While being patriotic, and while his son was fighting Italians in Ethiopia, he had some sympathy for Italians - but not for Hitler's Germany. He was a patriot for England - but not for British Parlamentarian Democracy. He considered in Hitler's Germany obedience was put to bad use, but he still considered it a virtue the English could learn from.
So, in a sense, even more if you extend "fascism" to include anything beyond Mussolini's original and its contributary Marinetti's Futurist Party (not quite Tolkien's glass of milk!), for instance Franco or Salazar, Tolkien was more or less fascist and not so crypto. He was against the Reds in the Spanish War.
The Orcs in The Hobbit (and later in Lord of the Rings) may well owe a thing or two to the Reds in Spain.
However, he also considered his books were not allegories. Some might take this as hypocritic, a bit like a record company accused of backmasking saying that in their record company all discs are turning one way only, forward - yes, but what about the magnetophone recordings before the actual discs? Well, I trust Tolkien for one, and for another, some who "decode" him are unusually inept at decoding allegories.
"Since their publication, many critics have labored to decode hidden allegories of real-world events in the adventures of the Fellowship. Because of its racial essentialism and black-and-white morality, Tolkien has often been accused of crypto-fascism."
- There is absolutely no racial essentialism in Tolkien's work, beyond the level like "negros are musically talented" - which is not a very racialist thing to say and also has very little to do with Fascism in the general sense.
There is no "Gondoreans are good" or "men from Harad are bad". Men from Harad were misguided at the start of the war, but one task of Aragorn after it was helping them around in a peaceful way. Peaceful, a part from a decisive destruction of Satanism, that is. And men from Numenor have turned bad : the Ring Wraiths are all originally "Black Numenoreans", and black does not refer to skin colour, but to moral alignment, Denethor sank to Occultism, to Realpolitik and to despair, the kingdoms of the North became dominated by the Witchking Angmar, the foremost of the Nine Ring Wraiths. Hobbits too have sunk low, like Gollum and like Lotho Pimple, not forgetting Ferney. One part of the story is a Rosa Parks turn for the good of the people of Ghân-Buri-Ghân.
It is just that Numenoreans are longer lived and more intellectually talented than some others (Aragorn being a young warrior at 80, like Abraham in Genesis 14), they had the talents necessary for colonialism, and some used it well, others very ill.
Orcs and elves are not human races, and orcs are a twisted version of the elvish "race" or rather kind. No conclusions can be drawn from relation to Orcs or Elves to relations between human races.
And "sorry for the word" (ok, not too much), but it was in use in his day and not everyone using it was ideologically a racialist and he was not.
- Black and White morality is certainly there in Tolkien - but that is the opposite of the Fascisms which went sour like curdled milk. Italian Fascism was beginning good mannered, up to O ... 79 years ago today, no, tomorrow, with the ban on mixed marriages between Italians (not Catholics) and Hebrews (not confessional Jews), against which, 79 years ago today, Pope Pius XI protested.
Why did it change? Because it believed in an evolving, not in a Black and White, morality.
Hitler's party North of the Alps had even less use for Black and White morality.
By contrast, Franco was preserving Spain from things like Sterilisation and Euthanasia, precisely because he believed, as a Catholic, in a Black and White morality.
So, in having this, Tolkien is actually, if not "antifascist" at least against the bad Fascisms. The nearly bad from start German workers' party, and the going bad Italian proto-version of it.
So, with yet another untalented reading of it as allegory about contemporary things, one can most usefully support Tolkien's aversion to allegory (at least to allegorical reading of his own works apart from Leaf by Niggle).
Nevertheless, while John Last is showing some ineptitude with the above quoted remark, I think that he is giving a not too bad story, which shows that Fascists doing Tolkien have some better inspiration than certain episodes of Mussolini or than Evola. A special bonus for pointing out a contrast between Tolkien and Evola:
"While Evola was theorizing a radical break with modernity, J.R.R. Tolkien was living it. After decades cloistered in the English department of a medieval university, rearranging the elements of Anglo-Saxon lore, Tolkien published The Hobbit, in 1937, followed, almost 20 years later, by The Lord of the Rings."
Mille grazie!
And as Evola might have dreamt of a Pagan antimodernity, Tolkien showed forth a Catholic Christian one, with no little Medieval tinge, not far from Pope St Pius X's Antimodernism.
I am much obliged. Due to this, I may simply state, I have been reading Tolkien for a very long time, especially in formative years and the last years before leaving my last adress in Sweden, I have not been paying attention to Evola and don't intend to too much.
Here is the adress to above story:
How ‘Hobbit Camps’ Rebirthed Italian Fascism
by John Last October 03, 2017
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/hobbit-camps-fascism-italy
Enjoy!
Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
St Gertrude
16.XI.2017
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