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18 August 2006

Rage Against The Machine

Mario Savio (December 8, 1942 – November 6, 1996) was an American political activist.
In 2004, it was revealed that Mario was the subject of a massive FBI surveillance program even after he left the Free Speech Movement. The FBI trailed Mario Savio for more than a decade after he left UC Berkeley, and bureau officials plotted to "neutralize" him politically, even though there was no evidence he broke any federal law. According to hundreds of pages of FBI files, the bureau:

  • Collected, without court order, personal information about Savio from schools, telephone companies, utility firms and banks and compiled information about his marriage and divorce.

  • Monitored his day-to-day activities by using informants planted in political groups, covertly contacting his neighbors, landlords and employers, and having agents pose as professors, journalists and activists to interview him and his wife.

  • Obtained his tax returns from the Internal Revenue Service in violation of federal rules, mischaracterized him as a threat to the president and arranged for the CIA and foreign intelligence agencies to investigate him when he and his family traveled in Europe.

  • Put him on an unauthorized list of people to be detained without judicial warrant in event of a national emergency, and designated him as a "Key Activist" whose political activities should be "disrupted" and "neutralized" under the bureau's extralegal counterintelligence program known as COINTELPRO.

Savio's crime was that of a passion for humanity which never fails to antagonise the state into the most extreme forms of illegal and underhand activities.

On 2 December 1964, Savio gave one of the most impassioned speeches you will ever see or hear, a revolutionary address in which he struck at university establishment, wider society at large and which inspired a massive student sit-in that the authorities feared would spread beyond their ability to control it.

Here's how Mario Savio became an enemy of the state....





1 comment:

Mary in Vancouver BC Canada said...

Hero of the people,
Mario Savio
In your presence of abscence
I gratefully thank you
For the energy, the work, the time
That you gave as a gift
For us, for you, for all.

Your words are forever on the wind
They ride on the aethers of air
Into our mind and we rise with you
Our voices to be heard
Not one, not a few, but enmass
A solid stand for freedom's cause.

Together we stand, united we are tall,
Hero's among us learn your song
And the chorus is refrained
By one and all,
The machine that oil and iron shackled us by day,
Releases it's captives for us to say,
The light of day has dawned upon the sodden slumbering land,
Awaken by a melody written by many, but sung by this man.
Thank you Mario,
I am grately proud of you,
~ Mary in Vancouver
May Truth rise up to greet you,
And may Grace guide you on the way,
And may the Light of Love
Show itself as Life grows
It's own masterpiece..one of a kind