DeAnna on Guy Fawkes Night, V For Vendetta, and English Liberties
11/05/2010
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A wonderful article, England Prevails: Right and Left Matter Whether You Like it or Not, by Kevin DeAnna on the Youth For Western Civilization website:

Imagine a dystopian England under the rule of a brutal fascistic regime. Political opposition is outlawed. Free speech is non-existent. Government spies go undercover in pubs and restaurants searching for prohibited expressions. Security cameras tape everything you do and even occasionally yell at you. The state controlled media promotes a specific political agenda and knowingly lies about facts that jeopardize its worldview. Violent thugs, funded by the state, openly attack political opponents while the regular police do nothing or arrest the victims. Those who do not believe in the official ideology of the state are either banned from decent jobs or hounded out of their profession.

Such is the world of V For Vendetta, a nightmarish fantasy designed to show how even terrorism may be justified to fight tyranny and secure freedom. The film dares to ask if violence is ever a legitimate tactic if the government crosses a certain line. It is a favorite of libertarians, including many YWC members, and tomorrow, tens of thousands will ”Remember, Remember, the Fifth of November” and ponder whether they’d be willing to act if the government ever crosses that fateful Rubicon.

The problem, of course, is that this is also the United Kingdom in the world we live in right now.

DeAnna goes on to illustrate the peculiar soft totalitarianism that has spread through Britain.

The occasion of DeAnna's article is Guy Fawkes Night, November 5, celebrated tonight with fireworks and bonfires—the only day, school teachers used to tell us in England, when no-one would ask the date when beginning the morning's note-taking. Apparently, it's become known to Americans because of this awful leftist movie (which my American son, needless to say, loves because of the violence). But, as DeAnna argues, V for Vendetta

actually reinforces the real, existing, insidious tyranny that exists right now in the Mother Country because it tells us that liberty’s enemies are always comically easy to spot, complete with uniforms and scary Germanic words...It lets people continue to believe the illusion that freedom will be restored without having to take on uncomfortable, politically incorrect issues.

Guy Fawkes, of course, was an English Catholic attempting to restore the rule of Rome, but I don't remember this ever being mentioned when I was child. It was basically the English Halloween, in which our Catholic schoolmates (mostly the completely assimilated descendants of Irish immigrants) joined with no thought of demanding a War on Bonfire Night to match the War On Christmas.

But I've been out of England for forty years and political diseases spread quickly in the Anglosphere. Probably the War On Bonfire Night is raging now.

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