Second, as we've seen, his "group" is democratic and doesn't always agree on everything. . .
His group is not democratic, it is a
self-appointed oligarchy.
The difference between a democracy and oligarchy is actually critical in the presentation of G-Shield. It is where they are in the wrong. They are a
Closely Held Private Corporation with no ties to any legitimate government, democratic or otherwise.
Well, that kind of depends. We know that G-SHIELD has a "board" who can outvote Gonzales, but that Gonzales appears to run day-to-day operations and be the chief executive. Whether or not G-SHIELD is democratic, at least in terms of its internal function, depends upon whether or not the members of this "board" are subject to election by all of the members of G-SHIELD. If, for instance, this board is elected by everyone in G-SHIELD, even the lowliest of grunts, then G-SHIELD may be said to be democratic, at least in terms of its internal functioning.
What it does not do, so far as we know, is, it does not serve a legitimate democratic polity. There's no direct evidence that it is an agency of the United States, or of the United Kingdom, or of the Republic of Chile, or of the Kingdom of Spain, or of the Republic of Iceland, or of the Commonwealth of Australia, nor any combination thereof. Which, of course, means that it, too, is unaccountable and above the law.
Though (I know, I know, I keep harping on this) I still want to know how they're running an aircraft carrier all by themselves.
Coulson's group has self-admittedly gone rogue, but they are maintaining the policies and command structures of previous organization. They are maintaining these policies and command structures while working for legitimate governments and while co-operating with the U.S. Army (Talbot.) They are hoping to stop becoming "rogue" and return to official status. We have seen no evidence that G-Shield is working for anyone but themselves.
All true -- except that Coulson-SHIELD is also trying to rebuild along more benevolent lines than the original SHIELD. Coulson has talked a lot about how there was a dark side to the original SHIELD, and the implication is that he is trying to figure out how to re-build SHIELD and to go legitimate again without continuing that darker, morally ambiguous tradition. Some people, like Andrew, May's ex-husband, think he is not succeeding in that, and is merely replicating the morally questionable ethos that helped bring the original SHIELD down.
* * *
Not to flog a dead horse, but I'd like to re-visit a discussion we were having earlier in this thread, re: Hydra and racism.
I've recently purchased a copy of the comic miniseries
Captain America: First Vengeance, which was released in conjunction with
Captain America: The First Avenger in 2011 and is set in the MCU. Each issue focuses on the pasts of different characters in CA:TFA, leading up to their actions in the film.
The relevant portions of CA:FV feature Johann Schmidt as he starts the process of founding Hydra. In it, we discover that Schmidt was originally a professor at an unestablished university in Berlin who meets Adolf Hitler at a Wagner production held at the Deutsches Opernhaus in February 1934. There, he intrigues Hitler with his hypothesis that the stories of the old Norse gods were based on advanced science; Hitler is interested, and orders a later meeting with Schmidt on the topic, but the head of the S.A.'s special weapons division, Ernst Kaufmann, kicks him out of the opera house after Hitler has left and orders Schmidt never to come near Hitler again on pain of death.
Schmidt is then approached by Heinrich Himmler, head of the S.S., who is interested in his Norse magic-science hypothesis and enlists Schmidt in his plot to attack the S.A. During the
Knight of Long Knives on 30 June 1934, the S.S. begins killing leaders of the S.A. Schmidt personally murders Kaufmann, and then leads a division of S.S. officers to seize control of an S.A. weapons testing facility in Kummersdorf. Schmidt and his men murder all of the S.A. officers present, and extorts Zola into joining his new S.S. division -- Hydra. So Hydra was founded essentially by stealing all of the assets and forcibly enlisting some of the personnel of the S.A.'s special weapons division.
We later get insight into Schmidt's political and racial philosophies. While coercing Zola into joining Hydra, Schmidt is evaluating Zola's work on a weaponized exo-skeleton: "Toys. You are a toymaker. I am not impressed. It is man himself I want to forge into a weapon. All of your budget is being rerouted to this task. Do you feel up to the challenge, Dr. Zola?"
Later,
First Vengeance establishes that Schmidt personally intercepted Dr. Abraham Erskine as he was attempting to flee Germany by train near the German/Swiss border on 14 September 1935. He forces Dr. Erskine to begin working for Hydra:
"My group has been monitoring your progress for some time, to see how much you could achieve without our assistance. But then, someone in the Party warned you what the Führer would be announcing at the rally tomorrow in Nuremberg: Laws against Jews and Aryans intermarrying... restricting the types of jobs Jews can hold, et cetera... Your wife's father was Jewish, was he not? That means your children are somewhere on this Aryan heritage chart, yes? Rubbish. Racist superstition masquerading as junk science. We know that the superior man will not be
born, Professor Erskine. He will not be a member of any 'master race.' He will be a race unto
himself. And you are going to help me
make him."
Erskine answers him, "You... work with Nazis even though you do not follow their ideology?"
Schmidt smirks. "And?"
"And that is supposed to make me think you are
less despicable than them? Or so much
more?"
"Forgive me, Herr Professor, for answering a question with a question: If I kill your family because of their Jewish blood... or if I kill your family because you refuse to aid me... will they not be dead all the same?"
In November 1940, Dr. Erskine is rescued from Hydra while at Castle Kaufmann in the Bavarian Alps by MI-6 Agent Peggy Carter. Dr. Erskine was working on the "Übermensch Soldier Program" for Hydra, and Schmidt had taken the formula and transformed into his guise as the Red Skull. For this, Dr. Erskine was being tortured. Initially, Dr. Erskine wants to try to rescue his wife and son as well, but Agent Carter informs him that they died of typhus during an outbreak at a concentration camp near Dachau in 1937. Schmidt had kept this information from Dr. Erskine, in order to keep leverage over him.
We get some final clues about Hydra's philosophies in the last issue: At a Hydra weapons facility in the Austrian Alps in October 1943, Hydra inadvertently helps unite the Howling Commandos by placing prisoners of war together form different ethnic and national units, in an attempt to sow discord amongst them by race and nationality. The commanding officer of the facility, Colonel Lohmer, remarks:
"Do you know why the Reich is destined to win this war, corporal?... The Reich shall win because we are united. In blood as in purpose. While our enemies... are the polyglot peasants of Europe, and the mongrel masses of North America. You see, then, the genius of splitting up the prisoners by nationality when they arrive."
Finally, intercut with all of these backstories is the framing sequence, wherein Captain America and the Howling Commandos are attacking a Hydra facility in the Nazi-occupied Danish Straits in April 1944. Monitoring their progress remotely, the Red Skull declares by an announcer system to the invading Captain America as he plays some Wagner:
The Red Skull said:
"Do you hear the call? Give thanks to the gods that you are called to hear it!" The call of he who is more than mortal, Herr Hauptmann. Wielding an arsenal of the power denied the great writhing mass of lesser men. Mythology and science fiction share this theme in common. Both speak to a far greater truth....
<SNIP>
This superior man... He cannot be born, Hauptmann Amerika. Only made. Let us see how well made you really are...
<SNIP>
No. No. No. Already you fail the test, Hauptmann. Mollycoddling the weak is not the altruism you think it is. All you're really doing is preventing nature from weeding the inferior out of the ecosystem. And sapping your own superior... but not limitless strength. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. And you, I fear... belong in no chain of mine.
<SNIP>
Yes, please, do enter, Captain. Learn if you are worthy of standing by my side.... I have sent a catastrophic surge through these Vita-batteries. Having gleaned all I can from this site, and the artifacts I found here... I will destroy it, I think. And you with it. Unless... you leave immediately. With your enhanced speed, you, and only you, should be able to outrace the blast. Embrace your superiority, Hauptmann. Leave your inferiors to their doom. Or perish with them. These are your only choices.
Now, the canonocity of
Captain America: First Vengeance is debatable. The first pages establish that Steve's mother died when he was a child in 1924, and that's been contradicted by
Captain America: The Winter Soldier, wherein it is established that his mother died when he and Bucky were already adults.
But if we accept this source, then that gives us some insight into Hydra's political philosophy. Their leaders may not believe in racism per se, but they are willing to help perpetuate racist genocides and to work with the ultimate in racists, because they are definitely proponents of a form of social darwinism. And their followers
do seem to believe in racism, given Lohmer's "unity of blood" rhetoric. Schmidt remains influenced by Aryanism insofar as they came to believe that the ancient Norse gods were real and possessed advanced science (he was right about that), but does not necessarily believe in the superiority (or even the biological reality) of the Aryan race. Schmidt, at least, believes that racism is superstition, but that the superior man who has the right to dominate and crush the weak--the "Übermensch"--will be created by fantastical science, and he intends to become that Übermensch.
It would seem that rank-and-file Hydra officers during WW2 still believed in racism and nationalism, again given Lohmer's "unity of blood" rhetoric. I simply don't see how we can interpret his idea that racial purity will defeat racial diversity as anything else.
So that gives us some insight into WW2-era Hydra's philosophy. It is a fantastical fascism--instead of venerating a particular nation as superior and deserving to dominate other nations, it venerates a superior man that science will create to do the same. Its leaders reject racism, but its followers do not.
(Incidentally, if Hydra is openly operating a facility in Nazi-occupied territory, that also tells us that Hydra had not openly rebelled against the German Reich yet as of April 1944. The film is ambiguous as to whether Hydra's intention to overthrow the Nazis was ever openly declared, or if the Nazis were under the impression that Hydra was still loyal to them right until the Allies marched into Berlin.)
For present-day Hydra? Well, there's at least
this exchange from the recent
Agents of SHIELD episode "One Door Closes:"
(Setting: SHIELD aircraft carrier Iliad on the day SHIELD fell. Hydra agents are holding several SHIELD members prisoner as the news plays.)
TV NEWSCASTER: Today, world leaders are scrambling for answers after SHIELD was crippled [glass shattering] by a series of devastating attacks. No one seems to be sure how long the terrorist group known as Hydra has been operating within SHIELD's ranks. [electricity crackling] But today, they made their presence known when they destroyed SHIELD headquarters, the Triskelion.--
TIM: I can't feel my arm, Mack. Can't feel it.
MACK: Tim, I'm gonna need you to trust me now, buddy. It's gonna be okay.
TV NEWSCASTER: Once affiliated with the Nazi Party, Hy...
[Hydra soldier shoots the TV. Electricity crackles, explosions continue in distance]
HYDRA SOLDIER: Always with the Nazi stuff! Now, which one of you is the chief engineer?
The only prior information we've really had on the attitudes of present-day Hydra members towards the organization's Nazi origins came from Season One, when Skye accused Ward of being a Nazi and Ward claimed that that had nothing to do with Hydra today. But considering that Ward's branch of Hydra may well have been planning to go rogue against Hydra command and that Ward himself was more loyal to Garret than to Hydra, I didn't consider that enough evidence to get a good sense of most Hydra members' attitudes.
Assuming this Hydra soldier's attitude is typical, it would seem that many Hydra members are in some way embarrassed by Hydra's Nazi origins. They do not consider it a Nazi organization--but I think the sheer anger the soldier displays at the mere mention of the Nazi Party suggests that there's a "the lady doth protest too much" thing going on there. I think they know that Hydra is far more Nazi-like than they would prefer to admit.
Given that mainstream Hydra, under Reinhardt/Whitehall, were still pursuing fantastical devices capable of granting superpowers after the fall of SHIELD (in the form of the Kree Diviner), my presumption is that Hydra remains committed to the idea of using (mad) science to create the Übermensch who shall rule the Earth and crush the masses. So it's still a fantastical form of fascism in that regard.
I still do not consider the idea that Hydra members wouldn't generally be racist and anti-Semitic to be realistic. I continue my assertion that this would be the equivalent of a story in which the Ku Klux Klan emerges from the ashes of the Confederate States of America yet does not believe in white supremacy. But that does appear to be the canon, now--unless the average Hydra member harbors racist beliefs that we just haven't been privy to yet, anyway.
