Coming this March to Disney+, Marvel will release the latest installment of the MCU entitled “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” which is supposed to take place after the events of 2019’s “Avengers: Endgame”.
At the end of “Endgame” and in the present day, an elderly Steve Rogers passes his shield along to Sam Wilson “The Falcon” to become the new “Captain America”. According to the premise of this new movie, Wilson ends up teaming with Bucky Barnes (Winter Soldier) to take on a group called the “Flag Smashers”.
So why is this whole premise awful?
Well, big media like Marvel and Disney are reviving an old Captain America villain to essentially shit on leftist politics and continue to stoke fear and misunderstanding within the public about anarchism.
In 1980, Captain America was introduced to a “villain” named Karl Morgenthau who went by the moniker Flag-Smasher and served as Captain America’s opposite. Instead of “patriotism”, Morgenthau’s Flag-Smasher was an anarchist who wanted to disband nation-states and borders.
Because this is apparently bad, Marvel continued to demonize the Flag-Smasher character by having him establish a “terrorist group” called ULTIMATUM (Underground Liberated Totally Integrated Mobile Army to United Mankind) which was developed to help Morgenthau achieve his goals of doing away with the hierarchal structures that come with nation-states.
So with his new network, Flag-Smasher and ULTIMATUM engaged in “terrorist” activities across the United States which brought him at odds with Captain America.
From there, Captain American tried to “help” Morgenthau realize that his ways were “wrong” which failed as Flag-Smasher held true to ideals.
But it’s here that shit started to really get bad in terms of that anarchist demonization.
According to the Flag-Smasher storyline, things went into a spiral for him when it was discovered that he was nothing more than an unknowing puppet for Captain America’s arch-nemesis Red Skull who additionally funded ULTIMATUM.
Upon learning of this horseshoe theory bullshit peddled by Marvel, ULTIMATUM turned their back on Flag-Smasher and tried to assassinate him while Flag-Smasher and Captain America joined forces to try and stop ULTIMATUM from carrying out further “terrorist” acts.
What a weird time to glorify patriotism
It’s not shocking that a big media company like Disney and Marvel would demonize any leftist cause since they inherently threaten the unjust hierarchies these large corporations support. What’s a little weird in the current political discourse is a company propping up patriotism — namely because of the fascist riot that took place at the U.S. Capitol last week.
Ironically, “Patriotism” has seemingly become the biggest threat in the United States when it comes to acts of domestic terror because initiated against the public. Meanwhile, anarchism in large part has been about community defense. But that doesn’t the Marvel/Disney narrative that’ll help them rake in massive amounts of cash.
Now obviously it’s unclear which direction “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” will when it comes to addressing patriotism in the latest MCU installment, however, you can probably be sure that if defending patriotism is some major underlying theme, Disney and Marvel are hoping this whole neo-fascist riot in Washington D.C. blows over once March comes around.