Klavan and Codename V
V FOR VENDETTA was of all films I have ever seen the most easy to mock and the most easy to hate. I am happy Andrew Klavan shares some part of my distaste and umbrage for this film. He writes in part:
Some of the Occupy Wall Street protesters have been wearing the Guy Fawkes mask from the film V for Vendetta. I think this is appropriate. I have not read the graphic novel on which the movie is based and make no comment on it, but the film itself, which wears the mask of a liberating screed, is in fact one of the most purely fascist American films ever made. It is a despicable apologia for murderous violence against free institutions, and presents a pitifully unrealistic rationalization for some of the most oppressive ideas currently in vogue.
Like all leftist art, V for Vendetta achieves its occasionally powerful effects by re-writing reality to fit the upside-down progressive imagination. For instance, the film suggests Christianity lies at the heart of political oppression. But in Realworld, no matter what you might like to believe, the simple fact is that Christianity has been in on the ground floor of every truly free society on earth since the fall of Rome. (The one arguable exception is Israel — go figure.) The film depicts the west’s war with Islamo-fascism as an Orwellian mix of racist propaganda and eternal mock-warfare. That in itself is an Orwellian lie. Whatever its merits as a religious philosophy, Islam has produced violent and oppressive states since its beginning — and was oppressive even in its cultural heyday, now almost nine centuries ago. It’s difficult to imagine any genuine vision of a free world that does not include the suppression of Islam’s violent extremists.
The film’s central gay character extols the beauty of the Koran, the followers of which would endorse his murder — yet he is murdered by Christians who, in life, might condemn his practices but would also preach his loving acceptance as a fellow sinner. The same supposedly enlightened character also rhapsodizes on the work of Robert Mapplethorpe, whose sado-masochistic photos of leather-clad men could easily have illustrated the sexual imaginations of the brownshirts who facilitated Hitler’s rise to power.
By turning the world-as-it-is on its head, the film manages to dramatically justify torture and terrorism in defense of oppressive and violent conformity. It positively envisions a world in which all people will come together as one to support acts of terrorism against free institutions. This united people even end up wearing the signature mask that will remove from them every trace of individuality. The target of their climactic attack is the British Parliament, the mother of all Parliaments, and thus the starting point of every modern free society. Earlier, the terrorists also strike at the Old Bailey, a symbol of the rule of law.
My comment: The Occupy Wall Street types are some combination of Leftist Fascists and Leftist Communists, but they carefully keeping their dogmas vague in order to sweep up more and ever more useful idiots who, seeing the meaningless Rorschach blot, see in it whatever they want to see, and imagine the movement stands for whatever their own pet cause might be.
Those of you who label ‘fascism’ i.e. national socialism a Rightwing effort are liars. No fascist in the history of world supported the Second Amendment, and that one point of Constitutional law is the touchstone that separates the Republican form of government from all forms of totalitarianism. Free citizens of a Republic not only expect their fellow citizens to be armed for their own self protection, they expect them to be armed for the sake of the public weal and protection of the common good — a responsibility not to be entrusted to anyone else. The subjects and patients of the totalitarian state expect the Glorious Leader to protect them from Emmanuel Goldstien.
In this case I must respectfully disagree with Klavan. V FOR VENDETTA was utterly unambiguous in its political stance. It was anarchist through and through, even to the choice of weapons and targets. Anarchists are no longer fashionable these days, so folks tend to forget that they were mad bombers, and their targets were leaders and parliaments, archbishops and the press, the military and the police and the professions — that is, all the people bombed and stabbed by Codename V in the graphic novel.
Anarchism is the simplest of satanic inversions: they seek the destruction of liberty in the name of liberty, and the abolition of virtue in the name of virtue.
There is almost nothing else to it. Occasionally the anarchist indulges in a bit of socialist theorizing, calling ownership of property theft, and so he justifies theft in the name of opposing theft; occasionally the anarchist indulges in a bit of Rousseau-esque enlightenment theorizing, envisioning an Edenic state of nature, and unable to imagine a legitimate social contract or source of social bond, seeks to abolish all law and order in the name of the legal technicality that the law is not lawfully established according to due process of law. The paradox delights them rather than giving them pause to reconsider their axioms.
Anarchy is destruction for destruction’s sake, and must be sharply distinguished from either the dream of a self-reliant or self-made landowner or businessman so beloved of republican mythology, or the self-sovereign libertarian which is the logical extreme of that myth — the small government philosophy and smallest-possible government philosophy are both philosophies that postulate an absolute standard of law and order to which all the free citizens rigidly adhere to which they are rigidly devout. The difference between that and the philosophy of no government, no law, and no norms is an absolute difference.
That there are anarchists among the socialists in Occupy Wall Street mobs I have no doubt. Socialist theory calls for riot and bloodshed to overthrow the previous social order of Christian kingdoms and/or Enlightenment liberal Democracies, and anarchists are useful idiots to serve the party during the destruction phase. They are destined to be purged during the clean up and consolidation phase, the Cultural Revolution, the Stalin show-trials, or whatever they are called which is the logical next step after the old order is uprooted and executed.
Socialist of the Fabian school seek metaphorical rather than literal anarchy: they seek the overthrow of social norms and local loyalties, the overthrow of the nuclear family and the free market, and the imposition of speech codes and politically correct thought so that no one knows right from wrong, good from evil. Again, once the high ground is taken, the purge begins, and the absolute freedom of speech (think of the campus riots of the 70’s) is replaced quickly by absolutist speech codes (think of campuses now.) The violence is not needed in nations where the spirit of the people has already been won over to Fabian ideas.
So Codename V is not long for the Occupiers, no matter what the future holds. The minitruth will airbrush the Guy Fawkes mask out of the public memory if the movement ever achieves its next phase, in much the same way that the Negro-hating eugenicism of Margaret Singer, founder of Planned Parenthood (more correctly called Murder, Inc.) has been airbrushed away.
I assume that Alan Moore did not care and that the Brothers Wachowski don’t realize that Guy Fawkes was trying to assassinate royal family and blow up the House of Lords so that a Catholic monarch could be restored. A symbol of treason against Protestant England Guy Fawkes could be, or of loyalty to Catholic England: but a symbol of anarchy (which was Moore’s take) or of Freedom Fighting (which was the Wachowski take) he can fill about as well as Santa Claus can be a symbol for child molestation: either by way of dark and savage irony in Moore’s case, or of blissful parochial ignorance in Wachowskis’ case.
END NOTE: My more thorough screed against this most atrocious of films can be found here:http://www.scifiwright.com/2009/05/v-for-vometous/
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
