“Avatar” Reveals U.S. Thinking on War

“Avatar” has become popular around the world, even sweeping through the movie market in mainland China. It would not be an exaggeration to say that one could draw simultaneous comparisons with “Avatar” in nearly every domain. There are some who see it as the meeting of history’s greatest demolition force and history’s greatest obstructionists. There are others who, looking at the present military predicament of the U.S., draw the conclusion that it represents the war on terror. If one pursues these passing associations to their source, then it also becomes a metaphor for the principle that motivates all of the world’s wars and for the outcome of those wars.

The author’s strongest feeling, after watching this hair-raising film, was a sense of awe at the imaginative power of the American people. No one controls American thought, not in the realm of scientific invention, nor even in the worlds of literature and sports. No one controls American thought from within the country, and in the end there is no one in the outside world who can control American actions. A part of U.S. history has always been that of the endlessly changing frontier. Since independence in 1776, the frontiers of American military strategy have included these: the Original Frontier — the former 13 colonies; the New Frontier — the later 50 states; the Overseas Frontier — becoming the leader of the West in the wake of the two World Wars. Now the High Frontier of outer space has become part of the U.S. national strategy, and part of its strategy toward the universe. This High Frontier extends to infinity.

This is how the U.S. has become the only country in the world that has no borders. “Avatar” represents the emerging reality and latent possibility of an America that has lost its borders by expanding its new frontiers. The United States of the present day is not simply a country in the Western Hemisphere, but rather an intercontinental nation consisting of hundreds of global military bases and overseas territories. America already controls the world’s international airspace, the high seas, orbital space and even cyberspace. On the basis of these formidable capabilities and powers, as well as financial superiority and other advantages, the U.S. is in the process of building a global empire.

As a member of the military, I paid close attention to the ways in which “Avatar” unintentionally reveals American thinking on war. Of course, the U.S. already uses aerial warfare and cybernetic surface assaults as a fundamental part of its methodology of war. They envision the main invasion force on Pandora as columns of futuristic attack helicopters and aerial bombers, while in action on the surface they make use of a kind of robot that unites man and machine. This is in complete accord with America’s most recent global strategies and with the vision of making war by means of cybernetic machines.

After the U.S. military unified and established a space command in 2006, they went on in 2009 to publicly establish a command for internet warfare. Information technology and space technology increasingly overlap and intersect, and the new kind of military that will grow out of the union of these two types of technological power will come to dominate warfare in the next ten years. Current conventional land, sea and air forces will increasingly be relegated to the fringe. As in the past, the nation that will be the first to manifest these characteristics will be the United States.

Americans revere violence. Whether invading or counter-attacking, what they rely on is not the teaching of morality, but rather competition through naked strength. The background of the whole movie is a forest, the imagery that testifies to America’s belief in the law of the jungle.

When things go to an extreme, they must reverse course. Freedom of thought leads to unrestrained action and consequently to a craving for unilateral domination that cannot be contained. This kind of completely unrestricted state of affairs has put America, a huge and populous country, on a path that endangers all of humanity.

America, a traditionally peaceful nation, has undergone large scale social changes and transformations that are difficult to imagine, becoming fundamentally a nation like Sparta that is eternally in a state of war. It would be a mistake to believe that this new world order was nothing more than a scheme drawn up under the leadership of the Bush clan and its henchmen. It is commonly held that the mechanism of America’s supremacy was shaped at the end of the 19th century when the U.S. carried out its first foray into empire, conquering the Philippines, Cuba and Puerto Rico through military action. From an economic standpoint, America has already become a unified military-industrial system, which can only develop and survive by making war. This is why “Avatar” could only appear in the U.S. It is a product of the whole of American cultural and traditional ethnic thinking. America, which has always acted as the representative of the Western way of life, already controls the greater part of the natural resources of the world, but they still look to the rest of the universe in search of more natural resources. All American plans to explore outer space share this motivation.

In reality, if one looks at what has happened in the year since Obama rose to power, the U.S. still adheres to the mentality of plunder and profit, and continues superciliously to follow the path of war. Analyzing it from this perspective, although the movie “Avatar” is a masterpiece of fiction and technology, it is certainly not imaginary as an international political reality.