I am sorry, but you have your facts wrong.
Hydra was NOT founded by the Red Skull. Not in the comics and above all, not in the MCU.
Never mind that Hydra was created in 1965, as opponents for Nick Fury and SHIELD (and NOT in the same era as Cap, as many people believe).
The sixties and seventies (aka smack in the middle of the Cold War) were crazy about spies and spy-organisations, and both Hydra and Nick Fury were Marvel’s attempt to cash in on that.
Heck….Hydra’s logo was created by Jim Steranko.
And he took this as an opportunity to render hommage to another villainous organisation: SPECTRE (as featured in the James Bond franchise)
So no, this isn’t a ret-con.
Where it comes to Hydra’s ideology: yes, they’re evil fascist genocidal douchebags.
But as an organisation, they are neiter racist nor anti-semitic (Because yes, you can still be evil without being either.)
In the prequel comics to CATFA, the Red Skull EXPLICITLY states that he does NOT follow the Nazi ideology, and that he thinks racism and antisemistim are “racist superstition masquerading as junk science”.
You will find that the organisation has MANY PoCs in their ranks, often in high and leading positions, something that is pretty much incompatible with a racist white-supremacist ideology. And no, their targets are anybody who will stand in their way (see e.g. CATWS), without regard for race or religion.
(Mind…. comic!Red Skull has Nazi roots (and still very much seems to be an adherent to Nazi ideology), but who
b) is only one leader amongst many and who
c) is known to use Hydra for his own goals and purposes, instead of the goals of the organisation. See commentary by Jordan White and what Hydra Cap has to say on the issue and about the Red Skull: “The true Hydra isn’t a collection of marauding thugs, preaching blind hatred and intolerance. It isn’t conquest for conquest’s sake. And it certainly wasn’t built to glorify one man” (Steve Rogers - Captain America #4))
Last but not least, in this case, Daisy / Skye is an unreliable source.
Ideally, a reliable, good source should have access to accurate first hand experience / data and should not be emotionally compromised.
Daisy / Skye is miles away from meeting these criteria.
a. She is emotionally compromised. At this point, what she wants to do is hurt Ward and discredit him, score some points, so she’s flinging the worst insults she can imagine at him. For a lot of people, that insult is “Nazi”. (Hence such things as Godwin’s law.)
b. She doesn’t have first-hand experience or access to first-hand data where it comes to Hydra’s interna, their plans, their ideology and their goals.
The whole point of CATWS and large parts of AoS is that SHIELD doesn’t know about any of this and is desperately trying to figure these out.
You’ll also note how Ward, who, unlike her, DOES have fist-hand experience with Hydra ideology and Hydra interna, pretty much goes “WTF? NO!” and for good reason.
Btw, the same holds true for pretty much every other Hydra agent, e.g. the one on the aircraft carrier Iliad, who listens to the news during the Hydra uprising and is quite exasperated and pretty much rolling his eyes at all that stupid when he hears the newscaster referring to Hydra as Nazi.
The other thing that has me cringing a lot in the Skye/Ward scene is that of all things, she cites the SHIELD handbook. Because ffs….that thing got written while HYDRA was still balls-deep embedded in SHIELD, so it’s very likely they co-wrote the thing as part of their efforts to obfuscate their tracks.
Because hell, as long as you think “Nazi”, a racist ideology that is centered on the belief in the supremacy of a white, aryan race, you’re never ever going to suspect PoCs like e.g. Sunil Bakshi or Jasper Sitwell of belonging to Hydra’s upper management (Similar goes for all the other PoCs we see as part of Hydra’s troops).
Bascially, Marvel has been (and ARE) using Hydra as a stand-in to tell stories and take pot-shots at a wide variety of harmful ideologies.
For example, they have represented Imperialist Japan, Americans arguing against interracial marriage and for “racial purity” in the 70’s, the NSA and US drone-strike policy (which people took note of within fandom, as well as outside of it. ) and right now Nick Spencer is using them to criticize Trump and his hangers-on as well as the recruiting tactics of extremist organizations like ISIS.
All of which are (and were) socio-political developments we most definitely should be having conversations about and where the plot of the Captain America comics serves / served as a conversation starter.
The problem is, the moment you’re insisting that Hydra are nuthin’ but Nazis!, is the moment you’re limiting and ultimately killing those kinds of conversations.
And yeah, on tumblr, HYDRA HAS been repeatedly linked with Nazism for the sole purpose of shutting down discussion of the morality and motives of HYDRA as an organization, and HYDRA characters individually.
And that is a damn shame. Because if you want to fight any kind of harmful ideology, you need to understand it first.
Where it comes to a jewish perspective on this subject….
Brian Michael Bendis, who happens to be jewish and who is also one of the top creators at Marvel, says that Hydra is NOT Nazi.
Stan Lee, who is also jewish, has no problem with Hydra and thinks the Hydra!Cap plot was “a clever idea”.
“Hank Johnson: Agent of Hydra”, was created by David Mandel, who is just as jewish as Jack Kirby and Stan Lee.
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