"Following the release of the graphic novel and its 2005 film adaptation, this design came to represent broad protest, later also becoming a symbol for the online #hacktivist group ' #Anonymous' after appearing in web forums, used in Project Chanology, the #Occupy movement, Anonymous for the Voiceless, and other #AntiEstablishment protests around the world. This has led to the mask also being known by the alternate name of the Anonymous mask.

[...]

"The British comic book series #VForVendetta, which started in 1982, centers on a #vigilante's efforts to destroy an #authoritarian government in a #dystopian future United Kingdom. When developing the story, illustrator David Lloyd made a handwritten note on the intended #anarchist protagonist, V: 'Why don't we portray him as a resurrected Guy Fawkes, complete with one of those papier-mâché masks, in a cape and a conical hat? He'd look really bizarre and it would give #GuyFawkes the image he's deserved all these years. We shouldn't burn the chap every Nov. 5th but celebrate his attempt to blow up Parliament!' Writer Alan Moore commented that, due to Lloyd's idea, 'All of the various fragments in my head suddenly fell into place, united behind the single image of a Guy Fawkes mask.'

"Moore also noted, 'how interesting it was that we should have taken up the image right at the point where it was apparently being purged from the annals of English iconography.' "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Fawkes_mask

#ResistFascism #ResistAuthoritarianism #UK #USA #USPol #NoKings #NoRulers

Just double-checking what year we occupied Civic Square, and stumbled on this;

"In Wellington the people who were organising that protest were planning to do a five day live in or maybe a fraction longer, about a week down the center of Wellington and they stayed for 108."

#JonathanYoung, MP, NZ National, 2017

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/thehouse/555211/sitting-in-a-grey-area

I doubt Young spoke to anyone who was involved in any way, because this is pure invention.

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#Occupy

I don't often strongly disagree with Lever journalists, but I have to take issue with presenting Occupy Wall St as a counterpart of the Tea Party;

https://play.prx.org/listen?ge=prx_9069_93a6dc63-3e91-4c9a-9e9b-0b7ee45674cc&uf=https%3A%2F%2Fpublicfeeds.net%2Ff%2F9069%2Ffeed-rss.xml

The two couldn't have been more different.

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#podcasts #TheLever#TaxRevolt#TeaParty#OWS#Occupy

"OWS had a justifiable concern that any ... affiliation would inevitably lead to the seven stages of political futility: cooptation, division, dilution, pacification, neutralization, disappointment and betrayal. Because of these concerns, what one sees coming out of the Occupy movement is not an exercise of politics defined by the normal terms and conditions of any conventional political science."

#MarkVanProyen, 2016

https://www.thesilo.ca/the-metapolitics-of-burning-man-fighting-the-lie-of-the-normal-art-economy/

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#PoliticalScience#Occupy#OWS

First, it's critical to distinguish a protest movement from a revolutionary movement. These are two different things and must have different sets of demands. The two can coexist at the same time. One can turn into the other based on political conditions. But they are not the same.

The goal of a protest movement is incremental change. The goal of a revolutionary movement is radical/total change.

#Occupy failed because its goals were revolutionary but its means and strategies were incrementalist. It thought like a revolutionary movement, but it *acted* like a protest movement.

If you know me, you probably have a good guess where I stand on incrementalism, but I will save that critique to the end. If people are aligned behind incrementalism, then even an insurrectionist (which I also am not) would be better to push to transition protest to revolution than to escalate directly to insurrection and break momentum.

One could argue that insurrectionary escalation during the 70's helped usher in the reactionaries who laid the path to our current crisis. We can also look to the "urban guerilla" movements of this era as examples of the opposite: thinking like a protest movement but acting like a revolutionary movement. They kidnapped and assassinated political leaders and CEOs, then demanded things of those with political power. In some ways #J6 was a similar thing, but I digress in my digression.

A revolutionary movement does not need to articulate demands at all. It demands nothing of the dominant system because its goal is the complete annihilation of that system. Its methods are direct action that creates the new world and destroys the old.

A protest movement does not build a new world, but reshapes the existing one. It demands things from those in power. But in order to do that, it must maintain at least some of the existing power structure. It must play a non-zero sum game where both sides have a chance of not losing. Either side can lose a bit, or even a lot, but both sides must exist in the end. If the demands of a protest movement are "cease to exist or we will destroy you" then the system will fight because it's going to die anyway.

So a protest movement is necessarily limited in scope as to what it can do and what demands it can make. These demands must be possible within the framework of the dominant legal system. These demands must leave the power structure mostly intact.