Real-World Superheroes

Very often, the biggest comic villains are created as an unwanted consequence of the deeds of a superhero. Something similar happens in our (hi)story, except that in the real world there are no superheroes, there are plenty of supervillains, and there is a whole group of nations thinking that having super-powers makes them automatically the superheroes of the world. They don’t bear a name as colourful as Justice Leage or such. They prefer to use acronyms like NATO and USA.

Picture this: we’re in the middle of the Cold War. The US and the Soviets are fighting petty little wars on petty little countries all around the world, but specially on the middle east, because you know, after killing each other, oil is one of the top of priorities of mankind.

So, to ensure a tidy and cheap river of black gold flowing to the western world, and prevent it to flow anywhere else, and fearing the contagion of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, Uncle Sam comes up with the great idea of overcoming the so-called republics of the middle-eastern states, most of them former colonies with less than 30 years of independence, and put a set of puppet-dictators such as Al-Assad, Mubarak or Gaddafi. After all, that technique had been proved succesful in Latin America during the past decade.

But if there are two things that change people the most, these are time and power. And these puppets had plenty of both, plenty enough to become not-so-puppets-anymore. And so, all of a sudden the middle-eastern fellows start to raise their voices, rally on the squares, showing banners written in english and conducting the uprise via Facebook events. ‘The arab spring’ it was called. And the whole world  acclaimed it.

As we all know, there was no summer to that spring. The civil war that started in Syria was the seed for what we know as Islamic State.