Book-faithful Uruk-hai and half-orc miniatures?

[Gibby]

Couldn't agree more. Is that quote from the film? I think the book one is even more pertinent:

“It was Sam's first view of a battle of Men against Men and he did not like it much. He was glad he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the man's name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies and threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would no rather have stayed there in peace -”

Emphasis mine. The point here is that Tolkien takes great care to distinguish between fighting between Men and Men (of different skin colours, but Men nonetheless - and remember that there are dark-skinned Men fighting for Gondor and pale-skinned Men fighting for Mordor as well as the other way around) and fighting between Men and Orcs (beasts, automata, evil spirits - whatever they are). And even then, he agonised over the possible salvation of Orcs.

You are right, it is Sam's POV in the book where those poignant words come from. I quite enjoyed the scene in the film where Faramir says it, so it's what came to mind first. I think a re-read of the books is in order this winter.

[Cubs]

Sorry if that was a bit heavy-handed!  

Hell, if I'm wrong I want to be told, so I can get it right next time!

[Captain Blood]

Hell, if I'm wrong I want to be told, so I can get it right next time!

 
You are a paragon of self-improvement.

I have enjoyed this thread 

[Cubs]

I do try, I do try.

[Gangleri]

Didn't Tolkien say "We were all orcs, in the Great War" or something to that effect?

I'm sorry to say that he seems never to have said or written those words.  It's a line often attributed to him in the form above: "Didn't he say that...", "I think I read somewhere that...", and so on.  I have never come across that phrase in Tolkien's own writing nor met anyone else who has.

I also think we should be very wary about connecting orcs to the working class.  Apart from Tolkien's interest in the "ennoblement of the vulgar," itself an extension of his Catholic beliefs, he was much too clever and much too generous for this sort of crude, classist allegory.  And let us not forget Gandalf's words to Denethor: "And for me, I pity even his slaves."

What's more, Tolkien was deeply displeased when adaptations of his works gave characters and races accents.  He wrote that all his works ought to be thought of as accent-free, as it were, and he was especially unhappy that orcs were inevitably given a Cockney accent and always dropped their aitches, even though (as Hobgoblin pointed out earlier) they speak Westron articulately and, evidently, without an accent.  This displeasure suggests he did not intend that orcs evoke the urban working class.

[Vermis]

I'm sorry to say that he seems never to have said or written those words.  It's a line often attributed to him in the form above: "Didn't he say that...", "I think I read somewhere that...", and so on.  I have never come across that phrase in Tolkien's own writing nor met anyone else who has.

I can't recall it myself, but there was a similar sort of feeling about the next war: he had a special horror about the increased use of vehicles and machines, especially aeroplanes and the carnage caused by their bombing. He considered it as using Sauron's methods against him, and when Christopher wrote to him about his new duties as a pilot, he likened it to Frodo finding hobbit-children learning to fly nazgul-beasts. Not all orcs, maybe, but possibly something like Saruman, at the least!

[Hobgoblin]

This quote, from Letter 66 (written to Christopher Tolkien while he was serving with the RAF in WWII), is the one that implies that British soldiers (of all ranks, I think) could be Orcish:

"Your service is, of course, as anybody with any intelligence and ears and eyes knows, a very bad one, living on the repute of a few gallant men, and you are probably in a particularly bad corner of it. But all Big Things planned in a big way feel like that to the toad under the harrow, though on a general view they do function and do their job. An ultimately evil job. For we are attempting to conquer Sauron with the Ring. And we shall (it seems) succeed. But the penalty is, as you will know, to breed new Saurons, and slowly turn Men and Elves into Orcs. Not that in real life things are as clear cut as in a story, and we started out with a great many Orcs on our side… Well, there you are: a hobbit amongst the Urukhai. Keep your hobbitry in heart, and think that all stories feel like that when you are in them. You are inside a very great story."

Emphasis mine.

[area23]

One cannot be pedantic enough on this argument. 
Very entertaining topic.