It’s as if James Cameron sat down one day 10 years ago and asked himself (as everyone should!), “how can I make a movie that is perfectly designed to please faustusnotes?” and, before he’d even had a chance to put his hand to his forehead, out of the blue came the answer: combine Nausicaa, Last of the Mohicans and Aliens! A lesser director would probably balk at this plan, but not James Cameron! He managed to pull it off, and throw in more than a little Princess Mononoke while he was at it.
The result of any such attempt, if executed by a good director – say, for example, James Cameron – and including Wes Studi in the cast, would just have to be brilliant. And Avatar is brilliant. I really can’t understand what all the criticism was about, because on any of the points where it supposedly failed, it clearly didn’t – at least within the context of big budget hollywood – and it excelled itself on so many other levels that it thoroughly deserves praise.
In essence it’s a classic anti-colonialism/anti-imperialism story with an excess of noble savage imagery, in which a representative of a powerful culture invades a supposedly savage or less-powerful culture and attempts to destroy them in order to take their resources. Like most imagined anti-imperialism stories along this line, it throws in the standard elements of the plot, with a soldier going native and the noble savages being brave but ultimately hopeless, though unlike in the standard noble savage story, in this case they aren’t doomed at the end. The story does what a lot of previous iterations of the story explicitly refuse to do – it has used the medium of science fiction to grant the natives the power they think resides in their own myth, and thus enables them to emerge victorious. This fundamentally undermines the original racist underpinnings of the noble savage myth, incidentally, which is based on the assumption that the beauty or pride of the natives is full of pathos because of their inability to endure in the face of a superior western culture – they’re doomed to die out, and we have to mourn their loss but accept its inevitability, which may also be a reflection on our own fall from the state of grace we supposedly once enjoyed in our more primitive forms. This doesn’t apply in Avatar, because the Nabi aren’t museum pieces, but a thriving culture with special technology, and in the end they use it.
I should say at this point that, although I portray the tale as “a classic anti-colonialism/anti-imperialism” story, I’m hard pressed to think of many in the modern era. “Classic” stories of this ilk are actually few and far between. Sure, we have some stories that are anti-war, or anti-particular wars (such as Platoon, or Three Kings) and we have a few tales which tell the sad story of the end of an indigenous tribe (like, say, Last of the Mohicans) and we have a few that are transparently glorifying in the conquest of the natives (Pocahontas?) and even a few which just attempt to portray them as the mysterious other (Black Robe), but do we really have very many anti-colonialism stories floating about? Sure, there may be some in print, but I think in the movies they’re actually few and far between, which probably explains the visceral right-wing response to a movie which so transparently puts America, rather than 19th century Britain, in the imperialist picture. It does so, too, with all the button-pushing tricks which James Cameron used so effectively in Aliens, deployed viciously to get us to think both ways, and to see the humanity of both sides. No wonder supporters of wars of choice don’t like it.
So what does Avatar actually do? It gives us a disabled hero, Jake Sully, whose legs are useless, who has been dumped against his will into a role he can’t perform, surrounded by people unlike him, because his brother died back home and he has the genetic fit to replace his brother in a very expensive job. The job in question is remote-control driving an avatar, the body of a Nabi alien grown in a lab, and using it to engage with the local Nabi on the planet of Pandora. He doesn’t have much else to do, the pay is good, and the military pressure him, so he goes. And as soon as he begins remote piloting that body, everything changes. Then the plot starts and he ends up being faced with some difficult choices between the needs of the soldiers and the corporation who want to exploit Pandora, on the one hand, and the needs of the Nabi amongst whom he is (literally) going native, on the other. Unusually for a hollywood movie, too, there is no artificial resolution here – he has to pick sides, and it looks likely that picking the Nabi side isn’t going to work for him.
From the moment I started watching this, I was struck by the complex ideas the avatars can be seen to embody. I immediately thought of Thomas Covenant, who thinks he is dreaming but refuses at first to engage with his world because the moment he wakes up, he’s back to being a leper; better to hang on to his reality than allow false hope, which is a problem surely Jake is going to suffer when he spends half his days in a body he can’t own, able to run and jump and fly, but the other half in a body with no legs. I was also reminded of the very new ethical controversies surrounding our real life versions of these remote pilots – the people flying drones over Afghanistan and Iraq from safe bases in the UK or America, who are a million miles from the (usually incorrectly targeted) actual people they are killing. The thought everyone has about this type of war is that its remoteness prevents people from making accurate moral decisions, because there is literally no interaction between them and the target, not even at the level of risk. But Jake Sully, while he is remote piloting, does interact with his targets, and that makes the offer of treachery he so easily takes early on in the movie all the more callous when it comes to its cruel fruition.
This movie was very well crafted, from beginning to end. Of course the actors are great, especially Sigourney Weaver and Sam Worthington. The world is wonderful, though I understand its blueness may not appeal to everyone. It’s clearly modeled on the jungles from Nausicaa, though there’s a strong undersea influence that I really like, and which really suits its low-gravity physics. The flying scenes are also beautiful, and very very redolent of Nausicaa at her finest. Just when the tension and boredom of his daily life begins to get too much, Jake Sully thrusts us into a beautifully-rendered combat, chase or action scene, so the pace of the movie is good despite its length. The mecha are James Cameron at his best, and also (again) the comparison of Sully on his tiny flying thing against the great corporate machines is very close to Nausicaa on her Mehve versus the Corvettes of her enemy. The Nabi themselves are very similar to Native Americans, an image which must have offended all those many Americans who don’t want to accept any particular hard realities about the behaviour of previous incarnations of Jake Sully, or the moral culpability of those corporations which “explored” the “wild” west. This similarity reached its cinematic perfection for me when I noticed Wes Studi, of Magua fame, playing the Nabi chieftain – reprising his role of Magua on the side of the good guys! And there’s more than a hint of Princess Mononoke in the relative positions and roles of Sully and his lover (whose name I didn’t quite catch).
In many ways, too, I think viewing this movie is like watching a version of Aliens remade by a more mature James Cameron. Aliens is shallow in the very best of ways, an action movie which glorifies a bunch of macho soldiers while it glorifies in destroying them; but it is devoid of any cultural context, any sense of the soldiers as having a military past, or any moral questions about who they are or what they have done in the past. The corporate operative is a cardboard cutout wall street bad guy, who from the start has no humanity. In their new incarnations in Avatar, these characters are fully fleshed out and human. The soldiers hint at their pasts, referring to conflicts in trouble spots we know of – Nigeria or “the desert” – and though they are the same rich, interesting characters from Aliens, we don’t see them in this movie in the same sense as uncomplicated representatives of the human race. These people, the first ambassadors of humanity to the Nabi, have killed humans, and are proud of it. Their leader is a noble savage figure of his own, vicious and strong and proud of it, loving his men and ruthless in his disposal of them. The corporate rep is just as scummy as in Aliens, but this time he has a conscience, and we see him struggling with it as he acts in his own and his corporation’s interests in heartless and destructive ways. As the tension mounts and the cost to his humanity along with it, we see his rhetoric escalate through a pretense at callousness to outright hatred, but it’s impossible not to notice the occasional nervous gulps, and the uncertainty. This is a man who knows that what he is doing is wrong, but he doesn’t have to do it himself, and he knows where the benefits lie. To back it up we’re given regular hints that the situation on Earth isn’t so pleasant, and the mission to Pandora isn’t just a mission of enrichment, but that there may be an edge of desperation to it. No one on the human side in this story comes out unsullied, but no one goes into it a cold inhuman monster, either. James Cameron has attempted to construct, within the limited confines of an action movie, a real semblance of the moral and cultural imperatives of soldiers and corporates in a colonial administration.
This inversion and maturing of the Aliens mythos is beautifully represented in film through the reversal of some of the key images from that movie. In that movie the hive mind was undoubtedly evil and the soldiers good and helpless – in this movie the soldiers are not good, and in control of their own situation and the escalation of the conflict, while the hive mind is portrayed as good from the start. That movie finishes with a memorable final scene of the frail human in her mechanised cage, destroying the highest representative of the hive mind. In this movie the most evil representative of the humans is in that metal cage, and the good guy is the representative of the hive mind that is being destroyed outside of it. The figures in the battle are reversed just as the moral sides have been flipped. I don’t think any of these images arose by accident. This is masterful work by Cameron, renegotiating his own opus to represent a more mature view of war and soldiers and the Other.
I’ve heard of a few other criticisms of Avatar that I’d like to look at, both political and aesthetic:
- It’s just another anti-colonialism movie: what are the other ones?
- It’s anti-American: It’s anti-imperialistic, and the only way it can be therefore construed as anti-American is if we equate imperialism and America. Does America still have a policy of manifest destiny? I’m yet to see anyone who criticized Avatar on this basis make a coherent claim that America is an imperialistic nation, or that it is still following a policy of manifest destiny. So how can this movie be anti-American? If the problem is that everyone doing the bad stuff is American, well, I think that there have been many many movies made with Americans playing the roles of Nazis, Russian spies, super-villains, etc. that were not decried for their anti-Americanism. The essence of this objection is that the movie too closely resembles a critique of the formation of America; but most of the people objecting to the movie also simultaneously object to claims that America was a colonialist project, so how can they then claim this movie is anti-American? Only by studiously maintaining that any history lesson with America as the bad guy is wrong – and any such objection is unscholarly, anti-historical, in short just plain stupid and wrong.
- The plot is crap: I don’t get this at all. The plot is very simple – soldier goes native, picks sides in a colonial war, helps the natives, the war unfolds, things happen. There is nothing complex in this plot, and as far as I can tell the only real holes in it are the usual action movie holes where people get away with things that in real life they wouldn’t (like refusing to fire on a sacred site, but not being punished; or running through a building full of cctv without being noticed). The plot of this movie is a third as complex as Last of the Mohicans, and I would say pretty much on a par with Aliens, so where’s the problem? Action movie plus simple plot, with a few minor slips to enable smooth flow of the action, is perfection, in my view.
- The anti-colonialist ideals are ruined by the going native imagery[1]: under this criticism, it’s bad that Jake Sully helped save the natives, because in doing so he removed their agency and ability to control their own destiny, and weakened claims about their own power. This is a valid criticism, from some purist post-colonial perspective, but it fails on basic aesthetic grounds, and more vaguely on a post-colonial grounds. The aesthetic grounds is that, of course, you could make a movie in which all the people in the movie who are like the people in the audience (i.e. American) are bad, and all the people who are unlike the audience (i.e. the 10′ tall blue people with brains in their tails) are good; but good luck with that. You need a person to bridge the gap in the races to maintain the key ideas of the anti-colonial tirade, namely that we all share a common soul, and that the act of colonialism itself was not some kind of racial or cultural inevitability – it was a set of choices by people like Jake Sully who, like Jake Sully, could have chosen differently. And, more practically, you need the audience to be able to identify with the hero, while identifying with the Other through him or her. This is the radical threat of the soldier who goes native, and precisely the reason that such behaviour was so widely scorned in colonial times. Secondly, from a post-colonial perspective this complaint is overdone because colonialism usually requires interaction and interrelations between the colonised and the coloniser, it involves treachery and compliant local powers, and there is no simple sense in which the colonials and the colonisers are simply divided by a line that sets them apart. The idea of an anti-colonial narrative in which everyone amongst the colonised is pure, and everyone amongst the colonising is evil, is as simplistic as a 1920s cowboys and indians movie in which the indians are all savages who have to be wiped out[2].
- The noble savage thing[see footnote 1]: the thing about noble savages is that they fit into action movies a lot better than if they were just noble and not very savage; and anyone who has watched Black Robe or Apocalyptica knows that it’s really hard to feel too much for a character who is just unremittingly savage. If your movie opens with you knowingly eating raw capybara testicles, things just are going to go downhill with your audience. If, on the other hand, it opens with the opening chase scene from Last of the Mohicans, we’re immediately on your side, and we don’t want you to die. The noble savage is an idea that rightly pisses off the people on the savage end of it, but when done well it is the main vehicle by which indigenous people are able to enter the consciousness of their western colonisers as real, worthwhile people while also retaining their difference. It’s also worth noting that the full and proper definition of “noble savage” requires a kind of acceptance that the “noble” part of the native character is an anachronism, and has to give way to the modernising influence of the white man; that the concept involves a fundamental assumption that this culture must pass, and that we should mourn its passing the way we mourn the passing of the dinosaurs, with a shrug of our shoulders and a guilty relief that they aren’t stepping on our car. This doesn’t happen in Avatar, because the sci-fi medium enables Cameron to imbue their “anachronistic” gaia-worship with a magical force which prevents their passing. So what we’re left with is more of a “noble warrior” or a “paladin savage” image which is not going anywhere, thank you very much (and is fun to watch in combat).
- The deus ex machina ending: I have no problem with a deus ex machina that is set up in the plot and is a fundamental requirement of the narrative context. Joseph has to squish the Egyptians with God’s Help; Jake Sully has to have his moment with the birds
- An action movie with a disabled lead: I think that not enough has been made of the fact that Cameron cast the lead character of an action movie as a person with a disability – a significant disability. I think this is quite revolutionary for hollywood, and should be used in all future conversations in which high-minded film buffs who think David Lynch is great tell you that action movies are shallow. Piss on them from a great height with the moral superiority of your equal opportunity action movie cred. But don’t mention the interesting and unresolved tension in the movie – the utopian society Sully wants to enter clearly has no place for the disabled, and as soon as you fall off a tree in Pandora that’s it, you’re deadweight on a very anti-disability society. I didn’t see many wheelchair ramps or braille signs on Home Tree.
- The squishy ending: I really hate fantasy stories where the character goes into a world they love so much more than this one, but at the end they return to the mundane world – in this case returning to life with no legs. I am willing to settle for any kind of compromise in order to have them get their wish and stay in the paradise they want to be in. This is part of the reason I love Neil Gaiman. Also, I note that the ritual in which Sully achieves this goal looks very much like that weird dance-ritual thingy in Baraka.
I think it should be pretty clear from this review that I loved this movie. My partner first saw it while tripping, which I think she recommends; I don’t know about that, but I strongly recommend watching it, and if you like it but haven’t seen them already, check out its main influences too, because they’re great as well. And if the supposedly rabidly left-wing anti-colonialism shtick pisses you off (because you, you know, like killing people and taking their stuff[3]), then just sit back and enjoy the awesome fireworks. Or take a chill pill.
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fn1: what is it about the left that, when presented with a brilliant left-wing anti-colonial polemic, widely popular and brilliantly done, they have to bring up these second-rate, second-order nitpicks of the work? I don’t particularly care if there is some aspect of modern “ism” politics that it fails on, it still does a damn good job of attacking the thing it sets out to attack, and we should be happy about that and save our complaints about it for some more deserving project
fn2: in fact I suspect most early cowboy-and-indians movies were more sophisticated than this, portraying indians on both sides of the battle and giving them a great deal of agency, even if it simultaneously portrayed them as inferior and bad
fn3: which obviously all my role-playing readers do
June 8, 2010 at 7:40 pm
It’s not often I agree with you, but I do on this. I thought Avatar was the best moviegoing experience I’ve had in years. Way better as a blockbuster than the Lord of the Rings films, and all the better for being an original story – which is as rare as a hen’s tooth in hollywood nowadays.
Since you asked, though, I do think Dances with Wolves is very much a a classic anti-colonialism/anti-imperialism film, so maybe Avatar is No. 2 on the list? I also think that Dances with Wolves is a bit braver, because a) it’s ostensibly “real” – no hiding behind sci-fi, and b) it has a very nuanced and subtle ending: the Indians win the battle but we know they’re going to lose the war.
June 8, 2010 at 8:11 pm
is that the sound of hell freezing over?
I think a lot of people say that Avatar was influenced by Dances With Wolves, so I wouldn’t be surprised by your claim (I can’t remember it, and might rewatch it). But that’s hardly a plethora of anti-colonialism movies is it? Can you think of any others? I can’t remember any significant ones I have seen in the last, say, 10 or 15 years, or heard of, but I could be missing something obvious.
June 8, 2010 at 10:33 pm
Dances with Wolves and Avatar are almost the same film, really. I think they’re both great, but then again I like pretty much any film that Kevin Costner is in, and I don’t care what anybody says.
As for anti-colonialist films – it depends how broadly you want to define “anti-colonialist”. You could include anything from Amistad to The Patriot in that bracket, not to mention stuff like Ghandi. Then there are non-Hollywood films like The Emerald Forest or even Aguirre, the Wrath of God. I know some of those are pretty old, but still…
June 8, 2010 at 10:37 pm
ooh, a Kevin Costner fan – brave! But surely you don’t think his Robin Hood is better than Robin of Sherwood?
I thought of Gandhi, but the kind of anti-colonialism I’m thinking of here is the one from the point of view of the colonists (which is why some people claim Avatar is anti-American, I think). Those movies are a bit rarer, I think. Don’t you think that the number of such films is out of whack with the general claim that Hollywood is radically left wing?
(given of course that nothing in America is generally particularly left wing by even right wing British standards)
June 9, 2010 at 6:19 am
I did enjoy the movie and while it does obviously build on the motifs in Aliens, and in many respects it is a more accomplished movie, the script in particular is quite a bit weaker I think.
I felt exactly the reverse regarding the two company men. Burke in Aliens seemed to genuinly care about Ripley at the start. It was almost certainly all a lie given he was telling the folks on LV-426 the coords of the crashed ship with no warnings along with but this just makes the char even more complex.
I don’t recall the company man in Avatar ever expressing anything other than contempt for the locals. “Show me the money” was his only consideration. That was probably Burke’s sole motivation as well, but he at least appeared to show more. If you believe the new guy’s performance was nuanced it still managed passsed me by on the however many feet screen of the London IMAX.
The scenery chomping marine boss also came accoss pretty 1 dimensional. The marines from Aliens were far more interesting characters.
And I thought Jake was just dull as dishwater.
This can all be boiled down to a fairly average script. Yes it got the job done, and the broader story was fine but can you quote a single line from this movie? Compare that to how many quotable lines there are in Aliens ?
The comparison isn’t fare to some extent of course – I must have seen Aliens half a dozen times at least over the last 25 years – but that in itself has meaning. I just can’t see me coming back to Avatar again more than once or twice (if, you know, it’s boxing day and I’m too stuffed with turkey to hop channels). I will give it another look though soon.
Good spot on that reversal of the hive vs the mech mind ! Very observant.
June 9, 2010 at 8:44 am
I’m willing to grant that the script wasn’t as good as Aliens, but there are very few scripts that are. I don’t think that’s a very fair yardstick, and if it had used similar soldierly behaviour, I think that there would have been a great many claims that he was doing derivative work.
Regarding the company men, there are definitely two scenes in Avatar where the rep shows his humanity. The first is the scene where they blow up the tree, and you can see him take a long, hard look, swallow nervously, and make a slightly nervy, off-colour comment, as if to say that he knows he’s just crossed the moral rubicon. The other is the period before then, when he is sitting in his office playing with the unobtainium[1], and you can tell he’s weighing his life in the balance and deciding that “yes we can!” I read a lot of his bluster about “fly-bitten savages” in the light of those little moments when he is showing his humanity.
In contrast, Burke has set Ripley up from the start and reveals himself to be an oily snake very soon. He commits a series of personally evil acts which, given the strength of the other characters in the movie, can only be inferred as meaning that he was hiding his true colours from the beginning – sudden conversions from caring company man to deeply evil species-traitor don’t happen in movies like that.
If Avatar were in the running to be considered “serious” (which it ain’t, cause it’s scif fi) the depiction of the company boss would be seen as a definite plus in the “nuanced analysis of colonialism” column. So much racism about indigenous people over history has been manufactured with exactly the purpose that we see in that scene at Home Tree: to get the company guy to swallow nervously but do it anyway. That’s much more nuanced than having him be a company despoiler-bot from central casting (even if some people were too stunned by the visuals to notice his acting!)
I thought the marine boss was not that bad. He obviously has to be a bit of a monster, but he didn’t give me the impression of a man who was hell-bent on killing natives – in his conversations with Sully I thought he would genuinely welcome a chance to move the natives on. I also though that early on he gave an indication of why he hated Pandora (the 3 scars on his head, which, fair enough). I really liked the scene of him standing in the cockpit of that huge ship holding a cup of coffee while they blew up home tree. This is not a man who carries personal vendettas close to his heart; it’s a day at the office for him, even if on a visceral personal level he would love to chop one to bits.
But I could be over-inferring on this point, because I liked that guy’s style of marine-y evil.
Also, I’m already remembering Sigourney Weaver scenes. The one where she emerges from the pod clicking her fingers for a cigarette, telling Sully not to get into too much trouble, etc. (But they don’t compare to her role in Aliens, of course).
Finally, consider the very first scene where we meet Jake; it’s a reprise of the first scene where we meet the marines in Aliens, but much more low-key and corporatized. I think this is deliberate. James Cameron is trying to tell people that they aren’t going to be seeing another Aliens-style military crew, all the exuberance and joy of fighting in this movie has been shifted to the “enemy.” This is a world of 9-to-5 shifts, remote-piloted drones, and policies and procedures – very much mirroring our understanding of soldiers as professionals as seen in Iraq and Afghanistan, rather than the cowboys of Vietnam, which is what we saw in Aliens. It’s also a movie which aims to posit military action as a tool in the service of the state, not something done for its own sake, and I think that’s helpful when considering the interconnections of colonialism and militarism.
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fn1: which name is very silly but I actually like it.
June 9, 2010 at 4:42 pm
It’s interesting you see the movie as anti-colonialist/pro-noble savage while I’d peg it as anti-capitalist/pro-environmentalist. The reasons I focus on the capitalist/environment angle are that the company was a) a company and b) only there to exploit, not colonise.
If I take your challenge to name films that are anti-capitalist/pro-environmentalist (instead of anti-imperialist), then I’d start by listing documentaries by Moore and Gore but more generally I’d say any movie with an environmental angle (which is pretty common these days, even including Transformers) meets the criteria to some degree (specifically any movie that mentions it is pro-environmental, but not all are anti-capitalist).
I can see how the two themes (anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism) are able to be seen in the same movie. I’d tend to suggest anti-American stuff is more probably the former than the later as critiques of their imperial actions are relatively minor compared to their capitalist ones (Philippines, Iraq and Afghanistan versus McDonalds, globalisation and the credit crunch). Your mileage may vary.
At this point it’s important to note that I think the movie was a visual masterpiece. Hopefully this portends things to come from Hollywood as we’ve finally moved away from Star Wars episode 1 CGI (which was OK), to this (which looks better than the real thing). My criticisms of the movie can be broken down into the following topics:
1. Logic
Firstly, The greatest failing has to be that after the company is driven off the movie doesn’t end with the lines “We should nuke the site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.” Regardless of what magical powers the natives have, from a logic viewpoint they’re useless compared to holding the high orbit and being able to move significant mass. The next logical step for the company would be to manoeuvre an asteroid into a collision path with the panel then strip mine the flattened remains. Nukes are a good secondary option.
Secondly, the critique of capitalism suggests that it’s bad due to its short-termism which prioritises profits over the environment. This is a valid critique, unless your capitalists have just spent 4 years travelling across the stars, which gives you an 8 year minimum return on investment.
Thirdly, assuming the company is out make a buck, why aren’t they focusing any significant effort on the native wildlife and chemicals? How much would one of those sell for on earth? The floating rock is infinitely less cool than the massive tiger beast if I’m a mega-wealthy purchaser.
Fourth, why do the company totally fail to investigate other mining options, some of which would seem to make much more sense. For example, they want to mine under the Home Tree, but they don’t want to just pull some of the already floating rocks into orbit and tow them back to earth? I suspect that the floating rocks may have significant amount of the floating element in them, but what do I know?
2. Predictable story telling
At every stage of the movie I was able to predict what would happen next. By contrast Clash of the Titans (which is a pretty terrible movie) had a plot that butchered thousand year old myths. I found that roughly as easy to predict and I’d read all the source material.
3. Bias
I disagree with you that any of the company representatives were moral. The lines were really clear, there are the Naavi (good), Naavi aligned humans (good) and humans who’ve come multiple light years to mine rocks and kill things with a different colour skin for fun and profit (evil apparently, who’d have guessed?). The executive was spineless (despite being nominally in charge) and does nothing more than pull a face at mass murder (as opposed to, say, finding a second site to mine) while the army leader is Killhappy McRacist [1].
Even if you accept the message, it was laid on with a trowel.
“To back it up we’re given regular hints that the situation on Earth isn’t so pleasant, and the mission to Pandora isn’t just a mission of enrichment, but that there may be an edge of desperation to it.” Nope. The Earth is dying (noted in the closing voice-over). The mission to Pandora isn’t a desperate one to save the Earth, it’s to make a buck while the earth burns. Do you want to place bets if it’s evil capitalism’s fault?
4. Racism
Firstly, not only are the Naavi more moral than the company, their also stronger and faster. They’re a literal master race.
Secondly, one thing that struck me in the movie was how everyone who was evil is white. There may have been some exceptions in the back ground I missed, so feel free to correct me. The Naavi are based on black and native American faces (I’ve read), but the military and company people were a uniform shade of pale, despite the fact that the American military is disproportionately black or that in a company that travels to the next star system I’d expect to see more than the odd Asian or Indian face [2].
A final check, remember how Jake’s job is to try to explain to the Naavi what the human’s want (i.e. to mine a rich deposit of these rocks)? Do you recall him doing that? Or trying to? The “How It Should Have Ended” crowd on YouTube suggests he didn’t and I don’t recall a great deal of (or any) effort being put into it.
[1] Yeah it suggests there may be reasons for him being like that (being scarred), but do you really think anyone looks at the scars and would then say “Yeah, those are nasty scars. Now it’s OK for you to kill Naavi/blacks/Jews/”? Of course not. Having a reason didn’t excuse him in the slightest, it’s not like he could have been an anti-whaling activist before hand. The man was a nut.
[2] Let’s assume it’s 100 years in the future, so Indian and China have about 2 billion people between them to the entire Western world’s 1 billion. Therefore about 2/3 of the evil cast should be from the Asian continent. But that wouldn’t convey the message that the Western world (which is mostly white) is evil.
June 9, 2010 at 5:24 pm
Hmmm, I should probably be clearer. Despite the critique above, I did enjoy the movie. I thought the visuals were great and the 3D effects worked without being intrusive. It was longer than I’d prefer, but that seems to be the trend in movies these days and I’m cool with that as it leads to longer (and hopefully better) stories.
I did think the story was predictable. My points about bias were the main drivers that I felt that way. My criticism on race didn’t provoke much more than a sigh in the movie itself (given the bias I wasn’t surprised to find out that the evil capitalists from the West were white…). The logical flaws were something I just enjoy picking it.
I would recommend this movie to others, but like most movies these days I’d recommend leaving your brain at the door (though not to anywhere near the same extent as required to enjoy G.I. Joe [1])
[1] Yes that movie is enjoyable if you take the right mindset in. The one I recommend is “Deaf”. If I hadn’t heard the explanations of what was going on then I wouldn’t still wake up screaming at the rampant stupidity.
June 10, 2010 at 12:13 am
(for Paul @7)
From the moment I started watching this I thought of it in terms of the East India tea company, hence the colonialism angle. As soon as you see it in that context, the whiteness and associated race issues are obvious – it’s much more a movie about 18th century America or India than it is about modern environmental issues, and if this is not what Cameron intended then to my mind he cocked up big time. I’m actually not interested in it as an environmentalist movie because it just fails to provide that critique on so many levels. I know that in the 3rd world corporations are running around with their own armies causing trouble, but in general the Western critique of environmentalism doesn’t work on that level, and when companies behave in that way they’re generally behaving in a crypto-colonialist fashion anyway, with Western and local government support (think of Dole fruit or United Fruit, which is a slightly old example anyway). But in the mind of the western viewer – and director too, I’d be willing to guess – the story we see in Avatar is old, the story of colonialism.
Against that backdrop the whiteness etc. is completely understandable. Typically there should be local legions too (in India this was particularly important) but I like the sci-fi way in which Cameron achieves this through the avatars. In this sense Sully embodies the moral conflict of the Sikh soldier in India in the 19th century, and that’s cool. As a colonialist story this stacks up very well, but as an environmentalist parable it just doesn’t work.
For example your point 4. is irrelevant if you assume that the movie is a critique of 19th century colonial practice, with a noble savage narrative for empowering the natives. Is it racist to say that white Americans were bad for practising slavery? Is To Kill a Mockingbird racist?
Whereas, a race-based environmentalist critique is just stupid (except where it approaches issues of western power, which are intimately tied in with colonialism and its legacy).
I agree with your point 1. pretty much completely but don’t care, because it’s a movie not reality, and you can’t fit all the nuances of colonial (Or in this case, rapacious corporate) practice into a movie that’s already 3 hours long – you present a stereotypical story well.
Your point 2, I think I agree but I find this common in good action movies, and I find the opposite tends to be associated with poor plot more often than good writing (I think you make this point too…?)
The bias thing makes more sense under an anti-colonialist reading – not looking for other sites, not negotiating, is exactly what the colonialists did. In its most ugly guise – slavery – colonialism had literally 0 moral defenses, and in its other obvious 19th century form – genocide – there was no question of “finding another site to mine.” So again, the behaviour fits within a colonialist paradigm, but exactly the same moral qualms I describe on the part of the corporate boss doesn’t work in an environmentalist story, because you’re right – the boss might not make much of an effort to look elsewhere, but he would probably try. A slaver, or a genocidal colonist, not so much…(and I maintain he did show signs of regret)
For your final points… the Asian/Indian thing I think is just American ignorance (and casting). I thought it was made pretty clear in the start of the movie that Sigourney Weaver’s character (Grace?) had spent months explaining the humans’ purpose and “killhappy mcracist” wanted to move to plan B because they “just don’t get it.” the point of Sully is that he didn’t get a chance to explain anything, because the forest hive mind identified him as special with its little Mononoke-style jellyfish. If the “this is how it should have ended” crew haven’t noticed that they’re pretty ignorant, IMHO.
That’s all for now, must sleep…
June 10, 2010 at 12:14 am
incidentally, if Cameron intended this movie as either
a) an environmentalism vs. capitalism movie or
b) a direct comment on the Iraq war
then he fucked it up massively, in my view. If on the other hand he intended it as a general critique of imperialism/colonialism, he’s done a great job.
June 10, 2010 at 6:51 am
Google searches of “Avatar” and “Colonialism” get about 91,400 results, a search of “Avatar” and “Environmentalism” gets about 135,000.
I think I can see where your interpretation is coming from, but it relies on a background of interpreting conflicts that way. For people like myself who are less focused on how pre-WWII empires were bad that isn’t the first interpretation that jumps to mind.
I’d agree that under a colonialist interpretation my point on race doesn’t apply if you take it as a critique of the British empire or America during slave trading. Of course if you take it that way you’re also assuming that Cameron doesn’t have anything to say on events in the last 70 years.
If you take is a comment on stuff that’s happened in Cameron’s lifetime then the options are modern American imperialism, cold war stand-offs, terrorism and environmentalism. I think we can agree this isn’t a movie on the cold war or terrorism (without some really stretched analogies).
If this is a movie on modern American imperialism then the movie fails to show the racial diversity of modern America (which hinders the analogy) or do a good job of showing America’s manifest destiny (We’re hear to bring democracy). It does a better job of showing the capitalist elements of the American way of life by showing that the company wants to keep the natives happy with stuff they don’t want (which is why Sigourney Weaver’s character can’t get agreement by offering gifts of education) or by trying buy the Naavi’s house when the Naavi consider it impossible to sell a home (a la the Kerrigan’s in The Castle). Both of these are a more modern capitalist message as in imperial setups the natives would gladly (and foolishly?) trade for beads (i.e. Manhattan, Melbourne) as opposed to taking the view that their home has a value that can’t be met by physical goods. [1]
On the executive, I’ll go so far as to say the actor did a good job with 2 dimensional material. But it’s not enough to make him look conflicted, it’s enough to make him look useless. I really got the feeling he had orders from above and pressure from military below and so just shrugged and signed off on genocide. If this was a British colonial setup then he’s the governor, which makes him a proxy for the crown with wide discretion on his actions (which he totally fails to use).
BTW, when I discussed this with Ghislaine last night she also pointed out that all the bad guys were male. That was something I’d noticed, but not paid attention to till she drew my attention to it. The bad guys are middle aged white men? Where do I hear that criticism? Would it be at any anti-globalisation protest? *Sigh* Yeah I suck. Next point please.
[1] Unless you want to make these ideal Noble Savages who both retain the connection to the wilderness and also have a Reuters feed to tell them they’re getting a dud deal.
June 10, 2010 at 8:51 pm
Yep, I love Kevin Costner. Anybody who has seen A Perfect World, Tin Cup or Field of Dreams and says that he isn’t great at what he does is an idiot. He’s no Olivier but then again who is?
For what it’s worth I like Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. It doesn’t take itself seriously and is a gripping yarn. Not as good as Flynn but about a thousand times better than the recent Scott/Crowe thing.
Don’t you think that the number of such films is out of whack with the general claim that Hollywood is radically left wing?
Not necessarily. You can be left wing while still being nationally populist, which is what Hollywood is; if you’re not American your story just doesn’t really interest the studios, unless an American spin can be put on it. That’s why even in the rare films like Avatar and Dances With Wolves which are on the side of the colonised vs. “American” oppressors, you still get a friendly white American guy telling the natives’ story for them (and sort of lording it over them to boot).
It’s also why even a very English story like Robin Hood, which always seemed to emphasise stealing from the rich to give to the poor in the legend, gets transmogrified into being all about liberty and freedom, which is a very American spin on the matter. It’s also why you never get an Englishman in the lead role – just Americans or else Americanised Australians like Erroll Flynn or Americanised Australianised Kiwis like Russell Crowe!
(On Hollywood’s left-wingness more generally, I think all that you can say about that is that it tends to be culturally left-wing inasmuch as most people in media and creative fields in the world tend towards the political left. Sort of like how the BBC kind of leans slightly to the left because most of its journalists are London-dwelling Grauniad-reading latte-swilling metrosexual types. It’s not bias, just the nature of the beast.)
June 11, 2010 at 10:49 am
Hmm, I just did a follow up search and I think we can put the nail in whether the director sees the movie as about Imperialism or Environmentalism:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/21/avatar-earth-day-release_n_546984.html
Of course, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the movie MUST be anti-capitalist in order to be pro-environmentalist. But separately, it is.
And just so I have the chance to get on the record predicting the plot of Avatar 2, a quote from the director: “Part of my focus in the second film is in creating a different environment – a different setting within Pandora. And I’m going to be focusing on the ocean on Pandora, which will be equally rich and diverse and crazy and imaginative, but it just won’t be a rain forest.”
My prediction: The subtitle on the next movie may as well be “Those Nazi capitalists! Is there anything they won’t ruin?!”
June 12, 2010 at 9:20 pm
Well, Paul, given the quotes in that link I’m willing to concede that Cameron intended the movie as a comment on environmentalism, but he obviously hasn’t separated environmentalism from colonialism/imperialism, because if he had we wouldn’t be seeing the naabi cast so explicitly as native Americans.
Your points about the race thing are interesting because they suggest a couple of possible things about Cameron:
– he’s a racist caster, and won’t put black guys into the movie
– he’s got a two-dimensional view of modern corporations as entirely white men’s world[1]
– he deliberately made everyone in the corporation white in order to give an anti-colonialist interpretation to the movie
I’m not convinced the first option has been ruled out, since in Aliens there was only one black character and he died first. But the obvious anti-colonialist overtones make me think that this can’t be true. So it’s one of the other two (or both).
Now, I think it’s reasonable to say that a nuanced take on modern imperialism would require recognition of the mixed races involved on the imperialist side[2]. But I think it’s also possible that a nuanced take on Imperialism will be missed by the majority of viewers, so if you want to make these kinds of claims (“environmentally destructive practices in the 3rd world are driven by imperalism”) you have to stereotype the imperialists to get people to notice. So it could be that Cameron was using a buick to swat a fly. I suppose we’ll never know.
But I think anyway that it stands as a better movie in the anti-colonialist context than the environmentalist one. It seems to have a pretty clear message of “you can’t just take their resources” (hence the speech of “let’s take back our world”) but I don’t think it so clearly says “you can’t just take the resources.” It’s very easy to be anti-colonialist and anti-/not pro- environmentalist[3]. In fact it even positions the planet itself as a kind of person, which is easily seen as anti-slavery but isn’t exactly a scientifically robust defense of environmentalism.
Regarding the corporate chap, and his apparently “weak” morality. If the depiction of his weakness is unrealistic, can you explain to me how colonialism proceeded for 150 years? It’s pretty obvious that the people doing it back then managed to override whatever sympathy they had for their fellow human being pretty quickly – and sympathy for indigenous people was so rife in the Victorian era, for example, that Queen Victoria had it[5], for example, but none of her letters suggesting a bit of restraint made any difference in Australia or India, and ultimately the Maori had to beg her to send the army to NZ to protect them from corporate marauders[6]. So, given that the corporate reps at the East India Tea Company did exactly what the corporate guy in this movie did for about 50 years, I don’t think he’s such an unrealistic character. He may seem weak to you, and like an immoral caricature; but India wasn’t conquered by girls blouses, and the stuff that happened there certainly wasn’t pretty[7]. I’m not sure that there’s an alternative character who you would be more comfortable with? For example, from a Robert Manne essay:
What is the alternative character behind these actions? A cold-hearted bastard who happily takes children from their families? A policeman who thoroughly believes the propaganda and acts without noticing the pain he’s causing? There’s no version of the colonial agent that sits well with modern sensibilities, and I think the one Cameron shows is the most believable[8], as opposed to being the most monstrous (which he could have done, and which we see in any movie about Nazis).
That’s enough for now, I’m off to a jazz club. I think it’s interesting to compare this movie with Starship Troopers, which gives us a racially- and sexually- equal society which is undoubtedly fascist. That’s a very interesting thing right there. I think which representation is more effective depends to some extent on what part of your story you’re trying to make clear.
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fn1: this isn’t entirely 2-D, since the majority of senior figures in the majority of corporations are white and the balance is definitely not consistent with American demographics; but it’s silly to maintain this line on corporations when the US president – that chap with his “yes, we can!” finger on the button – is black
fn2: at least in America. I think French imperialism is still mostly white, and I don’t believe Australia is Imperialist, our foolish excursion into Iraq notwithstanding.
fn3: support for “national self determination” is often founded on the basis that “they” should be able to decide how to dispose of “their” resources, for example, without much regard for whether or not if “they” disposed of “their” resources as “they” want, “we” might suffer[4]
fn4: I’m not saying this is a bad thing.
fn5: I read The Victorians by A.N. Lee as background material for Compromise and Conceit.
fn6: The letter is at the Waitangi Treaty grounds in NZ, which are well worth a visit.
fn7: and the role of the native soldier isn’t exactly well-explored in Avatar either, though as I mentioned the avatars themselves could be seen as an interesting parallel to this.
fn7: I’ve read Flashman!
fn8: this story reminds me of an article I read years ago about the children of Chilean men who were discovering that their dads were torturing bastards. The guy they remembered coming home and dandling them on his knee had just spent the day cutting off a leftists’ testicles. These kids were understandably unhappy with the concept of “truth and reconciliation.”
June 12, 2010 at 9:57 pm
“…he obviously hasn’t separated environmentalism from colonialism/imperialism, because if he had we wouldn’t be seeing the naabi cast so explicitly as native Americans.”
I think it’s more likely that environmentalists (including Cameron) see ideal noble savages are being a more pure state of being because they don’t own fridges and X-boxes. This is just them using an idealised view of tribal societies as a contrast with modern life. [1] It’s a bit of a stretch to assume that environmentalist by default is the opposition to imperialism, which is what would be required for your analysis to hold true.
“he’s a racist caster, and won’t put black guys into the movie” and “I’m not convinced the first option has been ruled out, since in Aliens there was only one black character and he died first. But the obvious anti-colonialist overtones make me think that this can’t be true.”
But (I believe) all the Naavi were played by blacks or native Americans. If he is racist I think he’s hiding it well in his casting decisions. You could be right about him trying to cast to make it about imperialism, but can you find any quotes to support the idea he’s thought about imperialism at all? I do not that the 4th option is that he just didn’t think about it at all and just cast a bunch of people, but given the deliberate choice of blacks/native americans for the Naavi I don’t think this is likely.
“It seems to have a pretty clear message of “you can’t just take their resources” (hence the speech of “let’s take back our world”) but I don’t think it so clearly says “you can’t just take the resources.””
But if the conflict is between environmentalists (i.e. the viewers) and evil corporations then the message works just as well. In fact you’d be quite likely to hear that the G20 protestors should reclaim their property from the corporate fat cats. In Oz at the moment the government is trying to run a line that foreign companies are not paying enough (stealing) our resources. Despite the fact that one of the companies is BHP 🙂
Ultimately, I think that both Cameron and most of the audience lack the background you have in studying anti-imperialist messages. Because of that, those messages don’t exist for the majority of viewers (or the director). You’re still fighting the last war, which is colouring your view of what this is about. This is an environmentalist movie. As no one declares themselves an anti-environmentalist there needs to be a villain, which in this case is a military-industrial complex. Now Cameron is of an age that protesting against the military-industrial complex is a natural action for him. Modern popular (i.e. big) environmentalist protests tend to get mixed in with things like G20 protests, which adds anti-globalisation/anti-capitalist messages to the pro-environmentalist message which may not be a core component of the environmental message, but do colour how people think about it.
Ultimately I think you’re way off base on this, but that said as you once told me “The author is dead”. If you start from your assumptions then, yeah I can see where your coming from. I just don’t think most people work from those assumptions.
All that said, it was a good movie. But not as good as Lord of the Rings, which successfully took a deathly slow book and extracted the excellent core story.
[1] You never hear about such societies being linked to the extinction of mega-fauna for example.
June 13, 2010 at 10:52 pm
Ultimately, I think that both Cameron and most of the audience lack the background you have in studying anti-imperialist messages. Because of that, those messages don’t exist for the majority of viewers (or the director).
Paul, I think this is a rather arrogant thing to say. You don’t have to have a background in “studying anti-imperialist messages” to notice them when they’re hitting you over the head with a sledgehammer, and in any case anti-imperalism is a huge part of public discourse in most English speaking countries nowadays because of Iraq and Afghanistan. There isn’t a day that goes by in Britain, for instance, where there isn’t some journalist or commentator in the Guardian or the Mirror blathering on about it. The media is saturated with supposed anti-imperialism, and the audience was probably more than aware of such messages in Avatar.
I think the film straddles both anti-imperialism and environmentalist positions equally – which as you point out should hardly surprise us, because they together comprise the core left wing package nowadays.
June 14, 2010 at 9:34 am
Ah! Grandiose claims based on right-wing persecution angst. This can be checked, using good old google. So first I did a search on “imperialism” in the Grauniad, and this week I found
So then I do a search on “iraq war imperialism guardian,” and I find
This is your “saturation” of anti-imperialism. There are two articles in all this that might be construed as anti-imperialist, one of which is Seamus Milne’s comment on the history syllabus, which may or may not be part of his ongoing personal feud with Niall Ferguson (I wouldn’t know) and seems defensible as “news,” coming as it does after the conservatives announce a review of the history syllabus to be conducted by someone Milne claims has said “we need more empires.” The other is the attack on the “pro-war left,” which makes the point you have missed so handily: mainstream British left-wing thought since before Kosovo has been dominated by the Eustonites and the concept of “liberal interventionism,” whose goal appears to boil down to killing a million Iraqi women so we can force the rest to wear bikinis and lipstick. More broadly, the British left has failed dismally to come to terms with the legacy or history of Imperialism, and except for a bit of window-dressing about the more egregious excesses has been completely unable to accept that Imperialism was wrong. This is why we see the Eustonites lionizing Orwell in defense of their drive for modern imperialist wars of choice, even though Orwell was ferociously anti-colonial (not that anyone would know – I think I’m the only British person who has ever read Burmese Days). This is why we can see documentaries on the BBC about the Blitz which talk about “research” that the British air force had done on the effects of terror bombing on civilian populations without mentioning that the “research” in question was done in Iraq from British bombers[1]. Or we can see documentaries on the Boer war that don’t mention concentration camps and starvation policies.
So there you go. It’s not a central part of British consciousness at all, any more than the British are able to think about their own class problems. More right-wing persecution angst from noisms, I’m afraid…
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fn1: which leads to some interesting engimas. If you don’t mention who did the research and how, you can’t explain why the research was not relevant to the Blitz, and can’t explain why British planners had the wrong idea about the effects of urban terror bombing. This is a hint at a broader problem for the British left – being ahistorical, they can’t figure out what to do with any modern problem.
June 14, 2010 at 9:49 am
small point Paul: there is no evidence that the Aborigines wiped out the megafauna. The Australian Museum says they didn’t, and I remember reading in print (not available online) latest studies showing that the Aborigines probably lacked equipment to kill them at all, nor is there strong evidence that they were eaten. It doesn’t really matter either way, but in Australia this has become a bit of a right-wing anti-aboriginal trope (a la Hanson) along with cannibalism. I think it has sprung up as a political trope explicitly in opposition to the noble savage image – “see, they weren’t so nice anyway!” I think it had grounding in scientific theory but hasn’t been dropped since the theory was updated. It’s one of those myths about Aborigines that I think will never go away now that it’s been established. Fortunately the cannibalism one has gone away, largely because it was false[1].
You could be right about anti-imperialism being overinterpreted. But the modern anti-imperialist message, of the Naomi Kleins etc., is that the multi-nationals are the new imperialists and they use compliant third world governments to steal resources from poor people, which I think is actually pretty true. Whether this necessitates painting the corporations as all-white is another matter.
Anyway, I think that regardless of Cameron’s stated intentions, this movie works really well as an anti-colonial movie that “fights the last war,” meaning it’s excellent background material for a Space:1889 version of Compromise and Conceit, but it lacks nuance as a critical analysis of modern corporate rapacity. Can we agree on that?
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fn1: Is there anything wrong with cannibalism as practised by most cannibals anyway? Eating your dead relatives might be gross, but it’s hardly morally wrong
June 14, 2010 at 10:55 am
“You don’t have to have a background in “studying anti-imperialist messages” to notice them when they’re hitting you over the head with a sledgehammer, and in any case anti-imperalism is a huge part of public discourse in most English speaking countries nowadays because of Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Cameron was hitting the viewer over the head with a sledgehammer. The hammer is labelled “Environmentalism” and I had to provide a direct quote from the director before Faustus allowed that the message may be there! 🙂 I agree with you that an anti-imperialist message is a big part of the public discourse, though I disagree that that’s the term people think of it in. Protests against the war in Iraq have lots of signs and reporting on “No war for oil” or comparing it to Vietnam, but the anti-imperialist wording doesn’t permeate the public consciousness in the same way. As an example, after asking a friend if they thought Avatar was an anti-imperial movie I had to explain what an empire was then how that could relate to the movie. [1]
“I think the film straddles both anti-imperialism and environmentalist positions equally – which as you point out should hardly surprise us, because they together comprise the core left wing package nowadays.”
To return to my “people don’t think of it that way” point, if we look at G20 protests we see pro-environmental ones, anti-globalisation ones, anti-capitalist ones, but very few ones with the word “empire” or “imperial” or similar words on them. The word imperial gets trotted out the same way “regime” does – it’s used as an insult that has robbed the word of most of its meaning [2]. The key left wing message may be a holdover from the left wing critique of empire, but its mutated enough now that it’s its own beast.
“This is your “saturation” of anti-imperialism.”
To further Faustus’s point, despite the paucity of anti-imperial messages in the Guardian, I suspect there are even fewer in the American consciousness. I ‘d think that if you ask the average American about empires they’ll talk about the American war of independence and how it was a good thing. For an American to see themselves as part of an empire runs counter to their national narrative about liberty [3] and about being a “sleeping giant” pre-World War II. The Americans who do think of it think in terms of cultural imperialism or globalisation/capitalism.
But this doesn’t address the real point. Why are you disagreeing with me when we could be joining forces to wail on Fautus? Proper right-wingers should be offended by the blatant assault by a bunch of tree hugging gaijin on our beloved capitalism.
Just kidding. 🙂
“there is no evidence that the Aborigines wiped out the megafauna”
I do recall hearing that, but I was actually thinking of similar claims I’ve heard of the Native Americans. I agree the idea is popular for rebutting the Noble Savage images [4]
“You could be right about anti-imperialism being overinterpreted. But the modern anti-imperialist message, of the Naomi Kleins etc., is that the multi-nationals are the new imperialists and they use compliant third world governments to steal resources from poor people, which I think is actually pretty true.”
You are right that Klein et al use terms like cultural imperialism a lot more these days. I still don’t think it’s the main term used to understand/think about them by the average person in the street, but I do concede that some use the term that way. Of course, used that way it doesn’t relate to American Indians/the Last of the Mohicans… (except as an indirect reference). [5]
“Whether this necessitates painting the corporations as all-white is another matter.”
If you wanted to do it about anyone these days I’d suggest the Chinese as the best targets on the basis of currently supporting dodgy regimes in return for resources. But frankly that’d be more than a little racist too. And these are SPACE capitalists! At the very least, the white captain should have along some sort of attractive African lady to take his calls.
“I think that regardless of Cameron’s stated intentions, this movie works really well as an anti-colonial movie that “fights the last war,” meaning it’s excellent background material for a Space:1889 version ofCompromise and Conceit, but it lacks nuance as a critical analysis of modern corporate rapacity. Can we agree on that?”
Yep, I agree. It’s why I didn’t see it as a great film as the story was a ‘just there to get to the next scene’. Working under different assumptions (i.e. yours or Noisms) then I can see how it would be a more thoughtful movie.
[1] Seriously. I guess empires have very little to do with their life.
[2] Take how often Bush’s presidency was referred to as a regime. And he’s the only guy I can recall being (rarely) referred to as an imperialist. But he has also called Chuckles McKillcrazy, so I think we can agree that insults against Bush were more a reflection on the users’ ability to find insulting terms in the dictionary than on the public zeitgeist.
[3] Yes, this does require ignoring their own countries history. It’s not like that’s hard.
[4] Which should be rebutted just because they’re stupid. So you want to live a lifestyle that makes 35 to 40 year olds the tribe elders? Know yourself out. Any disagreements I have with our way of life won’t be solved by looking backwards.
[5] Klein uses the term to reference back to things like the native Americans or the British Empire, so it’s not really the same imperialism in my book.
June 14, 2010 at 5:40 pm
I generally agree with the points in this comment. So nothing much to add except
Noble savages
The noble savage is so much more fun in movies and literature than the alternative, which in the hands of the majority of movie directors and writers is going to be either a stereotypical savage with no redeeming features, or someone just like the writer/director who therefore doesn’t work very well as a character marked out by their difference. I think it’s an age-old creative challenge, particularly for sci-fi/fantasy, to make a character which is simultaneously capable of displaying its difference from the assumed stance of the reader, but also capable of retaining a sympathetic reading (if intended as good/human-sympathetic) or not being so utterly alien as to be a boring adversary (if intended as bad). This is why Magua works so well, because he’s got noble traits but is clearly savage, and thus easily defined as a bad person; while chingachagook is just savage enough to be different without losing our sympathy. The only weak one in that trio was uncas, who was a bit of a bland character, neither noble nor savage, just kind of … there. I think the best American movie to portray Indians as different but not to glorify them as noble/doomed was Thunderheart.
Incidentally, the Native American lifestyle is unlikely to have left elders 35 to 40 years old. This is a fallacious reading of life expectancy statistics. The average life expectancy of a native tribe may have been 35 to 40, but largely because of infant mortality. Those who survived past 5 would have had a life expectancy not unlike our own (barring war, which the Iroquois for example managed to avoid entirely for about 400 years, apparently – not a fact you’d gather from watching Black Robe).
All-white corporations
I reckon it’s going to be a long time before you can make an anti-colonial movie with, say, Chinese or Japanese in the main role, outside of their own specific historical cases, and get a western audience to understand that it’s carrying a general message. So if you make a sci-fi with a racially-mixed main cast (like a multi-culti Aussie empire, if one can imagine!) then people will just not get the message. The same is true for the environmental message, because people see the big corporations as white. But I think actually the world’s biggest miner is Australian, the biggest shipping company is Chinese, and the biggest steel company probably Japanese. So we have the world’s biggest shipping company shipping coal and steel from the world’s biggest miner to the world’s biggest steel-maker, and no Americans or British involved. However, I don’t think the message would get out as clearly (particularly in Britain and the US, which still think everything is owned by Britain and the US). In the interests of spreading an anti-imperial/environmentalist message I’m willing to tolerate a lack of careful attention to detail here. Particularly since hollywood (contra Noism’s claims it is generally left wing) has a habit of casting the bad guys as the race about which Americans are currently worried. That’s why in the 80s Russians were the problem, in the early to mid-90s it was Chinese, etc. Had Cameron cast the corporation as Chinese I would have assumed that he was following the standard govt line about the economic risk posed by the Chinese[1].
Also, it’s probably the case that most movie-makers doing an environmental movie these days want to make it relevant to their own population and its own depradations, which in the American case means an anti-Imperialist movie with white people in charge of the corporations doing the despoiling.
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fn1: I have a friend who claims that SBS, the Australian multicultural broadcasting channel, does the same thing, because it’s funded by the Australian govt, so the news represents a broadly favourably pro-Aussie govt position on foreign countries. Hence the demonstrations against its decision to show a tv show which gave the Vietnamese govt a favourable view, contrary to the wishes of the majority of the Aussie Vietnamese community.
June 14, 2010 at 8:20 pm
So there you go. It’s not a central part of British consciousness at all, any more than the British are able to think about their own class problems. More right-wing persecution angst from noisms, I’m afraid…
What the fuck? I don’t even know where to start with this; I’m not right-wing and never have been (I don’t subscribe to any political ideology – this should be obvious from my internet nickname), but in any case, the idea that you can equate saying that there is a lot of anti-imperialist sentiment in British discourse with right-wing persecution angst is utterly bizarre.
Judging from your comment you seem to be aware that imperialism was (and is) motivated as much by traditionally “left wing” and “progressive” goals (i.e. making life better for the poor beknighted natives) as it was by traditionally nationalistic ones. You also seem to be aware that the British party which has done more for the cause of “imperialism” over the past twenty years, however you want to define it, is Labour. I’d also imagine you’re aware that the two defining conservative (“right-wing”, if you like) thinkers of the past 300 years, Burke and Oakeshott, were anti-imperialist for a variety of reasons?
So, remind me: why exactly should saying that British public discourse is dominated by anti-imperialism be down to “right wing persecution angst”?
You’re very fond of internet searches, I know, but they’re no substitute for taking a holistic view. I’ve read The Guardian for about the past 15 years, get The Mirror off and on; I don’t believe there is anybody who could argue that the editorial line in those papers has not consistently been “anti-imperialist” broadly defined. (Plenty of plain old stupid anti-Americanism too, mind you.) You can add to that BBC programmes like Question Time and The Big Questions, both of which I am a devotee. Meanwhile editorial comment in the Tory broadsheets, The Telegraph and The Times, has always represented both sides of the coin when it comes to things like Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan.
There isn’t a British person alive (and can read) who isn’t at least broadly aware of anti-imperialist discourse.
June 15, 2010 at 1:17 pm
Just so I’m clear about this then… the left-wing British media are full of anti-imperialism, and the discourse is saturated with it, but the left have always been fans of imperialism.
June 15, 2010 at 7:20 pm
Nope, imperialism is complex and doesn’t map completely to either traditional “left wing” or “right wing” positions (which is because, of course, nothing does). There have been anti-imperialists on all sides of the political spectrum.
Note I didn’t just say that the left-wing British media are full of anti-imperialism; the Tory broadsheets have been relatively nuanced about e.g. Iraq – they certainly weren’t tubthumping. I’m not even saying that anti-imperialism is a bad thing – I was against the Iraq invasion myself at the time.
To deny that it’s a dominant theme in public life, at least in Britain, is plain crazy talk.
June 15, 2010 at 7:25 pm
Paul: It’s why I didn’t see it as a great film as the story was a ‘just there to get to the next scene’. Working under different assumptions (i.e. yours or Noisms) then I can see how it would be a more thoughtful movie.
Let’s get one thing clear – I didn’t think it was at all thoughtful! The plot was threadbare and the script was awful. I loved it for entirely different reasons to faustusnotes, I think – to me it was just great entertainment. Probably the most entertaining film I’ve seen in God knows how long. The “message” was hammered in by a sledgehammer, like I said, but who cares when it’s done with such aplomb?
June 15, 2010 at 7:30 pm
oh come now, you singled out the left-wing papers (Mirror and Guardian) as anti-imperialist and the tory papers as more “nuanced.” And apparently your “holistic view” counts for more than actually looking at the contents of the newspapers. I read the Grauniad too you know.
After 18 months in Britain I found both sides of politics remarkably ignorant of the issue. I’d say there are two opinion writers in the Grauniad who think the British view needs to be reassessed, those being Monbiot and Milne; there are a few others who might mention it in passing; but there’s a huge spread of the British population who still think that they did more good than harm in the countries they “visited,” and see Empire through the prism of British greatness. “Anti-” in British discourse boils down to “we could have been a little politer.”
This isn’t going to go anywhere though; I think we should choose to agree instead that when a movie delivers its message as nicely as Avatar, it doesn’t really matter too much if you agree with the message (within reason, obviously). And it was nicely done.
What’s the problem with threadbare plot, though? I think threadbare plot is a good plan in an action movie. Aliens wasn’t exactly full of twists, now was it? Nor was Star Wars.
June 15, 2010 at 8:02 pm
“Let’s get one thing clear – I didn’t think it was at all thoughtful! The plot was threadbare and the script was awful. I loved it for entirely different reasons to faustusnotes, I think – to me it was just great entertainment.”
My apologies, I’ve misunderstood your earliest comments (or not read them closely enough).
In this case I agree with your overall description, but the clearly telegraphed story took away some of the fun for me so I don’t rate it as highly.
Faustus: one of the reasons you were praising it so highly was covering the themes you enjoy. I didn’t see those so I just spent the movie thinking that a twist would be nice and enjoying the sights in the meantime. So, well delivered – yes. Great – no. Maybe that’s because I was too defensive while watching it *shrug*.
June 15, 2010 at 8:31 pm
After 18 months in Britain
I lived there for 21 years and have been back regularly ever since! I think I know the country and its press a wee bit better… 😉
You’re right that quite a lot of British people probably do think that they did more good than harm in the Imperial era. But that’s not the same as saying they’re unaware of anti-imperialist discourse, is it? You can be aware of something without agreeing with it.
What’s the problem with threadbare plot, though? I think threadbare plot is a good plan in an action movie. Aliens wasn’t exactly full of twists, now was it? Nor was Star Wars.
Absolutely. The threadbare plot allowed James Cameron to really play to his strengths. His films have never had anything but threadbare plots, really. But Paul mentioned thoughtfulness, and I think I’d be hard pressed to argue that the plot was at all thoughtful.
June 16, 2010 at 7:58 am
If you know the country and its press so well, and you’re so sure that anti-imperialism is at “saturation” point, perhaps you can explain how all the newspapers have missed the chance to mention the word “colonialism” or “Imperialism” in discussing the finding of “unjustified” killing in Bloody Sunday? Britain’s last colony, and a finding of egregious, unnecessary violence against locals protesting occupation, and not a mention of either word in the British press, or in the underlying report. This is your “saturation” British coverage? Even the member of British parliament who was there and who was writing in the Guardian today couldn’t mention either word, but writes as if the prosecution of state violence in Ireland is somehow divorced from the politics and history of Imperialism.
If ever the British left-wing press had a chance to pin their rabid anti-imperialist colours to the mast, it’s this week. But there is nothing… even the finding that the 20 soldiers “acted individually” and that there were no orders, and no conspiracy, goes uncontested despite being frankly preposterous. The government apologises on behalf of “the country” and the newspapers talk about “nationalist” protesters, but no-one talks about colonies or colonialism or imperialism, even though the language of the situation and the apology contains a natural admission that NI is a British colony.
That does not represent a general awareness of imperialism, I’m afraid.
June 21, 2010 at 2:13 pm
Sorry, this isn’t adding much to the discussion, but…
I thought I was the only one who has seen Nausicaa (as you describe Avatar as part Nausicaa). Man, was that 25 years ago?
-Tourq
June 21, 2010 at 8:16 pm
Yeah, it’s an underrated secret of the anime world! But I think Cameron saw it too…
June 29, 2010 at 7:06 am
Well, as a member of her majesty’s finest (albeit on a somewhat long term, err, leave of absence, while a certain misunderstanding regarding the colonels daughter is resolved) I may be able to shed some light on the debate, having been involved in many a colonial enterprise myself.
The moving painting (amazing sense of depth I thought) portrayed a more technologically advanced group exploiting the resources of a more ‘primitive’ group (by the standards of the former certainly). The intended message may well have been environmental but I think it can be read just as easily as anti imperialist when you consider the extent commercial enterprise was involved with such exploitation in the past (the various East India companies / Dole Fruit etc… as previously mentioned). I think it is fair to say though that the environmental message is the one that most folk would pick up on first though, and any colonial context (intended or otherwise) would only be observed by those giving this strange experience (almost as good as eagle hunting) waaaaay more thought than it deserves!
Also, I suspect a reason why such a connection might generally not be observed so much these days is that corporations are now often regarded as more powerful than individual nations (BP’s suicidal actions aside). In acting less frequently as proxies for governments (as they often were in the past) and more as trans national entities owing allegiance to no one but their own international shareholders, the connection to empire and empire building (which I would suggest is traditionally seen as the action of states) is a less obvious one.
Regardless, I was very glad to see that by the end, like the natives I found myself fighting alongside more recently, they can do amazing things with sharpened fruit these days!
June 29, 2010 at 1:23 pm
Yeah, I don’t think I made it clear enough in the original post that Victorian-era and pre-WW2 colonialism was very much corporate-driven, with the big corporations being key stakeholders (to use the modern terminology!) in leveraging local resource extraction opportunities to maximize racially heterogeneous economic outcomes. People tend to think of the British Empire as being all Queen Vic’s fault, but the government and monarch of the day often stepped in to take an ameliorating role – as, for example, when the Maori appealed to the Crown for more British troops to be based in key cities, in order to prevent the trouble being caused by the companies. Queen Victoria, particularly, was known for the odd intervention in Indian politics to try and reduce the impact of the corporate actors[1].
The same is true in modern environmental destruction, but we don’t see it because strong governance structures prevent corporations from behaving recklessly in the first world to the same extent as they do in Nigeria and Iraq, and have done in many areas of latin America. Right up until the wave of communist uprisings in latin America, corporate and government there activity was carefully coordinated to maximise corporate profits at the expense of local populations[2]. In the Phillipines this was going on till at least the 80s and probably still is (Cory Aquino was famous for the terrible working conditions on her huge plantations). And even in modern Iraq, I don’t think you can count the behaviour of Halliburton et al as anything except an egregious case of profiting from colonialism, particularly given that the people who started the war were deeply involved with the companies that profited the most. “No blood for oil” may not be an explicitly anti-imperialist statement but it is very strongly implicit in the phrase, and for good reason – in the modern Western mind, colonialism and corporate rapacity are tied together. So naturally a story about corporate greed and environmental recklessness will have colonialist overtones.
What happened in Avatar is very easily seen as a representation of what is happening in the Sarawak[3], the Niger Delta, Iraq, West Papua, or Tibet today.
—
fn1: The Maori story I learnt at the Waitangi treaty grounds in NZ, and AN Lee’s The Victorians describes Queen Vic’s behaviour.
fn2: Chomsky of course has much to say about this, but there’s a wealth of evidence from multiple sources on this issue. The modern day versions of the same are the reason why there are now extreme leftists in Venezuela, and the Bolivian middle class had to choose between an Indian insurrection or a hard left Indian-rights Social Democrat
fn3: right down to the arrows in the tyres, I think!
June 30, 2010 at 7:05 pm
That does not represent a general awareness of imperialism, I’m afraid.
I missed this comment as I wasn’t subscribed.
I think you’re confusing the fact that many people in Britain don’t think of Bloody Sunday as an example of imperialism with a lack of awareness of imperialism generally. Just because they don’t agree 100% with everything you think imperialism and colonialism mean doesn’t mean they’re unaware of those things.
You also seem to be labouring under the misapprehension that there’s anything new or controversial to say about British relations with Ireland. By this point any single comment anybody could make would be totally staid and cliched. Everybody on these islands has known the truth about Bloody Sunday for many years. Okay, so the result of the enquiry was a damp squib and the left didn’t engage in a biting critique; that’s because it’s 2010 rather than 1973 and everything that could be said has been.
If anything the media commentary has (rightly in my view) focused on whether this enquiry was a waste of money or not given that we already know what happened.
June 30, 2010 at 8:10 pm
Since the Bloody Sunday report came out, there were additional (separate) revelations that the same paratroopers were involved in multiple other murders, that the RUC had an agreement with them not to investigate, and the head of security who deployed the paratroopers on Bloody Sunday knew all this. So why did the report find he had no reason to expect that the soldiers would kill, and (more pertinently to my claim) why is everyone in the press blithely accepting the finding that it was a few bad eggs?
Specific to the issue of the British left, failing to even mention colonialism or imperialism in this context is like the left in Australia reading the stolen generations report and failing to mention the word “genocide” anywhere in their response. It just couldn’t happen.
I get your point about further comment being cliched, but I wouldn’t have thought you would believe this would hold the left back. I certainly don’t. I would have expected a more robust response to the report, along the lines of wanting to make a clean sheet of imperialism, expose the policy of government sponsored murder and make amends. But instead we get this wishy-washy “oh well” and nary a mention of the coherent policy lying under the killings. It’s a case of “don’t mention the war.”
June 30, 2010 at 8:24 pm
Why is everyone in the press blithely accepting the finding that it was a few bad eggs?
Probably because it was. The British army is permanently engaged in missions overseas and massacres like that are an exceptional rarity. Bloody Sunday was clearly just an awful one-off incident and it would be bizarre to claim otherwise.
But instead we get this wishy-washy “oh well” and nary a mention of the coherent policy lying under the killings. It’s a case of “don’t mention the war.”
Because everybody’s sick of hearing about Northern Ireland, knows what’s happened and have their minds made up about it, and is busy moving on. The discussion was relevant 15 years ago, but not now. You’re reading too much into this.
June 30, 2010 at 9:20 pm
and here,
you make my point for me. The colonizers have moved on. Even though there are significant issues of justice still to be addressed, having moved on the colonizers are strangely uninterested in charging those responsible for state-sponsored murder, many of whom are still alive, because it was in the interests of the British state. Is it any surprise that the British media don’t want to make a fuss, given that they’ve retained their colony, achieved a peace deal, and “moved on”? This is not the type of onward movement which characterises people who understand or have come to terms with their colonial actions.
It’s not bizarre to claim Bloody Sunday wasn’t a one-off. I mentioned the reasons above, which you conveniently avoided. The targeted killing of up to 150 other civilians in the years leading up to Bloody Sunday, a known agreement between the RUC and the paras not to investigate murders by soldiers, all under the watchful eye of the man who deployed paratroopers at that march. Many of those paras had probably been involved in those other killings and expected leniency. This is not a case of bad eggs, it’s sufficient reason to question the inquiry’s findings that the man in charge could not have expected live fire, and the relatives of those dead certainly don’t seem to think that the current explanation is good enough. But the British have “moved on” to an enlightened understanding of colonialism, so they’d rather just let injustices done by them to others slide…
It makes my point very nicely, I think. The sad thing is that the British left is marginally complacent in this, while condemning imperialism overseas.
June 30, 2010 at 10:04 pm
The colonizers have moved on
Have you ever been to Northern Ireland? The place is unrecognisable compared to how it was 10 years ago. And if anything the Republicans have led the charge; it’s only a few hard core Loyalists left now who are complaining that justice was never done to the Provisional IRA leadership. Apart from them and a few very, very small Republican splinter groups the province is looking to the future.
Is it any surprise that the British media don’t want to make a fuss, given that they’ve retained their colony, achieved a peace deal, and “moved on”?
It’s not an issue of the British “moving on”, it’s an issue of Northern Ireland moving on and the United Kingdom moving on. Your reference to Northern Ireland as a “colony” is totally naive and simplistic. You could justifiably have called it that in 1610, not now.
It’s not bizarre to claim Bloody Sunday wasn’t a one-off.
Yes it is. Civilians were killed by the British Army, the Provisional IRA, the UVF, and plenty of other groups during the Troubles. It was a dirty war in a populated region and in those situations there are always civilian deaths. But there were not other massacres committed by the British Army. Where your “150 other civilians” figure comes from is anybody’s guess – according to the Sutton Index 153 civilians were killed by the British Army over the entire course of Operation Banner (1969-2007), so it hardly seems likely that 150 of those deaths came “in the years leading up to Bloody Sunday”. Each one of those 153 deaths was an injustice, and the collusion of the British Army with the Loyalist paramilitary groups shouldn’t be whitewashed, but the picture isn’t what you’re painting it to be.
June 30, 2010 at 11:15 pm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jun/20/saville-inquiry-killings-soldiers-troubles-northern-ireland
So maybe not everyone has moved on as much as you think…?
July 1, 2010 at 7:32 am
This link describes how 1 Para were known to be violent and suggests they were therefore the wrong force to use but discriminates between violent and likely to use lethal force.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/foyle_and_west/10287463.stm
Do you have a link regarding your comment “Many of those paras had probably been involved in those other killings and expected leniency.” or is that your “probably”?
The general expectation of leniency is clear but if it was the same soldiers who had already been “investigated” for such killings and went on to kill again on Bloody Sunday, that is incredibly damning and I would be appalled at the inquiry’s conclusion “the general had no reason to expect the tragedy that then unfolded”.
On the general point, I think it is pretty accurate to say that the colonizers have moved on but the colonized are quite rightfully still a bit more pissed about things. I think this is always the way though isn’t it ? Taking a more trivial sporting example, many Scots genuinely support any teams opposing England whenever they can, while I think the English are happy to root for the Scots when the reverse is true (which is only for Rugby I expect). The English have little reason to bear the Scots any ill will while the Scots do if they take a long enough historical view. Where do you draw the line though? I think the sporting position is obviously harmless enough but if it is backed by any genuine resentment it’s just getting daft. Similarly, I’m not that keen on the idea of Scottish independence either, not because I want the English to ‘rule’ the Scottish (obviously laughable when you consider the last 2 PM’s) but because I see myself as British not English (though I see myself as a Northerner first so not sure what that means lol). I also naively think the world would be a better place if countries could move closer to each other not further away, lets not roll back the clock a dew hundred years unnecessarily eh? The Irish point is obviously graver. As an Englishman of Irish descent I do think moving on (by which I mean being able to live in peace) is more important than justice – if winning the justice would threaten the moving on!!! I would however prefer justice as well if I’m allowed to have my cake and eat it. I think my personal rule of thumb for the pursuit of such justice would be it should be attempted if the victim’s (or their immediate kin) or perpetrators are still alive to receive/face it. After that, it’s history, everyone’s ancestor buggered somebody else, is anything really achieved by such archaeology ? Unfortunately, humanity is such a fuckwad at times, some crimes are so abominable that however historic they might now be, merely moving on isn’t an option (if Mengele was found in a retirement home for example?).
Northern Ireland has thankfully come on leaps and bounds regardless and while the communities there I suspect are still greatly interested in seeing justice done, they are also very happy they can now get on just with there lives without being shot at or blown up by anyone. Almost (sadly) anyway.
July 1, 2010 at 8:53 am
That report doesn’t really read so well in light of the link I put above, because almost all the claims read very differently in light of a known pattern of murders going univestigated. The report “discriminates between violent and likely to use lethal force” without taking into account the environment of Derry at the time, in which the Paras operating in Derry were killing civilians and not being investigated right up until 1973. They’d been given signals for years that murder was okay.
In light of this how do we interpret the bbc’s reporting that the Colonel in charge acted on his own in moving his troops, in the belief that the best way to deal with rioters was “to go aggressively after rioters.” What does “aggressively” mean in the context of 150 uninvestigated murders over 5 years?
Then we have this joyous moment of capitulation at the Inquiry:
Yes, I’m sure that, as someone who knew his soldiers had killed civilians and wouldn’t be investigated, he was surprised that they wouldn’t be killing just rioters. I’m sure the report found he was surprised that some of the “rioters” had been shot in the back, as well.
These kinds of innocent conclusions are further examples of a colonial mindset, which hasn’t yet shaken off the idea that Britain was a civilizing force in the world that acted in good faith in these countries.
In the specific context of this inquiry, it seems like a lot of the families of the dead are willing to settle for the report finding that they were, in fact, murdered and weren’t “guilty” in some nebulous colonial sense. But it’s clear from the report I linked to above that a lot of people in Northern Ireland have yet to get even the minimal justice of a recognition from their colonial occupier that their loved ones were murdered as part of a policy of state terror. And again, this is because of the colonial mindset – demands for justice or inquiries from the victims, and indeed the victims’ accounts, are placed well down the list of priorities compared to protecting soldiers who murdered in the interests of the crown, and maintaining the fiction that Britain acted in good faith in Ireland. You still see often cited that Britain was a “gentle” colonial master, even claims that they “treated the natives well” and improved local conditions. This kind of fiction requires the fictions presented in this report in order to be maintained. Maintaining a false image of Britain-as-civilizer requires also a false popular history of what Britain did.
“Moving on” is the ultimate final goal of all victims of colonial oppression, whether or not they’re still under the state that did it. Different countries find different ways to do it, and because history is nasty they tend to never achieve what objective standards of justice would want.
But for the colonizers, moving on means accepting that they did a wrong thing, apologizing and where necessary making amends. This includes incorporating a correct understanding of what happened in history books and inquiries, which is why that Belgian chap this week attracted so much ire. But it seems from this inquiry and the reporting on it that the British press, and in my opinion the British left, have fundamentally failed to accept the realities of their colonial past, and deal with them in their public discourse.
Lord Merton, of course, being the first and worst offender! Where did he contract that syphilis anyway, eh?
July 1, 2010 at 4:18 pm
Faustusnotes, that Guardian article doesn’t say what you are representing it as saying. It doesn’t say that 150 civilians were victims of targeted killings in the years leading up to Bloody Sunday. It says that the 150+ people killed by the British army in the years before Bloody Sunday did not have a proper police investigation into their deaths. But many of those killed were members of the Provisional IRA, and officially acknowledged as such by the IRA leadership. Some were Loyalist terrorists. These statistics are not hard to find. Your claim about 150 or more targeted killings of civilians is crazily off base.
We all know that there was some collusion between the army and the RUC during the early years of Operation Banner; the recent “revelations” are hardly that. It’s not right that this should have happened, but very little that went on during the Troubles was right.
But it’s clear from the report I linked to above that a lot of people in Northern Ireland have yet to get even the minimal justice of a recognition from their colonial occupier that their loved ones were murdered as part of a policy of state terror.
You keep talking about “the colonial occupier” in this incredibly simplistic way. My dad is a typical Catholic, Celtic-supporting, Irish-tricolour waving Glaswegian socialist, so I’m more sympathetic to the Irish Republican cause than most, but even I acknowledge that the majority in Northern Ireland always considered themselves to be British and supported the British Army’s presence in “the Province”. Even the catholic communities in Belfast welcomed the presence of the army in 1969, as they believed it would protect them from Loyalist persecution! Your view is incredibly naive.
Ulster was colonised by the British (English and Scots) during the 1600s after the Nine Years War, but 400 years is a long time; you can’t in any meaningful sense call the protestant (“British”) communities in Ulster colonists or occupiers any more. They’ve been there long enough. Broadly, I would support a united Ireland if the populace could be persuaded that would be preferable, but that’s the rub, and you’re painting it as if everybody in Nortern Ireland is desparate to escape the heel of British oppression – this simply isn’t the case.
By the way, “state terror” is silly hyperbole that doesn’t have any place in the discussion, especially in the context of Northern Ireland where the “natives” on both sides committed such horrific acts of brutality against each other. It also trivialises what real state terrorism is.
@Lord Merton: My boss is Northern Irish and at the pub last night we happened to be talking about crime. His opinion was that in some ways life was better in Belfast during the Troubles, because common criminals would just have their legs blown off by the Provisional IRA or the UVF; consequently petty crime and antisocial behaviour levels were very low! His tongue was half in his cheek, but just goes to show…
As an Englishman of Irish descent I do think moving on (by which I mean being able to live in peace) is more important than justice – if winning the justice would threaten the moving on!
I agree on balance. The thing about justice is that it has to apply to everybody, and there were thousands more victims of terrorist groups, both Republican and Loyalist, than there were of the British Army. It’s impossible for the families of such people to see justice, unfortunately, so moving on has to be prioritised. Like post-apartheid South Africa really.
July 2, 2010 at 6:37 pm
The Sutton database gives a total of 187 civilians murdered by the army between 1969 and 2001. Of these, 107 (55%) were killed in the first four years, 1969-1973. You can calculate stratified contingency tables online, which means I can find that of the people killed by the army up until and including 1973 (when the “tea and cake” inquiries ended) we have 107 dead civilians and 57 dead Republican Paramilitaries (RPs); afterwards we have 80 dead civilians and 88 dead RPs. So, amongst the dead up until 1973, there was a roughly 67% chance of being a civilian; afterwards, about 45% chance. The odds ratio of a death being civilian for pre-1973 activity compared to post-1973 activity was 2.06, and this was a statistically significant difference (p=0.001).
The population of Northern Ireland in 1971 was 1540000, so if we assume that those murders were spread over the whole population (rather than being clustered in two areas amongst young men, which is the reality), the murder rate varies from 1.4 per 100,000 (if we exclude “republican paramilitaries”) to 2.4 per 100,000 (if we include them) per year for 5 years running. This means that the British Army was killing people in NI at a higher rate than the murder rate in all of England now (the current UK murder rate is 1.7). They killed more people in 5 years than the Bali bombers managed to kill Australians in that terror attack; and 3.5 times as many people as died in London from the 2005 train/bus bombings. So yeah, I think “state terror” counts as a description of that – a bunch of clearly-identifiable, heavily-armed men, indiscriminately murdering civilians with impunity, backed up by helicopters and heavy vehicles, counts as state terror, and if it was happening to you in Liverpool now you wouldn’t be worried about insulting the “real” victims of state terror – you’d be one.
But interestingly, after the outcry over bloody sunday and the shift of the investigations into civilian deaths from the RMP to the RUC, the death rate plummeted and the relative distribution of paramilitaries and civilians changed. Which gets us onto your next point, that “many of those killed were members of the Provisional IRA.” On the statistics alone this isn’t true – the majority of those killed were declared as civilians by their killers. But amongst that minority, do we believe the soldier’s reports? While simultaneously claiming that “everyone knows” and “has always known” that the people killed on Bloody Sunday weren’t paramilitaries, you defend military actions by saying that the other people identified as paramilitaries really were correctly identified. How do you square those two claims? As the newspaper report notes, and as the Inquiry within it notes, we can’t believe the claims the soldiers made because they were not tested, and we now know that all 13 civilian deaths in 1973 were misrepresented. So why do you insist on believing that the other 80 deaths in those 5 years were all paramilitaries?
This is why you are making my point for me, about misunderstanding colonialism. You approach the problem from the perspective of someone who thinks that the British presence in NI was fundamentally decent, and then explain a whole bunch of inexcusable actions on that basis. You also assume that the colonial process is done and everyone has “moved on,” so that, for example, you treat these deaths as collateral damage in a military action against terrorists, and refuse to consider the possibility that the deaths were actually part of a systematic campaign of terror being waged by an occupying force. You have even twice in one comment raised the old canard that the British maintained the rule of law in Ireland – once by claiming the Republicans welcomed the army (which they did for about a year, until the murders started) and again with your comment from your boss, the point of which I understand but the reality of which is kind of belied by the fact that there was a military force killing people at higher than the civilian murder rate. And you can bet it was singling out catholics, too.
In fact, this second fact is easily confirmed from the Sutton Index – Catholics died at 6 times the rate of Protestants (at the hands of security forces) before 1981, and then at 10-15 times the rate after that. So that terror campaign was directed largely at the Catholic population, meaning that the murder rate in the Catholic population was probably in the order of 12-15 per 100,000 during the early 70s – comparable to modern Central America (which ranges between 9 and 60 per 100,000), and 6 times the UK rate. And these are excess deaths, not the complete murder rate.
You stick to this process of colonialist denialism even when presented with strong evidence in support of the theory that it was a murder campaign. Not just the overwhelming statistical evidence, but the evidence of cover-ups and lies about the killings, deliberate misrepresentation of who was being killed, and rewards (such as the medal given to the CO of the Bloody Sunday troops) being given to the killers.
Which isn’t to say that I disagree with you or Lord Merton about the justice issues here (and the situation was obviously even thornier in South Africa). But the issue at hand here was whether or not British people understand their own colonial history properly and whether it is adequately addressed in the media and public life. I think you make my case very well for me.
July 2, 2010 at 8:37 pm
Faustusnotes, this statistical analysis is pure sophistry, and just goes to show that debates over statistics are at best meaningless and at worst actively pernicious if they aren’t taken in proper context. Your lack of knowledge of the history of Northern Ireland is excusable as you’re an Australian and didn’t grow up on this stuff; the fact that you feel entitled to lecture the British people on “their own colonial history” in spite of this ignorance is much less so.
Here’s why it’s sophistry:
1) Your analysis of the murder rate (1.4 – 2.7 per 100,000) is totally devoid of meaning because it isn’t compared to anything that is at all analagous. Firstly, you shouldn’t be comparing this rate to the murder rate in England – you should be comparing it to the overall murder rate in Northern Ireland before and after the Troubles. You should also be comparing it to the murder rate of all the other groups involved. Go to the Sutton index, find out how many civilians were murdered by the Provisional IRA, the other Republican splinter groups, the Loyalist paramilitaries, and then compare that to your precious British army murder rate. Then factor in the number of criminal, non-sectarian murders in the period. Then let’s see how the British army’s murder rate compares. (I’m being charitable here and giving you the benefit of the doubt, but your later comments in the thread where you suddenly leap to the assertion that the British Army was killing people at “higher than the civilan murder rate” and start going on about “the UK rate” when earlier you were talking about England makes me think you’re being deliberately disingenuous and aren’t really interested in the truth.)
Secondly, you haven’t compared this murder rate to any other analagous situation internationally. What is the average rate of civilian deaths in similar situations to the one in which the British army found itself, around the world? How many civilians are usually killed in shooting wars in urban areas like Belfast? I suspect the proportion of civilian casualties in such situations is less like 67-45% and more like 80%+.
Thirdly, comparing Operation Banner to the Bali and London bombings is completely idiotic. “State terror” and “terrorism” are not defined by the number of victims; they’re defined by method. You bandy about this assertion of “indiscriminate killings” without any evidence except for the Bloody Sunday massacre, which as we’ve established was a unique event.
2) It’s backed up by blatant ignorance about the history of the Troubles. The reason why civilian deaths plummeted after 1973 was not due to a shift in investigations, it was due to a shift in strategy and a shift in circumstances. The years 1969-1973 were easily the most violent of the entire Troubles on all sides – communal violence was at its height during that period and thus the army’s tactics were, for obvious reasons, more heavy handed.
However, in the mid 70s the Provos changed focus to a “Long War” strategy aimed at attacking British military installations and economic targets and escalating the political battle; sectarian murder consequently declined. (The Provos had a deliberate policy of not attacking the Protestant community, especially during the “Long War” period where they tended only to assassinate Loyalist paramilitaries and UVF murderer/gangsters such as Lenny Murphy, while focussing on British targets. The idea was to protect the Catholic community from communal violence while aiming to unite the working class across sectarian lines; the IRA and Sinn Fein have always been the most principled Marxists in the entire United Kingdom. Of course, many civilians, mostly Protestants, were killed in the attacks on “economic targets” – a point we’ll come to later.) By the mid 1980s, the Armalite and Ballot Box period, even the military aspect of the “Long War” was declining in importance and the Provos were becoming increasingly subsidiary to Sinn Fein. Consequently violence lessened even further and the British army became correspondingly less and less heavy handed. There were always going to be more civilian deaths in the years 69-73 when the army was fighting gun battles in the streets against the Provisional IRA and the Provos were carrying out literally thousands of bombing attacks against both military and commercial targets, than in the 1980s when the Provos’ campaign was all about low intensity warfare.
As for all this guff about “colonialist denialism” – you really need to get out more. Your evidence isn’t strong – it’s weak, and worse, it’s interpreted through a lens of obvious ignorance. The sheer arrogance that you have in asserting that British people don’t understand their own history is really pretty shameful – you don’t teach your Grandma to suck eggs, and you’re forgetting that everybody in Britain lived through this stuff.
July 3, 2010 at 12:15 pm
The sophistry here is in presenting a database of deaths as facts and then getting hoity-toity when the stats don’t back up your claim. A common conservative trait, this, but we have already been over this discussion of why conservatives are on the nose in academia, haven’t we?
So, first this:
I’m not making any claims about the relative badness of these organisations, so I don’t need to do this. I’m simply making a claim about the nature of British Army operations in NI. But I did this for you anyway, thus sparing you the need to dirty your hands with this sophistry. The Republicans killed 156 civilians up until 1973 (the time period I looked at before), and 201 soldiers. After that period, the numbers were 547 and 287; the odds of a death being a civilian before the 1973 change compared to after were 0.4, which was highly significant – and in the opposite direction to the OR for the Army. If you include the RUC and UDR in the definition of army, you get a revised odds ratio of 0.7 because they killed a lot of those guys too, but more after 1973 than before. Only 44% of deaths were civilians, compared to 67% for the army, and this drops to 36% if you include the RUC and UDR. Note that these figures would be even more damning if we knew the truth about the 80 people the army killed who they classified, without investigation, as “Republican Paramilitaries.”
So in fact the army were killing civilians at a higher rate than the IRA, who were busily popping soldiers, almost as if they were fighting against a colonizing force… I note during this time that they didn’t kill any loyalist paramilitaries, but did kill quite a few Republican paras, which makes me think that the statistic “civilian” is misleading in this dataset. This is the effect of recall bias, I think, and also because the sides hadn’t crystallized it was hard for the media to identify loyalist paramilitary membership at that time. But, going with the conservative approach to statistics that I favour, I have chosen to trust the dataset on this detail. Of course, the fact that a dataset had to be assembled 30 years after the fact from media reports is itself a telling sign of colonial callousness.
I haven’t compared the British Army’s murder rate to the NI rate at the time because a) I don’t think there would be a reliable statistic for this, British data collection being poor in its colonies at that time[1] and b) I’m comparing to civilian murder rates in nearby countries at peace, because the issue here is not (contra Noisms) “were the Army worse than the paramilitaries” but “were they engaged in a program of state terror.” Which is why I’ve compared it to the modern UK murder rate, a figure not many people in the UK are happy with. I certainly don’t think they’d be happy if that figure doubled overnight because a bunch of heavily-armed thugs started randomly killing people in the streets. Which is my point.
I don’t understand the point you’re trying to make about my not being interested in the truth. I’m comparing the rate of excess deaths by the British Army in a territory of the UK with the murder rate in the whole of the UK, and finding them equal. That is excess deaths, deaths which would not have occurred if the Army were not there, are equivalent to a standard civilian murder rate. Or 6 times that for Catholics.
I can do that if you like, but it’s not favourable. The first survey of deaths in Iraq found that between 30 and 40% of violent deaths were due to the coalition during the post-war stabilization phase, largely due to airstrikes. A civilian death proportion up near 60% is more consistent with a death squad-style environment, which is why I labeled it “state terror.” Which brings us to this:
I’m not sure what to do with a comment as handily arrogant as this. First, by “without any evidence” do you mean that the 107 civilians killed in 4 years don’t count as evidence? Do you not really believe they were civilians? Is killing civilians not “indiscriminate” when the army does it[2]? Secondly, by “without any evidence” do you choose to ignore the information provided on the pre-1973 investigation agreement, which clearly encourages indiscriminate killing? And thirdly, we haven’t “established [Bloody Sunday] was a unique event.” Both in the numbers and in the reports about the investigation structure at the time, and from the Saville report and related discussion (linked to here) we’ve established that it was not a unique event in any way except its scale. It followed the modus operandi of every other civilian death in those 4 years: the army murdered civilians, claimed they were rioting or attacking police, weren’t investigated by the police, and the murders were buried. The only difference is that this time there was a camera there. So, we haven’t established anything of the sort.
And so again we see the failure to understand colonialism. You’ve started from the assumption that the British Army were behaving better than the paramilitaries; this has been shown to be false. You’ve dismissed claims of “indiscriminate killings” in the face of data from your own preferred source which makes clear that they were going on; and you’re still trying to maintain the line that Bloody Sunday was a unique moment of soldiers-gone-bad, when it constituted just 10% of all civilians killed in 4 years, and the murder rate by soldiers was equivalent to the entire murder rate of a modern peaceful state, or 6 times that in Catholic areas, and probably similar in those areas to the murder rate in a central American post-junta state. And you continue to treat Army reports of the allegiance of the people they killed as gospel truth, in the face of strong evidence that there is no way we can rely on their accounts. Even the data source you present is evidence of this – it had to be compiled 30 years after the fact, because the army weren’t counting. Yet you claim I’m behaving inexcusably for noting that the British don’t understand their own colonial history.
And on that matter I really have to pull you up, too. I’m British, I lived in Britain during the Troubles, and I remember how Britain lived this stuff – it didn’t affect the majority of British at all, and most of us were much more concerned about miner’s strikes and the trains running on time, and got pissed off at bag searches when we went to London. Plus, of course, it gave a great opportunity for the British to exercise their natural prejudices against the Irish. I also studied history at middle school in England, during which I studied the period of Cromwell and the civil wars, but funnily enough learnt nothing about his involvement in Ireland – which the British would consider inexcusable, if, say, the Americans were choosing not to mention the collateral damage of their conquest of the west. And I studied the Blitz, of course, interminably, but learnt nothing about who really invented terror bombing, or when it was first used; similarly I learnt all about concentration camps and Auschwitz, but our history courses seemed to have somehow skipped the Boer War. And there wasn’t much in there about India either. Given the British are very happy to berate Australians about our unwillingness to teach our own history, and of course love to remind the world that the Japanese don’t teach war history in school, I think it’s completely fair to point out that the British themselves haven’t come to terms with their own. Particularly if, like me, you’re a British citizen who did his middle school history in England and only discovered the word “colonialism” after he left the country.
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fn1: Ireland only got a census in 1969, about 60 years after the UK. But it’s not a colony, oh no.
fn2: You would do well to examine some of the Australian debates over how to report colonial deaths in this instance. Keith Windschuttle, the key denialist of Aboriginal genocide, has been called “cold” and “callous” by his critics precisely because of the way he uses these kinds of dismissive phrases. We’re talking about the murder of civilians by an armed representative of the state, which had the power to flatten the colony if it wanted. Dismissing these killings so callously as if they didn’t even happen, when they’re recorded in your own preferred dataset, doesn’t do your image any favours.
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