For reasons I can’t quite explain, watching A Man For All Seasons compelled me to have another watch of V for Vendetta. Maybe it is because they are both about the same thing; a rebellion against British authority. And yet in a way they are opposites of each other.
(you can read my review of A Man For All Seasons here)
V for Vendetta, remarkably, follows the same train of thought as A Man For All Seasons, set more than 400 years earlier.
Thomas More lost his head because he refused to bless the king’s bigamous marriage. More, as a trained lawyer, argued his defense correctly and competently. He had never spoken a traitorous word, so could not be tried for treason. He had given the king’s authority silent consent. Silent consent was the main principle of his defense, and it has a Biblical origin. The pharisees tried to trick Jesus into advocating rebellion (which he could be arrested for), and he simply told them to give onto Caesar what is Caesar’s. More gave the king what was owed to him, so had committed no crime. But the king disagreed.
In the end, More died not for rebellious actions, but rebellion in his own private thoughts. This might make him the first person in English history executed for thought crime, arguably the most important and profound legal precedent in western history. We can also infer from this incident how the Anglican church went on to be so silly performative. Anglicanism was performative from the beginning, invented out of nothing by a tyrant to virtue signal that his marriage was allowed and not bigamous. V for Vendetta is a tale of rebellion, but takes more after King Henry than More. Right near the beginning of the film, V rebukes the British people for silently consenting to the right-wing surveillance state. It’s not a statement he makes in a vaccuum either. V goes on to send everyone in London masks and costumes to put on and march in the street. It’s a collective act of rebellion to be sure, but it’s not a straight forward popular uprising, as these people do not participate in V’s coup in any way. There can be no misinterpretation of the film’s message here. This act of taking to the street is a signal of active consent of the new regime V has created for them. It is exactly the same as a Soviet or Maoist political meeting (street demonstration) signaling the people’s consent for communist government.
I consider this one of the most important points of divergence between traditional conservative and leftist authorities. Traditional “blood and soil” regimes receive their mandate to rule by birth, and blessed by God. Franco did not go around asking Spanish peasants for their opinions on his policy, for example. Peasants were not burdened by matters of state and in a way this was a blessing. Their private thoughts were their own. A leftist party, or the party, when they are in power, draws its authority from the will of the masses, rather than God or bloodlines, so their private opinions are of much more importance.
On one hand, leftism led to classical education for the masses, as most European despots had not bothered to teach their peasants how to read (what’s the point?). Informed consent requires education, so a leftist will almost without exception be more interested in educating the masses than a conservative. Even today, conservative politicians still ponder out loud why poor children should be taught to read at all instead of throwing them into the salt mines.
Why was V so obsessed with making Natalie Portman’s character agree with him? He literally tortures her 1984 style (also set in Britain, of course) until she loves Big Brother. The ethnics of the act aside, it’s a weird thing to spend so much time on in the middle of overthrowing the government, right? The torture scene is actually the most important segment of V for Vendetta, just like it was in 1984, and for the same reason. Winston Smith had to be made to genuinely agree with the regime even, especially, in his own private thoughts. V had to persuade Natalie Portman to fervently believe in his ideals, and not just say she agreed out of politeness or her shared dislike of the current regime.
This is actually quite similar to another movie by the Wachowski brothers, uhh, sisters. In The Matrix, Neo has to take the red pill and fully embrace the cause before he is able to unlock his powers as “the one.”
A conservative autocracy can get away with a lot of internal weakness without collapsing because it is built on the idea of silent consent. The people tolerate their cruel and incompetent government because rebellion is dangerous and things just aren’t that bad. But both the ruler and the ruled understand that there is a certain tipping point when there is too much suffering to be tolerated and the people rebel. In World War II the Soviet Union mobilized their entire economy for the war effort while Germany did not, out of fear that the population would not accept greater hardship.
So the government built by the conscious will of the people can endure greater hardships than a government built on the people’s backs with their begrudging silent consent. Conversely, the government built with “active consent” will collapse without it. The biggest and most obvious example is the Soviet Union, which collapsed suddenly, and that happened because enough Russians had stopped believing in the idea.
To comprehend the evolution of western political thought between the time of Henry VIII and the filming of V for Vendetta, there are two points that need to be understood. First, it is well substantiated by now that every government regardless of persuasion somewhat reflects the national values. An Anglo monarchy is no more a Russian monarchy than Russian communism is Chinese communism. They each have their own cultural and I daresay even genetic nuances.
My second point is that western regimes have adopted marxist characteristics, and this should be obvious to anyone who has eyes. Even the US government’s multigenerational obsession with “asymmetric warfare” has required study of the Marxist ideology fueling guerrilla movements around the world.
The nazis did not come to Kiev and make crowds of Ukrainians bounce while chanting “everyone who doesn’t jump is a Moskal.” What we saw at Maidan and comparable color revolutions is a perfect blend of Marxist and marketing techniques. The CIA had the Ukrainians wear cooking pots on their heads and bounce for the same reason V had the Londoners wear masks and costumes. Active participation, active rather than silent consent, is much more effective in shaping a society in your image.
American conservatives whine about “virtue signaling” and “cultural marxism.” Yet the “cultural marxists” are in power and they are not. Curious.
Westerners have caught on to the fact that leftist active consent builds a much stronger regime than silent consent. While the cause and nature of the Soviet Union’s demise is constantly misunderstood, western regimes do understand the peril in the context of their own societies. Henry chopped off Thomas More’s head for not affirming that a man can marry two (or six) different women as long as he identifies as divorced. If More was alive today, he would be canceled for not affirming that a man can be a woman if he feels like it. And ironically, it would be the same Anglican church that represses him for his bigoted thought crime.
The western leftist preoccupation with controlling people’s speech in consciously unnatural ways (like calling a single human ‘they/them’) because words are thoughts. Note that this is not the same thing as outlawing blasphemy, insulting the king, or disagreeing with a war. Knowing that you can’t blatantly insult your rulers is common sense, and it’s not even particularly disruptive for the average person to dance around those few sensitive topics. But to walk on eggshells every waking moment of your day afraid to accidentally say something non-conformist. Simply not being allowed to say “the king is an idiot” is too easy. The best rules are absurd and require the participant to defy reality itself. The best analogy I can offer is the emperor has no clothes. It’s not just that people in the story were scared to insult the emperor, they had to pretend he was wearing clothes and wasn’t naked. This is the ideal loyalty test, and probably the most effective way to establish active consent. Make people act like an obviously untrue thing is true for long enough, they will eventually start to believe it, making thought crime, even in other contexts, impossible.
At the end of the day, was V’s vision of Britain better than the bad right wingers? V shares Neo’s viewpoint of uninitiated people as mere collateral damage who can be casually killed if they get in the way, so it’s hard to argue the new order will be less violent than the old. As I already explained, the individual’s private thoughts are of crucial importance, so there will definitely not be less surveillance. If anything there will be more surveillance, because the old regime was mainly keeping an eye out for dangerous dissent. The one category that the new regime might arguably improve is the anti-buggery lies. Yes, it is unfair to beat people up and put them in concentration camps for being gay. That stuff not happening anymore will be an improvement for the 1% of people who are gay. However, I am of the opinion that Anglo culture is unhealthily obsessed with gayness, and bounces from one extreme to the other instead of finding a happy middle ground.
The elephant in the room here is that More lost his head for marriage-shaming the king hundreds of years ago, so this interpretation of Marxism (and let’s face it, Marx was a guy in Britain) had to be born in Britain, not Russia. The Russians have just never been conformist enough to make the Soviet system work forever. They were too non-conformist to not upend the monarchy, which is an easier status quo to maintain for reasons I explained already. It’s funny to contemplate because American and British Cold War propaganda depicts Russians as conformist when actually we are far more conformist than them. Keeping Russians at 1937 levels of ideological hysteria was impossible, especially outside the context of an imminent war. But apparently it is feasible, easy even, to wind up Anglos to Stasi levels of vigilance, and keep us there for years on end. In 2022 everyone was happily snitching on each other for walking alone on the beach without a mask, war with Russia was the thing that ended the lockdown, not internal dissent.
Unfortunately, there is an insurmountable cultural chasm between Russians and us which make a western Soviet Union impossible. What we’ve managed to create instead is a strange, distorted parody of the Soviet Union, like Stalin putting people in GULAG for misgendering someone. I also think a lot of our leftists are attracted to the idea of open borders because they are frustrated by American stubborn belligerence and think brown foreigners are nice, docile empty vessels they can indoctrinate. I’m sorry, but no. I know it’s not politically correct to say (wrongthink, even) but Americans and Russians, while different, are more similar to each other than to an Indian. If you fail to create American communism with Americans, you will fail even harder with people from a completely different culture. The white leftist’s desperation to recreate the Soviet Union reads like a parable about the hubris of man, the harder he tries, the farther away he’s taken from his goal.
See my followup to this article I wrote here:
Watch V for Vendetta on Amazon Prime
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I'd add that Germans were less inclined to work for Hitler 'cause they weren't threatened by being exterminated if Germany loses the war. I'm sure they knew we didn't have an ideology of Slavic supremacy.