Haiti and Avatar

Paul C. writes:

Anyone note the stark difference between the fantasy world of Avatar, in which non-white minorities build utopias free from the contamination of Western culture and its technology, and the world of reality, the thoroughly African society of Haiti, utterly helpless in the face of a natural disaster, wallowing in 80 percent poverty and completely dependent on what still-white America gives its people?

LA replies:

It’s time for a re-issue of Robert Edgerton’s important 1992 book Sick Societies, which tells what primitive cultures are really like. The truth is the opposite of the Rousseauian/Cameronian dream.

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James P. writes:

I have no doubt that the Left believes that Haiti’s problems, like those of Africa writ large, result from the contamination of Western culture (slavery, imperialism, capitalism, etc.) and that left to themselves, these countries would be peaceful utopias.

Apropos of which, have you seen Monbiot’s deranged column on Avatar? There’s a howler in every paragraph! His view is that Avatar is “profoundly silly” because it has a “happy ending” (American militarism is crushingly defeated), in contrast to the real history of the conquest of the New World, in which genocidal Europeans destroyed “everything and everyone they encountered.” And worst of all, greedy imperialist genocide “hasn’t yet ended”!

LA replies:

Please write to this guy and ask him whether the white American majority’s support over the last 45 years of an immigration policy that is turning whites into a minority in a nonwhite country is an example of greedy imperialist genocide.

Alan Levine writes:

I should point out that Robert Edgerton’s “Sick Societies” deals not with “normal” primitive societies in general, but with particular, dysfunctional primitive societies. By the way, although “Sick Societies” is not a bad book, Edgerton also wrote a book rather whitewashing Mau-Mau.

George Monbiot is a full-blown leftist psychopath. Apart from other distortions and his passing over the unattractive fact that the civilized Amerind societies such as the Aztec, Inca and Maya were just as brutal and bloody as any in the Eastern Hemisphere at their worst (or in the Aztec case, even worse than any that have ever existed there) he obscures the well-established point that the overwhelming part of the drop in the Amerind population was due to epidemics to which the natives had no immunity at all. You might as well blame the Chinese for the Black Death as blame the Europeans for the wiping out of the Amerinds.

Bill in Maryland writes:

You write: “It’s time for a re-issue of Robert Edgerton’s important 1992 book Sick Societies … “

It’s available new from Amazon.

.”.which tells what primitive cultures are really like. The truth is the opposite of the Rousseauian/Cameronian dream.”

Even some liberals have been forced to recognize this, eg Stephen Pinker:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ramBFRt1Uzk Up to 4:20 (brief BMW ad at beginning)

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 14, 2010 08:15 AM | Send