TheRealMafoo said:
When and what are you referring too? |
I'm not really sure! I don't have a comprehensive knowledge of colonial history, because there's so much of it. Even if we ignore things like the second Sino-Japanese War or the Algerian War, there's still the Anglo-Zulu war which took place in the 1890's.
Colonialism is dying, but it's not dead. It's not going to be dead for a long time, and its current fall from its former position is a result of a concerted international effort to decolonialize on the part of all major nations in the wake of World War II. Remember Hong Kong? Wasn't released from British rule until 1997.
The thing about colonialism in a modern context is that there's international pressures, including human rights organizations and the more humanely minded major world powers, that keep colonial efforts in check - in theory, anyway. The world has become hostile to colonialism on a large scale (we don't tend to look at southeast Asia much anymore, though some of us are still pissed off about Tibet) because it results in the death of cultures and the suppression of human rights.
That's not going to be the case for a place like Pandora, which exists under no international treaties except those which govern all of space, has no standing under human rights charters, and is invisible to the majority of the public because we can't afford to bring more than a few thousand humans there ever (according to Cameron, the cost of taking something to Pandora is ~$1 million per pound). The setup created in this sci-fi universe is exactly like that which lead to exploitative colonization by the British Empire in Africe i the 19th and 20th centuries.
My point being here is that we're making a concerted effort to lessen colonization in the world today, but those efforts exist under current circumstances and may change in the future, and would not extend beyond the power base of the constituent nations who push for decolonization.
I guess I'm trying to say
I don't see a return to colonization as unrealistic
