Propaganda (Agatha) All Along

Wonder what Agatha All Along has to do with Zionism, The Patriarchy and the wider Marvel Copaganda Machine? Here's a preview of few thoughts that will become a video essay at the end of the month

Disney Marvel and the [subtle] Propaganda Machine

This feels like LiveJournal in 2002. Only now I think about the world and the ways in which context and systems work hard to keep us as entertained -and therefore unaware- as possible. Hey there, I’m Ysha, sometimes I go by Activist Witch because -you guessed it-, along with identifying as a Pagan Witch I also sit at the intersection of multiple marginalised identities: I’m a Fat, Queer Non-Binary, Autistic, Immigrant of Colour, and educating myself about the modern world socio-cultural system to understand how I fit in is a never-ending experience for me, which at times I’ve come to share.

1. Agatha All Along and the Disney Marvel Machine

Like many witches in the last few weeks, none of my feeds could escape the -conscious or not- promotion of Disney' Marvel’s newest series: Agatha all Along. Because: Witches be witching. And cleverly, it’s October.

Because as witches and pagans we are at the margins of society for what concerns religious expectations and privilege (a slice of the wheel of privilege that sees white Christians on top of it), like all marginalisations, we are starved for representation so give us crumbs and we’ll feast.

Mind, I still have beef (or tofu, depending on your persuasion) with Disney for how dirty they did Wanda after Wandavision and (spoiler alert) the way she was written out of the Marvel Universe because “Women make babies, they go crazy, they need stopping”. I’m not joking, that’s the abridged version of Doctor Strange and The Multiverse of Madness where our villain is… the one woman we hadn’t yet kill in the marvel universe.

Agatha was the archenemy in Wandavision, and Disney have now exhumed her for a variety of likely reasons that all end up with the same result: they can sell her to us. Did you know the variety of Millennial-catered entertainment we’re getting recently is exactly because we are the last generation that, despite lack of funds for a pension or a house, have little enough -and nostalgia enough for a pre-social media era- that we’ll buy into that Nostalgia? To remain in Marvel discourse, the latest DeadPool and Wolverine is one such mashup of 90s nostalgia (when we were children / adolescents, the most gilded era for the brain) and that continues with Agatha. It’s not by chance that, for once, we get a Coven that’s not teenagers, but are quite literally the teenagers of The Craft (1996) if they were grown up now (Fairuza Balk was born in 1974, Kathryn Hahn in 1973).

Cause nostalgia is a Witch. With a capital B.

2. Marvel and the Patriarchal Lens on Motherhood

Agatha all Along episode two, and we are immediately reminded that “Women make babies, they go crazy, they need stopping”. If we had any doubt that this applied to Wanda and now to the other witch, Agatha, the episode makes is immediately blatant by juxtaposing a crying baby sound to the Darkhold (the Book of the Damned that corrupts everything and everyone that it touches according to Marvel Lore) in a crib in an hallucination Agatha experiences. Supposedly she traded her baby for it. And I don’t want to risk spoiling the series, but I won’t be surprised when it turns out that, at the end of “the witches road”, what Agatha wants to find it’s not her powers, but her child again.

Because -lest we forget- Marvel is written by men. Before the modern era of the Marvel Cinematic Universe that began with Iron man in 2008, the Marvel comics were written by white men for white young men, and it’s not by chance either that it started in 1939 coinciding with World War 2.

I mentioned in a couple of my videos the reasons why Motherhood is upheld as the promise that Patriarchy makes to (white) women. In short: because the one thing women are needed for is the perpetration of the (desirable) species. (for how women of ‘undesirable’ species are treated about their reproductive rights Dorothy Roberts “Killing the Black Body” will make your blood chill along with hopefully bringing you awareness of how the patriarchy loves to play “divide and conquer”). Somewhere in there we can go and analyse why Black Widow was sterilised as a prize for completing her training, why Wanda was punished for quite literally having a Phantom Pregnancy, and why I guarantee the “redemption” arc of Agatha won’t be as a witch, but as a Mother, the only function women can claim a respectful position within capitalist patriarchy.

And as said at the beginning, these are stories written and envisioned by men since 1939, and much as the Propaganda Machine is good at keeping updated with moods and trends, it is also impeccable at repackaging messages that are reactionary and conservative, along with ticking diversity boxes to make us eat it up. Because that’s all the status quo needs to keep surviving: the lack of real change.

3. Superheros, Antiheros, Fascism and the Status Quo

I have the strong feeling that the Venn diagram of Witches and lovers of the dark antihero, from Spike in Buffy The Vampire Slayer to Tom Hiddleston’s Loki (to Astarion, but that’s another video essay already under the provisional title of “Romancing the Shadow”), is a bit of a circle.

Not to worry: the redemption arc, necessary for a male antihero to become an “I can save him” sympathetic character, is definitely not the process that Marvel has envisioned for Agatha, despite arguably sharing remarkably similar background stories (“But I worked so hard to be a good son / a good witch, and YOU (Thor, Wanda) still get better recognition than me!” resentment ensues.)

As the late genius that was David Graeber (one of the main forces behind the Occupy movement) put it in his essay “Super Position”:

Comic-book superheroes were originally a mid-century phenomenon […] both fascism and superheroes were products of a similar historical predicament. […] One might begin here by considering who are the core audience for superhero comics. Mainly, adolescent or preadolescent white boys. That is, individuals who are at a point in their lives where they are likely to be both maximally imaginative and at least a little bit rebellious; but who are also being groomed to eventually take on positions of authority and power in the world, to be fathers, sheriffs, small-business owners, middle managers, engineers. And what do they learn from these endless repeated dramas? Well, first off, that imagination and rebellion lead to violence; second, that, like imagination and rebellion, violence is a lot of fun; third, that, ultimately, violence must be directed back against any overflow of imagination and rebellion lest everything go askew. These things must be contained!

Every Marvel Cinematic Universe piece of media is a piece of Propaganda for the Status Quo. In the 1980s and 1990s we had openly Copaganda films like Point Break (that is, films literally made to promote the idea of Police = Good. Hope you already are caught on why ACAB.). The MCU is the evolution of that, and the system that protects is, you guessed it: the white cis het capitalistic colonial Patriarchy.

• Thanos is an ecologist turned ecofascist on steroids that sees deleting half the universe population as a solution (and so he kills half of it).

• Ultron wants to bring peace, he also accidentally decided peace needs no humans (so he wants to kill them all).

• Killmonger wants to end colonialism by giving black people guns to equalise the (white colonial) violence perpetrated against his people. (and he also kills someone)

• The Flag Smashers want a united world without borders or patriotism, helping each other in times of need (but also randomly decide to kill people).

• Gorr The God Butcher recognises the Gods (authority without merit) are evil an decides to kill them.

Notice the trend of these villains? They sound reasonable until their enactment curiously always includes Killing (Imagination leads to Rebellion leads to Violence). Because “killing is wrong”, other than being one of the Ten Commandments of Christian extraction, is also a very basic human understanding. If you keep seeing over and over again that any “good in theory” concept for change eventually leads to mass extermination, you’ll start eventually to associate ‘Killing’ with any concept of change. And ‘Killing’ is wrong, therefore, if that’s always the way change is portrayed as, then change is wrong.

It’s the Pavlov’s Bell of morals. And media is amazing at inculcating values into us with the pretence of entertainment. Because no matter how media literate we fancy ourselves being, if we see repeatedly the same core values upheld, the same consequences for forces of potential change, we will end up internalising them.

Because imaginative as we can be, Humans also learn by imitation and example, and that’s actually why the weirdos get bullied (hello Autism, my old friend, don’t I know this first hand)

4. Disney and Zionism

In the last year, the horrors of a live broadcast genocide in Palestine at the hands of the western white colonial project of Israel, should have given us so much food for thought beyond the solidarity and rightful anger we should feel.

Colonialism is still alive and well in the 21st century, despite the way we are taught about it -when we are lucky enough to study within an educational curriculum that talks about it *cough* ITALY DOENST *cough*- and for those not in the loop: the zionist project of Israel began in 1897 / 1917, when with the Balfour Declaration, the UK government had the audacity to promise the Zionists their support to establish a state of Israel in Palestine. Without asking Palestinian People and with the colonial mindset of “I own and take decisions over things that aren’t mine, because really? everything is mine”.

Disney is on the Boycott, Divest and Sanction List by the way, and Palestinian people have directly asked for people to not support Disney. A few reasons as to why include:

• direct support of Israel. In addition to the $2 million CEO Bob Iger pledged in funds for humanitarian relief in Israel after “Hamas’ horrific terrorist attack”, specifically Magen David Adom and Red Crescent Societies. Iger said that Disney will match up to $25k in charitable donations from employees, yet the CEO has only reached out to Jewish Disney staffers in particular.

• Captain America: New World Order include superhero Sabra AKA Ruth Bat-Seraph, who “personifies” apartheid Israel. In a letter, organizations including the Palestine Film Institute and the Freedom Theatre criticize Marvel and parent company Disney for their “complicity in anti-Palestinian racism, Israeli propaganda, and the glorification of settler-colonial violence against Indigenous people.”

Activism tip: Targeted Boycotts work much better and are the way that’s suggested and supported by BDS, meaning we target few specific companies rather than dispersing our efforts:

We focus our boycotts on a small number of companies and products for maximum impact. We focus on companies that play a clear and direct role in Israel’s crimes and where we think we can have an impact.

Which is not to say I suggest you cancel your Disney+ subscription to torrent or pirate Agatha… but Duck Duck Go is free…

5. Cuba, El Paquete, and the delusion of Free Media in the West

The way media entertainment works to manufacture consent in the west is so obvious once you begin looking into it that it brought me back to a Vox documentary about the supposed way “rebels” to the communist system in Cuba claim their freedom by smuggling American TV and films (Iron Man makes a literal appearance) in the country.

To go into detail about the Cuba information system, from media to internet, is something I will leave for the Video Essay on “Propaganda All Along” that is going to be out and expand on these scribblings on Monday 28th October 2024, to coincide with the series finale of Agatha All Along set for Thursday 31st October. See how they feed us crumbs to get us excited? “Oh My Goddess! The Witch’s TV show has the finale on Halloween!?!!?”

The short version is that: looking at how modern entertainment in general -and Marvel media in particular- have a clear overall arch that means to makes us acquire and internalise a negative judgement for change and a protectionism of the current capitalist status quo, it is beyond ironic that the US dares to judge the Cuban government control of information, when their control of information exists exactly because the Cuban government concern is the insidious western propaganda masquerading as entertainment.

The reason why the Propaganda Machine in the west is so effective in keeping us entertained and make our moral values grow in a direction that will make us wary of change is exactly because, at the cornerstone, it sells the delusion of freedom and choice. And if you choose to pay the ticket (or the subscription) to watch entertainment content, surely you wouldn’t pay to be brainwashed, would you?

That assumes critical thinking and media literacy, and I guarantee, the brightest of us think sometimes of entertainment as “head empty, no thoughts” which is actually when our aforementioned critical eye is turned off.

Entertainment Media normalises the Human condition which we can’t experience first hand beyond the 100 or so people we know. To draw an average of the human experience we subconsciously observe and learn from what is shown to us, we internalised family values from the 1980s sitcoms just like we internalised morals and ethics that told us that the terrorists are always Arabs and the cops are always necessary if not actually good.

If the last few years of live broadcast (from the murder of George Floyd in 2020 to the Palestinian Genocide) have taught us anything about the priorities of our socio cultural system (white supremacist and capitalist) is that the information that gets to us, from news to entertainment, is packaged that way for a reason, to indeed “Manufacture Consent” and assent to global issues, to guarantee not only agreement but inaction. The stark contrast between the way the news about Palestine have been packaged, and the video directly shared from the Palestinian Victims in Gaza, show there’s a huge gap between reality and the way it’s served to us, with the clear intention of not only giving us information, but most importantly giving us an Opinion. That’s the opinion that the plutarchy we live in has an interest in maintaining.

Agatha is absolutely no exception, and that’s exactly why so many superficial diversity boxes are ticked, from people of colour to queerness: they are the sugar to sweeten the pill, the core value that will be sold to you when it will come the time to see what is the one redemption quality an evil witch can have: being a mother and abandoning her “crazy”.

let’s see if I’m wrong.

PS: #WitchesForPalestine Phase 2 is starting on 7th October 2024. Send an email to witchesforpalestine@gmail.com to find out how you can get involved and help!

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