I saw Avatar last week, just in time, apparently, to truly understand the significance of this:
While I understand the the analogy, I also see the differences between James Cameron’s fictional scenario and the actual scenario unfolding in the Middle East. For me, the most significant distinction is the complete lack of pretexts in Avatar for the human’s seizure of Nav’i land. Cameron, it seems, tries to draw a parallel between the human-Nav’i conflict and current U.S. military endeavors by peppering his script with “War on Terror” buzzwords like “hearts and minds,” “peemptive strike,” and “shock and awe.” However, in Avatar, the sole goal of the humans is to get unobtanim, a valuable mineral that lies beneath the Nav’i inhabited land. I presume that we’re supposed to understand that unobtanium is oil and Pandora (the planet on which the Nav’i reside) is Iraq. However, U.S. leaders never proffered possession or control of oil as a rationale for the Iraq War. U.S. leaders who claimed in retrospect that oil motivated the intervention either had to backtrack entirely or claim they were talking about a different war.
David Henderson comes closer to an analogous situation by comparing Avatar to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Kelo decision. In the Kelo decision, there was no pretext for the state’s acquisition of private land other than the fact that the land could better be used to foster economic growth. However, the Kelo example misses the key cultural aspect. Thus, I think the truest Avatar comparison is to centuries-old colonial endeavors, some of which were justified similarly. To quote Ken MacMillan from Sovereignty and Possession in the English New World on English imperialism:
The English were always more interested in the possession and exploitation of land than the subjugation and conversion of native peoples. Subjugation, extending back to the Norman Conquest of 1066, had historically doubtful legitimacy to the English. Instead, the land’s vacancy was frequently used as a chief rationale for establishing lawful possession (dominium). According to natural and cannon law, unoccupied and uncultivated territories (res nullius) become the possession of the first person to discover them and to put them to productive use, usually through cultivation. When, for example, there was doubt over precisely what lands could be possessed in New England, the Massachusetts Court declared that “what lands any of the Indians, within this jurisdiction, have any possession or improvement, by subduing, they have right thereto, according to that Gen[esis]: 1-28, chap: 9:1, Psa[lm]: 115, 16” As interpreted by the English, these Biblical injunctions to “be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it” suggested that dominium over the earth was only acquired through settlement and cultivation, which the nomadic natives did not accomplish.
Though there was a civilizing mission, as we find in the First Charter of Virginia, for example, which states the goal of:
propagating [the] Christian Religion to such People, as yet live in Darkness and miserable Ignorance of the true Knowledge and Worship of God, and may in time bring the Infidels and Savages, living in those parts, to human Civility, and to a settled and quiet Government…
But the primary rationale was economic. And ultimately the “civilizing mission” justification fused with the “economic development” justification, as evidenced by the words of Otto von Bismarck at the Berlin Conference of 1884, where he stated, “all the Governments invited share the wish to bring the natives of Africa within the pale of civilization by opening up the interior of the continent to commerce,” thus commencing the Scramble for Africa. In Avatar, we find this “fusion” justification. The humans have tried building roads for the Nav’i, the audience learns, and when that doesn’t work the humans resort to acquisition of Nav’i territory by force.
These justifications matter, and for me, they are the reason the War on Terror and Israeli West Bank expansion are not analogous to Avatar.
