Remember, remember the Fifth of November
The Gunpowder Treason and plot.
I know of no reason
Why the gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.
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#1 by Chris at November 7th, 2009
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Do you even know what Guy Fawkes Day celebrates? When you say 'Happy Guy Fawkes Day' you're basically saying 'Good thing they caught that terrorist. God save the Queen!' Guy Fawkes was motivated by his perceived persecution of Catholics. He wasn't a freedom fighter.
And the *book* V for Vendetta is about the 80's Thatcher government but it's a little more subtle than the movie. V isn't much of a freedom fighter in the book either. He's a violent anarchist seeking to destroy a post apocalyptic government that might be holding the last vestiges of society together. It's critical of all extremism.
#2 by Dan at November 14th, 2009
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"Guy Fawkes was motivated by his perceived persecution of Catholics. He wasn't a freedom fighter." Not even a freedom fighter for Catholics? "Perceived persecution"?
The Tudor and Stuart monarchies marks the origin and rise of the centralized power of the nation state and absolutist conceptions of sovereignty complete with secret police and state intelligence networks and the total absorption and subjugation of the church by the state. This model of state power and sovereignty was emulated throughout Europe. The Catholic Church was a competing source of authority and was relentlessly persecuted well into the 18th century.
There is a wealth of historical research that has flourished in the past thirty years broadly termed "Catholic revisionism" that explores the unpopularity of the English reformation, the money interests at work in its manipulation, the proliferation of restrictive legal positivism against individual liberty, the rise of nationalism and ideology to the same end, etc.
In God's Secret Agents, a very readable account of the background of the Gunpowder Plot, Anne Hogge has a great concluding chapter that examines analogies with the contemporary Global War on Terror (or whatever it's called now), torture, and civil liberties.