Anomalous Wave

This is stolen from a message written by someone else.

on nov 29 all of italian public education system will take it to streets once again, starting with teachers, children, parents and arriving at university students and precarious researchers. what’s noteworthy is that also high school students (in many ways the forerunner of the onda) have started holding lessons in public squares as universities have been doing in the past few weeks

dec 12: GENERAL STRIKE called halfheartedly (and for halfaday) by CGIL, italy’s largest (socdem) union now deserted by the other two mainstream unions, especially CISL which has turned into a bedfellow of mr b, while CUB-COBAS-SdL have called it for the whole day. It’s because of the students that this general strike has become possible. And they will be the bulk of the people on the streets that day, also the recurrence of the piazza fontana carnage.

News from Rome: the incident of Piazza Navona of 29 October is now being processed by the magistrate. That day, during an authorized demonstration against the Gelmini decree, a fight broke out. A group of neofascists entered the piazza, armed with sticks, prepared to attack the demonstrators.

Now, the magistrate has presented its hypothesis: it was not an attack, but a symmetrical fight between two groups. And therefore, 15 university students have been summoned to court. This is so obvious distortion of facts, it’s almost unbelievable. This reminds of the case from last spring, when a group of neofascists attacked students at the entrance of Sapienza: also in this case, the magistrate (and the media) tried to make it look like "a clash between opposite extremisms".

Today at Sapienza, there was a press conference about the incident and the process, organized by students themselves.  "These days we’ll keep on saying ‘we are not afraid’: not afraid to affirm the antifascist quality of this movement, and not afraid of these summons. We are not afraid of a government which tries to intimidate and criminalize us with these accusations. We are not afraid, and therefore we’ll keep on producing moments of conflict and protest with intelligence and with determination, which have characterized us until now."

Pro-Gelmini folks have put out a calendar with 12 female students from Emilia posing nude or semi-nude "to give their support for the Gelmini decree". No joke.