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Avatar: The Holocaust We Will Not See

120 points by swombat 17y ago

jafl5272 17y ago
He only has one book as the reference for all the “history,” which makes me doubt most of it. Certainly, the claim that everybody (except Aztecs and Incas) was “peacable” (sic) is nonsense. The Apache tribes often raided each other (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_indians http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_indians), and the legendary Apache fighting skills were certainly not a result of living peacefully for centuries before the Europeans arrived.
_h4xr 17y ago
I recommend getting over it. You are almost certainly the descendants murderers and conquerors. http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=7819&IBLOCK_ID=35 http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=7819&... That's just how humans roll. Western Europe had lots of problems, but countries that operate in the European tradition are better places to live. (At least, when you look at the immigration patterns between third-world and first-world countries, it's clear that first world countries export idealism, which is then processed into jaded realism and returned. Meanwhile, poor countries send their top .1% to join the Western world's top 10%; a good deal for both sides).
- aaronblohowiak 17y ago
  "Meanwhile, poor countries send their top .1% to join the Western world's top 10%; a good deal for both sides" -- not for the rest of the population of poor countries.
  - jacoblyles 17y ago
    What if the top .1% (however defined) of poor countries wouldn't have had the opportunity to exercise their talents at home? How many famous scientists would be subsistence farmers if the GDP of their country was lower? I would guess that India gains by having rich Indians living abroad. They increase the wealth of their families still living in India, they sometimes move back to India or start businesses there. If they didn't have the opportunity to move abroad and get rich, India probably wouldn't be as wealthy.
    - ippisl 17y ago
      What about doctors and nurses going to rich countries ?
- senthil_rajasek 17y ago
  "That's just how humans roll." Thats not how I look at it. We have made progress from a society of primitive tribes to a more reasonable society rapidly in the last couple of centuries. Universal women's suffrage (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Womens_suffrage#United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Womens_suffrage#United_States) did not even exist in the United States until the beginning of the 20th century. There is an endless number of social issues that Humans have made advancements, including Civil Rights, Gay Rights etc., Our understanding of the world has increased [changed] and so has our ability to make decisions based on such new knowledge.
  - jswinghammer 17y ago
    Your bias is defining all those things you listed as progress. For some those items are signs of a degenerate society that has lost its way. Your thinking is more like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_history#Social_evolutionism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_history#Social_ev... Than this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cycle_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cycle_theory
  - benmathes 17y ago
    You're definitely correct that we are progressing as societies. We observe new rights and freedoms along with rates of death and murder lower than ever in history. However, it's almost guaranteed that you do descend from conquerors, warlords, or murders. This probability says nothing about what you should do or whether you should learn from the past. It only states that in the past few thousand years shit has been pretty bad, and humans adapted to it.
- wendroid 17y ago
  The third-world isn't some laggard full of overbreeding simpletons. It was created in the 18th & 19th century by well armed invaders helped at the end of the 19th C by drought & flood that killed 50m people in India & China and 50m in S. America. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Victorian_Holocausts http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Victorian_Holocausts Indian & Chinese civilisation was crushed by armies & opium.
  - _h4xr 17y ago
    The third-world isn't some laggard full of overbreeding simpletons. Any concrete reason for that belief? It looks like the "overbreeding" is objectively true: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_birth_rate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_birth_rate . As far as simpletons go, you tell me: is there any intelligence test you know of that routinely ranks people in Djibouti over people in Japan? If not, it sounds like your statement is unfounded. The rest of your interpretation is also suspect. The places Victorians conquered weren't more advanced than the places the Victorians came from. Regardless of the reason, Europe was more technologically advanced than the rest of the world, and they used that advantage to conquer as much of the world as they could. When you complain about how the Victorians ran things, you have to compare it to something. If you compare, e.g., the Congo in 1955 (http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,866343,00.html http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,866343,00.html ) to the Congo in 2008 (http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1713275,00.html http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1713275,00.htm... ) you get the idea. You might not like how imperialists run things--but they run things well because they run them for profit. You can also consider Singapore (which is basically Victorian, and basically paradise on earth for law-abiding people).
    - pyre 17y ago
      > You can also consider Singapore (which is basically Victorian, and basically paradise on earth for law-abiding people). It's interesting that you need to preface that with 'law-abiding people.' What happens when you are accidentally on the other side of the law? Update: Maybe I should be more specific in what I mean. In Thailand you aren't a 'law-abiding citizen' if you criticize the king. What similar laws does Singapore have? What happens is someone doesn't like me and decides to set me up for a crime I am no guilty of (e.g. deface some property and then claim that I did it)? The only problem that I have with harsh justice systems: What happens if you're an innocent person, but that system believes you to be guilty?
- cynicalkane 17y ago
  I'd like to think modern man is a better class of humans than their murderously genocidal ancestors. With so many of the comments seemingly endorsing manifest destiny on the part of "civilized" people, I'm beginning to reconsider this opinion.
  - protomyth 17y ago
    read some articles on the "modern, civilized" Indian Health Service and find an reason to reconsider.
  - mmt 17y ago
    If I may quote another movie: "I'd like that.. but that shit ain't the truth." Other than merely agreeing with the commentor on this aspect of human nature, I do have a point. I believe to deny the brutality in our nature is extremely dangerous. I suggest the whole point of civilization is to recognize the destructive potential in us all and to regulate it. Granted, you may be right. However, the consequence of putting in unnecessary protections against destruction are much more mild than the converse case.
- dschobel 17y ago
  That's just how humans roll. Precisely. History is littered with examples of the imperialistic tendencies of man (if you want to see some grade-A imperialism, look into how the Aztecs built their empire, hint: it wasn't by having lots of babies).
  - maxwell 17y ago
    Appeal to history. Just because a lot of source code is littered with GOTOs doesn't mean that approach is "how hackers roll." Imperialism's just a phase; it's already generally considered harmful.
    - dschobel 17y ago
      The discussion at hand is about history of imperialism so 'appealing to history' shouldn't be that surprising. Also, I'm curious, how are things in your post-imperialist future? Is everything lovely?
      - maxwell 17y ago
        It's not surprising, but it's still a fallacy. And civilization without imperialism will probably be about as "lovely" as code without GOTOs.
- maxwell 17y ago
  > Western Europe had lots of problems, but countries that operate in the European tradition are better places to live. But what suggests "places that operate in the European tradition" will remain better (i.e. what traits of Euro civilization are optimal given any group of humans)? What makes this expression any more meaningful than something like, "C had lots of problems, but languages in the C-family are better to work with"?
  - _h4xr 17y ago
    If the smartest non-C programmers all started programming in C, and the C programmers never switched to something else, you could make that judgment. What's interesting is that I almost never find out, halfway through an argument like this, that I'm talking to someone who moved to a place unspoiled by Western imperialism. Mongolia, for example.
bokonist 17y ago
Question to HN readers who are sympathetic with this article: If you could wave a magic wand and "undo" all that was done, would you do so? So imagine all those who perished in the 1500's would be revived from the dead and restored to their ancestral lands, all those living in the Americas now would be sent back to England, Ireland, China, etc, with a one way ticket and $10K in cash to start a new life. Would you wave your wand and cast this spell?
- mattmaroon 17y ago
  I'm sympathetic to the plight of the native American, though this article is poor, but no, I would not. It's an unfortunate but necessary part of human progress. It's no worse than the Romans, or Gauls, or Saxons, etc. By that logic you'd have to keep waving your wand until we were all back on the Savannah tossing spears at antelopes.
  - eries 17y ago
    I think the most interesting part of Guns, Germs and Steel was the assertion that violence is not an aberrant condition for humans. In other words, violence is not a disease, it's standard operating procedure. However, it's normal only under certain conditions. So to prevent violence, you need to work on preventing those conditions.
  - Quarrelsome 17y ago
    I wouldn't say it was necessary. But it happened and that history wasn't ours. We only get to influence things that are happening now.
  - arcadeparade 17y ago
    >It's no worse than the Romans, or Gauls, or Saxons, etc. Or the Nazis? If they had won WW2 I'm sure some people in Germany today would be calling the Holocaust "an unfortunate but necessary part of human progress" and would tell us all about the backwardness of Jewish culture, I'm sure while also being "sympathetic to the plight" of those victims too. That doesn't mean that one group of people have the right to wipe out another culture to benefit their own, no matter what the consequences are. I'm really shocked by some of the comments here.
mattmaroon 17y ago
"But in this case the metaphor is conscious and precise: this is the story of European engagement with the native peoples of the Americas." One planetary race driving another into extinction is a universal, cookie-cutter sci-fi plot device. See Independence Day or Ender's Game. I suppose this was the only one where the victims had some sort of aboriginal-sounding accent, but I wouldn't take it as social commentary.
- aristus 17y ago
  They also had badass arrows. But on a world where the flying things are all glowing and lizardy, where did they get the feathers for the arrows?
  - swernli 17y ago
    Could have been from some of the plant life. There certainly seemed to be an abundance of native flora and fauna that took sufficiently different forms from the standard leafy greens that it isn't implausible that the "feathers" were really plant-based. Then again, it's a made up world in a sci-fi movie; there is a long list of things that wouldn't be "implausible."
  - whimsy 17y ago
    Didn't those hammerhead things have feathers on their heads?
eries 17y ago
I was expecting the "The Holocaust We Will Not See" to be the one that will obviously take place after the film ends. The native people have driven the imperialists off their planet. But, the imperialists have space weapons and the natives do not. Plus, the imperialists only want inert matter that exists underground. And, they are so evil they have no respect for life in any form. I assume a kinetic bombardment is imminent: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment
- jockc 17y ago
  I was thinking this too as the credits were rolling.
- seldo 17y ago
  [Warning: spoiler-heavy] I have to say the exact same thing occurred to me at the end of the movie. "And so the aliens returned to their dying world." ...yeah, to get more ammo. Of course, the counter-argument might be that the Na'vi managed to defeat a heavily-armed base using a skeleton force, before most of the tribes had even turned up, so by the time they got back Pandora could be too well-prepared to resist for them to be successful. Kinetic bombardment is all very well, but you need to get down to the surface to pick the stuff up -- unless you completely destroy every living thing on the planet, in which case you develop a very serious logistical problem (they were growing their own food on the surface).
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
- AndrewO 17y ago
  I'm sure all of this will make it's way into the sequel(s)...
- rms 17y ago
  I thought about that and assumed it was a plot hole in the movie. A neutron bomb seemed like such an obvious solution. The scriptment fills in some of the gaps though. First, corporations are banned from using weapons of mass destruction in space. Second, the planetary consciousness convinces the humans to leave and not return by threatening them with a virus that will kill all of them.
astine 17y ago
This article is largely based on the claims of Bartolome de Las Casas, an activist from the time of Conquistadors. Some scholars believe thathe wildly exaggerated the crimes in order to convince the Spanish and other governments to intervene.
- narag 17y ago
  Has anyone travelled to both Spain and Latin America? Spaniards are white. Latins have on average a mixed colour. So it's clear that extermination did not take place... there.
  - b-man 17y ago
    There was miscegenation for sure, not only with native people but between Europeans, Africans and everyone else that came here. But that does not imply that there was not an extermination. [1] [1] A single and not isolated example. -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupi_people#European_colonization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupi_people#European_colonizati...
    - narag 17y ago
      There was miscegenation for sure, not only with native people but between Europeans, Africans and everyone else that came here. The racial traits are different from african to american natives. It's clear the difference between Brazil or Cuba (where most slaves were brought) and Mexico. And remember I'm writting of average, About the word "extermination" it seems you're using it to describe killing of many individuals. I would keep it to refer to something like killing 99.99 indigenous population.
  - borism 17y ago
    What should I make of the fact they're mixed color? Extermination didn't take place, but rape did?
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
DanielBMarkham 17y ago
I made it about halfway this through before bailing. Yet another "western civilization is so bad" articles. Ho hum. The problem here is, as mattmaroon put it, if you buy into this logic we'd all still be chasing down antelopes on the savannah. At some point some civilizations, for whatever reason, start developing things like private property, the wheel, common law, reading, the printing press, etc. It's become fashionable to say something like "well, that doesn't make them any better than other civilizations" but I think that's soft-headed horseshit. Anybody who lives in a civilization with private property, contract law, medicine, literature and art is living in a better place, and in a better way, that somebody who doesn't have it. Some cultures are demonstrably better than others, like it or not. The interesting question, especially with alien stories, is "How do two wildly diverse cultures interact in a way that is respectful of both?" I've thought about this for some time, and using all the earthly examples I can come up with, the fact is they don't. If we ever meet another primitive species and interact with them? It's going to be very traumatic on the part of the other species. Likewise, if Cebulons from the Osari System arrive next week with technology five thousand years ahead of ours? You can say goodbye to a lot of what people think of when they talk about human culture. And I guess I'm okay with that. If the Cebulons show up, I'm going to be first in line learning to speak Cebulonese, watching all the Cebulonese TV shows, and taking my kids to Cebulonese high schools. We will learn, adapt, and overcome, and the human species will continue. To me that's a lot more rational that sitting around moaning about how things might have/would have been had things not changed. I just hope the Cebulons come to trade and exploit our resources in a manner respectful of private property, so we can go to their system and do the same one day :) I really did not like Avatar. Gorgeous, magnificent movie. Terrible hackneyed, one-dimensional plot. Ugh. I think a quote from Cameron's other movie is most apt: I vote we nuke it from orbit. It's the only way we can really be sure.
- cynicalkane 17y ago
  Would you be OK with that if the Cebulons wiped out 90% of the human population? Because that's at least the scale of the genocide we're talking about.
  - jobu 17y ago
breck 17y ago
It humors me when people speak so confidently about events that happened 400 years ago, and yet if you asked them to explain in detail the events of their own life a year ago would have trouble remembering. I went to an exhibit once with real photographs from a native indian population taken in the late 1800's. The photos showed a population that looked, quite frankly, very savage and violent. These people didn't look like Pocahontus or the friendly blue creatures of Avatar. I'm not going to state an opinion either way about the early colonization of America because frankly I have no clue about it and don't really care. However, I do have an opinion that raw life is a brutal thing. Always has and probably always will be. It was particularly brutal back then, for both the Native Americans and the Europeans. I'd hate to have to live in either time period. The depictions we see in movies are far, far removed from reality.
IsaacSchlueter 17y ago
This article, and many of the comments here, hint at a deeper and more interesting phenomenon: the need to have things be either all good or all bad. That is, either (A) western civilization is good, and the things it has done were good, and the things it values are good values, etc., or (B) it's bad, and the things it has done were bad, and the things it values are bad values, etc. Once this dichotomy is accepted, any evidence of goodness is proof of A, and any evidence of badness is proof of B. If A is accepted, then nothing can be bad, and if B is accepted, then nothing can be good. You get one guy saying "Medicine good!" and another saying "Slavery bad!" and they shout at each other forever. In fact, A and B are both all-or-nothing cognitive distortions. It's quite possible for the Native Americans to have been savages, and the Europeans to have been savages (with better weapons), and for one group of awful people to have murdered another group of awful people. Losing doesn't make someone good, and neither does winning. Having nice things today doesn't mean that genocide 400 years ago was a good idea. Being good doesn't mean we came from good people or entirely good traditions. Neither does being bad. Having some good traits doesn't mean we have nothing left to learn, or that we can't get better. In fact, good people can even learn things from bad people, or good cultures can learn things from bad cultures. Even if modern western culture is, on the net, much better for humans than aboriginal American culture, we can still probably learn a lot from it. There's a lot of richness between these blacks and whites. Perfection is not required for goodness.
- themilkmandan 17y ago
  Yes, all this black-or-white talk about genocide misses a lot of the subtleties. How about a nuanced analysis of the Jewish Holocaust? Nobody brings up enough the fact that Hitler built some damn good roads.
  - seldo 17y ago
    You're missing the point. It's not that genocide is sometimes good, it's that civilizations that commit genocide also do good things. The Germany that produced the Jewish holocaust also invented rocket science, which indirectly led us to the space program, satellites, and a big chunk of our modern communications network. Does this excuse genocide? No. Does it make it difficult to label German civilization as "all good" or "all bad"? It absolutely does.
davidw 17y ago
That's reddit bait if I've ever seen it.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
blahedo 17y ago
Fascinatingly, but unsurprisingly, this is yet another piece that uses Avatar as a springboard into an essay about real-world human events starting from the claim that Avatar is clearly allegory for one specific such event. Being from the second wave of such articles, it even takes note of the other interpretations and alleges them to be incorrect. What makes Avatar such a great movie is that A) so many people are so sure it's "about" a particular historical or current situation that they care about and B) they're all different. I've seen Vietnam, I've seen Iraq, I've seen Afghanistan, I've seen South America or the Americas as a whole, I've seen Africa, I've seen climate change, man, I've seen a lot of different interpretations. James Cameron FTW!
grellas 17y ago
The idea of glamorizing indigenous peoples has always fascinated me. Do those historically connected with a particular place throughout its history never experience cruelty? How does one explain the slaughter in Rwanda and similar places if tribes living in one place are said to be imbued with an innate purity that should exempt them from having the same impulses toward evil and genocide that characterize the rest of the world? As I ponder these things, and consider the lurid facts depicted in this article, my intuition tells me that this might be as much a case of selective reporting as anything else - reporting that seeks to shape a narrative consistent with a particular worldview held by the author of the piece. I know there have been atrocities in the United States and in the Americas generally. But there is undoubtedly something very good as well to be said for the United States in particular, where (whatever its shortcomings and inconsistencies) freedom has been upheld for the benefit of all sorts of people and with which most of the world pales in comparison in terms of opportunities, or at least that is how umpteen generations of immigrations scrambling to get here have seen it.

120 points by swombat 17y ago

He only has one book as the reference for all the “history,” which makes me doubt most of it. Certainly, the claim that everybody (except Aztecs and Incas) was “peacable” (sic) is nonsense. The Apache tribes often raided each other (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_indians http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_indians), and the legendary Apache fighting skills were certainly not a result of living peacefully for centuries before the Europeans arrived.

_h4xr 17y ago

I recommend getting over it. You are almost certainly the descendants murderers and conquerors. http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=7819&IBLOCK_ID=35 http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=7819&... That's just how humans roll. Western Europe had lots of problems, but countries that operate in the European tradition are better places to live. (At least, when you look at the immigration patterns between third-world and first-world countries, it's clear that first world countries export idealism, which is then processed into jaded realism and returned. Meanwhile, poor countries send their top .1% to join the Western world's top 10%; a good deal for both sides).

aaronblohowiak 17y ago
"Meanwhile, poor countries send their top .1% to join the Western world's top 10%; a good deal for both sides" -- not for the rest of the population of poor countries.
- jacoblyles 17y ago
  What if the top .1% (however defined) of poor countries wouldn't have had the opportunity to exercise their talents at home? How many famous scientists would be subsistence farmers if the GDP of their country was lower? I would guess that India gains by having rich Indians living abroad. They increase the wealth of their families still living in India, they sometimes move back to India or start businesses there. If they didn't have the opportunity to move abroad and get rich, India probably wouldn't be as wealthy.
  - ippisl 17y ago
    What about doctors and nurses going to rich countries ?
senthil_rajasek 17y ago
"That's just how humans roll." Thats not how I look at it. We have made progress from a society of primitive tribes to a more reasonable society rapidly in the last couple of centuries. Universal women's suffrage (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Womens_suffrage#United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Womens_suffrage#United_States) did not even exist in the United States until the beginning of the 20th century. There is an endless number of social issues that Humans have made advancements, including Civil Rights, Gay Rights etc., Our understanding of the world has increased [changed] and so has our ability to make decisions based on such new knowledge.
- jswinghammer 17y ago
  Your bias is defining all those things you listed as progress. For some those items are signs of a degenerate society that has lost its way. Your thinking is more like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_history#Social_evolutionism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_history#Social_ev... Than this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cycle_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cycle_theory
- benmathes 17y ago
  You're definitely correct that we are progressing as societies. We observe new rights and freedoms along with rates of death and murder lower than ever in history. However, it's almost guaranteed that you do descend from conquerors, warlords, or murders. This probability says nothing about what you should do or whether you should learn from the past. It only states that in the past few thousand years shit has been pretty bad, and humans adapted to it.
wendroid 17y ago
The third-world isn't some laggard full of overbreeding simpletons. It was created in the 18th & 19th century by well armed invaders helped at the end of the 19th C by drought & flood that killed 50m people in India & China and 50m in S. America. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Victorian_Holocausts http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Victorian_Holocausts Indian & Chinese civilisation was crushed by armies & opium.
- _h4xr 17y ago
  The third-world isn't some laggard full of overbreeding simpletons. Any concrete reason for that belief? It looks like the "overbreeding" is objectively true: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_birth_rate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_birth_rate . As far as simpletons go, you tell me: is there any intelligence test you know of that routinely ranks people in Djibouti over people in Japan? If not, it sounds like your statement is unfounded. The rest of your interpretation is also suspect. The places Victorians conquered weren't more advanced than the places the Victorians came from. Regardless of the reason, Europe was more technologically advanced than the rest of the world, and they used that advantage to conquer as much of the world as they could. When you complain about how the Victorians ran things, you have to compare it to something. If you compare, e.g., the Congo in 1955 (http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,866343,00.html http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,866343,00.html ) to the Congo in 2008 (http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1713275,00.html http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1713275,00.htm... ) you get the idea. You might not like how imperialists run things--but they run things well because they run them for profit. You can also consider Singapore (which is basically Victorian, and basically paradise on earth for law-abiding people).
  - pyre 17y ago
    > You can also consider Singapore (which is basically Victorian, and basically paradise on earth for law-abiding people). It's interesting that you need to preface that with 'law-abiding people.' What happens when you are accidentally on the other side of the law? Update: Maybe I should be more specific in what I mean. In Thailand you aren't a 'law-abiding citizen' if you criticize the king. What similar laws does Singapore have? What happens is someone doesn't like me and decides to set me up for a crime I am no guilty of (e.g. deface some property and then claim that I did it)? The only problem that I have with harsh justice systems: What happens if you're an innocent person, but that system believes you to be guilty?
cynicalkane 17y ago
I'd like to think modern man is a better class of humans than their murderously genocidal ancestors. With so many of the comments seemingly endorsing manifest destiny on the part of "civilized" people, I'm beginning to reconsider this opinion.
- protomyth 17y ago
  read some articles on the "modern, civilized" Indian Health Service and find an reason to reconsider.
- mmt 17y ago
  If I may quote another movie: "I'd like that.. but that shit ain't the truth." Other than merely agreeing with the commentor on this aspect of human nature, I do have a point. I believe to deny the brutality in our nature is extremely dangerous. I suggest the whole point of civilization is to recognize the destructive potential in us all and to regulate it. Granted, you may be right. However, the consequence of putting in unnecessary protections against destruction are much more mild than the converse case.
dschobel 17y ago
That's just how humans roll. Precisely. History is littered with examples of the imperialistic tendencies of man (if you want to see some grade-A imperialism, look into how the Aztecs built their empire, hint: it wasn't by having lots of babies).
- maxwell 17y ago
  Appeal to history. Just because a lot of source code is littered with GOTOs doesn't mean that approach is "how hackers roll." Imperialism's just a phase; it's already generally considered harmful.
  - dschobel 17y ago
    The discussion at hand is about history of imperialism so 'appealing to history' shouldn't be that surprising. Also, I'm curious, how are things in your post-imperialist future? Is everything lovely?
    - maxwell 17y ago
      It's not surprising, but it's still a fallacy. And civilization without imperialism will probably be about as "lovely" as code without GOTOs.
maxwell 17y ago
> Western Europe had lots of problems, but countries that operate in the European tradition are better places to live. But what suggests "places that operate in the European tradition" will remain better (i.e. what traits of Euro civilization are optimal given any group of humans)? What makes this expression any more meaningful than something like, "C had lots of problems, but languages in the C-family are better to work with"?
- _h4xr 17y ago
  If the smartest non-C programmers all started programming in C, and the C programmers never switched to something else, you could make that judgment. What's interesting is that I almost never find out, halfway through an argument like this, that I'm talking to someone who moved to a place unspoiled by Western imperialism. Mongolia, for example.

bokonist 17y ago

Question to HN readers who are sympathetic with this article: If you could wave a magic wand and "undo" all that was done, would you do so? So imagine all those who perished in the 1500's would be revived from the dead and restored to their ancestral lands, all those living in the Americas now would be sent back to England, Ireland, China, etc, with a one way ticket and $10K in cash to start a new life. Would you wave your wand and cast this spell?

mattmaroon 17y ago
I'm sympathetic to the plight of the native American, though this article is poor, but no, I would not. It's an unfortunate but necessary part of human progress. It's no worse than the Romans, or Gauls, or Saxons, etc. By that logic you'd have to keep waving your wand until we were all back on the Savannah tossing spears at antelopes.
- eries 17y ago
  I think the most interesting part of Guns, Germs and Steel was the assertion that violence is not an aberrant condition for humans. In other words, violence is not a disease, it's standard operating procedure. However, it's normal only under certain conditions. So to prevent violence, you need to work on preventing those conditions.
- Quarrelsome 17y ago
  I wouldn't say it was necessary. But it happened and that history wasn't ours. We only get to influence things that are happening now.
- arcadeparade 17y ago
  >It's no worse than the Romans, or Gauls, or Saxons, etc. Or the Nazis? If they had won WW2 I'm sure some people in Germany today would be calling the Holocaust "an unfortunate but necessary part of human progress" and would tell us all about the backwardness of Jewish culture, I'm sure while also being "sympathetic to the plight" of those victims too. That doesn't mean that one group of people have the right to wipe out another culture to benefit their own, no matter what the consequences are. I'm really shocked by some of the comments here.

mattmaroon 17y ago

"But in this case the metaphor is conscious and precise: this is the story of European engagement with the native peoples of the Americas." One planetary race driving another into extinction is a universal, cookie-cutter sci-fi plot device. See Independence Day or Ender's Game. I suppose this was the only one where the victims had some sort of aboriginal-sounding accent, but I wouldn't take it as social commentary.

aristus 17y ago
They also had badass arrows. But on a world where the flying things are all glowing and lizardy, where did they get the feathers for the arrows?
- swernli 17y ago
  Could have been from some of the plant life. There certainly seemed to be an abundance of native flora and fauna that took sufficiently different forms from the standard leafy greens that it isn't implausible that the "feathers" were really plant-based. Then again, it's a made up world in a sci-fi movie; there is a long list of things that wouldn't be "implausible."
- whimsy 17y ago
  Didn't those hammerhead things have feathers on their heads?

eries 17y ago

I was expecting the "The Holocaust We Will Not See" to be the one that will obviously take place after the film ends. The native people have driven the imperialists off their planet. But, the imperialists have space weapons and the natives do not. Plus, the imperialists only want inert matter that exists underground. And, they are so evil they have no respect for life in any form. I assume a kinetic bombardment is imminent: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment

jockc 17y ago
I was thinking this too as the credits were rolling.
seldo 17y ago
[Warning: spoiler-heavy] I have to say the exact same thing occurred to me at the end of the movie. "And so the aliens returned to their dying world." ...yeah, to get more ammo. Of course, the counter-argument might be that the Na'vi managed to defeat a heavily-armed base using a skeleton force, before most of the tribes had even turned up, so by the time they got back Pandora could be too well-prepared to resist for them to be successful. Kinetic bombardment is all very well, but you need to get down to the surface to pick the stuff up -- unless you completely destroy every living thing on the planet, in which case you develop a very serious logistical problem (they were growing their own food on the surface).
- deleted 17y ago
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AndrewO 17y ago
I'm sure all of this will make it's way into the sequel(s)...
rms 17y ago
I thought about that and assumed it was a plot hole in the movie. A neutron bomb seemed like such an obvious solution. The scriptment fills in some of the gaps though. First, corporations are banned from using weapons of mass destruction in space. Second, the planetary consciousness convinces the humans to leave and not return by threatening them with a virus that will kill all of them.

astine 17y ago

This article is largely based on the claims of Bartolome de Las Casas, an activist from the time of Conquistadors. Some scholars believe thathe wildly exaggerated the crimes in order to convince the Spanish and other governments to intervene.

narag 17y ago
Has anyone travelled to both Spain and Latin America? Spaniards are white. Latins have on average a mixed colour. So it's clear that extermination did not take place... there.
- b-man 17y ago
  There was miscegenation for sure, not only with native people but between Europeans, Africans and everyone else that came here. But that does not imply that there was not an extermination. [1] [1] A single and not isolated example. -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupi_people#European_colonization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupi_people#European_colonizati...
  - narag 17y ago
    There was miscegenation for sure, not only with native people but between Europeans, Africans and everyone else that came here. The racial traits are different from african to american natives. It's clear the difference between Brazil or Cuba (where most slaves were brought) and Mexico. And remember I'm writting of average, About the word "extermination" it seems you're using it to describe killing of many individuals. I would keep it to refer to something like killing 99.99 indigenous population.
- borism 17y ago
  What should I make of the fact they're mixed color? Extermination didn't take place, but rape did?
- deleted 17y ago
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DanielBMarkham 17y ago

I made it about halfway this through before bailing. Yet another "western civilization is so bad" articles. Ho hum. The problem here is, as mattmaroon put it, if you buy into this logic we'd all still be chasing down antelopes on the savannah. At some point some civilizations, for whatever reason, start developing things like private property, the wheel, common law, reading, the printing press, etc. It's become fashionable to say something like "well, that doesn't make them any better than other civilizations" but I think that's soft-headed horseshit. Anybody who lives in a civilization with private property, contract law, medicine, literature and art is living in a better place, and in a better way, that somebody who doesn't have it. Some cultures are demonstrably better than others, like it or not. The interesting question, especially with alien stories, is "How do two wildly diverse cultures interact in a way that is respectful of both?" I've thought about this for some time, and using all the earthly examples I can come up with, the fact is they don't. If we ever meet another primitive species and interact with them? It's going to be very traumatic on the part of the other species. Likewise, if Cebulons from the Osari System arrive next week with technology five thousand years ahead of ours? You can say goodbye to a lot of what people think of when they talk about human culture. And I guess I'm okay with that. If the Cebulons show up, I'm going to be first in line learning to speak Cebulonese, watching all the Cebulonese TV shows, and taking my kids to Cebulonese high schools. We will learn, adapt, and overcome, and the human species will continue. To me that's a lot more rational that sitting around moaning about how things might have/would have been had things not changed. I just hope the Cebulons come to trade and exploit our resources in a manner respectful of private property, so we can go to their system and do the same one day :) I really did not like Avatar. Gorgeous, magnificent movie. Terrible hackneyed, one-dimensional plot. Ugh. I think a quote from Cameron's other movie is most apt: I vote we nuke it from orbit. It's the only way we can really be sure.

cynicalkane 17y ago
Would you be OK with that if the Cebulons wiped out 90% of the human population? Because that's at least the scale of the genocide we're talking about.
- jobu 17y ago

breck 17y ago

It humors me when people speak so confidently about events that happened 400 years ago, and yet if you asked them to explain in detail the events of their own life a year ago would have trouble remembering. I went to an exhibit once with real photographs from a native indian population taken in the late 1800's. The photos showed a population that looked, quite frankly, very savage and violent. These people didn't look like Pocahontus or the friendly blue creatures of Avatar. I'm not going to state an opinion either way about the early colonization of America because frankly I have no clue about it and don't really care. However, I do have an opinion that raw life is a brutal thing. Always has and probably always will be. It was particularly brutal back then, for both the Native Americans and the Europeans. I'd hate to have to live in either time period. The depictions we see in movies are far, far removed from reality.

IsaacSchlueter 17y ago

This article, and many of the comments here, hint at a deeper and more interesting phenomenon: the need to have things be either all good or all bad. That is, either (A) western civilization is good, and the things it has done were good, and the things it values are good values, etc., or (B) it's bad, and the things it has done were bad, and the things it values are bad values, etc. Once this dichotomy is accepted, any evidence of goodness is proof of A, and any evidence of badness is proof of B. If A is accepted, then nothing can be bad, and if B is accepted, then nothing can be good. You get one guy saying "Medicine good!" and another saying "Slavery bad!" and they shout at each other forever. In fact, A and B are both all-or-nothing cognitive distortions. It's quite possible for the Native Americans to have been savages, and the Europeans to have been savages (with better weapons), and for one group of awful people to have murdered another group of awful people. Losing doesn't make someone good, and neither does winning. Having nice things today doesn't mean that genocide 400 years ago was a good idea. Being good doesn't mean we came from good people or entirely good traditions. Neither does being bad. Having some good traits doesn't mean we have nothing left to learn, or that we can't get better. In fact, good people can even learn things from bad people, or good cultures can learn things from bad cultures. Even if modern western culture is, on the net, much better for humans than aboriginal American culture, we can still probably learn a lot from it. There's a lot of richness between these blacks and whites. Perfection is not required for goodness.

themilkmandan 17y ago
Yes, all this black-or-white talk about genocide misses a lot of the subtleties. How about a nuanced analysis of the Jewish Holocaust? Nobody brings up enough the fact that Hitler built some damn good roads.
- seldo 17y ago
  You're missing the point. It's not that genocide is sometimes good, it's that civilizations that commit genocide also do good things. The Germany that produced the Jewish holocaust also invented rocket science, which indirectly led us to the space program, satellites, and a big chunk of our modern communications network. Does this excuse genocide? No. Does it make it difficult to label German civilization as "all good" or "all bad"? It absolutely does.

davidw 17y ago

That's reddit bait if I've ever seen it.

deleted 17y ago

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blahedo 17y ago

Fascinatingly, but unsurprisingly, this is yet another piece that uses Avatar as a springboard into an essay about real-world human events starting from the claim that Avatar is clearly allegory for one specific such event. Being from the second wave of such articles, it even takes note of the other interpretations and alleges them to be incorrect. What makes Avatar such a great movie is that A) so many people are so sure it's "about" a particular historical or current situation that they care about and B) they're all different. I've seen Vietnam, I've seen Iraq, I've seen Afghanistan, I've seen South America or the Americas as a whole, I've seen Africa, I've seen climate change, man, I've seen a lot of different interpretations. James Cameron FTW!

grellas 17y ago

The idea of glamorizing indigenous peoples has always fascinated me. Do those historically connected with a particular place throughout its history never experience cruelty? How does one explain the slaughter in Rwanda and similar places if tribes living in one place are said to be imbued with an innate purity that should exempt them from having the same impulses toward evil and genocide that characterize the rest of the world? As I ponder these things, and consider the lurid facts depicted in this article, my intuition tells me that this might be as much a case of selective reporting as anything else - reporting that seeks to shape a narrative consistent with a particular worldview held by the author of the piece. I know there have been atrocities in the United States and in the Americas generally. But there is undoubtedly something very good as well to be said for the United States in particular, where (whatever its shortcomings and inconsistencies) freedom has been upheld for the benefit of all sorts of people and with which most of the world pales in comparison in terms of opportunities, or at least that is how umpteen generations of immigrations scrambling to get here have seen it.