Chickens Running in All Directions (VIII)



A 'sovereign' Latvian government



In the previous blog, I wrote that “The reconciliatory event … must be an event of death …, because only death has sufficient charisma to impress and persuade the skeptical.”

In our day the reconciliation is of course to be accomplished by means of a democratically elected government. This is well and good. However, what does one do when the democracy turns out to be a self-enclosed system that does not recognize anything outside itself? Such a system victimizes ‘democracy’, and in due course becomes a unipolar government with the people tending more and more to gather on the unacknowledged other end, the other pole. In Latvia these 'other' people are called “populists”.

I also wrote that Latvia, its sovereignty in control of foreign banks, was in the process of desacralizing its sovereignty, and on its way to becoming an administrative area of the European Union by the name of Latvia. I pointed out that it was noteworthy that

“Two of the proxies [of European banks] doing the administering are already in place and easily identifiable. One is the President of Latvia, Andris Berzins http://www.planetrulers.com/latvia-president/ , while the other is Latvia’s Finance Minister Andris Vilks http://www.mk.gov.lv/en/mk/sastavs/vilks/ .”

A gathering of Latvian populists

Of course, a federated Europe has many opponents, not least among the Latvians. This may explain the fiction among some Latvians that Latvia is still a sovereign country. However, if the supporters of sovereignty are to take themselves seriously, the fact that the President of Latvia and its Finance Minister are, so to speak, Trojan horses of EU banks and the EU, the natives must be spending sleepless nights as they try to figure out how to get the horses removed from Troy’s marketplace. Can the Latvians remove said office occupants from said offices?

Some critics claim that Latvia has been stolen from its people. In this writer’s opinion, Latvia has not only been stolen, but has been robbed naked (izlaupīta līdz kailumam) as well,

·        what with the banks (plus the IMF and the ECB) encouraging Latvians as yet uneducated in liberal capitalist ways to borrow money that they were unlikely to be able to pay back, thereby rendering them helpless to resist de-sovereignization;

·        not to mention former Soviet apparatchiks blossoming into oligarchs with the help of, among other things, ‘the Harvard Boys’ http://michael-hudson.com/2011/08/russia%e2%80%99s-economic-interests-part-1/ , a wonder previously presumed only for the fern blossom on Midsummer’s eve;

·        by cashing in chips of the above, in place not only of the Trojan horses, but by way of said institutions and banks causing unemployment in Latvia, and forcing people (up to 20%) to emigrate to other countries to earn a living;

·        by causing deforestation of Latvia by way of inducing a debt crisis (a half, ~50%, of Latvia’s exports are in wood products, most of it raw timber), at the same time as stopping development of Latvia by permitting only well endowed foreign industries representing the status quo to invest in Latvia (ha, ha);

·        by all the above producing a demographic crisis over which the current Latvian leadership has but hypocritical concern. It is unlikely that the President of Latvia and Finance Minister will turn in their high retirement pay and salary, as the case may be, for Latvia regaining sovereignty.

Banks keeping Latvians employed

Thus, when speaking of death, we are actually speaking only of the death of Latvia as a sovereign nation. Whether an individual’s death as a scapegoat can re-found a nation through a sacrificial death in our time, as Karlis Ulmanis had an opportunity to do and become (but failed to) is doubtful.

Professor Rene Girard, whom I have quoted in a number of preceding blogs with regard to the scapegoat, is insightful not only in his analysis of the scapegoat syndrome. He also tells us that much of the literature of the Middle Ages is a ‘victimage mechanism’. Latvians are not yet conscious of this mechanism. For example, few Latvians realize that the 13^th century Chronicle of Henry (Indriķa hronika) http://www.indopedia.org/index.php?title=Chronicle_of_Henry_of_Livonia seeks to victimize ‘pagan’ (actually, pa-yan) proto-Latvians and that the victimization causes a substantial slaughter of native inhabitants and the destruction of their culture—of which their religion is a part.

A road somewhere in Latvia

As a consequence, Latvians today are greatly influenced by the victim syndrome. The best example of victimization is imprinted in the Latvian language itself. A language rich in endearing words (dear may become dearie, etc.), today this facility has become a grammatical formality (called a diminutive), a phenomenon vaguely remembered, seldom used. The endearing word is only rarely seen in the media. With all the proof that is necessary to call this linguistic phenomenon of the Latvian language a ‘term of endearment’, even the embodiment of the proto-Latvian people’s religion, the victims’ descendants chose to call a diminutive instead. No wonder we note with amazement the passivity (hailed by the apparatchiks of the Latvian government) of the Latvian populace when it comes to making political demands.

The victim of course cannot victimize, because to be a victim means to be inhibited, and any desire to act is tied in a Gordian knot http://www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_9_01.html . The state of finding one’s self a victim is a form of death that is sometimes known as living death.

This is why the question for Latvians is not how to be healed of the victim syndrome, but what steps to take when that syndrome has let slip out of hand national sovereignty and sees it replaced with a novel substitute: Latvia as an Administrative District of the European Union. The living dead then find themselves in an altogether ‘other’ state, perhaps as cooks in a kitchen trying to write a recipe for a system that transcends the unipolar world.

A burning issue at the core of  Latvian applewood

Is Latvia perhaps on the verge of untying the Gordian knot of political inactivity into which they have been tied by their unipolar government? Sometimes when something is untied, it unravels or a cover comes off with a whoosh.