“Avatar” is the latest in a long series of movies (and other fictional accounts) which play with the trope that “A large number of committed, low-tech native people (usually ‘of color’, be it red, yellow, or blue) can obliterate a high tech army composed of White European Males, which may include White European Males who are of African or Asian descent and female gender.” Very often, people point to “historical” incidents, such as Native Americans vs. Custer, or North Vietnam vs. A Bunch Of American Ethnic Stereotypes Led By Some Prick Second Looie Just Out Of West Point. Recently, the difficulties faced by the Evil Empire (USSR or USA, take your pick) in Afghanistan will be mentioned. A few will remember history began before 1800 and find some “Barbarians vs. Romans” example. All of these “historical examples” are supposed to let us believe that teddy bears or smurfs can take down a massive industrial army, usually in a single, dramatic, conflict lasting ten minutes on the screen and no more than an hour or two in “story time”.
But it’s all bullshit.
First, let’s look at tech differences. In the fiction, the conflict is usually paleolithic technology vs. technology far beyond present-day Earth. In reality, the technology is usually a lot closer — the difference between a bow and a single-shot rifle really isn’t that great. The Indians and the Cavalry both rode horses — one side didn’t have jeeps, never mind tanks or helicopters. Further, the Indians often had rifles they’d acquired via trade. Vietnam? They used primitive traps — and modern guns, mortars, mines, and explosives. Romans? Again, while Roman technology may have been better, it wasn’t THAT much better, especially against superior numbers.
You can’t compare “Bow vs. Flintlock” to “Bow vs. hyper-tech machine gun”. Nor can you compare “bronze axe vs. iron armor” to “bronze axe vs. layered composite armor designed to take a hit from a missile”. (And let’s not forget when there was a more meaningful tech difference — cannon and metal armor and horses vs obsidian and no metal and no horses, aka, Cortez vs. the Aztec Empire, a force of 1500 men or so conquered a continent. Now imagine those same Aztecs against modern mechanized military. Now imagine those same Aztecs against what the mechanized military of 200 years from now might look like. To help, think of what the mechanized military of 200 years ago looked like. Oh wait — there WASN’T one. In 200 years, technologies which could not be described in 1809 have come into existence. Imagining the technology of 200 years from now is pretty much akin to handing a pile of sand to Charles Babbage and saying “Here. Build your computer out of this. We do it, after all.”)
So, let’s put aside the idea that “primitive tech can beat high tech if your hearts are pure”. It just ain’t so.
Now let’s look at something else. Yup, Imperialist Invaders have indeed been driven off, or at least stymied or frustrated, by determined resistance by people who have access to decent personal weapons — perhaps the mortars and rocket launchers and assault rifles of the past war, cheap junk to the first world but still plenty deadly and only slightly behind the tech curve. However, this didn’t occur when someone rounded up all the Viet Cong/Mujaheddin/Whatever and pointed them at a massed column of tanks, artillery, and soldiers. It happened due to what used to be called “guerrilla warfare”, until someone noticed that term was French and we can’t call any actually successful military tactic by a French term, and so is now called “asymmetrical warfare”, which means, “While you are having sex with my sister the prostitute, I will sneak up behind you and slit your throat.” It also means “I will hide my weapons in religious buildings, hospitals, and marketplaces; I will disguise bombs inside children’s toys and teach my children to get you to go pick them up; I will attack only when you are asleep or alone or unprepared and then I will vanish into a crowd of seeming innocents so your only choice is to become a victim or a monster.” What it absolutely does not mean is “I will charge right at you, whooping war cries and exposing myself to you, while leaving my old, my women, and my children safely somewhere else so you know exactly who you can shoot and still retain some traces of humanity and conscience.” The process also takes years, sometimes decades, and “victory” comes not as a single triumphant moment but the inevitable slow degradation of enemy commitment and involvement until they “declare victory and leave”, letting you finally wipe out their puppet government, put in your own, and begin committing genocide against your people yourself instead of letting outsiders have all the fun.
But I guess it’s hard to put all that up on the screen. (Though “Charlie Wilson’s War” did a pretty good job, come to think of it. It’s called a “montage”, Mr. Cameron. Maybe you missed that class in film school.)
Of course, there have been times when the defenders of the homeland against imperialist aggression have, indeed, rode out on horse cavalry against tanks in open battle. It happened in Poland in 1938. Guess which side won?
Amusingly, while this trope is often found in movies which allow white people to wallow in white guilt while still making a white man the hero (sure, he turns against his own people (Dances with Wolves, Last Samurai, Avatar) but he’s the one who shows the savages and primitives how to win — without being LED by a White Man, they cannot DEFEAT the White Man. White Liberals get to have it both ways — they get to tear their shirts over the evils of capitalistimperialism, AND they get to still be the people in charge, the bringers of wisdom and guidance to the world. You can purge your guilt over crimes you didn’t commit and had no actual part in, and you get to be top dog and boink the hot Indian/Japanese/Smurf chick. Win/win!), the real origin is part of American myth and legend, namely, the myth of the American revolution, where the cunning, but outgunned, Revolutionaries defeated the armies of Imperial Britain by hiding behind walls and NOT wearing bright red uniforms. If we had had modern media back then, there would have been a movie about a British general who infiltrates the Americans, then eventually learns to sympathize with their cause (and falls in love with, I dunno, Paul Revere’s smokin’ hot daughter, who will wear a low-cut bodice or something), and he teaches them all to hide behind walls and not wear bright red uniforms, and then he’s made President of the United States by unanimous acclaim. You even see it poke up again in “Red Dawn” and the like, though at least in Red Dawn, IIRC, it was mostly guerrilla action and sabotage, not charging madly at Russian tanks waving a BB gun.
(I want to do a movie in which an Aztec somehow makes it to Elizabethan England, and while initially treated as a barbarian curiosity, his nobility, courage, and broad, well-muscled chest that glints in the sunlight eventually causes the English to respect him, and then he leads them against the Spanish Armada thanks to his knowledge of Aztec Warfare, and marries Queen Elizabeth and becomes King Xiticioalicxa I or something. Though to be really true to genre, we’d need to replace the Spanish Armada with the Aztec Armada.)