COMMUNIQUE
Solidarity with Bergtraum Students!
On 06, Mar 2012 | No Comments | In COMMUNIQUE | By secontent
Last Thursday dozens of students at Manhattan’s most overcrowded school fought with violent pigs and school staff as they tried to brutally repress the student body. In the chaotic video (now removed from Youtube), one can spot numerous incidences of officers physically attacking students simply for verbally expressing their rage at their abusive apparatus of school security. We’re happy to see at least a couple students with the confidence to fight back, and we want to offer any sort of solidarity these students now need as they become further criminalized for standing up for themselves and classmates.
(If you’re a Bergtraum student use the contact form to get in touch!)
In December 2010, students rioted when the principal Andrea Lewis demeaned her students by revoking their “bathroom privileges.” One officer was sent to the hospital after the ensuing unrest. In the next week, NYPD installed metal detectors. Dozens of students skipped school to protest the indignity. Those who did attend class had their electronics confiscated by the police. 500 phones were seized. There is perhaps no social set as volatile as high school students. Entrapped in boredom, humiliated by universal condescension by parents, teachers, and administrators, living in a world more policed than even the otherwise massively pig-infested streets of the City, their resentment of those who put them in this condition is a ticking time-bomb. It is no wonder, then, to see the system’s hatred of the poor, the young, and the disobedient manifest itself so openly in spectacles like these. It is also telling to see how futile these forces would be if the student body was more confident and unified.
As some community-organizing oriented groups seek to show their solidarity with students by defending public schools against privatization, we as anti-authoritarians are opposed to the school as a system of obedience and indoctrination. Thus, we have no hopes for saving the public schools. Instead, we hope to see them, along with prisons and asylums, fully taken over by their interned, and either revolutionized or destroyed. We are also aware this can only be done with the solidarity of those outside the institutions walls. We hope to see May Day as a first step in uniting students and their allies citywide in this effort.
Efforts of the General Strike Public Redcoration Committee
