This Is Not A Horror Movie, But Islamic State Reality

Orcs. That is what these creatures have turned themselves into. They are orcs. They are the real-life equivalent of Tolkien’s fictional orcs. And it is perfeclty possible that Catholic Tolkien, steeped in the history of the early and high middle ages, but also well aware of the entire sweep of the history of European Christendom (the ride of the Rohirrim to the rescue of his fictional Gondor owes, I am absolutely convinced, a very great deal to the real-life rescue of Vienna by Jan Sobieski and the Winged Hussars), when imagining the Orcs, drew upon his awareness of the behaviour of the marauding mohammedan hordes. I used to think, when I read about the Orcs, and Mordor, that nothing real could possibly be so awful. Now I know that I was wrong.