Avatar and the Na’zi myth of cyber-folk-soil

It is first necessary to make clear that the formula of this movie (with both its included variables and the conscious omissions) is fundamentally a fascist one. When I suggested this to a friend, he immediately objected that a parable of liberation can’t be fascist, which in itself is untrue, but completely beside the point concerning Avatar. After all, who in the film is enslaved? The Na’vi certainly are not, and as far as I can tell they are the only ones who treat anything living as beasts of burden. Just because there is some kind of tentacle assisted mind melding between slave and master the fact still remains there is a one directional use relationship between the Na’vi and the other animals on Pandora. So if we’re being honest the closest thing to a parable of liberation comes with the destruction of Hometree and the brief scenes of a few de-harnessed bird-like creatures escaping the life long bondage with the death of the Na’vi who domesticated them.

Instead, what we have with Avatar is an expulsion parable; one in which a Natural world and its Native population are in perfect balance and the only threat to this seemingly eternal harmony is an alien intruder – and this is the core of fascist ideology. This story is pure Nationalism and will serve those ends. Imagine a European who fancies his hereditary homeland as a kind of Pandora and the onslaught of Islamic immigrants as the human invaders – greedily demanding precious recourses from the native because the land from which they come is desolate. An old church in a Paris Banlieu burns and a French Nationalist can say look they have no respect for our history or what is sacred to us. Everything would be beautiful and functioning properly if only this foreign threat was excised. Our traditions and faith, once freed from these parasites, will lead us back to perfect equilibrium. The same holds for any American small town with a close-knit, insular, community that views the threat of economic catastrophe as some how the fault of Mexican immigration. Now imagine the opposite, the submerged, dispossessed and exploited, what could this movie mean from this perspective? The mistake made by many on the left is that this film is defending the indigenous peoples struggle against exploitative Capital, but it is crucial to remember that indigenous pre-historic people do not exist in a globalized capital world, and the attempt to undo history is reaction using the cover of an anachronistic fable of freedom – the very same framework that Hitler used to promise industrial progress without the internationalizing effect; paralleled unconsciously in Avatar with the implicit assumption of a return to nature with cybernetic capacity, thereby erasing the history between the tribe and cyber café and guaranteeing the pleasures of both by birthright.

The movie is important in the sense that it demonstrates the essential reactionary nature of the green movement and all its derivatives (primitivism, ecofeminism, green libertarianism, etc.). Of course the folk-soil mindset is at the base of the story with the modern addition of the cybernetic metaphor thereby uniting all the idols of the petty-bourgeois (computers and Gaia). The Alchemy at work here is the simple minded (and non-dialectical) mélange of the two polar modes of contemporary life style – the high technocrat and deep environmentalist. This creates a convenient palliative for a troubled conscience, in that it has a ruler by which to measure the iniquities of others and a license to exempt oneself since work on a computer seems relatively innocuous to the environment. A helpful comparison here would be the poets and intellectuals (Pound, D’Annunzio, Pirandello, etc.) who despised the decadent banality of the bourgeoisie but had too much of a personal affinity with the creative entrepreneur to condemn the system that awarded him so much freedom; so instead they threw their weight behind fascism and the Cooperate state which promised a different approach; namely, the liquidation of the stolid financial parasites and listless political compromisers. In other words the part of the deal which won them over was a promise to cleanse the system of its destructive elements and make more room for the great élans that were embodied in the noble poet and entrepreneur. Is there not an obvious parallel between Pounds reaction written with all the puns and tricks of Modernism and the fantastic natural world of Pandora created by innovative state of the art technology – in other words absolutely artificially? It is this reactionary and utopian theme that is recreated in the modern trends that infest the left: western intellectuals in privileged positions cultivating a solid sense of superiority by recasting the criteria of revolution to fit their already existing proclivities and personal tastes, and trying to appropriate the tradition as grounds to wax indignant over matters of personal preference; the restless progeny of the upper classes that believe the most radical change possible is precise refinement of the culture and society which produced their position to include more room for whims, eccentricity, and nature worship so that their spiritual wealth may one day equal their material wealth. The pathological hatred of the human effect on nature should not be mistaken for anything short of an out growth of sentiments created by private property; hence we see modern reflections of aristocratic hunting preserves in the equally sized estates of our ruling class which is often praised for defending the majestic land in their care from parasite-humans with the power of the land deed. And this is the trick of nature worship: it allows the rich to see the further deprivation of human beings as a morally righteous development – so long as the human rats are caged in the favelas they’re not cutting down trees or killing majestic animals.