60 points

Much like Jesus would not recognise his “followers”, Cap would not recognise the “america” he was fighting for…

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52 points

Considering he went to war in the 40s, I think he would recognize this America. For all of our flaws, we’re doing better now than we were then.

Like he said - he fought not because America is great, but because it is fragile. America is not some shining precious jewel, it’s a deeply flawed creature - the only thing that marks it as worth saving is the ideal that all people are equal. The further we get from that, the closer we come to being nothing more than trash and a rag.

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29 points

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiorello_La_Guardia

New York City in the 1930s was full of Socialists and Communists.

Much of the 1950s Red Scare was set up to punish the ‘premature anti-fascists’ who a young Steve Rogers would have listened to.

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3 points

But in that fragility, he understood that we were only as strong as our weakest link

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2 points

I agree with your statements on ideals, but I do not think America was on the precipice of becoming a fascist dictatorship in the 40s.

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5 points

You might be surprised, there were a lot of pro nazi Americans. The attack on Pearl Harbor changed what might have been a quiet agreement with the new reich

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-6 points

For all of our flaws, we’re doing better now than we were then.

Really? How many Palestinians were the US helping to murder back in the 40s? How many Afghans? How many Iraqis?

Or are you just happy that the people being murdered happen to be brown people and not ones you think should be included in the “white enough” club?

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2 points

Want to know how I know you’re not black or a woman? You think the 40s were better than now.

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37 points

Dang. This is a real Captain America from a “What If?” Published in 1983. “What if Captain America was thawed out today (1983)?”

Please save us, Cap. Oh wait, I guess now Disney owns you, too.

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26 points

Cap got so disillusioned by Watergate that he changed his name to Nomad for a while.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomad_(Marvel_Comics)

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4 points

Damn. I haven’t heard anyone pushing cap that hard this time around, I wonder what the modern version would look like these days

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4 points

If he saw what politics and patriotism have become now, he would probably just start drinking. Like everyone else.

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1 point

I’m not a marvel fan enough to really know, but I am aware of I believe Ultimate Captain America who is (at least for a while?) every bit a 1950s hard right winger and bigot

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22 points

It may be my ignorance, but the history of the USA i know starts with the massacre of indigenous people, then goes to the massacre of black people, then the massacre of mexicans, the massacre of communists, then the massacre of vietnamese ppl, then iraqs and afhgans, and so on. Where is the part that inspires the idea that the USA has such great values?

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65 points
*

You left out a bit. We also fought the British, and the Confederacy, and the Spanish, and the Kaiser, and the Nazis, and Imperial Japan.

America’s history is complicated, and full of atrocities, like the history of nearly every major nation.

The values he’s referring to in the comic are the core principles espoused in the founding documents. The idea of one nation with liberty and justice for all. At no point in history have those ideas been fully realized, but striving to meet those ideals is what America means to the Captain, not some borders on a map or colors on a flag.

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-15 points

But they were founded on the idea of the liberty of men… as long as they are white, protestant, male land-owners…

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13 points

…which was remarkably liberal for its time.

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10 points
*

Not really that liberal, compared to what the people they colonized were doing, before the europeans arrived.

Edit: Here’s some notes on that claim

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