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Will Brooks
Professor Altman
English 115
26 October 2014
V For Villain
Remember, remember the fifth of November. An eerie silence precedes the earsplitting explosion. A canopy of flame blankets the spot where the Parliament building once
stood. The hero the graphic novel V for Vendetta starts his first act with a bang. This violent
introduction tells the reader of the antics that the main character pursues. Vs actions include
kidnapping, torture, both physical and psychological, vandalism, treason, and murder. Although
these actions might seem to fit the description of a villain, he is perceived as the hero of the
story. Why is this? The totalitarian government Britain in the dystopian world of the not so
distant future has total control of its people. They watch the citizens through cameras with sign
attached that read, For Your Protection. The government operates total surveillance. Fences,
barbed wire, and huddled masses seem to occupy certain sections of the city. The government
has already rounded up all homosexuals and vilified the blacks through film. Concentration
camps hold unseen horrors unbeknownst to the public, but known to the reader. The scientists of
the camps perform inhumane tests on their homosexual, ethnic, or treasonous prisoners with an
unknown purpose but usually resorting in death. As the novel unfolds, it is clear that the
government is the villain. But is it the only villain? The main character, in his quest to
overthrow the government, betrays his morals and joins the plateau of villainy that the
government sits at. V is a terrorist. Simply put, he is somebody who uses extreme measures,
including murder and explosions, to accomplish his viewpoint and beliefs. The story of V has a
direct correlation to the terrorism seen in Al-Qaeda today. "Just War" is a concept that America

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holds very closely. The idea of a just war goes back to St. Augustine in their ideas of how a war
should be waged. Thomas Aquinas used Augustines vision for a just war and refined it
(Rothchild). Their ideals collected in the modern era as five ideals. War is only just if it is
waged by a legitimate authority. War must not be waged for narrow national interests but for the
re-establishment of a just peace. Violence used in the war must be proportional to the violence
that is received. There must be good grounds that achieving the aims of the war are attainable.
The war must be a last resort for the nations or kingdoms. V mirrors the unjust wars of the AlQaeda and terrorists today, because he breaks the five just ideals for starting a war.
War is only just if started by a legitimate authority. Terrorists are not a recognized
authority by todays standard. They are often cross-national groups with no sovereign power.
Michael Burleigh, in his book Blood and Rage, which tells the cultural history of terrorism,
explains that, for Al-Qaeda, recruits came from a variety of social, religious, and national
backgrounds, which gradually dissolve into a new global jihadi-salafist identity that picked and
mixed from secular geo-politics and several Islamic traditions in a thoroughly eclectic postmodern fashion (Burleigh 374). Terrorists do not necessarily represent all of Islamic countries
or faiths. The tenets of the faith the terrorists uphold lack worldwide acceptance by all Muslims.
This lack of a recognized authority by the world hurts the morals of this holy war that the
terrorist uphold. Likewise, V also does not have any authority in the world that he lives in. He
is alone person single-handedly waging war against a known authority. He has no right to start a
war with Britain. Albeit in more of an extreme way, V embodies the lack of authority that the
terrorists deal with.
War must not be waged for narrow national interest but for the re-establishment of a just
peace. V hates this statement. He believes that anarchy and chaos should rule the world. He is

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the polar opposite of the waging a war for peace. He wages for death, destruction, and mayhem.
This lack of a seeking of peace defines the Islamic terrorists. They are not looking for peace.
They try to kill Americans and westerners for the sake of pleasing their own god and
countrymen. Sayyid Qutb, a leading member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, says that it
is the job of true Muslims to remove that state of pagan ignorance from not only the Middle East
but the whole world (Gorka). This idea has been taken to the extreme. They remove ignorance
by responding with violence and hate. The destruction and pain from the 9/11 attacks stem from
this kind of radical thinking. The unjust war that V is waging does not seem to bother the
readers conscience. But what if citizens joined his cause? If that happened, the scenario in the
book would start to look more and more like the Islamic Jihad of today. They would kill to
cleanse the ignorance away.
Violence used in the war must be proportional to the violence that is received. The idea
of this is that the tactics of the war do not surpass the amount of violence needed to win the war
and succeed. War should never be an excuse for excess violence. V is in an interesting
situation. He has been wronged by the government. They had taken him as a prisoner, locked
him up, and performed tests on him. He has real reasons to be angry at the government. They
maybe even deserve revenge. But V is not out for just revenge. He is out for chaos, which in
turn means the pain and harm of possibly millions of people in the nation of Britain. Although
murder of other humans is wrong, there is substantial evidence that V would be in the clear for
eliminating the heads of the concentration camp who terrorized him, sealing them off the rest of
the world from their atrocities. But V calls for overthrowing of all the government, exceeding
the violence that was presented by the heads of the camp. Terrorists also succeed the proportion
of violence that was committed. They killed thousands of innocent civilians in 9/11. Osama bin

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Laden tried to appeal to the ethics of a just war by saying that the attacks were only defending
themselves. This is defensive Jihad (Bennett 83). This is false because the Americans are not
looking for total annihilation like the terrorists but rather a neutralization. V blew up buildings
for the sake of accomplishing the overthrow of the government. V most likely killed many
innocent citizens in the destruction of various buildings. V, like the terrorists, surpassed the
violence that is given to them.
There must be good grounds that achieving the aims of the war are attainable. War must
not be waged if no chance of achievable goals are in sight, which causes unnecessary bloodshed.
The goal of the terrorists is to rid the world of their ignorance of Islam. This goal is very well
impossible. The view on Islam in the U.S alone will not change even if threatened with death.
Islam is seen as a hungry, angry, war-loving religion. This world-wide cleanse is not truly
attainable. The foreseen account has been the constant fighting of Democracy versus Islam.
The death toll is rising as a testament to the type of war the terrorists are waging. Even the near
impossible goals of the terrorist are trifles compared to the odds that V possesses. V is a single
person who might be certifiably insane seeking to overthrow one of the most powerful
governments in the worlds history. The government in the novel prove to be the most
controlling and vindictive since the Nazi uprising. V creates a war that is not attainable. He
cannot win and is seen in his death at the end of the book. The goals of the terrorists and V are
even more unreachable when one thinks about the consequences of rattling the hornets nest, or
in this case, the world power. When the September 11th attacks occurred, there was fear that
America would default to untapped hatred and violence to the extreme (Bennett 17). If this
would have happened, The Middle East suddenly would have the full brunt of the American
nuclear arsenal. Likewise, the government in Britain could have clamped down even harder on

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subversive groups and people, making Vs job that much harder.


The war must be a last resort for the nations or kingdoms. War is a horrible beast. It
eats. It kills. It maims. It wounds. War must not be taken lightly. Because of the horrors of war,
war must be the very last option in the nations hands. They must first sort through all other
viable options. Although the reader does not know what happens before the start of the book, the
government seems to be dealing with V for the first time. His war is his first option. He revels
in the planning of it. He delights in the theatricality of war. V looks forward to the ending of his
war. V enjoys his war so much that other options were probably not even entertained. The
prime supporters of Islam have never tried to appeal to the religious or intellectual people of the
Western world, they have simply resorted to the blatant war against democracy that so defines
them today. Islam has no other alternative to their violent mentality that they hold.
To close, the principles of a just war are not what define or characterize the terrorists of
today or their fictional counterpart, V. War is only just if it is waged by a legitimate authority.
War must not be waged for narrow national interests but for the re-establishment of a just peace.
Violence used in the war must be proportional to the violence that is received. There must be
good grounds that achieving the aims of the war are attainable. The war must be a last resort for
the nations or kingdoms. V is not a hero. He is a blatant terrorist starting the most unholy of
wars. There might have been good morals somewhere along the beginning but all are soon lost.
Likewise, the terrorist are not fighting a just war. The question is, does the world see that? Or
are they lost in the political correctness of the situation? Easy going relativism defines our
culture in America (Bennett 47). Morals should not be lost just because someone has not walked
in someone elses shoes. Not everything is relative, despite the trendy ring that relative carries
in our world. There is right and wrong, just and unjust. Americans should understand and

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recognize the morality of a just war, as evident in our world by experiencing the hatred of
terrorists. Terrorism in the 20th and 21st century and V embodies the idea of starting a war for
what he believes in, but what he believes in is deadly and harmful.

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Works Cited
Bennett, William J. Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism. New York: Doubleday, 2002.
Print.
Burleigh, Michael. Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism. New York: Harper, 2009. Print.
Carr, Matthew. The Infernal Machine: A History of Terrorism. New York: New, 2007. Print.
Gorka, Sebastian L. "Understanding the enemy." Special Warfare Apr.-June 2014: 8+. General OneFile.
Web. 27 Oct. 2014.
Moore, Alan, David Lloyd, et al. . V for Vendetta. New York: Vertigo/DC Comics, 2005. Print.
Rothchild, Jonathan. "Just War." Atrocities, Massacres, and War Crimes: An Encyclopedia. Ed. Alexander
Mikaberidze. Vol. 1. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2013. 345-348. Gale Virtual Reference Library.
Web. 25 Oct. 2014.
Jerry Mark Long. and Alex S. Wilner. "Delegitimizing al-Qaida: Defeating an Army Whose Men Love
Death." International Security 39.1 (2014): 126-164. Project MUSE. Web. 27 Oct. 2014.
<http://muse.jhu.edu/>.

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