(Israel's anti-Netanyahu protests continue) by Shimi Cohen
by Shimi Choen
Jerusalem , August 2020
Guy Fox's mask may be familiar from the movie ‘V for Vendetta’, but has been in history since the 17th century for Best Seller.
The protest, or the many protests that have taken place in recent months, have many visual features that are common to all: signs with slogans, megaphones, backpacks, mouths open for shouting and hands raised. But all of these are completely random.
Alongside them are also agreed-upon features that have been adopted as distinct symbols of protest, such as the bandana, but the most prominent and intriguing of them all is the mask, which appears again and again in a variety of protests of recent years, and is exactly the same everywhere around the world.
This is the Guy Fawkes mask, best known as the mask from the Hollywood movie ‘V for Vendetta’ based on the comic book of the same name by Alan Moore.
In 1982, when Alan Moore was working on the film 'V for Vendetta' on which the film is based, whose plot focuses on future and dystopian England, he decided to give his main protagonist - an anarchist working against the regime - a Guy Fox mask, as an appropriate homage to similar circumstances.
Twenty-four years later, when the film was released, the mask began to spread around the world among protesting organizations against governments or financial entities, both as a symbolic act and as a way to disguise the identity of the protester.
The symbolic value of the mask, that is, from the idea that corruption is universal and temporary, and that it must be fought by exactly the same means, regardless of the period in which you live or the geographical area in which you are.
The idea that a 17th-century revolutionary, a fictional figure from the future and an activist living today ultimately share the same agenda is quite charming, but also utterly discouraging. While today’s protesters do not use gunpowder in their protest (at least not yet), they do face a world that has yet to face lessons and has not made the changes that were supposed to happen centuries ago.
