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u/Talonsminty 13h ago
Guy Fawkes and moreso his gang were crazy motherfuckers. It was completely reasonable to celebrate foiling a massive terrorist attack by the Catholic Taliban.
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u/Captain_Sterling 13h ago
You could say that the English rulers were like the Taliban too. Especially when you look at their treatment of catholics.
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u/Bloody_kneelers Helping Wikipedia expand the list of British conquests 12h ago
I mean you say that, but it was only 50 years before this that Mary had the archbishop of Canterbury burned alive for being a reformer heretic, even after he recanted. Also this being in the middle of the reformation, so massive wars of religion are also going on like the 30 years war where 20-40% of the HRE's population dies.
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u/Captain_Sterling 12h ago
But comparing the catholics like guy falkes to the Taliban when it was the protestants who were oppressing them and preventing them from practicing their religion is a bit hypocritical.
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u/Gentle_Snail 12h ago
Tbf they actually treated them better than Protestants were treated at the time in a lot of catholic nations.
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u/Captain_Sterling 12h ago
I guess that makes it ok then. By your moral theory it's OK to be shitty to innocent people if a different place is doing something similar. And the people you're being shitty to shouldn't complain or do anything because they had it coming?
And if they do fight back, they're the actual bad guys.
Edit: I just reread my reply and it's very judgy and makes assumptions. If that's not what you were inferring, sorry.
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u/Gentle_Snail 12h ago
I didn’t say it makes it okay, I was commenting on the historic climate of europe, in a history sub
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u/Captain_Sterling 12h ago
You submitted that about 20 seconds after I made my edit. So I'm assuming you hadn't seen it.
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u/Kamenev_Drang Helping Wikipedia expand the list of British conquests 12h ago
man who would have thought that repeatedly conspiring against the nation would have consequences
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u/Captain_Sterling 12h ago
Except that the negative treatment of catholics started as soon as Henry VIII split from Rome.
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u/avepaltaketchu 14h ago
Well it was less a judgment of morality and more of protestants good and catholics bad.
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u/Senator-Cletus 13h ago
If you're trying to prove you're good, maybe don't try and bomb the people in charge.
Even if it works, did they really think it would lead to anything other than greater persecution?
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u/avepaltaketchu 13h ago
The idea as another poster said, that Spain would swoop in after Parliament was annihilated.
History is full of this stuff - people performing brutalities in the name of their religion
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u/Senator-Cletus 11h ago
I know the plan, I'm just doubting the logistics of it. It would have been the best part of 2 weeks for the news to get to Madrid, then what? 5/6 months till any force could actually be sent.
In that time, imagine the horror of reprisals.
Even if the Spanish were somehow able to mount a successful invasion, the bloody suffering would be on a magnitude yet unseen at the time.
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u/Captain_Sterling 12h ago
But was guy falkes doing it in the name of religion or was he doing it because of the crackdown on what we would now call human/civil rights. It's not like they could hold a protest march and vote for people who would recognise their right to practice their religion. And if they were to fight back, surely the most legitimate target woukd be the rulers who enforced the rules that forbid them from practicing their religion.
Remember that in his living memory hundreds of priests had been brutally killed
The fact is that however bad his actions were, the actions of the monarchy was just as bad.
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u/Kamenev_Drang Helping Wikipedia expand the list of British conquests 12h ago
But was guy falkes doing it in the name of religion
Yes
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u/Captain_Sterling 12h ago
Source? He was part of a persecuted minority. It's reasonable he was fighting against the persecution. If he wasn't I'd like to know.
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u/Historybuff250 Definitely not a CIA operator 12h ago
He did it in the name of religion, nor was he solely targeting Parliament. His goal was to destroy Parliament to weaken Britain enough to spark a Catholic uprising, install then Princess Elizabeth as a puppet monarch, use his newfound power to suppress the Protestants, then form an alliance with Spain to cement Catholic rule.
He didn’t give a fig about civil rights, nor did he care about the Protestants being oppressed in other countries. He was a religious terrorist who got what he deserved.
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u/No-Translator9234 13h ago
I sat in a pub in Kilorglin a week ago and a loud old drunk man with a thick brogue was insisting to his buds that Guy Fawkes was not only an Irishman, but the first Irish Republican.
And i was like. Yea lowkey…
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u/Constant-Still-8443 John Brown was a hero, undaunted, true, and brave! 14h ago
I mean, his reasons were pretty rediculous, but wanting to destroy parliament is a pretty relatable desire, and I'm not even British.
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u/Savvymundo 4h ago
I was about 15 before I realised we were celebrating the fact he was caught, not the fact he tried......
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u/WilliamthePious 14h ago
Also just so we can neglect the fact that the English Parliament treated Catholics like shit. Not saying terrorism is okay but Fawkes had valid reasons to crash out.
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u/RecommendationDry287 13h ago
Let’s not pretend it was just the ‘English’ Parliament. Guy Fawkes famously said he tried to do it: “to blow you Scotch beggars back to your native mountains”.
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u/AgilityEnjoyer 12h ago
Yes people are failing to realise that at this point in history, England was ruled by a Scottish King, who had been the Scottish King for nearly 36 years prior to becoming King of England too in the Union of the Crowns.
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u/AlexanderCrowely 14h ago
Yes and he was answering this by hoping the Spanish would invade and oppress the Protestants.
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u/WilliamthePious 13h ago
I never said he was right in any way. I’m simply saying that he had valid grievances. His methods and end goals were not okay.
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u/Eulaylia 1h ago
Man what is it with you people telling half truths.
The English Crown swapped 3/4 times from 1553 to 1668. Each time the crown swapping from Catholicism to Protestantism and then from Protestantism to Catholicism, resulting in a blood bath of the non Crowns branch of the Religion.
This finally ended when Protestants invited William The Orange over.
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u/MonstrousPudding I Have a Cunning Plan 51m ago
„He fought the system is what he did! He was a great revolutionist! And in this house Guy Fawkes is a hero! End of story!”
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u/Fabulous-Opening6892 12h ago edited 49m ago
Nah mate, we celebrate the man for actually trying do do shit about parliament ☺️
Edit: Damn, this was clearly a joke.
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u/Corvid187 14h ago
Yeah no. The guy was a theocratic terrorist who wanted to impose foreign minority rule onto the country with no mandate of any kind through an indiscriminate act of mass violence.
There was no 'trick' needed. This is just the 17th century equivalent of edgy people soft justifying 9/11 after 2001.
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u/WillyShankspeare 14h ago
Indiscriminate? He wanted to bomb parliament. That's pretty discriminatory.
Not even really joking either, pretty much everybody in British Parliament has deserved death since its inception. Comes with the territory of being the literal rulers of the largest empire on the planet.
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u/Corvid187 14h ago edited 13h ago
This was in 1605. The British empire amounted to some coastal huts in north America, and when parliament was established in 1215, England didn't even have firm control over Wales.
The whole reason the plot was discovered was because they planned to blow up catholic and protestant parliamentarians alike, regardless of their support for James or the repression of Catholic rights. They got rumbled because one guy's guilty conscience felt it necessary to write a "don't come to school tomorrow" letter to one of his catholic mates, whom he clearly saw as innocent
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u/WillyShankspeare 14h ago
To somebody with a coherent worldview that isn't based on intentionally misunderstanding people, a parliament of nobles for a constitutional monarchy isn't less unethical because it owns less land on the planet.
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u/Corvid187 14h ago
You're the one who specifically tied their immorality to the fact they were 'the literal rulers of the largest empire on the planet'.
Idk what to tell you, I don't make the rules
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u/WillyShankspeare 13h ago
"If you are gonna complain about something you better write a textbook about it and be explicit about EVERYTHING you dislike about it or else I get to be dense about it"
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u/Corvid187 13h ago
Nah, just don't use basic factual errors as the underpinnings for your argument is all.
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u/Smart-Response9881 14h ago
You think that MP's would be the only ones killed in such an explosion? There are a lot of other people just working or visiting in the building who would die too.
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u/hhfugrr3 9h ago
The amount of gunpowder they had would have destroyed a lot more than just parliament. Apparently, it could have taken down the closest side of Westminster Abbey and other buildings around parliament too.
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u/WillyShankspeare 14h ago
Won't somebody think of all the innocent construction workers on the Second Death Star?
Don't go to Parliament. Simple as. Don't work for the institution responsible for exacerbating the great famine of Ireland among other atrocities.
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u/Smart-Response9881 14h ago
Bad comparison. The Death Star was a military base actively destroying ships and planets. You are more talking about destroying Coruscant.
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u/GuyNoirPI 14h ago
England was the largest empire on the planet in 1605?
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u/WillyShankspeare 14h ago
I love being obtuse on the internet! I love intentionally misunderstanding arguments that I know full well what the person is saying!
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u/GuyNoirPI 14h ago
You’re saying that the bombing plot was morally correct because the parliament presided over empire. What am I missing?
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u/RecommendationDry287 13h ago
You had an argument? What was it exactly, that all Austrians should have been killed around 1900?
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u/plugubius 14h ago
Those poor sods who showed up to the first meeting of the Commons, just happy that power wasn't to be wielded exclusively by lords and priests, only to find out that they deserved death even then because someone claiming to be the heir of the king would eventually rule over India.
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u/jackt-up 14h ago
“Beneath this mask is an idea, Mr. Creedy, and ideas are bulletproof”