I just saw V for Vendetta (finally) last night, and have been stewing a little on some of the criticisms about it... here's my not so nice take on that.
Any fan of the second amendment should gleefully cheer the logic of V for Vendetta. Terrorism, according to the movie, is not the enemy. It is a means to an end, just as a firearm is only the means to an end (self-defense or hunting). You can have two car bombers, one who blows up an American embassy, the other who bombs an Iranian police station as part of an effort to liberate his people from the mullahs. Yet, who in their right mind, would claim to be a lover of liberty and find cause to condemn the latter? That is why I find it disgusting that self-proclaimed conservatives would actually object to the movie on political grounds. V is not an Islamist, recognized a code of chivalry in his dealings with innocent civilians, and focused his entire actions on restoring good government. We need no reason to justify our efforts to kill the terrorists who attack us because their cause is unjust, their targets uncivilized and cowardly, and their cause wholly against decency, modernity and civilization in general.
We no more have to condemn all terrorism to condemn our enemies than we have to condemn all gun owners to condemn those who use a firearm to maliciously harm innocents. I am a patriot, and as such am unwilling to condemn all terrorism because that would mean condemning the men who gave us our country's independence. Having ancestors who actually shed blood in the War for Independence tends to make you a little nuanced in your perspective on politically-motivated violence; my colonial rebel ancestors would undoubtedly be called terrorists today on both sides of the pond if the events happened today. Indeed, isn't that the irony, that the USA PATRIOT Act would, technically, label the entire Continental Army as a band of terrorists? No doubt some smug republican will chortle at this, saying that I am a liberal idiot because "clearly," no one would call them terrorists. As we all know, the victor writes the history, and there should be little doubt that, had our founders lost the war, that to be called a "Jeffersonian" would be an epithet, not a stand of principle for liberty and justice. George Washington would be regarded as a villian, while Benedict Arnold a hero for his return to loyalty to the crown. God Save the King, not Yankee Doodle. You get the idea.
The movie was quick to remind viewers of a point that Orwell raised in 1984: governments have always been their people's greatest enemies. The truth is that Americans, even "hard-headed, realist" conservatives, are usually very naive about how many evil people have been attracted to government since the dawn of human civilization. America has been pretty lucky. Our armed citizenry has spared us many of the problems that other countries have faced. V for Vendetta is significantly closer in spirit to 1984 than Paradise Now. It's almost astonishing to me how libertarian the movie actually was, despite being made by Hollywood, which is renowned for its left-wing politics. You had an an evil government leader who committed crimes against his own people when they were weak, a government out of control that turned its police powers right back on its own people and that showed virulent hatred to perceived enemies.
It should be duly noted how much hatred the British government had for America in this movie. I was surprised after seeing that anti-American broadcast near the beginning that any conservative could have felt that this was a hypothetical government that deserved pity. It was a classic cautionary tale. A real and legitimate enemy (Islamists) is used by the those evil men and women who hunger for power to get the power that they want, and then surprise, they act as evil men and women. Even more ironic is the fact that conservatives will quickly defend the right to keep and bear arms in part on the grounds that the 20th century proved that governments often can and will mass murder their own people, yet so many apparently missed the fact that the British state in this movie is a quintessential democidal regime.
As a Christian, I was not offended by this movie in the least. In fact, it was 2 hours, 12 minutes of a reminder of why people with power must follow good, strong rules even when they seem to be good people. There is a slippery moral slope that starts to get made when someone says that they are good enough that they need not be bothered with such pesky rules as "due process of law," a strong avoidance of the use of lethal force by agents of the government and transparency in government processes. Good people need never fear the light, for their actions will vindicate them in the light. We are all mixed, we all have skeletons in our closets, but it should really give good, God-fearing people a terrible suspicion when someone has a phobia of the light of public scrutiny all the while winking and saying, "trust me." Blind trust is for newcomers to the faith in their relationship with God, not responsible citizens in their dealings with the government.
I think is worth noting about the conservative criticisms of this movie is that all too often they make the mistake of assuming that those in positions of power are like them. Among the powers that be, there are no true conservatives or leftists, but power-hungry, evil men and women. Often in the bureaucracy that evil manifests itself in the form of incompetence coupled with a hateful obstruction of any reform process, which is what the FBI has suffered from in its management, and what prevented its field agents from being able to collaborate on the warning signs that three independent field offices uncovered. Those that must interact with the public will use every tool in their arsenal from blatant fear-mongering to appeals to tradition and religion. They are whores in the most pejorative sense of the word. Does anyone really think that the "Christians" in V for Vendetta were Christians, rather than evil men with enough ambition to do anything they needed to stay in power and gain more? That is the only scary part about this movie, it revealed that many people cannot in fact discern moral character at all, and that many would refuse to follow Christ's command to judge the fruit of a demagogue's heart.
I think this comment from Dr. Baehr for WorldNetDaily says it all:
The rest of "V for Vendetta" not only depicts Christians as evil people who oppress and torture "innocent" people, it also depicts homosexuals as a persecuted, harmless minority of "nice" people. Both of these portrayals are hate-filled, false stereotypes, but the second one is actually contradicted by the secret stash of homoerotic pornography that one of the homosexual characters in the movie hides in a secret room in his house. If all homosexuals, and all homosexual activists, are such goody two shoes, how come so many of them resort to unsafe sexual practices that spread deadly diseases, and how come so many of them promote pornography, support the murder of unborn children through abortion and molest underage children?
The moral blindness of millions of Christians is terrifying today in an age where our influence is being lost. The circumstantial evidence to support the corruption of our government is growing daily, and much of it is abetted by seductive calls to trust our leaders with discressionary power that flies right in the face of what our religion teaches about human nature. The unwillingness to discern whether those who wrap themselves up in the trappings of the Church was what allowed many abusive priests and pastors to rape our community from within, and now we run the risk of empowering the government to do it from without. No Christian should ever justify or cheapen what happened at Abu Ghraib, though we must not disparage our military as whole either. Yet, too many Christians forget that the Bible teaches us that people are not born with good natures, nor do good things happen in the darkness most of the time. What we face is a battle of civilizations between our own, instigated by our Islamic enemies.
The only way that they can win is to divide us from within by causing us to forget the basic tenets of our ancestors' religion, throw out our traditions and become a people with hearts of fear, not faith. It scares me to think that many of our leaders attack the very people who remind the laymen that a Biblical worldview has no place for power that is not bound by the rule of good law, that those who criticize our wars abroad are anti-God, family and country, and that having a lack of faith in our elected political leaders, including a deep suspicion of them based on historic trends is apostasy from the faith. Too often these leaders have justified evil conduct because it was for a "good purpose."
The most damning scene in the whole movie was when V broadcasted the message to the people that they, not the Chancellor, were the reason why the country had fallen apart. One man cannot change anything on that level, others must follow the change he initiates. At the end of the day, if and when America becomes a tyrannical country, most Americans will not be able to point their finger at the other side and say that it was all their fault. Conservatives will have to look to George Bush when the USA PATRIOT Act is used against abortion protesters and gun rights activists. Liberals will have to look to Bill Clinton when the (Sons of) Carnivore scour the Internet for all subversive conduct. We will get the government that we deserve, and we are headed toward a government that has abandoned all of the essential rules of conduct that our founders fought for, and that works not on traditional standards of justice, but rather the morally relativistic "ends justify the means."
For my part, I liked V for Vendetta. The graphic novel (which I am halfway through) is better, but the movie is good on its own. I think that it is more telling that many on the right are not incapable of distracting themselves from reality long enough to enjoy this movie for what it is: a good government-bashing philosophical action movie. It makes me wonder just how much these people really believe that government is a necessary evil, rather than as a misused good which is how the neo-Marxists, to borrow from WorldNetDaily's pathetic critiques, would classify it. In fact, I would go so far as to say that anyone stupid enough to call this movie neo-Marxist is not qualified to voice an opinion on politics. Marxist is the last thing that can be legitimately used as a label for a movie whose main hero boldly declares about governments, "peoples should not be afraid of their governments, governments should be afraid of their people." Marxism is statist, and that is such a pure libertarian sentiment that to call V a Marxist is no more of a coherent insult than to call John Locke a died-in-the-wool fascist or to call the Apostle Paul an anti-semetic rabble rouser for his harsh critiques of ancient Israeli culture. This seems to me like a case of people having a movie hit too close to home for them, that it turned one too many sacred cows into McDonald's hamburgers and so, in their desperation to find a cause to ridicule it, have taken to flinging labels, hoping that some of them might actually stick.
Some examples of the criticisms:
Hollywood Loves Terrorists
WND Hit Piece 1
WND Hit Piece 2
WND Hit Piece 3
TCSDaily's Doug Kern apologizing for fascists