Whether it’s the tremorous sound of orcs stepping in unison, or the horrific gulag-bound trains thundering towards their hellish destination, intimidating means of arrest are a striking commonality among both fictional and real-life totalitarian actors. In his no-holds-barred, damning work The Gulag Archipelago, Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn asks us to imagine such a scenario: “Shut your eyes, reader. Do you hear the thundering of wheels? (Solzhenitsyn 172); this, of course, referring to the locomotives that transported millions of innocent Soviet civilians towards misery, starvation, and doom. Misguided by intense urgency, and granted perverse new power, such people (or beings, in Tolkien’s case) will always dismiss core decency for terror, embracing “lawful” evil at the first chance.
The orcs within Tolkien’s fantasy universe, under influence from both Sauron and Saruman, are willing to follow this tragically common path. People are no longer individuals to them, rather “piece[s] of luggage,” and a “nuisance to be stolen” (Tolkien 445). Just as the men in the Soviet Union who were overcome with malice and trained in the art of psychopathy, these orcs (per Tolkien’s legend) molted from their elven forms and became putrid embodiments of subservience and brutality. They embraced this crooked nature, abandoning the loft and beauty of Rivendell and Lothlorien for caves and other lightless abodes.
Once the humanity is removed from the human, they become mere trash in need of being taken out, objectified in the most callous sense imaginable. What should horrify us all, however, is the near universal susceptibility we all share: the cold truth that almost all are capable of making their fellow people suffer dreadfully, and justifying it with relative ease in hindsight. As Solzhenitsyn reminds us early on in The Gulag Archipelago, “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being,” and it is often those who ignore this incisive reality that lack an ability to combat it.
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