The Whiskey and Gunpowder blog has an excellent article based on its namesake that explores the Whiskey Rebellion of the 1700's and the Gunpowder Plot of the early 1600's.
The following passage really made me think of something I'd thought of before:
Anarchists and various anti-government types often appropriate a stylized simulacrum of Guy Fawkes’ face as their symbol because Guy was the one caught preparing the barrels of gunpowder. He is most closely associated with the anti-government plot in the popular imagination…
But Guy wasn’t interested in permanently or drastically reducing the reach of power of government; he merely wanted a Catholic monarch in power to persecute the Protestants, instead of the prevailing situation in which a Protestant monarch was persecuting the Catholic minority.
Guy was actually much like your garden-variety nationalist. He wanted his kind of people in power. This is not unlike the supporters of the few politicians we like — like Ron Paul.The Republican Party and the Democratic Party aren't small-government or pro-civil liberties. They just kick and scream as if they are. But really, it's just that their version of big government isn't being posed on the rest of the nation.
That's it.
And it also reminded that statism has so many different incarnations (in this case religious) that we really have to question whether it was the religions themselves or something else that was the cause of it.
I don't know. Maybe something like, you know, the human heart.
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