Re: Captain America: Civil War - pre-release discussion, news, rumors,
I don't buy that one either. I'm expecting Vision to perhaps be secretly working with Cap. to try to minimize damage/conflict as much as possible.
I don't really see the Vision as working on either side. His line in
Age of Ultron says it all for me: "Humans are odd. They think order and chaos are somehow opposites and try to control what won't be." I don't think he's one for dichotomies.
That was my impression of him as well. I'm just trying to come up with a reasonable explanation for why he would seem to be working with Tony - and the best I've come up with so far as that he wanted to be neutral, but Cap convinced him to 'side' with Tony so he can be on hand to stop things from escalating too far.
Ah, gotcha.
I can certainly see Steve being very skeptical of his government. But by the same token, I have a hard time seeing him as someone who thinks he should by right be able to lead a private army without answering to anyone but his own judgment. There's something very fascistic about the idea that a superior man should be above the law and does not need to answer to the people; the exercise of executive authority by people who are laws unto themselves is inevitably going to lead to abuses and be injurious to the rights of the people. I can see Steve rebelling to an abusive registration system, but I have trouble seeing him as rebelling against any registration system.
On the one hand, I can understand that, but on the other hand I don't think 'not being above the law' necessarily requires a 'registration act' type situation. The avengers could easily exist independently, call their own targets, etc, and still be willing to answer for any unintentional damage done. And the govt. could easily let them do so, if that was what everyone wanted. Of course, then we wouldn't have a movie.
I mean, I'm not convinced you can have the Avengers
not be putting themselves above the law without making them an agency of the democratic state. Vigilanteism is a crime for a
reason. I mean, right there -- the Avengers pick their own targets? On what basis do they operate? By what set of standards will they operate to protect the rights of suspects? How can there be an effective chain of custody for evidence? How can they make sure that charges against suspects hold up in court? Who gets to tell the Avengers when they've gone too far, or when they can't do something?
To put it another way:
Would you trust the police not to be part of the democratic state?
And yet he had no problem with that in Age of Ultron when thats what the Avengers basically were.
And
Age of Ultron depicted a lot of ways in which this fact was deeply problematic. After all, God knows how many people died as a result of a threat the Avengers themselves created. A sovereign nation lost its capital city. Johannesburg was trashed and God knows how many South African citizens were killed; parts of Seoul were destroyed along with its subway system, again killing who knows how many innocent South Koreans; the Avengers evaded the authorities when Bruce Banner had just killed who knows how many people in Johannesburg; numerous other people were killed throughout the world by Ultron robots attacking facilities; and, oh yeah, the world itself was almost destroyed. But no one has the right to regulate the Avengers after the consequences of their actions were so ruinous?
I can see Steve leading the Avengers without governmental accountability in the immediate post-SHIELD world for a time as a temporary situation. I have trouble thinking of him as someone who would want to lead a private army without answering to anyone else as a permanent situation.
I think he would rather lead a private army that is doing the right thing than hand over that army to a govt. that's obviously going to abuse and misuse it.
And who gets to decide what constitutes "the right thing?" Steve?
"You know, the last time I was in Germany and saw a man standing above everybody else, we ended up disagreeing."
Here's the thing: Steve
does sometimes rebel when he thinks he knows what's right and the institutions he is serving are in the wrong. He violated Colonel Phillips's orders to rescue Bucky and the other 400 POWs from Hydra in CA:TFA. He went on the run from SHIELD and then tore it down to prevent Hydra from launching Project Insight in CA:TWS.
But Steve
also always made sure he was answerable for his actions afterwards. In CA:TFA, as soon as he returned to the Allied base, he reported to Phillips and said that he would like to submit himself for discipline. In TWS, he made sure to release all the information he had on Hydra and SHIELD to the public; Natasha testified before Congress about why they made the decisions they did, and I presume Steve did as well, since he wasn't exactly in hiding as of A:AoU.
So, yeah, sometimes Steve rebels against the morally illegitimate exercise of power by authority figures. But he also has a history of then making sure that he is held accountable for his own rebellions, of submitting to legitimate authority so they can determine if his rebellions were morally justified.
That's my basic problem with the idea that Steve would even
want the Avengers not to be answerable to anyone: He may be suspicious of powerful institutions, but I also think he doesn't see himself as being above the law or having an inherent right to break the law just because he thinks what governments are doing is wrong. Steve requires a fairly extraordinary set of circumstances to drive him to rebel -- and I am not convinced that what to me sounds like a sensible idea in a democracy ("nobody should be able to exercise executive power without answering to the people through the legitimate democratic state; those who are powerful should have checks and balances on them") is inherently something that would drive Steve to rebel.
So I suspect that we're going to find out that there's something about he Sokovia Accords that is particularly onerous, that in some way violates the rights of superpowered individuals, rather than just him objecting in principle to the idea that he and the Avengers should not get to be self-appointed police and soldiers.
I think at the end of the day it's going to come down to this: when Captain America sees innocent people in trouble, he's going to save them. Whether the govt. approves or not, even if there's a possibility that something could go wrong, he can't NOT be a hero. It's just who he is. And that's automatically going to bring him into at least some kind of conflict with just about any regulation you can imagine, unless he was the one making the decisions about what's allowed.
Well, that's a pretty damn ominous line of thought. "Unless he's the one making the decisions." Doesn't sound very in keeping with the values of liberal democracy Steve believes in.
Very cool trailer, but it still seems like a huge stretch to think that Tony and Steve -- after all they've already been through together-- could ever actually be driven to go to war with each other.
Get in arguments and minor fistfights and throw each other around? Sure. But not an actual war where they're mobilizing forces and strategizing against each other.
I take it for granted that both Steve and Tony are deliberately trying to make sure they don't use lethal force and only disable rather than permanently damage or kill the other.
