the story no one wants to hear

Avatar Half-Tells a Story We Would All Prefer to Forget
By George Monbiot, Monbiot.com
Posted on January 18, 2010, Printed on January 18, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/145107/

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. 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.

The butchery began with Columbus. He slaughtered the native people of
Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic) by unimaginably brutal
means. His soldiers tore babies from their mothers and dashed their heads
against rocks. They fed their dogs on living children. On one occasion they
hung 13 Indians in honour of Christ and the 12 disciples, on a gibbet just
low enough for their toes to touch the ground, then disembowelled them and
burnt them alive. Columbus ordered all the native people to deliver a
certain amount of gold every three months; anyone who failed had his hands
cut off. By 1535 the native population of Hispaniola had fallen from 8m to
zero: partly as a result of disease, partly as a result of murder, overwork
and starvation.

The conquistadores spread this civilising mission across central and south
America. When they failed to reveal where their mythical treasures were
hidden, the indigenous people were flogged, hanged, drowned, dismembered,
ripped apart by dogs, buried alive or burnt. The soldiers cut off women's
breasts, sent people back to their villages with their severed hands and
noses hung round their necks and hunted Indians with their dogs for sport.
But most were killed by enslavement and disease. The Spanish discovered that
it was cheaper to work Indians to death and replace them than to keep them
alive: the life expectancy in their mines and plantations was three to four
months. Within a century of their arrival, around 95% of the population of
South and Central America had been destroyed.

In California during the 18th Century the Spanish systematised this
extermination. A Franciscan missionary called Junipero Serra set up a series
of "missions": in reality concentration camps using slave labour. The native
people were herded in under force of arms and made to work in the fields on
one fifth of the calories fed to African-American slaves in the 19th
century. They died from overwork, starvation and disease at astonishing
rates, and were continually replaced, wiping out the indigenous populations.
Junipero Serra, the Eichmann of California, was beatified by the Vatican in
1988. He now requires one more miracle to be pronounced a saint.

While the Spanish were mostly driven by the lust for gold, the British who
colonised North America wanted land. In New England they surrounded the
villages of the native Americans and murdered them as they slept. As
genocide spread westwards, it was endorsed at the highest levels. George
Washington ordered the total destruction of the homes and land of the
Iroquois. Thomas Jefferson declared that his nation's wars with the Indians
should be pursued until each tribe "is exterminated or is driven beyond the
Mississippi." During the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864, troops in Colorado
slaughtered unarmed people gathered under a flag of peace, killing children
and babies, mutilating all the corpses and keeping their victims' genitals
to use as tobacco pouches or to wear on their hats. Theodore Roosevelt
called this event "as rightful and beneficial a deed as ever took place on
the frontier."

The butchery hasn't yet ended: last month the Guardian reported that
Brazilian ranchers in the western Amazon, having slaughtered all the rest,
tried to kill the last surviving member of a forest tribe. Yet the greatest
acts of genocide in history scarcely ruffle our collective conscience.
Perhaps this is what would have happened had the Nazis won the second world
war: the Holocaust would have been denied, excused or minimised in the same
way, even as it continued. The people of the nations responsible - Spain,
Britain, the US and others - will tolerate no comparisons, but the final
solutions pursued in the Americas were far more successful. Those who
commissioned or endorsed them remain national or religious heroes. Those who
seek to prompt our memories are ignored or condemned.

This is why the right hates Avatar. In the neocon Weekly Standard, John
Podhoretz complains that the film resembles a "revisionist western" in which
"the Indians became the good guys and the Americans the bad guys." He says
it asks the audience "to root for the defeat of American soldiers at the
hands of an insurgency." Insurgency is an interesting word for an attempt to
resist invasion: insurgent, like savage, is what you call someone who has
something you want. L'Osservatore Romano, the official newspaper of the
Vatican, condemned the film as "just . an anti-imperialistic,
anti-militaristic parable."

But at least the right knows what it is attacking. In the New York Times the
liberal critic Adam Cohen praises Avatar for championing the need to see
clearly. It reveals, he says, "a well-known principle of totalitarianism and
genocide -- that it is easiest to oppress those we cannot see." But in a
marvellous unconscious irony, he bypasses the crashingly obvious metaphor
and talks instead about the light it casts on Nazi and Soviet atrocities. We
have all become skilled in the art of not seeing.

I agree with its rightwing critics that Avatar is crass, mawkish and
cliched. But it speaks of a truth more important -- and more dangerous -
than those contained in a thousand arthouse movies.


George Monbiot is the author Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning. Read
more of his writings at Monbiot.com. This article originally appeared in the
Guardian.

C 2010 Monbiot.com All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/145107/