Several days ago, Wendy McElroy mused about a Libertarian Fixation on Guy Fawkes?, with which I empathized to some degree.
She wrote, in part:
I don't get it. So Guy Fawkes was used as a role model in a comic book (actually a wonderful graphic novel V for Vendetta that was trashed by its movie adaptation)...does that make him a libertarian ideal? There was nothing libertarian about Fawkes. He was a Catholic crusader who wanted to blow up Parliament as part-and-parcel of removing a Protestant monarch from power. He wasn't against government or tyranny; he was against one form of government that he wanted to replace with another form he liked better: a Catholic one.
I didn’t know much, if anything, about Fawkes before reading V for Vendetta, and as I recall Fawkes’ religious motivation wasn’t emphasized in it. And to be honest, for me that still isn’t an important element in the legend. The reason I “remember, remember” is because Guy Fawkes was a singular individual, then as well as now: he was a person of action. Instead of whining about the political problems he saw in his day, instead of simply bowing his head and living under intolerable conditions, he devised a plan and then actually attempted to execute it. Unlike the ostensible focus of the movie, I am more interested in the idea—that being resisting tyranny—than the man himself. It is also somewhat amusing to me that Fawkes has probably become a legend largely because of the crackpot tinge to his plan ... certainly something today’s genuinely pro-freedom individuals can relate to, as we’re considered the mental ones in the era of state-above-all.
I daresay Uncle Warren shares this selective, anti-state focus with me, which is why his newest podcast, UWA 42: Remember, Remember, garnered this response from me: “Bloody brilliant!”
Fawkes was all that
But I have to plug an American version, who is still reviled as a religious fanatic, even though those who wrote and talked to him during his trial and imprisonment found him quite sane.
But see, John Brown had to be a madman. The alternative was there was no religious justification for slavery. And we couldn't have that.
He was hung on December 2nd.