Guy Fawkes Day- 5 Things to Know about the UK Celebration of Failed Revolution

Guy Fawkes Day- 5 Things to Know about the UK Celebration of Failed Revolution


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Guy Fawkes Day is annually celebrated throughout Britain on November 5. Being known as Bonfire Night and Firework Night as well, this holiday represents perpetual celebration of liberty over tyranny. If you may be wondering who Guy Fawkes was or how is this day celebrated, keep reading this article because here are five things you should know before celebrating the next Guy Fawkes Day.


1.Historical background
On the evening of the 5th of November 1605, a group of men attempted the "gunpowder plot", a failed try to blow up the Houses of Parliament and kill King James the First. The man behind this terrorist act was named Guy Fawkes. Nevertheless, the plan was discovered when one of the conspirators sent a letter to his cousin warning him not to come to the Houses of Parliament. Fawkes was caught just before lighting the fuse which led him to execution.


2.Religion background
Guy Fawkes was one of a small group of Catholics who felt that the protestant government was treating Roman Catholics unfairly. They were not allowed to practice their religion in public because King James 1st, a Protestant, refused to change the laws. They hoped that attack would be the beginning of a great uprising of English Catholics. This plot backfired because it provoked hostility against all English Catholics and led to an increase in the harshness of laws against them.


3. 5th of November Poem
For many centuries the poem about Guy Fawkes's failed revolution has been spreading throughout England. The traditional verse exists in a large number of variations but this version seems the most popular:

Remember, remember the fifth of November,



Gunpowder treason and plot.
We see no reason
Why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot!


Guy Fawkes, guy, t'was his intent
To blow up king and parliament.
Three score barrels were laid below
To prove old England's overthrow.
By god's mercy he was catch'd
With a darkened lantern and burning match.


So, holler boys, holler boys, Let the bells ring.
Holler boys, holler boys, God save the king.
And what shall we do with him?
Burn him!

4.Guy Fawkes mask

In the 1980s graphic novelists Alan Moore and David Lloyd created a comic strip, "V for Vendetta", in which the main protagonist is a cloaked anarchist who wears a grinning Guy Fawkes mask while battling against a fascist authoritarian state. The authors wanted to celebrate Fawkes by turning him into an anti-hero for the modern age.
Since then the image has been adopted by the Occupy movement, and Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has also donned a Fawkes mask. It has become a regular feature of many protests. Mr Lloyd has called the mask a "convenient placard to use in protest against tyranny…it seems quite unique, an icon of popular culture being used this way".


5.Celebration

Today, this event continues to be remembered through the usage of fireworks and bonfire parties, mostly in England but also in places such as Australia and New Zealand. A part of the celebration is burning effigies of the conspirator.

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In UK, Guy Fawkes remembered with protests

By SYLVIA HUI

The Associated Press

LONDON — "Remember, remember, the fifth of November." The 400-year-old story of Guy Fawkes and other plotters' failure to blow up London's Parliament is traditionally marked in Britain with this schoolchildren's rhyme, bonfires and mulled wine at fun fairs.

In this photo taken Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2011, an Occupy Seattle protester wears a Guy Fawkes mask while protesting in downtown Seattle. From New York to San Francisco to London, some of the demonstrators decrying a variety of society's ills are sporting the stylized masks loosely modeled on a 17th-century English terrorist, whether they know it or not. The masks come from "V for Vendetta," a comic-based movie whose violent, anarchist antihero fashions himself as a modern Guy Fawkes, the Catholic insurrectionist executed four centuries ago for trying to blow up Parliament. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)

In this photo taken Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2011, an Occupy Seattle protester wears a Guy Fawkes mask while protesting in downtown Seattle. From New York to San Francisco to London, some of the demonstrators decrying a variety of society's ills are sporting the stylized masks loosely modeled on a 17th-century English terrorist, whether they know it or not. The masks come from "V for Vendetta," a comic-based movie whose violent, anarchist antihero fashions himself as a modern Guy Fawkes, the Catholic insurrectionist executed four centuries ago for trying to blow up Parliament. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)

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But this year Guy Fawkes Day is taking on a distinctly political flavor, as protesters inspired by the folk hero marched on Parliament — though with entirely different motivations than the 17th-century activist.

Fawkes is a household historical name in Britain for plotting with 12 other conspirators to blow up Parliament with explosives, assassinate King James I and install a Catholic monarch in the botched "Gunpowder Plot" of 1605.

The conspiracy fell apart when authorities found out about it and caught Fawkes guarding barrels of gunpowder in the cellar of Parliament. Fawkes was tried as a traitor, and the king's narrow escape has been celebrated every year on Nov. 5, with fireworks and the burning of effigies known as "guys" across the country.

Although not widely known outside Britain, the folk hero's story has recently been seized upon as a potent symbol against state power with the rise of two modern anti-government movements.

Stylized Guy Fawkes plastic masks — with a clownish, sinister mustachioed smile and features loosely based on drawings of Fawke — have been worn by hundreds of protesters from the anti-capitalist Occupy Wall Street movement from New York to London. And before that, members of the international rogue collective of "hackivists" known as Anonymous had worn the now instantly recognizable masks during protests against the Church of Scientology.

The design of the masks came from the comic book and movie "V for Vendetta," which features a violent, anarchist antihero who fashions himself a modern day Guy Fawkes and rebels against a fictional fascist government.

On Saturday, a group including many who wore the same masks tried to march into London's Parliament Square, but it was blocked by a heavy police presence. Many of the activists were the same people behind the Occupy London movement, which has set up camp outside the iconic St. Paul's Cathedral for weeks to protest social inequality and the excesses of the banking industry.

Meanwhile Anonymous, which has made a name for itself by launching cyber attacks on government and large corporate websites, also seized on Guy Fawkes Day by backing an online campaign urging people to collectively withdraw their money from large banks Saturday in a bid to show their anger against the banking sector. Activists have dubbed Saturday "Bank Transfer Day" and "Operation Cashback."

In Britain, the nursery rhyme "Remember, remember, the fifth of November/ Gunpowder, treason and plot" is familiar to most as a warning that treason would never be forgiven.

___

November 05, 2011 01:26 PM EDT

What if Guy Fawkes's Gunpowder Plot had succeeded in 1605?

World history would have been very different – with a guillotine in Trafalgar Square, no Big Macs and Tony Blair as president of Britain.

Guy Fawkes and fellow conspirators planning the gunpowder plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament, circa 1605 Photo: GETTY

By Max Davidson

7:30AM GMT 05 Nov 2011


What if Guy Fawkes had pulled it off? Even four centuries after the Gunpowder Plot was foiled, the hypothesis grabs the imagination.

James I blown to smithereens at the opening of Parliament. Hundreds of MPs and peers murdered. The ruling class of England wiped out at a stroke. Pandemonium on the streets. A crater hundreds of yards wide in what is now Parliament Square.

As a terrorist atrocity, striking at the heart of a nation, it would have dwarfed 9/11. Guy Fawkes would not have been a harmless bumbler, recreated in pillowcases stuffed with leaves and chucked on bonfires, but a hate figure to rival Osama bin Laden.

Lovers of counter-factual history – the things that would have happened if events had taken a slightly different turn – have had a field day with the plot that was so dramatically thwarted in November 1605.

It was a Catholic plot aimed at engineering a transition to a Catholic monarchy; but Catholics constituted such a tiny proportion of the population that it had little realistic chance of success.

Even if the Houses of Parliament had been blown sky-high, the scale of the carnage would surely have provoked a backlash against Catholics by the Protestant majority, similar to the backlash against Muslims after 9/11. The England that emerged might have been a nastier, less tolerant society, which might in turn have made the development of a liberal constitutional monarchy less likely.

Depending how things had panned out after that – and during the Civil War, if there had been a Civil War – we might have had our own version of the French Revolution in the late 18th century, with a guillotine in Trafalgar Square and tricoteuses from Kent and Sussex doing cross-stitch in Whitehall. Instead of our dear Queen, we might be lumbered with Tony Blair as president. Chills the blood, doesn’t it?

One piquant aspect of this historical parlour game is that, if James I had been assassinated by Guy Fawkes, along with his eldest son Henry, the next in line would have been Charles I, who was only four and would have needed supervising 24/7 by a no-nonsense nanny with a good grasp of the English constitution.

Another likely consequence of James being assassinated is that Shakespeare would never have produced Macbeth, which was written to curry favour with James and probably first performed in 1606, in the wake of the Gunpowder Plot. The King James Bible, work on which started in 1604, would probably have survived a successful Gunpowder Plot, although it would be called the King Charles Bible, which doesn’t have the same ring. But can we be so sure about other achievements of James’s reign?

If there had been constitutional upheaval in the years following 1605, it is hard to believe that the colonisation of the New World – Jamestown, Virginia, the first major English settlement in America, was established in 1607 – would have proceeded at the same rate. The French might have stolen a march on us, the United States might have become Les États Unis and Americans might now eat croissants rather than Big Macs.

There would be no baseball World Series, just boules in the town square, and given the French love of wine, there would certainly have been no Prohibition, which would have put the kibosh on that Prohibition-era film classic Some Like It Hot – which would have robbed Marilyn Monroe of her most famous role, which might have meant Jack Kennedy having an affair with someone else, which could have impacted on the Cuban missile crisis...

So many what-ifs. So many might-have-beens. Would MPs have fiddled their expenses if, somewhere in their collective consciousness, there lingered a folk memory of Parliament being razed to the ground in a bonfire of the vanities? Would we take Parliament more – or less – seriously?

Perhaps the one stone-cold certainty is that, if the plot had succeeded, Bonfire Night would never have evolved in its present form. Generations of children would have been spared the indignity of sitting on street corners, in front of a padded sack with a pumpkin on top, squeaking ''Penny for the Guy’’. We would have had fewer over-the-top firework displays that cost millions and are over in minutes. And the Health and Safety Executive would have had to find something else to fuss about – which is perhaps scariest of all.

.

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Occupy...Starbucks?

Published: Thursday, 3 Nov 2011 4:57 PM ET

By: Cadie Thompson
Producer, CNBC.com




Photo: coifmo66/Flickr
Starbuck 2011 Holiday to-go cup
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Is that what we think it is?

The Nutcracker featured on Starbucks' new holiday cups shows some very familiar similarities to the Guy Fawkes mask that is often associated with group Anonymous and Occupy Wall Street protesters.

Was the resemblance to the Guy Fawkes mask intentional? Well, it may be.

As the Gothamist points out, Starbuck's [SBUX 44.19 2.79 (+6.74%) ] CEO Howard Schultz has recently made some comments about the political and social state of the United States that could be interpreted as support for the protesters.

Supporting the Guy Fawkes cup theory is a recent statement made by none other than Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz. "We've lost something," Schultz said. "We've either lost our conscience, or lost our soul... People want human connection... I thought there would be social unrest in America. I mean violence."


Source
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Guy Fawkes mask inspires Occupy protests around the world

By Nick Thompson, CNN
updated 3:08 PM EST, Fri November 4, 2011

A member of Anonymous UK at the Occupy London sports the Guy Fawkes mask in London on November 3.

London, England (CNN) -- Generations of Britons have grown up pledging to "Remember remember the fifth of November: Gunpowder, treason and plot" -- the figure of Guy Fawkes linked forever with fireworks, bonfires and childhood fun.

Now -- more than four hundred years after the gruesome death of the man who plotted to blow up the Houses of Parliament with barrels of gunpowder -- members of the Occupy and Anonymous movements are hoping to provide their own reason to remember Guy Fawkes Night.

On Saturday, November 5, hundreds of protesters wearing the sinister black and white Guy Fawkes masks plan to march on Parliament in central London.

"It will be a night our government never forgets," Malcolm, a member of hacker group Anonymous, said with a smile. "Our government should be expecting us."

The march will recreate one of the final scenes of "V for Vendetta," a film based on the comic books by Alan Moore about a mysterious masked revolutionary who brings down a totalitarian regime, succeeding where Fawkes failed by blowing up parliament.

The Guy Fawkes mask, worn by V, the film's protagonist -- with its diabolical grin, devilish black moustache and thin goatee on a porcelain white background -- has become the talisman of a new generation of activists as an unprecedented wave of disgust and anger with establishment figures has swept the world.

While the mask has been spotted in Occupy protests from Oakland to Hong Kong in the past month as people rally against what they perceive as growing corporate greed and rising social inequality, the mask was first embraced by international hacker ring Anonymous in 2008.
The group of hackers, notorious for their online attacks on high profile banks and government agencies, first wore the masks to conceal their identities in public protests against the Church of Scientology in 2008.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange recently wore one to a rally at St. Paul's Cathedral in London, where Occupy protesters and members of Anonymous have been camping in tents since the demonstration began three weeks ago.

Guy Fawkes was the only man ever to enter Parliament with honest intentions.

Member of Anonymous UK

Malcolm, a 44-year-old Anonymous member and camper, says the mask has become "an international symbol for rebellion and anonymity."

"The point of wearing the mask is to be able to go to a protest without fear of retribution or aggression from the establishment," he said, his mask perched on the crown of his head.

"I have no problem with anyone having my identity, but I like the fact I can choose not to."
Joshua Whitfield, 19, is a fan of the Vendetta books but says it doesn't matter why people choose to wear it.

"Some people wear it to make a fashion statement, others because they know what it's about," he said. "I thought I would show my support for the book and for Anonymous by picking up a mask and being part of the movement."

The popularity of the mask -- an estimated 100,000 were sold last year -- has created a bit of a conundrum for activists who are trying to undermine, not support, businesses owned by the establishment.

Time Warner (which also owns CNN) owns the rights to the masks, meaning every mask sold puts more money, albeit a small amount, into the corporation's coffers.

Rather than continue to give money to a company they say they don't support, activists are now having their own replica masks mass-produced and shipped in from Asia, according to several Anonymous members.

Rather than buy an officially licensed mask at a shop in central London, Whitfield said he was able to purchase his mask from an Anonymous member for £3 ($4.80).

"We don't really want people putting money into corporate pockets, and this is one of our solutions," explained Anonymous's Malcolm.

In the four centuries since Fawkes was sentenced to death -- by hanging, drawing and quartering -- for his treason, there has been much debate in Britain over whether he was a terrorist or a freedom fighter.

Ironically Fawkes, far from being the anti-establishment hero he has come to be seen as in the years since his death, was a monarchist who merely wanted to replace the Anglican king with a Catholic queen.

But it is perhaps his "man of action" persona that most intrigues anti-establishment activists today, and Malcolm is quick to repeat the age-old adage about Fawkes.

"As they say -- Guy Fawkes was the only man ever to enter Parliament with honest intentions," he said with a grin.

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Related:

A FACE YOU CAN'T FORGET by yours truly:

https://sites.google.com/site/endrtimes/a-face-you-can-t-forget

The Gunpowder Plot - Roman Catholic Jesuit Conspiracy

Uploaded by bibleortraditions on Apr 28, 2008

The Gunpowder Plot, 1605 - Roman Catholic Jesuit Conspiracy.

In 1605, young men planned to blow up
the Houses of Parliament. Among them was
Guy Fawkes, Britain's most notorious traitor.

PART TWO: