Right-militant symbolism encountered in the last two months playing the Battlefield franchise of online shooters:
One Nazi flag profile image, all colors and proportions on-model
A wide variety of South American users and private servers with 4-letter clan tags and logos (frequently in quartered unit patch format with skulls and lightning bolts as prominent elements) that map to local paramilitaries
A few Rising Sun flags and uyoku dantai slogans
(just now) one profile tag consisting of a large silver police shield bearing an image of a modern rifle above the large numbers “88″ in blue
Left-militant symbolism:
One profile image of a red flag with yellow hammer and sickle flapping in the wind
A swastika made of right-facing handgun stamps that was actually the most novel take on the subject I’ve seen in a while
A LOT of Blue Lives Matter iconography – the American flag (often subdued color) with one blue stripe, the Punisher skull, often with “first responder” subculture signifiers like the numbers 5.11, etc.
5.11 clothing is far Right now? What political affiliation is Dickies? Timberland boots? LL Bean?
Being a fan of comic book character The Punisher is far Right? What political affiliation does liking Spiderman indicate? Deadpool? Captain America?
Seriously? You’re tarring all first responders as far Right? We’re legit going with the “firemen up against the wall” thing here?
I don’t think it has ever been controversial that Punisher is “hard on crime” right wing. Not far-right, but definitely right and violent (and a little racist). I would not all be surprised to see far-right groups attaching onto him.
(Of course, many stories feature him put him in a negative light for exactly this reason.)
Captain America is socialist.
Spider-man is liberal technocrat.
Deadpool is ironic nihilism.
Most super heroes contain a pretty identifiable ideology.
Do a search for “blue lives matter” and yeah, you’ll see the Punisher skull pop up a bunch!
Captain America is socialist?
Captain America is socialist?
There’s nothing contradictory about Captain America being socialist. It’s not like the military is a capitalist endeavor.
Cap has always stood for generosity, unity, and protecting the little guys from bullies and prejudice. Hell the CA movie is basically socialist-realism.
When you think about it, we really don’t know much about Steve Rogers before he became Captain America. We know he walked into a recruiting office eager to do something–anything–to help fight the Nazis. We also know that his parents were dead by then (one of the reasons he was accepted as a volunteer was that he had no family.) But beyond that, it feels almost like he wasn’t a real person until the day they gave him the Super-Soldier Serum.
But I think he must have been a very interesting person indeed. Because Steve Rogers has always been socially progressive–his attitude towards Sam Wilson might seem patronizing to modern audiences, but for someone born in 1917, Steve Rogers is pretty damned enlightened. He seems to have been working-class; there’s no real mention of an inheritance anywhere in his background, and he’s had to take jobs to make ends meet on several occasions. And he’s very strongly anti-Fascist; it’s telling that he signed up to fight against Hitler a year before the United States’ entry into the war…and was passionate enough about it that he wouldn’t take 4F for an answer.
All those things add up to a very interesting, potentially shocking, probably fascinating backstory that’s never been touched on. Namely, that Steve Rogers probably grew up in a Communist household. He might not have been a card-carrying Communist himself, but his parents almost certainly were. Because being a Communist had a different meaning during the Great Depression than it did twenty years onwards, in a Cold War America. During the 1930s, when unemployment was high and a privileged few were almost completely insulated from the Depression’s effects, lots of people joined the Communists because they believed in things like unionization, racial equality, and fighting back against the rise of totalitarian dictatorships in Europe. (Lots of prominent leftists went to help in Spain against Franco before Hitler rose to power. It was the cause celebré of its day.) The later political connotations didn’t come about until after World War II…which is part of why so many people wound up getting nailed by accusations of associating with Communists when the witch-hunts started.
(Ironically, he did participate in some McCarthyist tirades in the 50′s. But then they retconned that by saying it wasn’t the “real” Captain America, and in the 60′s he was fighting for equality for black people and has always been a generic progressive since then.)
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