Every November 5th, Britain burns Guy Fawkes in effigy before it sets off the fireworks, a ritual George Lawson calls a reminder of what the state does to people who resist. V for Vendetta makes the burned heretic its hero, and its mask passed on to the hacktivist international, Anonymous. Lawson, a professor at the Australian National University and the author of Anatomies of Revolution, helps guide us through the thickets.
George reads it as a film of two eras—Alan Moore’s Thatcher-era comic and the War on Terror flick—and hears Václav Havel’s “The Power of the Powerless” in V’s televised speech on complicity. The film is prescient about its enemies list, down to a talk-show host executed for owning a Quran. Lyle still wants to know where the capitalists are, and the conversation balks at the great-man cult, the Count of Monte Cristo theatrics, and V’s prison hazing of Evey.
The real argument is about revolutionary violence. George notes that the last forty years of unarmed people power are the historical exception. From the late nineteenth century through the 1970s, movements argued openly about when terrorism was justified, and George, citing Benjamin Case, points out how many campaigns coded as nonviolent were anything but. For Lyle, hardly anyone actually believes in nonviolence. The question is which violence, in what context, to what ends, from Palestine to Myanmar. Van, deep in a Weather Underground rabbit hole, can’t decide whether his generation is cowardly or wise. George, who grew up under IRA bombing campaigns, worries about the people violence attracts and the despotism it leaves behind, and insists that any defensible revolutionary violence is not vengeful but redemptive. That’s a problem for a film with Vendetta in its title.
Check out The Bang-Bang Podcast for the full episode (unpaywalled!).
Further Reading and Listening
Anatomies of Revolution by George Lawson
“The Power of the Powerless” by Václav Havel
“Riots as Civil Resistance” by Benjamin S. Case, later expanded into Street Rebellion
How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm
“Standing with the Palestinian resistance: A response to Matan Kaminer” by Andreas Malm
Love and Struggle: My Life in SDS, the Weather Underground, and Beyond by David Gilbert
Reckoning: Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements by Deva R. Woodly
Bang-Bang’s The Battle of Algiers episode
Teaser from the Episode
V For Vendetta Trailer
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