same as in reality. And that's why I think you should not read this book unless you do realize this difference. This is a wonderful book, but dangerous if read by the simple minds. You are not Elrond, people, I'm not King Aragorn, and Omar Khadr is not an orc. We are all humans who have to question every step we do, and we will once be judged by what we did, not by what flag we were fighting for.

Elves and Ringwraiths, Hobbits and Orcs, Gandalf and Saruman, Aragorn and Sauron, Peace and War, Light and Darkness, White and Black, America and Al-Qaeda, GIs and Terrorists, Christendom and Islam, Good and Evil - do you really think it is so simple?

Given at Versailles in the month of May, in the year of grace 1708, and of our reign the sixty sixth.