2972 The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies | True Stories
Is there a hidden story behind The Hobbit Trilogy and Lord of the Rings? Warning: Spoilers! In The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies - having reclaimed Erebor and vast treasure from the dragon Smaug, Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) sacrifices friendship and honor in seeking the Arkenstone, despite Smaug's fiery wrath and desperate attempts by the Hobbit Bilbo (Martin Freeman) to make him see reason. Meanwhile, Sauron sends legions of Orcs in a sneak attack upon the Lonely Mountain. As the fate of Middle Earth hangs in the balance, the races of Men, Elves and Dwarves must decide whether to unite and prevail - or all die.
Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio.
So Peter Jackson's pixel genocide trilogy of The Hobbit has finally come to an end with the Battle of the Five Armies.
The ultimate hymn to the mantra that sighs does not matter.
Although martial arts tend to rigidly classify fighters by weight, somehow a giant battle-hardened orc in, hey, stab my abs, partial armor, wielding a nine-foot sword, no less, is no match for an albino elf with noodle arms whose only effective blade is his chiseled jawline.
Call me old-fashioned or a size bigot, but I'll put my money on Andre the Giant over Wallace Shawn every day of the week, and twice on Sundays.
Contained within the narrative of five armies is a depressingly unheard cautionary tale regarding regime changes and power vacuums.
Smorg, the dragon, is an old king who dominates all the lands around him.
He guards a near-infinite treasure, having driven the dwarves from the Lonely Mountain many years before.
The treasure is, in reality, government power.
Which seems infinite because it is self-replenishing.
Taxpayers are a self-renewing resource.
They send in their money, unlike gold or trees, which are really hard to harvest.
Think of Smaug as Saddam Hussein.
When he is killed, his kingdom does not enjoy a liberated peace, but rather erupts into massive battles.
This is the power vacuum created by a decapitated leader.
The current civil war in Iraq, for example, or the war waged by Arab nations against the newly forged country of Israel.
The Battle of the Five Armies functions as a standard war recruitment mythology, in that heroic good guys take out literally legions of giant bad guys.
Dwarves mow down orcs like jet-fueled lawnmowers.
Bad guys get decapitated and fall off screen, but good guys get invisible belly wounds that give them ample time for Shakespearean exit speeches.
Bad guys are unmourned.
Good guys drown in the tears of their loved ones as they soulfully expire on the ice.
This is the perspective of the soldier.
And Tolkien, the author, fought in some of the bloodiest battles of World War I. You cradle your friends as they die, but enemies explode into distant red fog.
Germany was forcibly transitioned from a monarchy into a democracy after the First World War.
This hurried mess produced the Weimar Republic, so-called because Berlin, the German capital, was under the control of the Communists at the time, which surrendered to Hitler a decade or so later after destroying the German economy through hyperinflation.
The Hobbit was written during Hitler's rise to power.
The end of the German monarchy provoked political and economic disasters that led to the Second World War, just as the end of Smaug provoked the Battle of the Five Armies.
The subtitle of The Hobbit is There and Back Again.
This is war.
We are heading back to the First World War in the slow, double-tap suicide of ancient Western culture.
Greed is constantly denounced in Tolkien's works.
Greed for power, for rings, for gold.
Greed is forever the motive for malice, except perhaps for the baseless and causeless evil of Hitler slash Sauron.
However, greed is a confusing element in Five Armies.
Thorin wants to return to his homeland to kill the dragon and reclaim the lonely mountain, but once he achieves this, his lust fixates on mere money.
He could secure his kingdom by sharing his treasure, which is portrayed as so vast that a tenth of it could easily sustain a monarch.
Smorg did not share, and Smorg was killed.
Thorin does not share, and Thorin is killed.
This shows the inevitable corruptions of centralized power, be it unowned wealth or political power, two sides of the same black coin.
Tolkien himself was an anarchist, although not a particularly consistent one, as the title of the third book in the Lord of the Rings trilogy shows, The Return of the King.
This is like a feminist pining for The Return of the Patriarch.
The Battle of the Five Armies rages not because Thorin is corrupted by power, but because, as the new dwarven king, his companions consistently defer to his authority.
A king goes mad because he is unopposed.
This is a lesson as old as King Lear.
And political power creates the sycophancy, which promotes and hides narcissism and megalomania.
The problem is not the gold, as always.
The problem is the power.
It is not so much that Thorin refuses to buy peace with gold, but rather that his companions are willing to sell their moral conscience to the illusion of political power.
Why don't they put things to a vote?
They can't, because royalty.
We suffer from the same plague.
Something is legal, therefore it is moral.
We scarcely have any conscience left independent of government edicts.
Welfare is legal, therefore it is not the forced redistribution of wealth.
National debts are legal, therefore they are not the enslavement of the unborn.
Fiat currency is legal tender, therefore it is not mere electronic counterfeiting.
War is not murder because...
Thus, is Thorin any better than the dragon Smorg?
There was an uneasy peace and stability before the dwarves arrived.
Lake Town was burned from the sky, just as Fallujah was, and the end of Saddam Hussein was the end of relative stability.
Those burned alive by the flamethrower of Dragon Breath could be forgiven for, in their last moments, bitterly regretting their greed.
Like most recipients of promised political change, they received only death and destruction.
Liberty, fraternity, guillotine.
The dictatorship of the proletariat?
Dictatorship.
Using violence to advance social change usually backfires.
It is like trying to fast grow a rose by yanking on it, rather than letting the patience of sun and water do the job for you.
The true progress of mankind is multi-generational and involves the gentle and peaceful parenting of children.
Battling dragons and overthrowing dictators creates the trauma that harms children, thus only accelerating the wild blades of the cycle of violence.
What message should we take from The Hobbit?
At the level of bald allegory, it is as instructive as a history lesson.
The Lonely Mountain is the ancient home of the Jews.
Just as the British did with the 1917 Balfour Declaration when it promised a state to the Jews, the very British, Bilbo Baggins, strives to ensure that the dwarves reclaim their ancient kingdom.
Jewish stereotypes abound.
Dwarves are really good at creating jewelry and working with gems.
Speaking with outsiders in the local language, but conversing among themselves in their own ancient tongue.
Obsessed with gold and adept at having others fight their battles for them, even the big noses and flowing beards might be considered a kind of clue.
The standard myth of exclusion is central to the tale, but remains frustratingly elusive in the plot.
Everyone who desires power becomes corrupted.
Greed for control undoes the soul.
Except for those who gain power at the end of the story, who apparently usher in a new golden age.
The drama of dead souls is always violence.
The sword is needed to excite those who can barely feel.
They must kill or witness killing in order to feel alive.
The soulless will always thirst for the lie that violence brings life, that violence brings freedom, that violence reforms the world.
These bodies will always rush out to slaughter for a myth, for a lie.
The lie is necessary for the kill, but the kill never makes the lie true.
It is not supposed to.
It is only supposed to appease the remnants of the conscience.
Most history is designed to erase history so that the same false promises can be made again and again with a straight face and swallowed without questions or skepticism.
Thus war is supposed to liberate when it is merely designed to protect and profit those in power.
The lie is that if we murder the dragon, we do not become the dragon.
