MCU meta: Bucky Barnes and HYDRA (not related)
Because I've caught myself posting substance to Tumblr again.
1) The life and times of Sergeant James 'Bucky' Barnes
(1) At the start of Captain America: the First Avenger, Bucky has been a soldier for a while and a very good one. Whether Bucky enlisted or was drafted, he went to basic training and he emerged some flavor of private or, in truly exceptional circumstances, a corporal. Nobody comes out of basic a sergeant, which is an NCO (non-commissioned officer) rank and one of responsibility. When we meet Bucky in the movie, he’s been a soldier for a while, long enough for at least one promotion up to E-5, two or three promotions being much more likely. Which is a lot in a short amount of time - about a year-and-a-half past Pearl Harbor, less time in service assuming Bucky didn’t ship off to basic in 1941. As such, I’ve usually written Bucky as getting a field promotion for valor in combat because things just don’t happen that quickly. It’s still a speedy trip to sergeant, but it’s not completely ridiculous.
Any way you want to play it, when Steve is asking Bucky if he’s gotten his orders, he’s not asking brand-new-soldier Bucky about his first chance to be a ‘real’ soldier. He’s asking probably-home-on-leave Sergeant Barnes where he’s going next.
(2) Bucky has experience leading small units - a team, a squad. He might have already been a platoon sergeant, but no sure thing. Regardless, by the time he’s rescued by Steve, he’s an experienced NCO. He knows how to get things done, both with respect to regular Army crap and the corralling and maintenance of the men in his unit. He understands how the division of labor between CO and NCOIC works out, that he is the sheepdog to the CO’s shepherd when it comes to executing orders and handling the men. He also understands that the relationship between platoon sergeant and platoon commander is a separate thing between them and has a public face, which is united and in which the NCO is proper and respectful of rank, and a private face, which is more informal and generally reflects the fact that the NCO has more life and military experience than the officer and has an obligation to use those experiences to improve the officer and keep everyone from getting killed.
(3) Both points above matter when it comes to Sergeant Barnes and Captain Rogers, especially because the latter was commissioned as a captain and has never had a command position before at any level and truly and completely knows nothing about nothing about leading anyone anywhere to do anything in some form of proper military fashion. Bucky’s instruction necessarily doesn’t begin once he’s team sergeant on the Howling Commandos - it begins during the rescue, the minute he realizes that he’s not having a drug-induced hallucination and Steve really is Captain America and needs all the help that he can get because Steve doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing. Even if Steve doesn’t confess that right away, which he probably will, Bucky knows him well enough to tell.
(4) As important as Sergeant Barnes’s experience is to Captain Rogers, it’s possibly even more important to Brooklyn’s Own Bucky Barnes. Who has been through hell on the battlefield, an even worse hell in Zola’s and Schmidt’s lab, and is now presented with a very hard truth: Steve Rogers doesn’t need him anymore. Steve is no longer frail by many metric; he doesn’t need defending or nurturing, he doesn’t need anyone to advertise his virtues or prop up his self-esteem because everyone else now knows exactly how awesome Captain America is. Steve is no longer short of friends or invisible to women or at the mercy of either his ailments or the neighborhood bullies. Every single protective function Bucky has ever filled for Steve out of friendship and brotherhood has now been rendered moot. Thankfully, while Steve may not need him for anything but companionship anymore, Captain Rogers needs him for a hell of a lot. Steve may be quicker in mind and body, but Bucky is the one who knows how to make everything happen. And that won’t change even as Steve learns the ropes; Captain Rogers will always need Sergeant Barnes. And that’s probably a comfort to Bucky at a time when little else is.
eta: it got added to on Tumblr that for (1) it was technically possible to be thrown into war as a sergeant with almost no experience, especially as the full force of the draft ballooned the number of men in uniform. It was possible, absolutely, but not necessarily likely.
fic of mine where it comes up:
* Antediluvian and La Caduta: the former is Bucky’s pre-movie war career and the latter is his imprisonment, where he struggles to be an NCOIC while also being a lab rat, through the rescue and the formation of the Howling Commandos.
* Recursive, which is a Steve(-and-Bucky) story, but mostly about the Howling Commandos and Steve’s CO-NCOIC relationships with both Bucky and Dum Dum Dugan (after Bucky’s fall) matter a lot.
2) The post-war evolution and spread of HYDRA ideology
(This was written to provide a context for the Freezer Burn series continuing into a post-CA:TWS environment (this is not me saying that will happen, but in order for it to be possible, this needs to happen first), but if you take out the names I need and insert ones like Alexander Pierce’s, I think it works just fine as MCU-compliant.)
HYDRA stopped being just about science almost immediately, before Johann Schmidt ever heard of Steve Rogers. The science was always a means to an end, a striving for efficiency in a world system that tended to chaos. Once Schmidt had his paws on the Tesseract, he finally had a tool that allowed him to think on a grander scale. He’d had time, by that point, to form opinions on what Hitler was doing right and what he was doing very wrong and he was quite sure he could do better. The Tesseract would allow him to try. But, in the end, it wasn’t enough.
Schmidt was the first to move HYDRA away from its Aryan roots, remove the racial and ethnic biases that informed an organization created by the Nazis and spawned from the Ahnenerbe. He was the first to see the potential of the Third World as lab in the non-medical-experimentation way, a place to organize social units and society both overtly and covertly, as cells within an oblivious society and as a substitute society in a failed state. The post-war, post-colonial period was crushing on the Third World, with poverty and ridiculous politics endemic as new nations struggled to invent themselves free of the imperial training wheels; many failed and most bloodily. From this, starting in the early 1960’s, when Schmidt was freed from his ‘prison’ and at liberty to roam the world on his own terms, Schmidt and HYDRA built up generations of believers, men and women who saw HYDRA as the only entity capable of providing the real necessities - shelter, safety, food - in a local environment full of privation and danger.
HYDRA became a force for good at a time when the supposed benevolent powers couldn’t be bothered. HYDRA looked upon the the First World with disdain, worse than useless because they claimed to be well-intentioned but were in fact cowardly and self-interested, either refusing to walk the talk of their supposedly strongly held values - what else was the Cold War? - or spending their blood and treasure in wasteful fashion when they did act in support of those beliefs. The Soviets were a different flavor of wasted potential, mastering the punishment of the police state without any of the inducements or productivity to provide for/earn support from the people.
Phase Two came in the 1970s, with the mass migration from the Third World to the First, tens of thousands of Africans and Asians and Indian subcontinentals moving to the US and Europe. Most of them weren’t HYDRA, of course, but some were and brought with them their belief in HYDRA’s way to world peace through order. Couple that with the general sorry state of political and economic life in the 1970s - strikes, government bankruptcies, government scandals, Vietnam - and the continued social upheaval from the 1960s, made the First World prime for receiving the HYDRA gospel. HYDRA’s new adherents drew from both ends of the spectrum, the liberal/progressive and the conservative. This was the time of the radical left, the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground and the Red Army Faction, the PLO chic in France, etc., and the idea of a militant response to social ills - for that is what HYDRA offers - was a natural part of that zeitgeist. On the right, an organized response to social upheaval, a promise of peace and order, had a similar attraction.
The fall of the Iron Curtain and the end of the Cold War didn’t change HYDRA’s plans per se. The fall of the Wall opened up the Warsaw Pact countries to the same surrogacy offers HYDRA had made to new and failed states for the last half-century, an offer that grew in appeal as newly unmoored-from-Moscow Eastern European economies failed and impoverished states fell into gangsterism and war and the sort of political incompetence and corruption that had befallen other regions generations earlier. Latveria was the sole exception, led carefully and well and if you want to know where Victor von Doom’s hatred of HYDRA comes from, it’s from having spent the 1990s watching HYDRA prey on the vulnerable, which in turn he had not much sympathy for because they took the easy option, the path of least resistance, handing over their dignity and honor to HYDRA rather than fight for their own nation on their own terms.
HYDRA had no problems recruiting in the post-Cold War era. The 1990s were a violent decade, starting with the first Gulf War and then into the horrifying violence and depravity and death of the implosion of Yugoslavia and the Rwandan Genocide and everything that happened in Somalia, among other lowlights. The First World was no better than anywhere else, just with less bloodshed; there was no “peace dividend” in the West, no glorious post-communist flourishing in Eastern Europe - a few years after the end of the Cold War, the Russians were watching Yeltsin fumble, the Americans were impeaching Clinton. Japan went from industrial powerhouse to the Lost Decade.
And then came 9/11.
Phase Three was begun in the mid-oughts. It would not have been possible merely after 9/11 or the invasion of Iraq; it required a more international involvement. The bombings in Madrid and London were necessary pieces - total war against soft targets to galvanize populations that might have otherwise been content to let the Americans suffer for their hubris. The chaos of the Middle East, from Iraq and Afghanistan to Iran’s internal spasms and external support of terrorism all the way through to the Arab Spring, the growing restiveness of young China against Beijing’s control, the evolution of Putin’s Russia, these were all necessary but not sufficient - every revolutionary knows that you can’t win with the rabble alone, you must have the participation of the educated and professional classes to succeed. HYDRA needed critical mass inside Western Europe and the US.
After years of economic trouble - the banks, the mortgage crises, the recessions, the unemployment, the bailouts of EU member nations by other member nations, etc. - HYDRA decided that conditions were close to optimal. After generations of expanding the welfare state and the tools of societal organization, governments had more power over their citizens than ever before. Even as, within the EU, governments had less control over themselves than ever before, presaging a centralized HYDRA control over all states. Technology allowed unparalleled access to information and ever-expanding methods of surveillance and control and the citizenry had allowed that control to be expanded beyond state security requirements, however they were defined.
Phase Four was more aided than impeded by the ‘Era of Heroes’ beginning with Tony Stark’s decision to don the Iron Man armor. Stark himself was not a problem; he was a glitzy spectacle, unreliable and ill-defined, everything he had been in industry but encased in armor and able to fly. Stark wasn’t out to save the world or make life better for everyone; he was out to right the wrongs that penetrated his very rarefied bubble and that was only when he was sober. Thor was an outright boon to HYDRA, revealing the location of the Tesseract while also confirming that there were other objects of great occult power if they could get them. But more importantly, it sent SHIELD and other governmental security agencies into panic mode because of the now-confirmed threat of extraterrestrial life - they’re out there and they can pretty easily kill us. The liberty not sacrificed for security after 9/11 was whittled down even more. And further still after the Battle of New York.
HYDRA was aware of the discovery of Captain America as soon as it happened, as well as of his miraculous survival. Schmidt saw it as a sign, proof of the rightness of the moment. That Steve didn’t immediately return to action was irrelevant. When he did return, to fight in the Battle of New York and then to reclaim his place in the public eye, HYDRA saw it as an opportunity: Captain America, who time and legend had turned into a figure of immense popular power, drew the eyes and hopes of all. And he once again bore his shield to do battle on behalf of a governmental agency, validating that agency’s agenda by his participation in it. Fury was happy to use him to grease the wheels of his own plans, not realizing that by doing so, he was bringing HYDRA that much closer to its goal.
Also posted at DW.
1) The life and times of Sergeant James 'Bucky' Barnes
(1) At the start of Captain America: the First Avenger, Bucky has been a soldier for a while and a very good one. Whether Bucky enlisted or was drafted, he went to basic training and he emerged some flavor of private or, in truly exceptional circumstances, a corporal. Nobody comes out of basic a sergeant, which is an NCO (non-commissioned officer) rank and one of responsibility. When we meet Bucky in the movie, he’s been a soldier for a while, long enough for at least one promotion up to E-5, two or three promotions being much more likely. Which is a lot in a short amount of time - about a year-and-a-half past Pearl Harbor, less time in service assuming Bucky didn’t ship off to basic in 1941. As such, I’ve usually written Bucky as getting a field promotion for valor in combat because things just don’t happen that quickly. It’s still a speedy trip to sergeant, but it’s not completely ridiculous.
Any way you want to play it, when Steve is asking Bucky if he’s gotten his orders, he’s not asking brand-new-soldier Bucky about his first chance to be a ‘real’ soldier. He’s asking probably-home-on-leave Sergeant Barnes where he’s going next.
(2) Bucky has experience leading small units - a team, a squad. He might have already been a platoon sergeant, but no sure thing. Regardless, by the time he’s rescued by Steve, he’s an experienced NCO. He knows how to get things done, both with respect to regular Army crap and the corralling and maintenance of the men in his unit. He understands how the division of labor between CO and NCOIC works out, that he is the sheepdog to the CO’s shepherd when it comes to executing orders and handling the men. He also understands that the relationship between platoon sergeant and platoon commander is a separate thing between them and has a public face, which is united and in which the NCO is proper and respectful of rank, and a private face, which is more informal and generally reflects the fact that the NCO has more life and military experience than the officer and has an obligation to use those experiences to improve the officer and keep everyone from getting killed.
(3) Both points above matter when it comes to Sergeant Barnes and Captain Rogers, especially because the latter was commissioned as a captain and has never had a command position before at any level and truly and completely knows nothing about nothing about leading anyone anywhere to do anything in some form of proper military fashion. Bucky’s instruction necessarily doesn’t begin once he’s team sergeant on the Howling Commandos - it begins during the rescue, the minute he realizes that he’s not having a drug-induced hallucination and Steve really is Captain America and needs all the help that he can get because Steve doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing. Even if Steve doesn’t confess that right away, which he probably will, Bucky knows him well enough to tell.
(4) As important as Sergeant Barnes’s experience is to Captain Rogers, it’s possibly even more important to Brooklyn’s Own Bucky Barnes. Who has been through hell on the battlefield, an even worse hell in Zola’s and Schmidt’s lab, and is now presented with a very hard truth: Steve Rogers doesn’t need him anymore. Steve is no longer frail by many metric; he doesn’t need defending or nurturing, he doesn’t need anyone to advertise his virtues or prop up his self-esteem because everyone else now knows exactly how awesome Captain America is. Steve is no longer short of friends or invisible to women or at the mercy of either his ailments or the neighborhood bullies. Every single protective function Bucky has ever filled for Steve out of friendship and brotherhood has now been rendered moot. Thankfully, while Steve may not need him for anything but companionship anymore, Captain Rogers needs him for a hell of a lot. Steve may be quicker in mind and body, but Bucky is the one who knows how to make everything happen. And that won’t change even as Steve learns the ropes; Captain Rogers will always need Sergeant Barnes. And that’s probably a comfort to Bucky at a time when little else is.
eta: it got added to on Tumblr that for (1) it was technically possible to be thrown into war as a sergeant with almost no experience, especially as the full force of the draft ballooned the number of men in uniform. It was possible, absolutely, but not necessarily likely.
fic of mine where it comes up:
* Antediluvian and La Caduta: the former is Bucky’s pre-movie war career and the latter is his imprisonment, where he struggles to be an NCOIC while also being a lab rat, through the rescue and the formation of the Howling Commandos.
* Recursive, which is a Steve(-and-Bucky) story, but mostly about the Howling Commandos and Steve’s CO-NCOIC relationships with both Bucky and Dum Dum Dugan (after Bucky’s fall) matter a lot.
2) The post-war evolution and spread of HYDRA ideology
(This was written to provide a context for the Freezer Burn series continuing into a post-CA:TWS environment (this is not me saying that will happen, but in order for it to be possible, this needs to happen first), but if you take out the names I need and insert ones like Alexander Pierce’s, I think it works just fine as MCU-compliant.)
HYDRA stopped being just about science almost immediately, before Johann Schmidt ever heard of Steve Rogers. The science was always a means to an end, a striving for efficiency in a world system that tended to chaos. Once Schmidt had his paws on the Tesseract, he finally had a tool that allowed him to think on a grander scale. He’d had time, by that point, to form opinions on what Hitler was doing right and what he was doing very wrong and he was quite sure he could do better. The Tesseract would allow him to try. But, in the end, it wasn’t enough.
Schmidt was the first to move HYDRA away from its Aryan roots, remove the racial and ethnic biases that informed an organization created by the Nazis and spawned from the Ahnenerbe. He was the first to see the potential of the Third World as lab in the non-medical-experimentation way, a place to organize social units and society both overtly and covertly, as cells within an oblivious society and as a substitute society in a failed state. The post-war, post-colonial period was crushing on the Third World, with poverty and ridiculous politics endemic as new nations struggled to invent themselves free of the imperial training wheels; many failed and most bloodily. From this, starting in the early 1960’s, when Schmidt was freed from his ‘prison’ and at liberty to roam the world on his own terms, Schmidt and HYDRA built up generations of believers, men and women who saw HYDRA as the only entity capable of providing the real necessities - shelter, safety, food - in a local environment full of privation and danger.
HYDRA became a force for good at a time when the supposed benevolent powers couldn’t be bothered. HYDRA looked upon the the First World with disdain, worse than useless because they claimed to be well-intentioned but were in fact cowardly and self-interested, either refusing to walk the talk of their supposedly strongly held values - what else was the Cold War? - or spending their blood and treasure in wasteful fashion when they did act in support of those beliefs. The Soviets were a different flavor of wasted potential, mastering the punishment of the police state without any of the inducements or productivity to provide for/earn support from the people.
Phase Two came in the 1970s, with the mass migration from the Third World to the First, tens of thousands of Africans and Asians and Indian subcontinentals moving to the US and Europe. Most of them weren’t HYDRA, of course, but some were and brought with them their belief in HYDRA’s way to world peace through order. Couple that with the general sorry state of political and economic life in the 1970s - strikes, government bankruptcies, government scandals, Vietnam - and the continued social upheaval from the 1960s, made the First World prime for receiving the HYDRA gospel. HYDRA’s new adherents drew from both ends of the spectrum, the liberal/progressive and the conservative. This was the time of the radical left, the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground and the Red Army Faction, the PLO chic in France, etc., and the idea of a militant response to social ills - for that is what HYDRA offers - was a natural part of that zeitgeist. On the right, an organized response to social upheaval, a promise of peace and order, had a similar attraction.
The fall of the Iron Curtain and the end of the Cold War didn’t change HYDRA’s plans per se. The fall of the Wall opened up the Warsaw Pact countries to the same surrogacy offers HYDRA had made to new and failed states for the last half-century, an offer that grew in appeal as newly unmoored-from-Moscow Eastern European economies failed and impoverished states fell into gangsterism and war and the sort of political incompetence and corruption that had befallen other regions generations earlier. Latveria was the sole exception, led carefully and well and if you want to know where Victor von Doom’s hatred of HYDRA comes from, it’s from having spent the 1990s watching HYDRA prey on the vulnerable, which in turn he had not much sympathy for because they took the easy option, the path of least resistance, handing over their dignity and honor to HYDRA rather than fight for their own nation on their own terms.
HYDRA had no problems recruiting in the post-Cold War era. The 1990s were a violent decade, starting with the first Gulf War and then into the horrifying violence and depravity and death of the implosion of Yugoslavia and the Rwandan Genocide and everything that happened in Somalia, among other lowlights. The First World was no better than anywhere else, just with less bloodshed; there was no “peace dividend” in the West, no glorious post-communist flourishing in Eastern Europe - a few years after the end of the Cold War, the Russians were watching Yeltsin fumble, the Americans were impeaching Clinton. Japan went from industrial powerhouse to the Lost Decade.
And then came 9/11.
Phase Three was begun in the mid-oughts. It would not have been possible merely after 9/11 or the invasion of Iraq; it required a more international involvement. The bombings in Madrid and London were necessary pieces - total war against soft targets to galvanize populations that might have otherwise been content to let the Americans suffer for their hubris. The chaos of the Middle East, from Iraq and Afghanistan to Iran’s internal spasms and external support of terrorism all the way through to the Arab Spring, the growing restiveness of young China against Beijing’s control, the evolution of Putin’s Russia, these were all necessary but not sufficient - every revolutionary knows that you can’t win with the rabble alone, you must have the participation of the educated and professional classes to succeed. HYDRA needed critical mass inside Western Europe and the US.
After years of economic trouble - the banks, the mortgage crises, the recessions, the unemployment, the bailouts of EU member nations by other member nations, etc. - HYDRA decided that conditions were close to optimal. After generations of expanding the welfare state and the tools of societal organization, governments had more power over their citizens than ever before. Even as, within the EU, governments had less control over themselves than ever before, presaging a centralized HYDRA control over all states. Technology allowed unparalleled access to information and ever-expanding methods of surveillance and control and the citizenry had allowed that control to be expanded beyond state security requirements, however they were defined.
Phase Four was more aided than impeded by the ‘Era of Heroes’ beginning with Tony Stark’s decision to don the Iron Man armor. Stark himself was not a problem; he was a glitzy spectacle, unreliable and ill-defined, everything he had been in industry but encased in armor and able to fly. Stark wasn’t out to save the world or make life better for everyone; he was out to right the wrongs that penetrated his very rarefied bubble and that was only when he was sober. Thor was an outright boon to HYDRA, revealing the location of the Tesseract while also confirming that there were other objects of great occult power if they could get them. But more importantly, it sent SHIELD and other governmental security agencies into panic mode because of the now-confirmed threat of extraterrestrial life - they’re out there and they can pretty easily kill us. The liberty not sacrificed for security after 9/11 was whittled down even more. And further still after the Battle of New York.
HYDRA was aware of the discovery of Captain America as soon as it happened, as well as of his miraculous survival. Schmidt saw it as a sign, proof of the rightness of the moment. That Steve didn’t immediately return to action was irrelevant. When he did return, to fight in the Battle of New York and then to reclaim his place in the public eye, HYDRA saw it as an opportunity: Captain America, who time and legend had turned into a figure of immense popular power, drew the eyes and hopes of all. And he once again bore his shield to do battle on behalf of a governmental agency, validating that agency’s agenda by his participation in it. Fury was happy to use him to grease the wheels of his own plans, not realizing that by doing so, he was bringing HYDRA that much closer to its goal.
Also posted at DW.