A safe bet that most of the Samizdata writers were out lighting bonfires, shooting off rockets and getting rat arsed tonight
i prefer to remember Nov 5 for the attempt, not for the arrest!
We should not also forget that Guy Fawkes was a mercenary hired by a gang of religious fanatics ultimately bent on replacing one theocratic dictator with another!
Guy was clearly committed, not a mere mercenary... but I suspect most people who think of him fondly these days are not in fact supporting a pro-catholic Spanish invasion of Britain so much as commending the idea of blowing up Westminster for far more contemporary reasons.
Guy Fawkes lives!!!Posted by Rignerd at November 6, 2009 05:14 AM
I spent Guy Fawkes day along with several tens of thousands of my closest friends demonstrating outside the US Capitol building in protest of the pending Nancy Pelosi "Health Care" bill. Although the date was, I'm sure, purely coincidental (most Americans haven't a clue who Guy Fawkes was) I thought it highly propitious. After all, we were there to figuratively "blow up" Congress. And none of us was hanged for it! (Not yet, anyway.)
I love this speech. Thanks for posting it.
But I wouldn't want to actually blow up the Palace of Westminster - I'd prefer to buy it and turn it into a memorial to all those families, all those individual lives and values that have been twisted, disfigured, crushed and destroyed by the predations of the British Government down the centuries. It is, after all, a very gothic and very grand work of architecture. No other building in the country could ever be quite so fitting to the purpose as the Palace of Westminster. It is fucking horrible.
The Victoria Embankment needs to be connected to the Chelsea Embankment. It would do wonders for traffic flow.
On G.F. night I was looking after people at the park where I work - but I did catch the end of our fireworks display.
As for the gunpowder plot:
James I was an terrible man (full of statist ideas), but blowing up Parliament for the sake of the Catholic Church was not the correct response.