Endangered species either tell our story or only the version of the story told by those who made us become extinct will remain.
On summer nights, on the doorstep of my house, in a public housing neighborhood reached by a dirt road on the outskirts of Plasencia (Extremadura) in the early seventies of the last century, I listened to the stories told by a neighbor who knew how to tell all the stories in the world. He on a cattail chair, the others on the ground or standing. Up to so many. Seduced storytelling is power.
My nephew says that Israel bombs Gaza because the Palestinians had already attacked Israel, on October 7, 2023. In his history, nothing happens before October 7. Blank page. There is no 1948, nor 1967. Nor the Nakba, nor 77 years of colonial occupation. Neither England, nor the unimplemented UN resolutions… The story of a child without memory. The Community of Madrid wants them without memory, which threatens the educational centers that explain the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
But girls and boys always ask questions. And there are always teachers or aunts who respond, while raging education departments wish everyone were amnesiac.
A genocide is a planned mass extinction strategy. Whoever executes him never calls it genocide. And whoever tells it must tell complex stories, without blank pages. My neighbor told us complex stories. He dwelt on details that had nothing to do with it, we thought while listening to him. But then it always ended up making us exclaim: Oh, of course, that’s why before…!
Everything had been planned beforehand. And everything was understood later. Could this be the case in the conspiracy that is suffocating the public university?
The world works well if 5% of the population manages knowledge and 95% are satisfied with stories full of blank pages. Easy stories for an amnesiac audience
For example, the story of President Ayuso: Public universities are idiots, they don’t know how to manage, they lack an entrepreneurial mentality. We have to put an end to this.
A blank page in this story: the growth of private universities is supported by the growth in debt of families, who must take out loans to finance their children’s careers. In five years, in Spain, loans for studies have increased by 60%. One in seven credits requested is for study.
Another blank page: no public university has been created in Spain in the 21st century, but 46 private ones have been opened. This is not due to the law of supply and demand, because the majority prefer to study in public schools. But creating private universities is easy, they are required less than public ones and the Government of the Community of Madrid lets them pass even if they don’t meet the requirements.
The threat of extinction falls on the possibility of building a less unequal society
Another blank page: the Community of Madrid offers as credit to the public university what should be paid by law. They’re fine with suffocating. With 5% of the population properly educated at elite universities, they simply need to direct the lives of the remaining 95%. Furthermore, that 95% always have the option of going into debt to pay for a title at a beach bar. Ayuso sees no reason to finance with public money the university studies of many middle-class people who are only expected to efficiently consume amnesiac stories and accept salaries lower than the average rent.
When we talk about 5% versus 95%, 60% credit growth, and an expansion of the private versus a contraction of the public (in 1995 there were 10 private versus 45 public and today there are 46 versus 50), we’re talking about structure. The class struggle today is played with those numbers. The threat of extinction falls on the possibility of building a less unequal society, where people who live on unpaved roads as children can one day also become university professors.
The university goes on strike in Madrid on 26 and 27 November. It’s not just a strike for funding 1% of GDP. It is not a strike just to demand that the Community of Madrid respect the LOSU. It’s not a strike just to be able to turn on the lights in the classrooms. Each of these reasons alone would be enough to support a call for a strike.
It is a strike against the extinction of article two of the Spanish Constitution of 1978. Against the extinction of the welfare state. And of the entire tradition of political thought that made the existence of that article possible.
