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tarheel91 on 29 December 2009
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donathos said:
Khuutra said:
TheRealMafoo said:
Khuutra said:

World's changed and we're more educated, eh?

Can you tell me the last time we had some good, old-fashiond colonialism in its first stages?

(here is a hint: it wasn't 600 years ago)

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

I completely agree.  It's not unrealistic.  And to speak to Reasonable's latest post, I don't think it's even a bad thing to present a colonialism analogy.

If we're looking at Avatar alone, in a vacuum, I think I have no problems.  It's just that it seems to me that this is *almost always* how it's presented.  Maybe I'm wrong?  Maybe I'm remembering selectively?  But it feels like "the guy in the suit" is always the villain; that business tactics in the movies always amount to foreclosing on an elderly widow.

And, because Avatar *is* so... metaphorical, and widely applicable, it seems to be saying not just that this one business is operating this way, but that Business Operates This Way--by uprooting people's Hometrees to get at unobtainium.

Do some businessmen operate this way, even today?  Absolutely.  And it has a place in art, and maybe Avatar is that place.  It's just a theme that seems highly familiar to me by this point, and I don't see much science fiction stepping up to the plate to show how business *ought* to operate in these kinds of scenarios.  No heroes who show how unobtainium might be obtained w/o horrific consequences, just the moral that unobtainium is best left unobtained, and to want to do otherwise is to be the villain.

But again, maybe I'm overstating the case?  Maybe the fiction examples I'm looking for exist, and I'm just blocking them from memory?  I dunno.

You're ignoring the setting of Avatar.  This is a colonial setting.  Businesses historically DO operate like that in a colonial setting.  They abuse the native people and the land for profit.  This isn't humans and Na'vi living peacefully together and all of a sudden the big bad corporation comes in a ruins everything (if it was, I'd agree with you).  This is emperialism motivated by greed and led by corporations as it has always been throughout history.


About unobtanium.  Yes, the message really is it's better left alone.  Whether you think that's right or not is up to you, but there's certainly something to be said against uprooting an entire clan of people who've lived in a single spot for centuries, possibly even millenia for profit.  This isn't the sort of thing where unobtanium saves the universe and this is a moral dilema.  This is the sort of thing where unobtanium = unimaginable profit and it's greed vs. conscience.

 

Note: TheRealMafoo should check out my first paragraph too.  Again, this movie isn't about corporations in general.  This movie is about imperialism and the corporations that motivate it (which is only a portion of corporations, not all of them).