Grant Ward to Jemma Simmons, from “Out of the Shadows and Into the Light”

I suppose it is a bit indulgent to quote your own fic, but I really like this line of mine. Here we have a Grant Ward who didn’t betray the team in Season 1 telling Simmons about Hydra in preperation for her infiltration of it in Season 2. He’s been inside Hydra, he knows the logic of how they think.

Hydra is fascist, yes, and evil. But a fascist genuinely believes that their ideas are the best solution to the problems they see. Alexander Pierce genuinely believed. Hitler - god, we all know he believed. Mussolini - he believed. All the political footsoldiers that took those two men and every other fascist dictator into power… they believed. Yes, I’m sure there were Blood Knights recruited into Hydra-in-S.H.I.E.L.D. that were there just for the chance to kill, or people who joined out of resentment or betrayal (John Garrett, for example) or because they wanted something (also John Garrett, namely he wanted to survive and stay alive) or just plain amorality. But an organization that was just a bunch of selfish, resentful Blood Knights couldn’t have lasted.

Hydra believes. All those Hydra Goons that get mown down in TWS, in AoU, in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. A lot of them believed. They looked out the window. They saw the terrorism, the crime, the poverty, the instability and wondered why it had to be that way. They came to the not illogical conclusion that the problem was human freedom. Freedom is a problem. It’s a problem I’m willing to live with, personally, but in a more unfree world, a lot of the things that trouble us currently would be gone… we just wouldn’t be free. And a lot of people wouldn’t be happy with that trade off.

But history has shown us time and again that there are people that will. And there’s nothing wrong with that, inherently - the trade off is a value judgement, and some people can genuinely decide that their freedom is less important than their safety, and I can’t fault them for making the choice they did. I wasn’t there. BUT, the trick is that you can’t trade someone else’s freedom. You can trade your own freedom for security, for safety. But you can’t start doing it to other people, or you start crossing the line into becoming what Hydra-in-S.H.I.E.L.D. is. Its not a choice anyone can make for anyone else. 

Hydra-in-S.H.I.E.L.D. is a perfect example of the intoxicating power of good intentions, and just how you pave the road to hell with them. So you’ve looked out the window. You’ve decided freedom is the problem. Now what? Obviously the rest of the world (as a whole) doesn’t agree with you. You can try to persuade them, but people are, at least in safe times, pretty attached to their freedom. You think about all the lives that could be saved right now if your solution was implemented. You think about all the lives that could be saved in the future - all the wars that won’t happen, all the corruption you’ll eliminate. All the needless suffering you can prevent. 

But people like their freedom. What can you do? Can you kill them all? Kind of defeats the purpose. But you can kill some people. One person to save a thousand. That’s something most people would agree is probably acceptable, in a theoretical sense. But what happens when it becomes two people to save two thousand?  A hundred people to save a hundred thousand? Or maybe a thousand people to save a million? Once you ratchet up the numbers, it becomes a lot less defensible to most people. 

But if you’re Hydra… the logic holds all the way on up. So you do what Hydra did. They made the world progressively more unstable so S.H.I.E.L.D. would get more power. So they could get more power. I think Project Insight was a result of Hydra letting the post-Battle of New York rush of power go to their head, but that was the final culmination of their logic. As pierce says, kill millions to save billions. 

Hydra is fascist. And this is a point that many people have made many, many, many times. And this particularity is important. But Hydra is a distinct flavor of fascist. Its not the same kind of fascism as Hitler’s Nazism, or ISIS’s “Islamofacism” or Scientology’s profiteering through thought control or the fascistic tones one can see in the USA’s Military and Intelligence Apparatus (NSA spying, Drones, etc).

And I think, at least in the MCU, Hydra’s flavor of Fascism is… especially idealistic. It seems to me to be much more concerned with building something new rather than tearing town something old. It feels… optimistic. It feels more… global. Nazism was founded on exclusionism. On a master race. ISIS enslaves and destroys the nonbelievers. Scientology labels everyone else an SP. Hydra considers those who aren’t inside it its enemies, but they want to extend their glorious regime and “protection” over everyone. They want everyone to be a member of Hydra, in a way. 

Hydra’s fascism is the fascism for the modern world. And that’s what makes them so scary. Hydra is the fascism for the modern, interconnected, globaized world. Its the fascism for the world where the borders are slowly being erased. Its a fascism that can appeal to people from every background and every country and every religion and every ethnicity and every class. Because everyone can look out the window. 

(via kyliafanfiction-archive)

A somewhat Dated post, but I’m still quite proud of, in a lot of ways.