George Monbiot: Avatar and the Genocides We Will Not See

[marmar]

via CommonDreams:



Published on Tuesday, January 12, 2010 by The Guardian/UK

Avatar and the Genocides We Will Not See
Cameron's blockbuster half-tells a story we would all prefer to forget

by George Monbiot


Avatar, James Cameron's blockbusting 3-D film, is both profoundly silly and profound. It's profound because, like most films about aliens, it is a metaphor for contact between different human cultures. But in this case the metaphor is conscious and precise: this is the story of European engagement with the native peoples of the Americas. It's profoundly silly because engineering a happy ending demands a plot so stupid and predictable that it rips the heart out of the film. The fate of the native Americans is much closer to the story told in another new film, The Road, in which a remnant population flees in terror as it is hunted to extinction.

But this is a story no one wants to hear, because of the challenge it presents to the way we choose to see ourselves. Europe was massively enriched by the genocides in the Americas; the American nations were founded on them. This is a history we cannot accept.

In his book American Holocaust, the US scholar David Stannard documents the greatest acts of genocide the world has ever experienced(1). In 1492, some 100m native peoples lived in the Americas. By the end of the 19th Century almost all of them had been exterminated. Many died as a result of disease. But the mass extinction was also engineered.

When the Spanish arrived in the Americas, they described a world which could scarcely have been more different from their own. Europe was ravaged by war, oppression, slavery, fanaticism, disease and starvation. The populations they encountered were healthy, well-nourished and mostly (with exceptions like the Aztecs and Incas) peacable, democratic and egalitarian. Throughout the Americas the earliest explorers, including Columbus, remarked on the natives' extraordinary hospitality. The conquistadores marvelled at the amazing roads, canals, buildings and art they found, which in some cases outstripped anything they had seen at home. None of this stopped them from destroying everything and everyone they encountered. ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/01/12-4

[notadmblnd]

1. No such thing as engineered mass extintion

that would require a conspiracy, and we all know there's no such thing a conspiracies:sarcasm:

[RaleighNCDUer]

2. The genocide was horific enouogh - we don't need to lie to make it worse.

The population of Hispaniola in 1492 was in the vicinity of 250,000, not 8 million. The population of the Americas was between 30-50 million, not 100 million. There is NO archeological evidence to support the numbers he claims. The fact that we can't get an estimate better than 20-40 million is good evidence of how terrible the genocide was.

So far as I can tell, the "100 million" number comes from a counting of accumulated deaths at the hands of Europeans, over a 4 century time span. If the peak population of the Americas in 1492 was 50 million, and 30 million of them died within 60 years (by 1550ish), that still left 20 million of that initial population and two more generations born to that 20 million, from which there were still further deaths. So there is no discrepancy between saying that 100 million died, and that the peak population was 50 million. The diseases that devasted central american populations within 10 years didn't reach north america for another 50 years - when the English landed at Jamestown in 1607 it had only been 1 or 2 generations since a devastating plague had decimated the population.

[Nikki Stone1]

3. Monbiot is right on here.

.

[Phoonzang]

4. He hasn't seen the sequel yet...

The humans come back and in force and exterminate the Na'vi. 200 years later, they're living on reservations.