Couple notes.
1) there is an obvious, to me, comparison with 9/11. Ponder, if you have not, how that date was obviously chosen for symbolic effect. Can you think of any other combination of digits which would so conjure emergency and fear? 4/11? 3/3?
I am not entirely willing to say I feel sure 9/11 was perpetrated by high elements in our government, but it seems absolutely clear that the investigation was botched from the outset by the destruction of evidence, and that wrong and empirically indefensible conclusions were reached by an official body after what could and should have been a thorough, honest, and professional investigation. These points are in my view beyond dispute.
Neither is it in dispute that the conspiracy extended at a minimum to pre-planted explosives/cutting charges in Tower 7, and almost certainly to all three towers.
2) The malefactors were shown to be hypocritical Christians. Particularly in Britain this was then, and is even more so today, ridiculous. It was an attempt to villify Bush, obviously, but as such constituted itself a propaganda. Many Occupy Wall Street protesters seem to have failed to grasp that totalitarians use many rhetorics, but that the rhetoric of the Left has most often been used to build the social order that film portrayed. Hitler and his National Socialists found their support among working class Germans, and it was not his universal healthcare, education and other State-funded perks that Leftists objected to, or to his de facto control of the German economy and habit of expropriating the private property of citizens deemed undesirable, but rather his nationalism, and particularly his opposition to the Soviet state.
But Hitler was to Stalin roughly what Trotsky was: a disavowed brother. Nothing more. Nothing less. And self evidently, they were close brothers for a time. They each viewed the other as seeing the world in the same way. That was part of the reason Stalin found it so hard to believe Hitler has betrayed him, which caused his military enormous tactical and strategic difficulties in the early stage of the invasion.
3) And by what process of logic does a group which fears a totalitarian government want to abjure the right to gun ownership? As the police commissioner said, in response to the question “what do you think will happen?”: “what usually happens when unarmed people face people with guns”. Those masses would have broken and fled in the first volley, had those soldiers fired. The tactical situation would have been much different if there had been a gun under every cloak.
It is so hard not to see Leftists as unprincipled imbeciles who munch propaganda happily all their lives, that I have ceased making the effort. Obviously. They are stupid, do not understand history, do not think deeply, and live their lives in a muddle of sentiment, vacuous pipe dreams, and the very real if unconscious acceptance of despotic violence as a means to the end of their moral confusions, but not an end to human suffering. They know utopias are not born at gunpoint, but being weak they have ceased to care.
4) And finally, V never would have gotten away with anything in the modern surveillance state. He walks out the door, and then disappears to the authorities. How? There would be cameras on every street corner, informers on every block. There would be satellites and even drones watching every street, every alley. If there were sewers they would be covered with cameras too. Just put yourself in the seat of a competent authoritarian, particularly one facing one person. How hard would it be to catch this guy when you can call curfew and detain anyone you want at any time?
I see this fallacy often. I saw it in the last Hunger Games movie. People seem to fail to grasp that cameras everywhere means an ubiquitous eye. American movies are filled with miraculous escapes which are not recognized as such merely because they cut to the next scene. In the real world, the people with resources and planning and the upper hand pretty much always win.
I wonder sometimes if these are not mere plot devices, but an unconscious effort to avoid awareness of just how tight the noose has become.
My sense is that an acceptance of death itself is a prerequisite to the acceptance of the modern world. It is giving my some difficulty–this is indeed an audacious project, to remain consciously awake but cultivate inner calm–but I am making progress. My world is an odd one, but the one I choose.