Remember that he fought in a war where it was Democracy vs Dictatorship.
It was very much a good vs evil feeling at the time. You can look at propaganda pieces of the time.
It was very much a good vs evil feeling at the time. You can look at propaganda pieces of the time.
Here's an example of his thought on WWII:
> I have just heard the news. Russians 60 miles from Berlin. It does look as if something decisive might happen soon. The appalling destruction and misery of this war mount hourly : destruction of what should be (indeed is) the common wealth of Europe, and the world, if mankind were not so besotted, wealth the loss of which will affect us all, victors or not. Yet people gloat to hear of the endless lines, 40 miles long, of miserable refugees, women and children pouring West, dying on the way. There seem no bowels of mercy or compassion, no imagination, left in this dark diabolic hour. By which I do not mean that it may not all, in the present situation, mainly (not solely) created by Germany, be necessary and inevitable. But why gloat! We were supposed to have reached a stage of civilization in which it might still be necessary to execute a criminal, but not to gloat, or to hang his wife and child by him while the orc-crowd hooted. The destruction of Germany, be it 100 times merited, is one of the most appalling world-catastrophes. Well, well – you and I can do nothing about it. And that shd. be a measure of the amount of guilt that can justly be assumed to attach to any member of a country who is not a member of its actual Government. Well the first War of the Machines seems to be drawing to its final inconclusive chapter – leaving, alas, everyone the poorer, many bereaved or maimed and millions dead, and only one thing triumphant: the Machines. As the servants of the Machines are becoming a privileged class, the Machines are going to be enormously more powerful. What's their next move?
http://www.tolkienestate.com/en/writing/letters/letter-chris...
If you read his full letters, you will discover that davidy's ideas about what Tolkien thought, and what he represented in LotR, are tremendously wrongheaded.
There are plenty of examples of nuanced war stories, with more consideration and without requiring the use of "evil," for example by Kurt Vonnegut or Joseph Heller. But the path of reading those books starts in adulthood.
> more consideration and without requiring the use of "evil,"
Unfortunately, whether you like or or not, there is a such thing as evil for most people. You appear to like "nuance", which appears to be code for some sliding relativistic scale. Yes, dehumanization is bad, but that's not what Tolkien is doing when he talks about evil, whether you think so or not. That's why, for example, torturing information out of Orcs is unjustifiable in-story regardless of circumstance - because to engage in such an act is to be an Orc, which is a mode of being (alluded to in the Letter I quoted)- or why taking up the Ring causes good to be perverted into evil.