Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo has shown a penchant for referencing western pop culture in his speeches to international audiences, most recently giving a shout out to Game of Thrones during his “Winter is Coming” speech at last week’s IMF-World Bank meetings in Bali.
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In previous speeches he’s also brought up political thriller House of Cards and blockbuster superhero movie Avengers: Infinity War. Well, it seems like some in the camp of Prabowo Subianto, Jokowi’s rival in the 2019 election, might also have an affinity for Marvel superheroes, as one of his spokespersons said he hoped the former general might become Indonesia’s very own Winter Soldier.
“Hopefully Pak Prabowo can become ‘The Winter Soldier’ who will return Indonesia to a good condition,” Suhud Alynudin, a PKS politician and member of Prabowo’s campaign team, told reporters yesterday at the candidate’s birthday celebration as quoted by Detik.
It’s not clear from Suhud’s statements if he was actually referring to the Winter Soldier from the Marvel Cinematic Universe (sorry, gonna get super nerdy here for a second) whose real name is James “Bucky” Buchanan Barnes, childhood best friend of Steve Rogers aka Captain America who got captured and brainwashed into becoming an assassin for the Russians after WWII before eventually being deprogrammed and joining the Avengers in the fight against Thanos in Infinity War.
(Yeah. And his comic book history is even more convoluted.)
It would be weird for a Prabowo supporter to reference Marvel’s Winter Soldier given his somewhat villainous associations, so it could be that Suhud was referring to the more general, pre-superhero use of the term to refer to a true soldier who comes to fight for his country even when conditions are at their worst (a play on the words of American writer Thomas Paine who in 1776 spoke of the “Sunshine Patriot” and “summertime soldiers” who deserted because the going was rough).
That would certainly be in line with Prabowo’s recent embrace of the Trumpian “Make Indonesia Great Again” tagline.
Whatever Suhud’s precise meaning, some from Jokowi’s camp certainly took it as the PKS politician referencing the cyborg-armed supersoldier, with one member of the president’s party, PDI-P education secretary Eva Kusuma Sundari, saying that Prabowo could be the Winter Soldier because Jokowi was the leader of the Avengers.
“It is suitable (to call Prabowo ‘The Winter Soldier’) and Pak Jokowi the commander of the Avengers, Captain Marvel, who led the Avengers including the Winter Soldier together to fight ‘Thanos’, (ie) poverty, laziness, hoaxes, corruption and so on so that the Republic of Indonesia can go forward,” Eva said yesterday night.
Ok, we’re pretty sure she meant Captain America and not the actual Captain Marvel (whose movie is coming out next year) because after that Eva showed some decent knowledge of Marvel movie continuity by specifying that it was only suitable to call Prabowo the Winter Soldier during his good phase, not when he was a bad guy, unlike Captain America who was always good.
Yes, Indonesian politics has somehow become this incredibly nerdy. We can’t really explain it, but if the alternative is political attacks based on racism, religious intolerance or xenophobia, we’ll happily take weird superhero and pop culture metaphors any day of the week.
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