RossaLincoln said:
Therumancer said:
I agree with you to an extent, and your overall sentiment about there being nothing wrong with super heroes who are just plain out nice guys is spot on.
That said your point sort of falls apart when you start getting into specifics where your by and large equating left wing morality with "what's right" when 50% of the population disagrees with that just for a start..
I would argue that believing in fair play, equal rights, personal liberty, not being scared into submission by ominous national security paranoiacs, and not being an asshole are "what's right", unambiguously, and further, they aren't, or they shouldn't be the exclusive property of the left. If the other 50% believes otherwise, that says more about them than it does about the left.
I would also like you to describe some of these so called liberals who supported Hitler. Because in the US, the nazi sympathizers were all right wingers like Charles Lindberg who opposed things like unions, rights for minorities and equality for women. Sorry, but this is history. The leftists were, regrettably (and I am deliberately understating here) far far more likely to idealize Stalin's USSR precisely because communism and fascism were diametrically opposed to one another.
I'm sorry, but this is history. The nazis were right wing ideologues, not leftists. National Socialism was an artifact title that obscured the roots of the party having coopted an angry quasi-socialist organization and turned it into a xenophobic, anticommunist (which meant anything up to and including new deal style ideas), pro war and racist paramilitary group. They opposed liberals in their own country and once in power ruthlessly destroyed them, sending artists, gay people and dissenting intellectuals (some of whom to be fair were also conservatives) to death camps along with Roma and Jewish people. Liberals- like the ones in the US government at the time, were very much interesting in fighting hitler. The isolationists who also didn't like anything remotely commie-sounding, were the ones who wanted to stay out of it.
EDIT: just to be fair, let me note that I think that tied for worst president of the 20th century (and it's a three way tie for the country's history as a whole) is Woodrow Wilson. And not because of his attempt to create the League of Nations (because I support international cooperation and nations working together to prevent wars and so forth. I am no isolationist), but because he was a liar who gunned the country into going to war after campaigning on his record of keeping us out of WWI, he actually jailed or deported people for speaking out against the war (or for being socialist, and this was before the USSR so the only argument against was that he didn't like uppity workers), unconstitutionally limited freedom of assembly, he was opposed to women's suffrage, and was an enormous racist the likes of which hadn't been seen in the White House since before the Civil War. Just so we're clear I'm not reflexively team Democrat.
Umm, no, not even close. The Nazis were a left wing movement based on workers rights and the forcible overthrow of the upper class. A lot of the anti-Jew bigotry came about due to a lot of the upper class happened to be Jewish, and extremely racist themselves, getting into that position largely due to an entire era where Jews had a monopoly on money lending due to Christian religions forbidding it. Not all Jews were involved or were the problem of course, but they did symbolize the upper class and top 1% of the day. Indeed when you get down to it a lot of liberals in the US right now are starting just like the Nazis, albeit without the racial overtones, demonizing the top 1% and working towards tearing it down. Indeed the reason why nations like Romania got in bed with the Nazis was specifically because Germany provided muscle to assist with the "Re-romanianization of property", namely they went in, killed a lot of the top 1% (many of whom were Jewish) and then gave the land and wealth to the people through the government.
Hitler was an international man of the year because of his economic theories and the way he presented himself as a man of the people, what was appealing about him was that he envisioned/promised days when every man could have a "Volkswagon" putting cars, which were still the stuff of the upper class, into the hands of the everyman.
Now to be fair with you, Hitler was right about a lot of things, indeed a lot of the areas I go left wing on are similar to some of the areas where Hitler leaned that way. I myself tend to be very big on worker's rights, unionized labor, and limiting how much power groups of businessmen can directly leverage in society. The thing was that those things Hitler wasn't right about were absolutely bug nuts crazy. This was a guy who turned strong handed reforms into ethnic genocide, and had an agenda literally based on the occult where he believed he was going to genetically restore a race of giant, blonde-haired, psionic supermen that he believed went extinct to become our leaders. The thing was though that he got to the point of being able to indulge that insanity because he was incredibly popular and charismatic on a global level, and very much following an extremely liberal agenda assuming you weren't say a Jew or a Gypsy and on one of his genocide lists. The guys who followed Hitler in the US were pretty much the everyman, the guys who liked the ideas presented by the dude who was telling them that he could build an economy which would let everyone have a car, along with greater equity between the rich and poor.
See the thing is Hitler has only been made out to be this monsterous nightmare dictator after the war ended due to propaganda. The scary thing about him is that he's the guy you like, the leader who tells you what you want to hear, and happens to be honest about most of it to the point where you kind of miss those insane little points that are going to snowball as time goes on. The funny thing about Godwin's law is how so many people like to compare leaders they don't like to Hitler, when really an appropriate comparison can only be made to a leader which the majority of people actually like. Someone like Hitler will almost always be a "people's champion" as he was. This also means that none of the leaders we have here in the US come close, we're seeing elections resolved by single digit percentages, both Obama and Bush were vehemently hated by too many people to really invite Hitler comparisons... but that's neither here nor there.
What we're actually talking about here is Captain America. On a lot of levels he personifies the idea that "The Price Of Freedom is eternal vigilance", he's about the might and will of the US compared to other ideologies and threats. He was created pretty much to show up the whole "peace at any price" crowd, and the guys with isolationist sentiments which were a big deal during "World War II". Captain America is the "enlist and do your duty" type of guy. As a character he's not really intended for peacetime, which is fine, because in comics your pretty much always dealing with one threat or another.
Your more or less "okay" with the whole "equal rights" and "personal liberty" bit. Your off kilter with "fair play" since Captain America is all about overwhelming military superiority and doing what you have to in order to win. After all the defining power of the character is that he's pretty much better than any human could ever be, he is a super soldier, the very manifestation of a special weapon, and one that proves itself superior to anything else thrown at it. The idea of a "super" anything is to be better than the other guy, not fight on an even playing field. What's more while Cap did lead troops in the trenches, he, like Nick Fury, was big on offensive operations behind enemy lines. Indeed Cap's WWII super team is called "The Invaders" because they invaded other countries for the US (stop and think about this).
Where the real problem is when your talking about people being "paranoid about security", Captain America is pretty much national security incarnate, that's what he's supposed to be about, albeit his approach is by definition pro-active. Indeed the entire point of him being a war time icon is to pretty much shut down the people who just want to sit on their butts, refuse to acknowledge threats, and have the US mind it's own business. Despite how history presents things now, even after Pearl Habour there were a lot of people that wanted to stay out of World War II, that event merely tipped things, to get our intervention through, and it was a constant effort by The War Department to produce propaganda and control the media to keep people on track and on target. Cap is pretty much a manifestation of that, who is also a very effective war machine. Indeed properly portrayed he would BE that paranoid for all intents and purposes. Especially seeing as the threats presented by Middle Eastern Muslims (long history of terrorism, betrayal, failed diplomacy, and of course the 9/11 attacks), North Korea (they are at least trying to build WMDs they can launch into the US), Russia (has now launched two invasions of independent states, has been threatening the US and it's allies), and of course China (massive human rights violations, theft of our copyrights, patents, and IPs, and a massive military build up followed by aggression against US allies like Japan and The Philippines), all of these threats exist, and arguably the left wing's attitude is very similar to that prior to World War II "we should stay out of this kind of thing, and mind our own business", and that is the anti-thesis of the point of Captain America.
Now granted, the thing about Cap is that he doesn't exist in the real world. Rather he's supposed to symbolically confront our enemies abroad. As I said, Cap's place is to be doing things like sticking a star spangled boot up the posterior of Putin or Kim Jong Un (much like he would have done to the Nazis), when he's not fighting more fantastic super villains of course. Granted in real life you can't so stuff like this, there are no real super heroes, but then again the guy is supposed to just point the finger at our enemies and the threat they present in his stories. He wasn't around IRL to almost single handedly turn the tide of "World War II" and floor Hitler with a haymaker either.
My point about the social issues other than that is that they are debatable, and that is why Captain America's stories should generally not involve them. When it comes to something like gay rights, Cap just shouldn't go there, as the nation is divided almost down the middle. His purpose is the big picture and dealing with threats, not to make social statements outside of that arena in order to symbolize one political philosophy or another. Properly used it just shouldn't come up (in either direction) Cap belongs kicking butt, not debating domestic social philosophy, people who use him for that miss the point, and that's the problem. He needs to be above that, standing for America, not your America, my America, his America or the other guy over their and his America. He's the guy who puts his boot up our butts and says "stop fighting about gay rights, we have terrorists to kick butt on, worry about that later", so to speak. He should always be doing something else as opposed to indulging a writer's domestic political axe grinding.
