Text of a leaflet distributed and fly posted in the city and near the University of Salento
The fact that TAP is not only an energy infrastructure but it also involves the idea of a world was made even more obvious on 20th November, as parliament members, ENI and TAP executives and shit like that were gathered together during a conference organized at the University of Lecce. The conference was interrupted owing to protests inside and outside the hall and many showed indignation at the role of the University, openly lined up on the side of the powerful. However the fact that the University is not a cradle of free thought but a factory of technicians who are to run the world should be known to everybody. As they are constrained by exams, debts and credits, students have no longer the time to reflect, discuss, oppose. Except in rare and sporadic occasions, when the routine of classes and exams is interrupted by some awareness that can’t be postponed.
However universities are normally at the service of the most powerful. It is sufficient to think of the very tight link between University and war, of research financed for military and control purposes, of the interference that big lobbies have over universities so that they can influence studies which have undisputable scientific value but which actually serve the profits of some multinationals.
The same goes for the University of Salento, which invests all its energies in nanotechnologies and engineering.
Now the University of Salento openly collaborates with TAP, as it helps with the monitoring of the olive trees uprooted by the multinational to build the gas pipeline, hosts conferences whose speakers are persons involved in massacres like TAP country manager Michele Elia, and warmongers like ENI executives, whose responsibilities in Libya are strictly linked to the death in the sea of thousands of desperate people. Finally, through the voice of its professors like Boero’s, [the University] defends what can’t be defended by intervening in the press in order to give reassurances on the safety and utility of the gas pipeline and to give credibility to a harmful and imposed work that the majority of people don’t want.
Among other things Mr Boero can’t even claim to be impartial, as he has been given commissions directly paid by TAP for years; for this reason he’s simply an accomplice of the devastation that TAP wants to bring over the lands where it is to go through.
But if the university is no longer a factory of idea and agora of critical thinking, it can always become a place of conflict: between the builders of a world made of war and exploitation and those who want to destroy it.
And so against TAP, let’s block everything!
Enemies of TAP
Translated by act for freedom now!
