A very subversive and controversial American band was started back in Los Angeles California in 1991.
They were revolutionary and they were good. They were “Rage Against The Machine”.
Whether one likes their music or not is not necessarily important, but what is more important, was their radical political and social messages decrying the oppression of the poor, globalization, in addition to other causes.
The band would perform on Saturday Night Live in 1996, singing “Bulls On Parade” from their “Evil Empire” album, that would shoot to number one on the Billboard charts that year.
Rage opened up for the great Irish rockers U2 in 1997, and all of their profits went to support social organizations including U.N.I.T.E., Women Alive, and the Zapatista Front for National Liberation.
To say the least, lead singer Zach De la Rocha, and guitarist Tom Morello certainly put their money where their mouths were.
The bands debut album “Rage Against The Machine”, with it’s driving anthem for equality and social justice showed a Vietnamese Buddhist monk burning himself to death on the cover. The song “Killing In The Name” would achieve Platinum album status.
This monk would be on the cover of many magazines when I was a young kid. It was beautiful, and yet so horrific at the same time.
President Diem whom we backed during that terrible Vietnam War was killing Buddhist monks and many others. The monk burnt himself to death in protest of the brutal Diem regime.
Diem was also passionately anti-Communist. Tortures and killings of “communist suspects” were committed on a daily basis. The death toll was put at around 50,000 with 75,000 imprisonments, and Diem’s effort extended beyond communists to anti-communist dissidents and anti-corruption whistleblowers. [26] Wikipedeia.
The Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Chiapas, Mexico, is an armed revolutionary group whom “Rage Against The Machine” supported in the 1990’s.
The Zapatista’s opposed globalization, and the effects that it had upon the peasants and their people’s indigenous way of life, and some consider them to be the first “post-modern” revolution. They wanted to protect their own resources and land, in addition to their jobs that were being wiped out by NAFTA and cheaply mass -produced American genetically modified agricultural imports. NAFTA and the removal of Article 27 from the Mexican Constitution, which previously guaranteed land reparations to the indigenous peoples of Mexico, helped to cement their cultural, familial, and social devastation.
So this became an axe to grind with Zach de La Rocha and “Rage Against The Machine”, after NAFTA was signed into law under the Clinton Administration.
De la Rocha has been particularly outspoken on the cause of the EZLN. He explained the importance of the cause to him personally:
“ It is important for me, as a popular artist, to make clear to the governments of the United States and Mexico that despite the strategy of fear and intimidation to foreigners, despite their weapons, despite their immigration laws and military reserves, they will never be able to isolate the Zapatista communities from the people in the United States… Through concerts, videos, interviews, broadcasting of information at concerts, and our songs’ lyrics we have placed within reach of young people, our audience, the experiences of the Zapatistas; we act as facilitators of the ways in which they can participate and put them in contact with the organization and the Zapatista support committees in the United States”. [46] Wikipedia.
Lead singer de La Rocha of Rage would take many trips to Chiapas, Mexico to help the people.
At a concert in Coachella Valley, California, “RAGES” lead singer Zach De la Rocha would quote his good friend Noam Chomsky, that would later be used by Fox News against them suggesting that the President of the United States should be assassinated.
The radical and wild haired Zach would say at the concert,
“A good friend of ours once said that if the same laws were applied to U.S. presidents as were applied to the Nazis after World War II [...] every single one of them, every last rich white one of them from Truman on, would have been hung to death and shot—and this current administration is no exception. They should be hung, and tried, and shot. As any war criminal should be”. [35] Wikipedia.
At another concert Zach would go off on Fox News and “Hannity and Colmes” by saying, “A couple of months ago, those fascist motherfuckers at the Fox News Network attempted to pin this band into a corner by suggesting that we said that the president should be assassinated. Nah, what we said was that he should be brought to trial as a war criminal and hung and shot. THAT’S what we said. And we don’t back away from the position because the real assassinator is Bush and Cheney and the whole administration for the lives they have destroyed here and in Iraq.
They’re the ones. And what they refused to air which was far more provocative in my mind and in the minds of my bandmates is this: this system has become so brutal and vicious and cruel that it needs to start wars and profit from the destruction around the world in order to survive as a world power. THAT’s what we said. And we refuse not to stand up, we refuse to back down from that position”…[44]
The Zapatista’s continue to fight for change, but not through the muzzle of a gun anymore, as they were crushed by the Mexican military back in the 90’s. They disseminate they’re causes and conditions to the world by the use of the internet to expand their base of support.
The band “RAGE” had, and still has balls, and so where are all the musicians today that have a social conscience and a passion for the poor and downtrodden, and are willing to “stick their necks out”? and I mean for anything other than fame and fortune.
