http://welcomebacktopottersville.blogspot.com/2011/11/ows-orwells-wickedest-scenario.htmlThe only good thing about fascism and its brutal and oppressive tactics is that it's never subtle. Push these people and you'll always get the answer to Inspector Finch's rhetorical question in V For Vendetta: "What usually happens when those without guns stand up to those that do?" And always there are billions who listen to the answer and its inevitable, blood-tinged physical syntax.
Anyone out there remember the late Mario Savio? Mario Savio's name has been all but lost to history even to well-meaning and well-educated liberals who didn't happen to watch Rachel Maddow's eloquent show the night before last. Savio's speech on December 2, 1964 on Sproul Hall's steps briefly put him in the news in relation to the increasingly hostile conflict between University of Berkeley officials and the students' right to free speech.
Savio's fiery, impassioned "bodies on the gears" speech, as it came to be known, proved once again that great rhetoric is recyclable and that the abstract ideology underpinning it can be used to illuminate many controversies that endanger the rights of our fellow humans. As Maddow said, he could've been talking about Vietnam, civil rights or a whole host of other topics. But on December 2, 1964 he was calling the university on its greater allegiance to its board of governors than to the first amendment rights of its students.
Savio's spirit lives on in Occupy Wall's Street movement and it's impossible to imagine the man who'd briefly shared the same ideological stage as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X not supporting this beginning of the uprising of the 99%. And perhaps some of the countless thousands of young people braving police brutality and exposure are the grandchildren of some of the people who'd surrounded Savio and the police car atop which he'd stood after they'd arrested Jack Weinberg for simply handing out leaflets informing people of their civil liberties.<snip>
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