Are the Flag Smashers in ‘Falcon and Winter Soldier’ good, actually?

On the spectrum of Marvel Cinematic Universe villains, a group that chants “one world, one people” while stealing food and vaccines to give to needy refugees doesn’t exactly seem to be at HYDRA levels of evil. 

Then again, this same group robs banks and acquired the serum that HYDRA used to make super soldiers, and its leader is fully prepared to burn her enemies alive because violence is “the only language these people understand.” Which leads us to ask the age-old question: Are they terrorists or freedom fighters?

We speak of the Flag Smashers, the antagonists of Marvel’s new TV hit The Falcon and The Winter Soldier. Three episodes in, the show has shown plenty of willingness to run headlong into the moral gray areas of the MCU, and the Flag Smashers seem to inhabit the most intriguingly grey area of all. 

That’s in contrast to the original Marvel comics, where The Flag-Smasher (singular, not plural) was conceived as an unabashed supervillain. First appearing in the pages of Captain America in 1985, The Flag-Smasher was the alias of Karl Morgenthau, a self-described “anti-patriot” who wanted to avenge the death of his Swiss diplomat father by doing away with national landmarks, borders, flags — anything that led one group of humans to think themselves superior to another. 

The Flag-Smasher was avowedly anti-American as well as anti-Soviet, and good ol’ Cap couldn’t stand for that.  

But this isn’t the Reagan era; it’s harder today to turn the concept of flag-smashing into a cartoon villain. We live in a much more diverse America, a more integrated world, and plenty more of us are aware of the evils that have been perpetrated in the name of nationalism. Sure, there are Republicans who want to build expensive, pointless walls. There are also economists telling us that allowing freedom of movement across borders could add up to $100 trillion to the global economy. Mention flags these days and you might just as easily recall Eddie Izzard’s succinct summary of colonialism: “No flag, no country!” 

So it wasn’t surprising that the Flag-Smasher would get a 2021 upgrade. Karl Morgenthau, a middle-aged white man in the comics, is now Karli Morgenthau, a young mixed-race woman (as Erin Kellyman, who also stole the show as Enfys Nest in Solo, has noted about her character Karli) on the show. The singular Flag-Smasher, who took hostages and attacked landmarks, is now a diverse group of Flag Smashers who use AR tags and Anonymous-style flash mob tactics in the service of feeding transnational refugees. Instead of underground lairs, they rely on an underground network. “They call you Robin Hood,” says one enthusiastic supporter. 

Things have become more ambivalent on the other side of the legal line too. In place of Steve Rogers’ morally unimpeachable Cap, we have John Walker, whose attempt to question members of that underground network has all the clumsy arrogance of an occupying army. Just call him Captain Ugly American.

“Violent revolutionaries aren’t good for anyone’s cause,” Walker insists to Sam Wilson, aka the Falcon. “Usually said by the people who have the resources,” shoots back Sam, who has his own reasons to question the system represented by a red, white, and blue flag.   

Battle of the Blip

From a story perspective, the most interesting aspect of the Flag Smashers is what their presence says about the last five years in the Marvel universe. When half the world’s population disappeared in the Thanos snap, it makes sense that the world adjusted. Life was full of grief, but it was also easier in some ways for the 4 billion who remained. “We got a glimpse of how things could be,” Karli tells her team. “We can’t let these assholes who were put back in power after the Blip win.”

That makes sense: You don’t need to support Thanos’ insane population control scheme to see how a half-capacity Earth could have been better for the average inhabitant. Prices would have fallen, more housing would have been available, and wages would have risen for employees almost everywhere (as they did after the Black Death, which wiped out a third of Europe). 

The Flag Smashers represent one of the thorniest, most fascinating ethical dilemmas the MCU has ever given us.  

Add to that the sudden sense of global awareness conferred by such a tragedy — think of the United Nations’ founding after the deaths of 60 million people in World War II — and the “one world, one people” slogan takes on a boatload of meaning. If you’d had a glimpse of humanity at its best after a disaster (and as Rebecca Solnit explains in the excellent book A Paradise Built in Hell, we’re often at our best after disasters) you wouldn’t want to give that up. 

The genius of The Falcon and The Winter Soldier is that, like WandaVision, it gives us just enough of a glimpse of the chaos after billions returned for us to draw our own conclusions. Via a soft-focus TV ad, we’re introduced to the Global Repatriation Council: “Helping you get back to the way things were” while navigating unspecified “changes to borders and laws.”   

Attitudes to the GRC vary depend on whom you’re asking. According to Walker’s sidekick, Battle Star, the GRC’s main job is “reactivating citizenship, social security, healthcare” — and who can argue with that? But the Flag Smashers don’t want to go back to the way things were, an attitude that millions of us who have lived through a global pandemic that upended the old commuting lifestyle can certainly relate to. 

For Karli and company, who we’re told were literally turfed out onto the streets when the Blip returned billions, the change between before and after is thoroughly visceral. For them the GRC doesn’t just represent the return of the “assholes who were put back in power.” It’s an unnecessary layer of bureaucracy at best, sinister favoritism to the returned at worst. “You had six months of supplies just sat there,” Karli told a GRC soldier who called her a “filthy Flag Smasher” after the heist at the end of episode 3. “Don’t you understand? We’re fighting for our lives!” 

Unfortunately for the Flag Smasher cause, Karli then blew up every GRC employee in a Lithuanian warehouse with a bomb in her car, apparently to send a message. The line between freedom fighter and terrorist had clearly been crossed. 

Karli’s deputy, Dovich (Desmond Chiam), was horrified. So too were many viewers, who took to social media to declare that her sudden switch in tactics made no sense — and was especially galling in an episode that turned supervillain Baron Zemo into a relatable nice guy.

Indeed, the framing is a little odd, given that the show has gone out of its way to make Karli sympathetic up until this point. There is no foreshadowing of her turn to coldhearted violence. Perhaps we’re meant to read something into the friendly chat Karli and Dovich have prior to the attack, but exactly what that might be isn’t clear — even on multiple rewatches. 

Regardless, we shouldn’t damn a whole movement that has been pretty nonviolent up until this point just because of one action by one of them, even if she is their nominal leader. To do that would be to misread the history of nonviolent resistance, which has always had internal debates with members who want to take more direct action, or who lose their heads in the heat of the moment (watch last year’s Oscar-nominated Trial of the Chicago 7 for an excellent example of that).  

Then there’s the question of what it means that the Flag Smashers have the super-soldier serum — which opens up a whole other can of MCU worms. After all, this is the serum that gave us Captain America in the first place (not to mention, tangentially, the Hulk). It also gave us Bucky the Winter Soldier, and more HYDRA henchmen than you can shake a shield at. Are all uses of the serum bad? If not, who gets to decide who can use it? If the government can — when maybe, morally, it shouldn’t — why would an anti-government group not think it has the same right? 

“It was taken as a precaution,” Kellyman told Syfy Wire about the Flag Smashers’ use of the serum. “Now they’re realizing they probably do need it a little bit more than they realized in the first place.”

And here we are in a place where Karli has likely committed a war crime under the Geneva Convention (the killing of captive combatants, which at least some people in that warehouse were). That tips the scales for her personally into terrorism, but given Dovich’s surprise, the jury is still out on the Flag Smasher movement as a whole. The remaining three episodes will tell us more, as will the revelation of the mysterious Power Broker who may have been manipulating Karli’s movement all along.

Regardless of the outcome, the Flag Smashers will remain an iconic group for many in our world — and their struggle for unity and equality will represent one of the thorniest, most fascinating ethical dilemmas the MCU has ever given us.

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is streaming on Disney+.