Chickens Running in All Directions (VI)

Since an existential crisis in a community’s and nation’s life is necessarily a moment closely tied to founding violence, or ‘re-founding violence’ as the case may be, can Latvians find the mechanism of peace in a re-founding sacrifice?  

Though the answer may be in the affirmative, before we come to it, we must see what the scapegoat mechanism with regard to Latvia may be. There are many variants as to who is the victim who will serve a community driven to the blink of an eye before it dies.

One of the mechanisms is games of chance or lottery. An old game of chance is known as King’s cake http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_cake : only one of the slices of the cake will contain a bean or a piece of coal. He who gets the piece with the bean or coal is the “chosen” one. As Girard points out, games of chance are the only games specific to man, and closely related to sacred rituals. Whoever chance chooses is also the chosen reconciliator of the community, i.e., sacrifice.

Often however the reconciliator is a person already in the public’s eye, and this may be the case of Latvia, if only because the anonymous reconciliator Adolfs Buķis (d. 1993) was implicitly dismissed as a person of doubtful mental health and the media has conspired with the government to forget him. In other words, the fact that Latvia’s leaders at the time of the foundation of the nation chose a parliamentary form of government continues to dismiss the average citizen as one who may participate in determining the future course of the nation unless officially selected for some office in government by the government.

In short, the symbolic King’s cake, when ready to serve, goes to the first person in Latvia. Such a first person is of course the President of Latvia. Since July 8th of this year, the office of the President of Latvia is belongs to Andris Berzins http://english.ruvr.ru/2011/06/03/51236385.html .

Interestingly, while President Berzins has become citizen number #1, this was not clear to the rest of the world at the time of his election (June 2^nd).

When the news of Berzins elevation to the post of President of Latvia first reached foreign ears, many thought that Berzins was another Berzins http://www.diena.lv/sabiedriba/politika/ekspremjers-andris-berzins-kluvis-par-saeimas-deputatu-775757 . The mix-up occurred because Berzins the President came as if out of the woodwork. This is not to say that the man was not around, but he was never particularly noticed for either initiative or excellence. He was simply there, so to speak, waiting to serve Latvia.

How did Andris Berzins star pop up so suddenly? By all signs, he was chosen quickly and in circumstances shrouded by secrecy. In fact, those closest to Berzins and Berzins himself were not quite prepared by the honor. This was particularly noticeable during the President’s first days in office.

·        When Berzins had a photo-op with high ranked visitor from Estonia, the visitor had to indicate to President Berzins that perhaps the photo-op had lasted long enough and it was time to leave the stage.

·        The President’s common-in-law wife (until July 4^th, when a hasty marriage was arranged) was barely acquainted with the idea of her companion becoming Latvia’s next president.

·        It appears that the new president craves invisibility, what with opting not to spend his off hours at the Jurmala residence of presidents, but preferring an Old Town Riga apartment instead.

·        It is understood that the new President’s out of Riga residence on weekends will be his countryside home. Given that the new President is—among other things—a pensioner receiving Latvia’s highest pension (~ Ls 4500), one may wonder how great the number of visible and invisible police to protect him from irate pensioners who receive Ls 200 per month and less.

To discover the answer for Berzins sudden rise to power, there is an interesting, even plausible story. This writer has it from a well placed and believable source.

The story does not however begin with President Andris Berzins, but the mayor of the City of Ventspils, Aivars Lembergs, Latvia’s richest ‘oligarch’, a man enmeshed in litigation in London over the ownership of a certain number of shares in a company called Vitol.

The story tells that the bets among legal minds favor the possibility, even likelihood, that Aivars Lembers will be arrested when he appears in court in London. While preparing for this turn of events, the mayor of Ventspils took certain steps to protect himself. In effect, he put his weight behind Andris Berzins to make sure that the man from the “Valmiera bunch” (known by Latvians as the Valmiera Group) became the next President of Latvia. The story adds that Lembergs is well acquainted with people of the mentioned former group.

The story then takes another interesting twist. It appears that if the court in London orders the arrest of the mayor of Ventspils, he may be released from jail in London for a jail in the country of his origin, Latvia. Mayor Lembergs’ release to Latvia at a time his man is the President of Latvia means that the mayor escapes the worst of the law, and goes pretty much free. Of course, a story is but a story. Nevertheless, along with deniability as to its veracity, it also is not without certain credibility.

If President Berzins is suspected of being in office as a result of a deal with mayor of Ventspils, in other words, if the story above has veracity, who of the two—Berzins or Lembergs--becomes the scapegoat?

As in a sacred game of chance, we can toss the coin. Call your choice: heads or tails. On the other hand, we may remember that Latvia is lacking a re-founding sacrifice ever since President Karlis Ulmanis failed to make it in 1939 when Latvia was overrun by the Soviet Union.

Does the President of Latvia Andris Berzins have cause to remember President Ulmanis failure, or does he rather remember the why and wherefore he came into office?

Recommended essay (in Latvian): http://www.delfi.lv/news/comment/comment/gundars-davidsons-slazda.d?id=39645309

Chickens Running in All Directions (II)

The Latvian people’s response to their government’s presumptuous liberal capitalist economic policy is to continue to emigrate. The government, but for an occasional crocodile tear, has no objections. One Latvian delegate to the European Union even expressed her displeasure of such emigrants by suggesting that she is skeptical about their loyalties to Latvia. In other words, if you cannot suffer the government’s failures, perhaps Somalian refugees will make better citizens than those Latvians who now live in Ireland, England, Germany, etc.

This brings us to yet another Polanyi observation about the rise of institutional standardization in the nineteenth century, one that I closed the previous blog with, re: “Not economic exploitation, as often assumed, but the disintegration of the cultural environment of the victim is … the cause of disintegration.”

There can be no doubt that Latvia is experiencing yet another step on the continuum of victimization that is due less to economic difficulties than the disintegration of the cultural environment. I have pointed this out in many earlier blogs. As this writer sees it, the cultural disintegration of Latvia has gone through a number of stages, beginning as early as 1209 (Bishop Alberts crusade against Jersika) and continuing on through our own time.

Whether the current stage of cultural disintegration is due to accidentally bad economic choices, or due to an undue influence of oligarchs (taking the place of former “barrons”), or pro-urban prejudices among poorly qualified urbanite ‘cultural ministers’ may, for some, be a matter of debate. However, there is no doubt that Swedish banks have seized for themselves a notable say over Latvia’s sovereignty due to the Latvian government’s uncritical acquiescence in letting a self-regulating global market take its course.

When ‘economic exploitation’ is put next to ‘institutional standardization’, the latter can be seen for the cultural exploitation it is. This exploitation was first expressed clearly by the Latvian “culture workers” under the Soviet system. It was, for example, the cultural worker who diminished the significance of the Johns Festival at midsummer and instituted ‘folk dances’ to a degree never practiced or imagined by the forebears of Latvians. This form of cultural exploitation (pretended to be an unknown) by urbanites at the expense of rural traditions, necessarily results in the diminishment of the latter, but is almost never accompanied by a critical evaluation of its long-term effect.

Another known unknowns that Latvians pretend not to remember, is the turning of the festival of Johns (midsummer) into folklore. This ‘change’ begins no later than the nineteenth century with the arrival in Latvia of the Herrnhuters, but picks up pace when the neo-Christian Lutheran church began to marginalize the Herrnhuter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravian_Church movement. The marginalization was carried out by the Lutheran church presuming for itself the authority of “religion of State”. Support from the state was of course received. This is not to say that the Russian Orthodox Church did not play a role in the marginalization, but that is quite another story.

It is amazing how quickly under Lutheran tutelage the Latvians forgot about the Herrnhuter movement, which for all its neo-Christian elements was founded on an earlier arch-Christian layer of belief in the West. Assuming that the Children of Johns, Herrnhuters, Hussites, et all occupied a transitional ground in the evolution of modern Christianity, the Latvian Children of Johns may be presumed to have been connected, both, to Eastern arch-Christians and orally communicated Christianity http://www.rbc.org/questionsDetail.aspx?id=59980 . This is not to say that such a memory was convenient to either the Herrnhuters or the Lutherans, but all three of said Christian sects represent three separate ways of interpreting Christianity. The reader may check out the history of the Hussite movement http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07585a.htm. It is possible that the Hussites and others bear the meme of rebellion passed to the future by the existential will of the “heretic” Cathars’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hussite to live.

To return to the political scene in Latvia today.

Though change is natural and inevitable, it does not imply a repetition of the past as a catastrophe. Unfortunately, in Latvia ‘change’ has come to mean a catastrophe, because violence has been such a constant. The latest catastrophe to visit Latvians is through a now former President Zatlers and recently installed President Berzins.

Zatlers’ failure to follow through on his initiative to dismiss the Saeima with aggressive argumentation means the letting go of perhaps the last opportunity to discuss in depth what ails Latvia. Without questioning the sincerity of the former President, his failure to debate, at the same time that he presumes to name his reform party in his name (a name as yet untested in political arts) is a presumption that suggests an almost unbelievable lack of familiarity with things political, popular and populist in nature.

As for President Berzins, he is, among other things, a former banker. It is not by chance that he takes office at a time Latvia is continuing to experience a boom in out migration. Indeed, it is apparent that President Berzins has no will to reverse the boom, because by all evidence he is a “market man” and knows how a self-correcting market operates.

Recommended essay (in Latvian): http://www.delfi.lv/news/comment/comment/gundars-davidsons-slazda.d?id=39645309

Chickens Running in All Directions (I)

To continue :

According to the economist Karl Polanyi (1886-1964)  http://uncharted.org/frownland/books/Polanyi/POLANYI%20KARL%20-%20The%20Great%20Transformation%20-%20v.1.0.html “…by the end of the nineteenth century the peoples of the world were institutionally standardized to a degree unknown before.”

Though Polanyi refers to the 19^th century, what he had in mind was not only that one century or the universal bureaucratic infrastructure crabbing and sterilizing governments, but how that same standardization “…enforced [a] uniformity of domestic systems [which] hovered as a permanent threat over the freedom of national development….”.  The result was, as Polanyi calls it “anarchistic sovereignty”, which became “…a hindrance to all effective forms of international cooperation….”

The failure of the international system in the 1920s and 1930s or as Polanyi says, “the passing of capitalist internationalism”, then “…let lose the energies of history …, the tracks of which were laid down by the tendencies inherent in a market society.”

The above thought may be carried forward to Latvia today, because the Latvian government has for all these years of failed capitalist internationalism presumed to join (in the name of Latvians) that very failure, justifying the course as the only way to escape the Bolsheviks. While such a presumption is not of all Latvians, it was presumed such by those who bought into the system of institutional standardization, which had preoccupied so much of the energies of the 19^th century.

The standardized system became the system in Latvia today by way of liberal capitalism teaming up with individual rights and buying with ‘good’ money a sustained period of growth. Even so, though a significant number of people in the West have indeed had access to ‘good’ money, their sustainability and their money is illusory. The Latvian government however does not see it thus and has no intentions of hiring scholars and other experts to research alternatives for any eventuality.

Too, both liberal capitalism and human rights became identified with ‘freedom’ as sold by a more or less libertarian America in a fit of temporary success. The Latvian-Americans who arrived in America mid-20^th century were America’s vanguard. They were not ones to discover the ebb in the tide of a free and self-controlling market and, therefore, in of the potential damage to their own that an ebb in their prescribed course would bring.  

Most Latvians fleeing the Soviets went to Germany (mostly) and then migrated to other Western countries (particularly the U.S.A.) during the late 1940s and early 1950s. As their arrival in America coincided with America’s and Western Europe’s post WW2 economic boom, the ‘right way’ of both politics and the economy for Latvians became what Polanyi called “failed capitalist internationalism”. In other words, few people, let alone Latvians, remembered Polanyi’s observation or perceived it as prescient http://ardictionary.com/Prescient/11143 .

This is one of the reasons why the Latvian government, having escaped the clutches of the Soviet Union, continued with its rightward tilt. Not surprisingly, Latvia is now caught up in the collapse of capitalist internationalism the second time around, this time however known by the name ‘globalization’ a la neo-liberal capitalism. And not surprisingly, Latvian politicians and business leaders continue to insist that no such collapse is taking place or is ever likely to take place.

All the same, the economic collapse of the West along with the value of its monies—the dollar and the euro—is foreseeable more clearly than ever. Given that economically Latvia is among the last of the European Union’s countries, it ought to be among the first to jump off the wagon known to be running out of tracks.

It is interesting that with the passing into retirement of President Valdis Zatlers [assuming that Zatler’s Reform Party will fail due to an early stall] and the aggressive implant of President Andris Berzins as the new President by the market forces, the opportunity—perhaps the last—for Latvians to escape death as a singularity has passed.

Currently the ‘word’ of the Latvian government is best expressed by the mantra: “Latvia is an example to the rest of the world”, sometimes also called “The Latvian Option” http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/dec/20/latvia-debt-economy-europe-austerity / . The Prime Minister has written a book called “How Latvia came through the financial crisis” http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xjn59w_latvian-prime-minister-launches-his-book-about-financial-crisis_news , though no crisis has as yet been overcome.

No, no one in Latvia is jumping off the wagon or the system.

Though Latvia’s wagon has no engine, it rolls on. Though the system is now run by bad or fiat money, and few Latvians of former times would recognize themselves in the world of today, the cultural vacuum or debasement smiles on. To end with the words of Karl Polanyi: “Not economic exploitation, as often assumed, but the disintegration of the cultural environment of the victim is … the cause of disintegration ”.

Part 2 to follow.