Friday, November 4, 2011

Masks For Malcontents

The Occupy layabouts think they're making a statement (that being "we're edgy, cool and anti-corporation") with their V for Vendetta Guy Fawkes masks. But are they?
While Fawkes' image has been romanticized over the past 400 years, he was a criminal who tried to blow up a government building. It would be hard to imagine Americans one day wearing Timothy McVeigh masks to protest the government or corporate greed.
Good point. And surely a Judy Rebick mask would be more appropriate (and much scarier), no?

1 comment:

Carlos Perera said...

While I agree that the typical "Occupier" probably doesn't have the foggiest notion about who Guy Fawkes was--except insofar as the name comes up in the _V for Vendetta_ movie--the crafty old Leftists who are pulling the strings behind the scenes of the "grassroots" OWS movement would probably see the blowing-up-government-buildings thing as a feature, not a bug.

While they almost certainly despise Timothy McVeigh for blowing up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, radical Leftists do so not because they are categorically opposed to terrorist violence, but because of the particulars of the case. Weather Underground terrorists (like Obama's friends Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn) are, after all, Movement heroes to these people. No, their, objections to McVeigh's act would run along the lines of Lenin's famous--and famously cynical--"Kto kogo?" (Who-whom?) question. Pity, from their point of view, that right-wing terrorists are better at handling explosives and firearms than their own folk.