Few people outside Ukraine know that the war between russia and Ukraine began not in 2022, but in 2014. Even then Ukrainians started calling russian soldiers orcs and russia itself Mordor.
Orcs first appeared in the universe of the writer Tolkien. Orcs are a people who have no culture and science of their own, who cannot create anything beautiful. Orcs have no talents and, most importantly, can not live peacefully – only in a constant state of war. And it does not matter whether they fight among themselves or with other peoples inhabiting the fabulous Middle-earth.
That is why their world is a perpetual darkness, where nothing grows and nothing is built, but a constant build-up of armies for further conquest and destruction of other peoples’ cultures. For them war is a common thing, and often they do not realize what they are fighting for and what their goals are. Destruction for the sake of destruction.
The same happened to Ukraine in 2014 and then in 2022. The enemy was deservedly demonized, because it is impossible to compare those who commit terrible crimes with people. Gradually, the concept of orc equals russian soldier went beyond Ukraine.
Perhaps this was facilitated by the fact that such concepts began to be used by officials on their official channels. For example, mayors of Ukrainian cities wrote about orcs, the Ukrainian parliament also used such terminology a couple of times.
Funny incidents with russian orc soldiers
In August 2022, the official youtube channel of the Lord of the Rings saga posted a video message from “real orcs”. They asked not to compare themselves with Russian soldiers, because those “dishonor the title of soldiers by committing terrible crimes” and “Ukrainians are fighting real evil”. Such a comparison offends them very much.
What should we call the criminals who invaded Ukraine?