What a children’s cartoon taught me about empire, genocide, and the stories we tell ourselves
I was recently rewatching Avatar The Last Airbender, and Prince Zuko said something that I’ve probably heard over and over again, but is seemingly evergreen in recent light of Venezuela, Iran, and Palestine. The scarred prince, perhaps a metaphor for the scarring of imperial evils, said that “Growing up, we were taught that the Fire Nation was the greatest civilization in history. And somehow, the War was our way of sharing our greatness with the rest of the world. What an amazing lie that was.”
I had to pause my rewatch because suddenly I was thinking about every American history class I ever sat through, every speech about spreading democracy I ever heard, every time someone justified another bombing campaign as bringing civilization to the uncivilized, and I realized that Zuko’s words were not just about a fictional empire in a children’s cartoon but about the very real empires that have shaped our world through the same foundational lie dressed up in the language of benevolence and progress that never seems to exist. In fact, nothing is more primitive than killing people for sport, and that’s what today’s great colonies seem to take their greatest pride.
The Fire Nation didn’t call what it was doing conquest because conquerors are the bad guys in the stories we tell ourselves before bed, so instead they called it sharing, spreading, civilizing, bringing the light of their advanced society to the backward corners of the world. This is what they said when they wiped out the air nomads, and it what they said when they colonized the earth kingdom’s largest cities… remind anyone of a colony in the levant spreading their light through killing the indigenous and taking their cities?
It’s the exact mythology that Lyndon Johnson invoked when he sent half a million troops to Vietnam, promising to bring development and democracy to Southeast Asia while American bombers dropped more tonnage on that small country than was used in all of World War II, turning rice paddies into craters and villages into body counts that we filed away under pacification. We were there to help them, you see, to save them from communism and backwardness, to lift them up into modernity even if we had to burn down every thatched roof and defoliate every jungle to do it. Robert McNamara later admitted it was all a mistake, but somehow that word mistake doesn’t capture the weight of over a million Vietnamese dead, doesn’t account for the generations still being born with defects from Agent Orange, doesn’t explain why we got to frame our war crimes as errors in judgment rather than deliberate acts of imperial violence.
And then came Iraq, that same lie repackaged for a new generation, Bush standing on aircraft carriers declaring mission accomplished while Rumsfeld promised we’d be greeted as liberators, speaking about America’s sacred duty not to run away from murderers and extremists who would tear down what they could never build, as if the Iraqi people were incapable of civilization without our bombs to guide them. We were bringing them freedom, spreading democracy at gunpoint, and when Madeleine Albright was asked whether the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children due to our sanctions was worth it, she said yes, we think the price is worth it, and I wonder what kind of mental illness allows you to weigh half a million children against whatever geopolitical objective we were pursuing and come out thinking the math works in your favor. But that’s the thing about empires, they brainwash you to see other people’s children as prices worth paying, as collateral damage, as unfortunate but necessary sacrifices for the greater good that somehow always seems to benefit us and devastate them. Bush himself spoke of it in almost religious terms, how the United States had crossed oceans and settled wilderness and built the greatest democracy only to face the sacred duty of spreading that light to the Middle East, framing American imperialism as a civilizing mission that dated back through Greece in 1947 and the Berlin Airlift, conveniently forgetting that we were also the ones who armed Saddam Hussein in the first place, who drew the borders that carved up the region, who installed and deposed leaders based on whether they served our interests rather than their people’s needs.
Israel learned from its parent colonies, or maybe we learned together, two settler colonial projects backing each other up in the great game of rebranding ethnic cleansing as self-defense. When Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich says there’s no such thing as Palestinians because there’s no such thing as a Palestinian people, he justifies our physical erasure in the most violent ways, the same way Americans talked about empty lands and virgin territories that somehow had millions of indigenous people living on them before we decided they didn’t count as people at all. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced a complete siege on Gaza, declaring we are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly, and that word animals is doing so much work there, dehumanizing an entire population so that what comes next can be filed under pest control. These aren’t fringe voices screaming into the void but government ministers articulating official state policy, telling us exactly what they’re doing while the international community nods along because Israel has the right to defend itself, as if defense means bombing hospitals and refugee camps, as if the act of resisting your own erasure is somehow aggression against your erasers.
Netanyahu himself framed it in apocalyptic terms, calling it a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle, language so revealing that his office deleted the tweet after a hospital in Gaza was bombed but the words remained on record in his Knesset speech because you can’t unsay what you’ve already said, you can only pretend you didn’t mean it the way it sounded. But he did mean it that way because that’s how empire always talks about the people it destroys, casting them as darkness that must yield to light, as jungle that must give way to civilization, as animals that must be controlled or eliminated. Israeli Minister of Education Yoav Kisch said those are animals, they have no right to exist, they need to be exterminated, speaking about two million people trapped in an open-air prison as if they were vermin requiring extermination. These sentiments have been foundation of Israeli policy since its inception (how else do you expel 70% of the indigenous population, massacre their villages, and set them up as the combatants?), just as American dehumanization of Vietnamese and Iraqi and Afghan, and now, Venezuelans didn’t begin with any particular attack but has been the foundation of our foreign policy since we decided we had a manifest destiny to spread from sea to shining sea and then beyond our shores to anywhere our interests demanded.
The Fire Nation convinced its citizens that the other nations were backward, primitive, in need of Fire Nation intervention and guidance, and Prince Zuko believed it until he traveled beyond the walls of imperial propaganda and saw what his nation actually did to the villages it “liberated”, saw the burned homes and displaced families and realized that greatness built on the suffering of others isn’t greatness at all but something closer to monstrosity. But how many Americans have had their Zuko moment, that awakening where you realize everything you were taught about your country’s role in the world was a carefully constructed lie? We’re still taught American exceptionalism as fact rather than nationalist mythology, still learn about Manifest Destiny as westward expansion rather than continental genocide, still frame our wars as tragic mistakes rather than deliberate campaigns of imperial domination. The language does so much work for us, we don’t invade, we intervene; we don’t occupy, we stabilize; we don’t massacre, we engage in regrettable but necessary operations with acceptable levels of collateral damage.
And the thing that makes it all so insidious is how the empire convinces not just its citizens but its victims that resistance is futile, that the natural order of things involves their subjugation, that fighting back against the civilizing mission makes them terrorists and savages proving they needed civilizing in the first place. It’s a perfect circle of justification that feeds itself, where every act of resistance becomes evidence of barbarism requiring more intervention, more occupation, more violence in the name of peace, more children reduced to statistics in the name of spreading our greatness. Israel says the same thing now about Palestinian self-determination, that they’ll never permit a Palestinian state, that the land belongs to them by ancient right and divine promise, that Palestinian resistance isn’t liberation but terrorism because they’ve defined the terms of the conversation in a way that makes their violence defense and Palestinian violence aggression, just as we defined Vietnamese resistance as communist expansion and Iraqi resistance as terrorism and Afghan resistance as barbarism, always framing the people whose homes we’re destroying as the real threat to peace.
The Fire Nation fell eventually in the show because enough people like Zuko woke up and chose differently, but our empires are still here, still spreading their greatness, still convinced that the burning they leave behind is actually the light of progress, still teaching their children that they’re the heroes of this story even as the bodies pile up and the refugees flee and the history books written by the victors erase the truth of what was done in the name of civilization. Netanyahu speaks of children of light overcoming children of darkness while Israeli forces kill a Palestinian child every fifteen minutes, and Bush spoke of freedom’s march while we tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and Johnson spoke of self-determination while we rigged elections and installed dictators, and through it all we maintained the fiction that we’re the good guys sharing our greatness with a world that should be grateful for the honor of our attention, never quite understanding that from the perspective of the people we’re bombing, we look exactly like the Fire Nation looked to the villages it burned, exactly like every empire has looked to the people it conquered while insisting it was bringing them light.
