[stracciatella]

Для тех кто всерьез поддерживает Тони по политической части у меня два прекрасных мета-поста.

original post >> teatotally.tumblr.com/post/144240012830/the-acc...

I can’t stop chewing over this huge plot hole and I think until I write this down, I won’t stop, so even though I know no one is going to read this, I have to put it down in words. Ever since the first trailer for Captain America: Civil War, I’ve had this huge WHAT THE FUCK reaction that I’ve been holding on to, hoping that the movie would somehow make the UN sanctioned accords make sense to me, or at the very least, the side objecting to them would point out what a huge, huge mistake this would be with actual, you know, facts. That exist. In the world. And I was really stunned that at no point did anyone point out what a disaster they could be, because of what an actualfax disaster the UN has often been at oversight and peacekeeping.

It would have taken less than ten minutes for them to dig up some real-world examples of disastrous policies that led to the slaughter of thousands of innocent people, and given those arguments to someone on the team as a basis for their suspicion of what the accords intended to do. But I’m equally baffled by why they had Tony and Rhodey coming out in favor of the accords and the UN and Thunderbolt Ross, for god’s sake, when they would know these things because of the nature of their jobs, and Vision because he has access to all that information in the databanks.

If you’re not familiar with the giant shitstorm that is often UN peacekeeping work and human rights oversight, here are a couple of Greatest Hits for you–and these are just a few that have happened within Tony’s and Rhodey’s lifetime.

In 1995, during the Bosnian war, Serbian forces invaded a UN “safe zone” created by peacekeeping forces (UNPROFOR) in Srebrebnica, raping and murdering Muslim Bosniaks. By the time they were done, about 7,800 people were dead, mostly because of an ill-equipped and unprepared UN force. It’s considered the worst mass-murder in Europe since WWII. In Rwanda in 1994, the Canadian Force Commander sent a cable to the UN headquarters about an imminent threat of atrocities; not only did no one apparently receive the cable, but the threat was mostly just ignored by the UN security council, and in the resulting genocide of one million people, one of the more infamous events occurred when thousands of people sought refuge at a school and the Belgian peacekeeping forces abandoned them to be slaughtered.

In Sudan in the mid-2000s, it took more than two years for the UN to intervene against the Janjaweed, and they came in such limited numbers that fighting continued until 2010; it’s estimated that over 300,000 Sudanese died during the conflicts. In the Sri Lankan civil war, the UN Human Rights Council considered the country’s situation appalling, but not enough to actually do anything about it, and more than 6,000 people were killed within a four-month period in 2009. These are all events that occurred recently; I won’t even get into the horror of Cambodia in the ‘70s or talk about the failure that is going on right now in Syria.

The thing is, Tony Stark made weapons, so not only would he have known about these things, it’s pretty likely that his company sold weapons to the large-scale aggressors, at the very least. He might also have known or met many of the personnel involved. USAF Col. James Rhodes would absolutely know about these failures, and Vision would have had access to all this information. If Marvel is going to posit that the UN exists and can wrangle 116 different countries to demand oversight and accountability (and I’d definitely recommend reading laporcupina’s excellent dissection of the unlikelihood of that happening as quickly as it apparently does in the movieverse) and that Tony’s enthusiastically on board to ease his manpain and Rhodey is saying that Steve’s arrogant to reject the UN, then why didn’t they just use the facts of the UN’s malfeasance to support Steve’s argument that you can’t trust agendas and politics in these situations?

This makes no sense to me, and I kept waiting and waiting to see if someone, anyone, was going to bring up the fact that the UN is at best horrifically bumbling and negligent and at worst corrupt and culpable in the slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent people. But no one did, and now fandom’s attacking Steve as some sort of imperialist emblem and a petulant child stamping his feet and yelling ‘Murica! Freedom!’ and it really depresses me, because that is ignorant and shortsighted and a seriously dropped ball. Along the lines of the other unfathomable plot point of having a guy like Tony Stark siding with a dangerous, dogmatic reactionary like Thunderbolt Ross. Sure, we find out that Ross’s agenda really was terrible, but anyone could have seen the writing on the wall there, that he was the worst possible representative (and what was he? the overseer? the head honcho? just a functionary? who knows, because they never spelled that out) for something designed to rein in superheroes.

Tony and Rhodey should have absolutely known this, but everything was so deus ex machina, set up to make us think both sides have a really good point, but they don’t, not really. All anyone has to do is look at how the UN Security Council is set up to know that: out of 15 countries on the council, 5 of them are permanent–France, Russia, China, the United States, and the United Kingdom. And guess what? Those five countries can veto the rotating other countries’ votes, so no matter how much support there is in the international community for action, if one of them doesn’t feel like it’s in their interest to support it? They kill it. You wanna know why the UN never stepped in to prevent genocide in Syria? Russia and China vetoed it, because it went against their interests. You can imagine what all these countries, including the US, have done with this power over time.

The accords have disaster written all over them. I immediately thought back to the history of Argentina’s dirty war in the ‘70s, where tens of thousands of people vanished, called The Disappeared–and the movie played that out, with Our Heroes getting sent to a black site prison ship. These things exist in the real world, The Disappeared vanish without a trace, and Tony and Rhodey absofuckinglutely know that. Tony’s line about them changing the terms after Steve signs is mind-boggling–the man ran a global company for years, he’d know as well as anyone that you don’t get to change the terms of a contract AFTER you’ve signed it. That’s NOT how the world works, for anyone, and it sure as hell wouldn’t work with the UN and whoever drew up that enormous document.

I just would have really liked to see that actually be acknowledged, for them to have taken what they learned and changed and grew, but there’s no evidence of that. Rhodey seems to still believe just as strongly in the UN as a force for good at the end, and Tony doesn’t seem to learn anything at all or grow or change. I’m bewildered by why none of this turned up in the movie in any way, especially in Steve’s mouth: this is a man who saw first-hand what ulterior motives and capitulation and international communities turning a blind eye to what they don’t want to know can do. And I can’t see how, even if they theoretically could come up with a way to get 116 countries to draft that document, any timely or useful decisions could be made. Hell, even an actor outside the universe (John Boyega) can tweet about how “what are you gonna do, wait for the decision about whether to act arrives in the post?”, so why isn’t anyone IN the universe talking about that?

I mean, say the accords were in place before Lagos, and say the oversight committee sent the Avengers there to do their stuff. The entire scene would STILL have played out exactly the same. Steve would still have had his buttons pushed by Rumlow, Wanda still would have accidentally sent the bomb up there. Oversight doesn’t change that, it only changes when and how they get to go. So say the Avengers weren’t sent in–and Rumlow took the biological weapon and unleashed it on a civilian population. The Avengers are damned if they do, and completely damned if they don’t. There’s no win there.

I’m not saying any oversight is bad. There are probably actually trained individuals, even enhanced ones, who might be in a position to work WITH the Avengers to establish some sort of tactical operations command, make quick decisions on important events. I don’t know what that is, but I know it’s not the UN. And I’m really bewildered by why no one in the movie was talking about that.

reply avelera.tumblr.com/post/144250772150

The only thing I would add to this is that there was a baffling lack of HYDRA being mentioned by name in the film, and I think it’s because the Russos went into the movie wanting to make sure both sides had equal justification and so some pieces of information had to be strategically left out, because even one data point could upset the balance of opinion. And I think on the surface they did a pretty good job of this, actually. Certainly as comic book movies go, which tend to be extremely simplistic, it was stellar.

However, in reference to your essay: SHIELD was a hyper-skilled, hyper-funded clandestine organization from the looks of it. And yet they were infiltrated by HYDRA for literally half the century without anyone knowing for certain, including Nick Fury. The UN is… not any of those things. There were goddamn Senators working for HYDRA, Alexander Pierce was at least on a level with Ross. This wasn’t a bad guy organization of foot soldiers, they were hidden in the highest ranks of government and power for decades.

Literally all I wanted Steve to do at that meeting was say, “What if HYDRA infiltrates this oversight committee?” Because what are you going to do if that happens? Run another McCarthyist committee that weeds out “traitors”? Pierce turned down a Nobel Peace Prize, is there any vetting process possible to make sure that the person who pulls the trigger on the Avengers isn’t HYDRA, or mind-controlled, or some sort of Loki illusion, or any of the dozens of ways someone can be compromised in this universe?

And again to your point, what if bad guys invade one country and someone on that council wants that country to suffer, or fall? What about trade wars, what about conflicts of interest? I totally got the point btw, private organizations that answer to no one and have massive power are terrifying, especially when unregulated (not that anyone seems to mind too much when those organizations are financial institutions that aid the elite). But the sheer logistics involved in actually organizing such a body given the threats they’ve already faced, in-universe, and the risks if they get it wrong was truly boggling to me. Great essay, btw.