The Falcon and the Winter Soldier

This is an argument that has been forwarded throughout revolutionary movements across history and is undermined by the fact that is simply not true. Its SOMETIMES true and internal reform often doesn't work but we don't hear about the places that avoid revolution because, well, they avoided revolution.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Sep 7th 2021 at 5:05:52 AM

It also ignores countries like south Korea (Kinda. It was a slow process to get their ), Taiwan, or Spain, etc where they did internally reform.

Or others like South Africa where a mix of both external pressure and internal was needed.

Edited by miraculous on Sep 7th 2021 at 4:51:46 AM

Shit I’m from Cuba, we had our revolution and you know what happened there……..

Revolutions can get really bad. This, however, has no bearing on the effectiveness or lack thereof of internal reform.

The main problem with internal reform is that it requires the people abusing power to, themselves, prevent further abuse of power.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Sep 7th 2021 at 6:42:49 AM

Ehhh, I'd argue it's more that there is a non-violent method to replace them.

This was going to be an edit but it took so long to post that I can just make a new post! Ha ha!

It is hard for me to disagree that the show's politics are wildly naive, especially when the question of whether people will accept a black Captain America is so integral to the story. America, as in the United States of. A country that elected its first black President only 13 years ago, whose election drove half of the country into a racist fury that we're still feeling to this day.

It gave rise to white militias, a huge increase in white terrorism, and the retaliatory election of an openly racist President vowing to put minorities in their place - which he proceeded to do by cultivating white nationalism and normalizing extremism. The public retaliation for Barack Obama broke this country in such a way that it's unclear if it can even be put back together. It's hard to believe the same wouldn't happen over Sam.

People are going to die in hate crimes because of this. Sam himself is going to go home and find a contingent of Oath Keepers or Proud Boys standing around his home. Like fifteen guys holding AR-15s who don't start a fight, don't make any aggressive enough action that a superhero might justifiably beat them up. Just. There. Watching. Shadowing him (and probably his family) everywhere he goes. "Just in case." And the cops and the FBI and the government will let them do it. Because that's what this country is.

I, personally, got shades of "Revisionist Dr. King" from the GRC's resolution. Dr. King is commonly depicted as the Paragon of Non-Violence; a man who changed a country and brought about rights for black people everywhere due to a dedicated campaign of non-violent protest. A man who condemned the violent acts of his contemporaries like Malcolm X, pushed for a more peaceful disobedience, and whose dedication to civil debate was rewarded with acceptance from a government willing to change. He said the right things and made the right arguments, and the government relented.

This, of course, is a bald-faced lie pushed by a predominately white culture with a vested interest in telling minorities to be patient and wait for a more palatable time to have this conversation.

Dr. King, while personally non-violent, was not anti-violence. And he was absolutely not accepted. He was branded a dangerous radical, seen as a threat to the people in power, and ultimately murdered. And in the wake of his death, his followers set the country on fire. The government was forced to act because every city was burning; the Civil Rights Act of 1964, signed by a Democrat from before the Southern Switch, was a desperate bid to end the riots.

The Civil Rights Act was a product of revolution. It was won through violence after non-violence failed and the "Paragon of Non-Violence" was shot in the head. Our media doesn't like to acknowledge that, because telling oppressed peoples that violence is more effective than non-violence is a dangerous message for their oppressors.

From a show so steeped in black culture and the experience of being a black person in the United States, I was honestly startled to see Revisionist Dr. King played completely, utterly, brutally straight in the end. Sam condemns the violent acts of his contemporaries like Karli, he says the right things and makes the right arguments, and the government simply relents.

A dedicated abuser of power will lock down the non-violent methods of replacement. So what looks like "You just go through the proper channels to put non-abusers into power," can turn into, "The abuser has to let you remove them from power." And then the end result is the same: internal reform requires people abusing power to, of their own volition, agree not to abuse power anymore.

It's what Hitler did. It's what Putin did. It's what American Republicans are actively doing. Pulling up the ladder behind you so that no one you don't like can climb it is power abuse 101.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Sep 7th 2021 at 7:38:14 AM

Frankly, you can tell what part of the country a person was from if they believed Obama created Right-Wing Militia Fanatic. There's about fifteen of them in my general area with hordes of gun piles, plots against the government, and conspiracies about LSD in the water and helping the UN take over the world. All of them existed when I was in high school and my local school got regular John Birch Society New American magazines describing how the end was nigh.

Basically, a lot of people did not want to believe that America was as radical and racist as it was well before then. That Timothy Mc Veigh was dying to start a war against the government was something I remember people looking for some sort of medical condition or past trauma to explain because in the Nineties, no one wanted to believe, "Maybe Americans have radical politics too."

At the core of Captain America is the belief that the American people and government are fundamentally good. That they can overcome and embrace the better halves of their nature voluntarily.

The thing about Karli is that 100% she was going to make sure the public stood by the GRC. Because the cops, FBI, ad other groups absolutely love violence and do their best to put agitators and infiltrators in groups to make them act like Karli.

Because Doctor King was 100% not a pacifist and he 100% was correct he was waging a campaign of optiocs. He marched deliberately on the places that would make him and his people look like victims (which they were) to win publicly sympathy.

Karli played right into the system's hands.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Sep 7th 2021 at 11:27:42 AM

That isn't what tobiasdrake said. What they said was that these types of people became more radicalized in response to a black man getting elected president.

That said, I'm not quite comfortable with saying this show was using the idealized and inaccurate take on Dr. King's philosophies as Sam is far from non-violent and this show had a black man as a showrunner.

Edited by windleopard on Sep 7th 2021 at 12:24:10 PM

uh no he did say that.

Which makes it odd that, if her violent attacks were diminishing her cause, that the threat of a bigger and badder “Karli 2.0” is what gets the GRC to back down.

Tobias says that the reaction to Obama's election intensified the process, not that they literally sprung fully-formed from the ground. It's important not to be myopic with provicinalism here and avoid "because (x) happens in Kentucky, it was a globla phenomenon".

Edited by Gaon on Sep 7th 2021 at 12:36:27 PM

For one, the GRC was a UN led group of people from different countries, so trying to get rid of all of them would either require a breakdown in diplomacy between different countries or multiple revolutions. (Though TBF the MCU sometimes feels like it forgets if SHIELD is a US or UN organization, what with the upper staff being mostly- entirely? American and feeling very US centric, and I can see that applying to the GRC)

I've gone on record as 'the GRC related politics of this show are such a nonsense mess that trying to engage with them as they are will just result in tangles' though so. Take it as you will.

I don't think the politics are remotely nonsensical by the standards of television. They're oddly fairly consistent and well thought out. It's just the show drops some hints that the GRC are actually people who aren't genocidal madman and want to make this as painless as possible.

You know, the supplies and being worried about the deportation being actually carried out. They just don't develop it enough that you can believe the only reason they back down isn't that Sam looks like such a big badass that it would be politically unfeasible.

Two more episodes you could say that the camps exist to avoid famine, civil war, and other Blip stuff.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Sep 7th 2021 at 8:38:11 AM

At the risk of possibly playing devil's advocate, the GRC are still human and do have a sense of self-preservation. Given how close Karli came to killing them, they are likely worried Sam either won't be able to stop the next person like her or he might outright refuse to come to their rescue.

It's also not the entirety of his argument, it's just a coda there.

The Flagsmashers aren't beaten but coming up with a compromise is better. Even if said compromise is the much-much smarter "build a shit ton more houses."

Sam is a carrot and stick sort of fellow.

I would advocate for revolutionary reform and a kind of economic terrorism. That is to say, General Strikes, where the working class refuses to work and does everything in its power to grind the workings of industry to a halt until their demands are met.

And also arm themselves for the possibility of a violent retaliation.

I've said before that the Flag Smashers' "One World, One People" sounds more sinister than might be intended since it could be argued to be calling for homogeneity.

I mean, it is.

The whole point is to use violence to break down borders.

Uh. No. There is a wide difference between open-borders policy and homogeneity.

The Flag-Smashers are already villains. You don't need to Ron the Death Eater them on.

It would have been interesting if someone at the GRC supported the deportation because there were people who used the Snap to practice settler colonization. But that is not what the story shown presented.

Which is why I said the slogan sounded sinister not their goals.

The slogan makes me think of One World Order, but the people who it's coming from makes it less so, or at least it sounds like a teen with delusions of grandeur at best. It's part of why I don't really agree with those who see her as a spokesperson for anarchism, and suspect a lot of it was viewer projection or assumptions based on the comics version who she shares very little in common with.

Edited by AlleyOop on Sep 12th 2021 at 3:16:40 PM

To be fair, it was easy to misconstrue what the Flag-Smashers were about. At the end of the day, they were just an open-borders movement. That's literally the beginning and end of their central goals: they wanted people to be allowed to freely immigrate wherever they wanted.

A lot of people want that. Fuck, I want that.

But the show couched that in language like, "They want to go back to the way things were during the Blip. They think things under the Blip were better!" Which is a somewhat misleading way to talk about an event in which billions of people fucking died for the sake of a madman's economic ideology - especially when "Was Thanos Right?" had been an obnoxious talking point in the fandom for the past year or so.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Sep 12th 2021 at 10:53:14 AM

Yeah, that was an issue too. 'Everything was better during the Blip!' not for the billions who were effectively dead. I've even seen arguments go around that the Avengers were wrong to restore people who died in the Blip after five years had passed. Ugh.

The "One World, One People" slogan actually sounds oddly fascistic (there was a Nazi slogan that was something like "One People, One Nation, One Fuhrer"). Though, they're clearly not fascists.

And I did originally assume their goal was something akin to being pro-Thanos or at least believed that the chaos that ensued during The Blip was a good thing. That such a group would exist is fairly plausible to me. Though, that turned out not to be the case either.