The closest specific analogue, in this regard, is the Federal state centered in Washington. Like SHIELD, it arose in and after World War II as the “world’s policeman.” Like SHIELD, it posed as heroes protecting world peace from villains, starting with Nazi Germany (in the films, HYDRA originated as a rogue Nazi cell) and Imperial Japan.
But, also like SHIELD, Washington and its allies were themselves infected with the same statist disease as their foes. They countered the infamous Nazi (National Socialist) domestic policies with the economic regimentation and civil-liberty squashing of the New Deal and of wartime controls, and answered the Nazis’ Holocaust with holocausts of their own, most demonically in Dresden, Hamburg, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. (What can be more diabolically super-villainous than the incineration of whole cities, overwhelmingly populated by women, children, and the elderly?)
Like SHIELD/HYDRA, Washington (through such “Hydra heads” as NATO, the U.S. military, the CIA, the NED, etc) has used mass deception and
covert interventions (both hard and soft) to generate chaos so as to precipitate its own
overt interventions, and to extend its hegemony. World history since the Second World War has been a tissue of such incidents.
The alien invasion of New York City in
Marvel’s Avengers (the previous movie in the Marvel cinematic franchise) was SHIELD’s “9/11,” which it used in
Winter Soldier to justify an extreme expansion of its power, in the form of “Project Insight.” Thanks to an algorithm invented by Captain America’s old nemesis Arnim Zola (played by Toby Jones), and the agency’s total access to private data (hello NSA!), SHIELD/HYDRA’s computers can predictively identify anyone in the world who will likely threaten the agency’s power and plans.
This data is used, along with a network of spy satellites that can pinpoint the exact location of anyone on the planet, to target three heavily-armed, autonomous, and stratospheric “Helicarriers,” which are essentially supervillain-scale versions of the drones that are today raining terror, dismemberment, and death throughout South Asia and the Middle East. And note the parallels with Obama’s “kill list” and with the
close cooperation among the NSA, the CIA, and the military in the drone program.
One of the greatest moments in the film is when Captain America decides not to try to purge HYDRA from SHIELD, as Nick Fury (played by Samuel L. Jackson) wants to do, and as some minarchist (utopian) libertarians would like to do with the State. Instead, he realizes that SHIELD and HYDRA cannot be disentangled: certainly not practically, and perhaps not even conceptually.
So it is not Captain America, but another character that accomplishes the actual abolition of SHIELD: the Black Widow (played by Scarlett Johansen). And she accomplishes it not with fists, guns, or large metal disks, but with that ultimate weapon, feared by states and other monsters alike:
sunlight. After hacking all of SHIELD/HYDRA’s secrets, she simply uploads the entire trove to the internet, after which she dryly notes, “…and it’s trending.”
Did the somewhat-reluctantly applauding audience in Alabama realize they were essentially applauding the causes of Edward Snowden, Ron Paul, and other enemies of the bourgeoning warfare/police state? Surely not all of them; many probably look askance at Paul, and perhaps even revile Snowden. But the overall moral of the film’s story was so clear, that they wouldn’t have clapped at all, if something in it didn’t ring true in their hearts, and if, even inchoately, they didn’t see ominous parallels between SHIELD/HYDRA and the metastasizing, domineering state that rules, threatens, and pretends to protect them. And for that, there is cause to be both grateful and hopeful.