Why do we celebrate persecution?

last updated 8 January 2015

United Kingdom

Justin Champion

Guy Fawkes Day is a celebration of bigotry, said Justin Champion in the London Guardian. Every year on the fifth of November, the English light bonfires and burn effigies to commemorate the foiling of the 1605 “Gunpowder Plot” to blow up Parliament. The festivities are seen as a handy excuse to indulge in gleeful pyromania. But what are we actually celebrating? The torture and execution of Fawkes, a Catholic who wanted to kill King James I because he supported laws oppressing Catholics. The bonfires burning Fawkes in effigy are “a residual act of anti-Catholic hatred that reveals the Protestant foundations of modern political culture in the U.K.” The children’s poem tells us to “remember, remember” the terrible Gunpowder Plot—but do we remember that Catholics in Scotland and Ireland were overtly persecuted for centuries, right up until the last few years? One black friend who watched recent footage of the celebrations—images of “masked figures marching in procession, carrying burning crosses”—said it looked like the Ku Klux Klan had come to Sussex. Presumably the KKK bigots also see their revelry as “a harmless bit of fun.”