'V for Vendetta' Reviews
Butler Schaffer liked V for Vendetta from both an anarchist and quality movie perspective. Wally Conger thought is was a good reminder of the eternal right of revolution. Anthony Gregory reminds us that V was not a terrorist. He was a logical, and necessary response to state terrorism. But violence isn't what finally destroys the state. The end of tacit acceptance by the people does that, without a shot being fired. [claire]
From Mr. Schaffer's review:
The openly anarchistic nature of this movie will produce shudders in well-conditioned statists who, in the words of F.A. Hayek, cling to their "fear of trusting uncontrolled social forces." Such people will trot out historic instances in which self-proclaimed "anarchists" killed a few score of people, as evidence of the need for government. That states managed, in the 20th century alone, to slaughter some 200,000,000 people in wars and genocides has never provided an occasion for defenders of political systems to do a practical cost/benefit analysis of these alternative systems!
While V for Vendetta contains a great deal of violence, "V" reminds us, early on, of the social application of Newton's Third Law of Motion: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. In a political context, it is as childish to posit the violence engaged in by one group as "peacekeeping" and the opposing group as "terrorism," as it is to regard one side as "good" and the other as "evil." It is the interdependent violence inherent in all political systems that is made evident in this film.
From Mr. Gregory's review:
I cannot endorse all of V's violent methods. But that is not really the point. As for blowing up empty government buildings, while it may sometimes be arguably defensible in the context of a just revolution, such destruction rarely achieves any improvement. The right to revolution against tyranny, however, is itself an idea at least as old as the United States.
The movie is about such ideas. V considers himself the personification of the idea of retributive justice. He characterizes himself as an "equal and opposing reaction" to the "monstrous" state violence that created him, a monster. To dislike his methods, one must also dislike the brutality that spawned his reactive violence. A difference between him and the state is that the latter practices much more expansive violence against countless innocent people. V's retaliatory violence is met and overshadowed by the state's own, which is far more encompassing. Another difference is that the state's violence enjoys legal privilege; it is obscured and enabled by the concept, held by most its subjects, that the state should be allowed to do what private actors are not.
And that's the real important point to be found in the movie. When a single man does something criminal, he is generally perceived as an anti-social element. When the state practices criminality on a much grander scale, it is considered security. The double standard, taken to an extreme, is the ideology of totalitarianism, the ideology adopted tacitly by the populace in the film.
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In the end we see that only fear and passive acquiescence have allowed the oppression to persist. When the people finally realize they far outnumber the state's minions and can stand up to repression, they do so and the despotic charade crumbles. What must happen first is that they must admit to themselves that something has gone terribly wrong with their country. Once they all see the tyranny for what it is and are willing to confront it, it doesn't stand a chance.
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I enjoyed the article
Amusing
That Reason's V for Vendetta review was more nuanced than the Lew Rockwell coverage -- oddly enough, the hardcore anti-statists seem more blind to the movie's flaws. Not to sound nostalgic or Ned Ludd, but I'll stick with the original comic.
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