Dismember, Dismember / The Fifth of November

[flwyd]

Several months ago, this phrase came to me, hoping that Guy Fawkes was drawn & quartered. It turns out, the punishment was even more cruel and unusual than that.

Private collection, illustration of the Hanging, drawing and quartering of Guy Fawkes. This print shows what happened to the Gunpowder Plotters of 1605. The punishment for treason was gruesome: the offender was dragged on hurdles through the streets to the execution-place, hanged, but taken down while still alive, castrated, disembowelled and cut into quarters.

I've always thought the activist proclivity to wearing V for Vendetta masks seemed like a poor choice of association. Is this the conclusion you want from an #occupy event? Not to mention, as someone pointed out today, that Guy Fawkes was trying to blow up a symbol of representative democracy in favor of a 9-year-old religiously-aligned monarch.

(Expanded from a Google+ post I made in June.)

Comments

[dan-the-tax-man.livejournal.com]

Ah, but it wasn't all that representative, that is what Fawkes and his fellow conspirators (led by Catesby) were upset about. They felt that King James I had promised to allow the Catholics equal treatment under the law and that he'd failed to live up to that promise. To them, the House of Parliament was not an institution of representative democracy, but rather, a symbol of a government that had done great evil to English Catholics (in much the same way that V blows up the House of Parliament - it is no longer, in his mind, a symbol of representative government).