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.

The following blogspots center on a variety of subjects, which I have initiated. You are invited to look and respond.

http://esoschronicles.blogspot.com/ Not-Violence main subject

http://melnaysjanis.blogspot.com/ Temple of Janis (John) site

http://the-not-voter.blogspot.com/ Arguments for systems change

http://the4thawakening.blogspot.com/ Sacrificial crisis in Latvia

http://oedipusrexrewritten.blogspot.com/ Oedipus Rex Rewritten

I suggest you look at the links imbedded in these blogs or at the end of the blog as an integral part of my argument.

The 4^th Awakening

31 The Whispers of Crazy Jane

© Eso Anton Benjamins

The debates over the great migrations of the European people of a thousand and more years ago are by no means over. Contrary to the map provided by the Wikipedia link above (great migrations), I keep an ear open to the arguments of Anatoly Fomenko. I quite admit to borrowing from both Scaligari's and Fomenko's chronological sketches and using these according to my intuition. I make no guarantees to myself or anyone else over the ultimate accuracy of my “picture”. Still, like most everyone else, I seek to discover a coherent scenery out of a present that I distrust.

I tend to accept Fomenko's thesis—more or less—that so-called “ancient Egypt” is a geographical area in the dessert straddling the Nile valley, which served as a cemetery for ancient kings, and that many of these kings came from about the Black Sea region, though not exclusively.

I also agree that there never was an “ancient” Jerusalem, but that there were many. These were more or less urban centers that served as sacrificial centers and, thus, were generetrixs of proto-modern societies. My logic is based on my own studies, given a liberal mixture of various readings, lately much contributed by Rene Gerard and his theory of the role sacrifice played in the creation of a community. Incidentally, I believe that Jerusalem is a cognate of Yaroslav, Jersika, and no doubt other yet to be discovered place names. The name arises from the name “lamb”, which is pronounced “yehrs” in Latvian. The other half of the name “salem” quite matches that of “slav”, the first lending itself to be interpreted as “peace”, the second as “holy” or “praise be”. The name of Jerusalem may contain a distant echo of the name “avis” (Ave!), sheep in Latvian, re Ram-ava, the “Ram” part possibly echoing to a distant “Jeru”. The English word “ram”, meaning a male sheep, as well as the act of butting through, and making way.

As for the city of Jerusalem as it is today, I am impressed by a map of about the time of Napoleon on which the city of Jerusalem does not appear. This map is probably an overlooked sample of the hundreds of maps that were burned along with books by the neo-Christian rewriters of history. As we know, the Arabs call Jerusalem as Al Quds. If the dry sands of the desert in Egypt were in fact the preferred burial ground for ancient kings, Al Quds may have served as a stopover point for those who transported the dead. The city may have served as much as a hospice as a trade center for spices much in demand by the embalmers trade. The embalmers’ magic was as if restoring the body of the dead to eternal life.

In any event, if the proto-Latvian Jersika (possibly a fort, a castle, a market) has its origins in a sacrificial center and if it still was that in the 13^th century, there are innumerable reasons why the Germanic invaders and the secularizing priests they supported wanted Jersika off the map. It is no secret that Bishop Albert hoped that he could turn Riga in a Jerusalem. Had he succeeded, perhaps he would have renamed it Star-ost.

The proto-Latvian Jersika-Jerusalem was effectively removed from the map around 1209 by Bishop Albert. The bishop sent into oblivion what may well have been a centre of Johns, an arch-Christian center. With it went  the left wing of Christianity (Krust + Jahni), which was founded on sacrifice. In came the right wing of Christianity. It facilitated the advance of the current secular age by eliminating sacrifice altogether.

If we follow this rough outline of history, then it is to be expected that the consequences of the elimination of sacrifice should bring society to its apocalyptic margins at which we find ourselves today. Girard calls it “sacrificial crisis”. As bankers rake in money right and left from the poor, Jesus, the Son of God, sits on his throne in heaven and wonders what name he went by among the living.

So, trying to help Jesus out a little, I now come back to Clever John and his visit to the Sun Mountain, the story I left several blogs behind. As we then saw, Clever John was not only making use of the gullibility of his brothers and having an adventure or two at their expense, but he was also ready to let Crazy Jane be killed as if it were no great matter—as long as it advanced his cause.

Meeting no serious obstacles, Clever John then decided to visit with the Sun Herself. He had, after all, fooled Crazy Jane and stolen a number of valuable aids from her: a ring, a neckerchief, two pair of the Devil’s boots; and, not least, he exchanged a horse for a cricket by taking advantage of his brothers’ gullibility.

However, his mother the Sun, gave Clever John his comeuppance. As soon as John came into Her garden atop Sun Mountain, She presented him with a coat of a brown bear. In the language of myth, this effectively turned Clever John into a bear. And if we remember something of ancient stories, a bear was the sacrificial scapegoat—right or wrong—of a community wronged and seeking someone to blame.

I am sorry to say that what remains of the fantastic tale which I have been attempting to reconstruct (some may say with too much creativity) is all down hill from now. If the first and second parts of the story was part of the Via Dolorosa of Clever John going up the mountain, we are now on the Via Dolorosa of Clever John going down.

The Story of Crazy Jane and Clever John, Part 3

(…story begins at blog 15),

Clever John rubbed the ring with the kerchief for all it was worth. For a long time nothing at all happened. Clever John was ready to throw the ring and kerchief away, when he saw right before his eyes Crazy Jane. She was not standing before him as if she had come at his bidding, but Clever John saw her emerge out of the fog of his own eyes, She stood in the Ahdere river and lifted and poured bucket after bucket of water in and out of the river.

“Oh dear!” exclaimed Clever John, “why did I not think of it before. Of course! Crazy Jane! I love her!”

Then Clever John explained to himself why it is that he loved Crazy Jane: “If I but put a sieve across the empty bottom of the bucket, Crazy Jane will soon collect me as much gold as I need and more. She will get me my Princess in no time at all.”

But by then Crazy Jane had caught up to her involuntary image and appeared before Clever John in person.

“I read your thoughts, Clever John,” said Crazy Jane, “and they are not good. Yes, there is gold in the river, but there is so little of it that it would take a thousand years for me to get as much as you need. You see, the gold sifts down to the bottom of the river from the thin golden film that the Sun lays across the Ahdere on sunny days. Besides, most of it is used up by Mother Death, who collects it to cover the dead with.”

“That is bad news,” said Clever John.

“Do not despair, Clever John,” said Crazy Jane, “there is another way if you only hand me back my father’s boots.”

(To be continued.)

Asterisks & Links of Interest

Unchanged Feature: What is reality, what is myth?

http://www.voltairenet.org/article167588.html

Changing Feature: In the preceding posts, I started a compilation of a series of video clips, which when seen as a linear sequence tell a story in a telling context. This is a continuous story. If it began in the past, now it is moving parallel to the day we live. Note what is happening around you. Put this clip as a tail to your blog http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCctqbRrsBQ so others may see. The origin of this post is at http://the4thawakening.blogspot.com/ 

The following blogspots center on a variety of subjects, which I have initiated. You are invited to look and respond.

http://esoschronicles.blogspot.com/ Not-Violence main subject

http://melnaysjanis.blogspot.com/ Temple of Janis (John) site

http://the-not-voter.blogspot.com/ Arguments for systems change

http://the4thawakening.blogspot.com/ Sacrificial crisis in Latvia

http://oedipusrexrewritten.blogspot.com/ Oedipus Rex Rewritten

I suggest you look at the links imbedded in these blogs or at the end of the blog as an integral part of my argument.

The 4^th Awakening

30 How to Tie Tongue (3)

© Eso Anton Benjamins

Europe is now sixty-five years past when the “great” powers engaged in a suicidal war that devastated them, and devastated the small nations of Europe even more. The people emerged from that war with minced memes and were more than happy to settle on a steady job, be earning money, become consumers, and as long as the conditions of the “great” Marshall Plan of easy money (or unaware indebtedness) prevailed, they were ready to sleepwalk into the future under almost anyone’s leadership. As by some consensual meme, they went without looking into the pits were the lions, wolves, and gladiators were thrown after falling dead in the Coliseum.

Under the “great” Marshall Plan (U.S.) many nations lost their identity. However, some did not lose it, and this was because their survival was accidental. Latvia is one such accidental survivor. After World War II, Latvians were further dispersed both within and without their and Soviet borders; and the meme of the early twenty years of independence (the so-called presidents Chakste and Ulmanis years) was hung up by the Soviets to dry out whatever waters of history remained in it.

Certain tough sinews did not however dry out, but swelled up with life when the time had come for the Soviet Union to collapse. The trouble was that the moisture that filled the rejuvenated fibres found that the old meme of liberty had not kept up with the times. As a result, the reviving Latvian leadership failed to understand that an identity for a nation in the post-WW2 world is in an of itself fine, while an exclusively ethnic identity is not.

While the European West has not quite managed to overcome its ethnic and questionably ethnic history, it has overcome it sufficiently to begin thinking of expanding its consciousness. This is dramatically expressed in the invitation of the NATO countries for Russia to join them.

The difficulty is with the fact that behind NATO stands the U.S. Empire, and Russia is not about to succumb to the U.S. no matter how many NATO and U.S. rockets surround it. This is why from an idealistic point of view, the foreign policy of Latvia ought to be neutral until Europe discovers a way to resign from NATO and create its own military or Russia find a way to become part of a federation that includes NATO. While waiting in the neutral ether, Latvia and Latvians would be wise to reposition themselves as one collective.

Belonging to NATO encourages Latvia’s zionationalists (secular select ethnic nationalists) to wing it West and surrender their geo-strategic position (and their potential as a European capital) to the NATO military machine in return for EU highlighting the interests of post-Soviet-Latvian parliamentarian “natives”. As I have pointed out, native Latvians possess a very limited sense of their past at this time. That observation extends to most Latvians sixty years old and younger. If those older than sixty have an influence on those who come after them, they ought to tilt toward interpretations and perspectives of history not filtered through the view finder of Latvia circa 1918-1945. There are still many seventy years old and older, who may not wish to hear of this, nevertheless, this is precisely why I am pointing to the missing history proto-Latvians brought to self-consciousness by way of the Herrnhuters. To leave over a hundred years of history in a zionationalist hole hurts the truth, politics, and the nation.

Why were the Herrnhuters repressed? They came to proto-Latvia from deep within the West. They were of the West. They were not “oriental despots”. Was there something wrong with them?

Truth is that they carried with them a virus, and that virus was the same that arch-Latvians knew by way of the name of the Jersika (1209) and the world order that preceded the pre-Jersika era. In other words, a survivor of that distant era came from the West to link up with a meme of proto-Latvians who were still in possession of a similar meme going back to when Livonia was covered by forests. The Herrnhuters were an offspring of the (Jan) Hussites, who were offsprings of the Lollards in England (…was Robin Hood of the great Robin Wood perhaps one?), who were once linked to the people on French coast and through them to the lands of the Cathars and Bogomils.

Too far fetched? If so, we minimize the importance of proto-Latvians and the suffusion of their memory meme with the Herrnhuter meme. We continue to minimize and overlook our and Herrnhuter connection to Jersika, because we are forbidden to look that way by the political establishment still. I suggest that this is to the psychological distress of the proto-Latvian meme within us to this today.

The Baltic heirs of the Herrnhuters burned down a great number of German manors in Latvia’s Vidzeme region, once a Herrnhuter stronghold. While not many westernized Latvians sympathize with the Latvian soldiers who went Red and became Bolsheviks, their movement was of utmost earnestness, and we dismiss their earnestness to our peril. The short lived Iscolat Republic (founded December, 1917), led by the Bolshevik Fric Rozinsh, had not in any way dishonoured itself, though talk of the first signs of “red terror” are happily speculated on by historians oriented to the western way of thinking. What was of essence to the Herrnhuters (whether German or proto-Latvian origin) was to escape their explicitly unequal status vis a vis the Baltic Germans and their barons. That concern reflects back in my life to my great-great grandmother (1770-?), daughter of one who named himself “Liberts”, said daughter marrying one Gusts (= August = Au-just?) fathered by one Andžs (Aeinas?). In other words, liberty, equality are summoned in the fullness of their gifts, because their repression was and never is more than just tolerated.

Though it is unlikely that Latvia wants to preserve a zionationalist identity, the repressions of the memory meme of the people of Latvia (whether of Latvian, Russian, or other national origin) have not succeeded entirely. Latvians have preserved a distinct self-consciousness. The accidental location of Latvia at the geographical centre of Europe has helped in the preservation process, because the location facilitates the desire to stand out. The object of desire, the princess, is—quite reasonably—the ritual of Johns Eve on Midsummer, the arch-Christian ritual that celebrates the overcoming of the sacrificial crisis.

The loss of financial sovereignty and such accommodations as the human psyche may make if easy money is for the taking, has complicated and possibly makes it impossible to create an entity lacking in individuated national identities. Then again, paradoxically, the loss of financial sovereignty may help Latvians of all national and linguistic origins to regain their identity. To be sure such a heretofore repressed identity is unlikely to be supported by post-Herrnhuter supra (ethnic) nationalists and neo-Christian neo-capitalists.

Naked reality suggests that the language policy of the Latvian government is ill advised, if for no other reason than its ethnic population finds itself in a demographic death spiral. The nation cannot afford polarization of its citizens, and has to substitute its partidocratic parliamentary mind set (meme) with a nationalism of greater breadth than its elites have been willing to offer so far.

The Story of Crazy Jane and Clever John, Part 3 (…story begins at blog 15), in the next blog. Less the reader forget, we left Clever John despairing of discovering a pile of gold and, therefore, rubbing the ring he was given by Crazy Jane. He is hoping that the maid he had let the old witch kill, may yet come to his rescue. It is about a week after Johns Eve.

(To be continued.)

Asterisks & Links of Interest

Unchanged Feature: What is reality, what is myth?

http://www.voltairenet.org/article167588.html

Changing Feature: In the preceding posts, I started a compilation of a series of video clips, which when seen as a linear sequence tell a story in a telling context. This is a continuous story. If it began in the past, now it is moving parallel to the day we live. Note what is happening around you. Put this clip as a tail to your blog http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNgjzGzFeB0&feature=related so others may see. The origin of this post is at http://the4thawakening.blogspot.com/ 

The following blogspots center on a variety of subjects, which I have initiated. You are invited to look and respond.

http://esoschronicles.blogspot.com/ Not-Violence main subject

http://melnaysjanis.blogspot.com/ Temple of Janis (John) site

http://the-not-voter.blogspot.com/ Arguments for systems change

http://the4thawakening.blogspot.com/ Sacrificial crisis in Latvia

http://oedipusrexrewritten.blogspot.com/ Oedipus Rex Rewritten

I suggest you look at the links imbedded in these blogs or at the end of the blog as an integral part of my argument.

The 4^th Awakening

29 How to Tie Tongue (2)
© Eso Anton Benjamins

If Latvians have a role to play in their government, it is not as ordinary passive citizens who do little else than drop their ballots in a box on Election Day. While some will continue to vegetate, others may begin to think of themselves as a “chosen people” or, better, the only people. Of course, today this is a discredited notion. Yet others will identify with naked humankind and succumb to the pleasures of fools gold.

An alternative is possible if the citizens of Latvia realize that succumbing to elitist-materialist pressures is as certain to betray national identity as it identifies with fascism and neocapitalism. Today the charisma of neither holds or ought to hold one’s attention for longer than a passing glance. This suggests that the alternative belongs to some third way.

If we look at the alternatives of becoming “chosen”, “selected”, or “elite”, we must also remember that democracy in a “parliamentary a democracy” (the kind of democracy that is instituted in Latvia) is a democracy for the minority. To what extent is democracy real for citizens when the order of democracy does not extend its privileges beyond the princes who sign the Magna Carta?

When a parliamentary democracy draws into an ever tighter knot [as it does when (vis a vis the rest of the population) it bypasses the human dimension of personally caring], it becomes a democracy for an even more restricted group, an oligarchy of—to be generous—a conglomerate of oligarchs. If the concentration of juridical parties financed by said  oligarchs is topped off with a constrained language, we have a zionationalist choke on the freedom of thought and language.

Because Latvians are so few in number (est. 1.2 million), the risk of them losing their language is as certain as is the blending of the oligarchs of the world into a one supra nationalist entity at Davos. Something like that happened when the Baltic Prussians became German speaking. As we know, the Prussian orientation aligned with that of their repressors. The native population became militaristic or assumed a passive stance, and the nurturing Saulele (see blog 26)—what happened to her?

We are witnessing the crumbling of the Latvian language in real terms on the internet. Thought and language receives little attention in hyperspace or it is an exception. Coherence is not something that has yet made an appearance.

To corroborate the dismal prongnosis, studies show that Latvian students read the least number of books among European students. As for poets, they have freedom to speak, but most, having been brainwashed about the glories of anarchy in the West, have nothing to say about the community. For the most part poets write either positivist claptrap or write in a language that is the technical inverse of legalese. Writing at the folk (in this instance subjective) level may exist, but no one is certain of it or encourages it in a consciousness raising manner. A subjective meme centring on the community is not poetry’s forte as a subject these days.

In spite of the bleakness created by the anaemic memes, there may be one area where a small nation may excel if it but comes with the right memes. Such a right meme—one which can make quick political and economic manoeuvres, practice discipline, reach a high level of education, be loyal to its nation and cultivate its language, knows the advantages of small, etc.—has to be not only persuasive, but its persuasiveness has to come with charisma attached to it.

Such a meme however must be achieved and does not come of its own and without effort. At the present, the Latvians have a chance of coming to such charisma only if they overcome the sacrificial crisis plaguing their community. Likewise they must discover a ritual worthy of repetition and without it soon wearing out. At this time it does not appear that in Latvia either the state or church is capable of creating the kind of charisma that leads to action.

An alternative to dying has for humans always meant turning to community building. The Children of Johns (heck past blogs to find out more) would surely be among the volunteers attempting to renew and breathe life (charisma) into the community. Unfortunately, after their repression in the middle of the 19^th century, they went underground, many of Germanic origins having been part of the local community integrated, and with the repressions creating demand for a more radical reaction than a not-violent community could offer, in due course ceased playing a visible role. Having brought proto-Latvians communal singing, choirs, and a unique and ancient system of democracy by lottery (the system is unworkable today because of the institutionalization of gross social and economic inequalities), the disappearance of the Herrnhuters was actively encouraged by a more rough and tough workers movement that no longer had roots in a countryside neighbourhood, but were thrown to the winds of urban streets. Without the protection of life in a community in situ, the endearing term, as well as the endeared rock suffers a sacrificial crisis. The memes of the weak words are up on the board to be erased.

What if anything can save the post-Soviet-Latvian language and Latvians from dying by 2050, a time when the population of Latvia—assuming no great wave if immigration—is 1.3 million in total? Will Iceland save Latvia? It is a brave island, but it is an island far in the ocean.

How can survival be realized when, for the most part, the European Union (EU) works toward collapsing and eliminating differences by way of a bribe (the charisma of money) rather than blood (the charisma of reality)? How can a sacrificial crisis be resolved under circumstances when a sovereign nation loses its financial sovereignty to a central bank and it has no money to fight back with?

There is only one answer: the only weapon available against those who have money and power is one’s body. However, one’s body cannot be brought to bear unless the entire community joins in.

In short, the answer (example of action) must be sought back in the time when the arch-Christians refused to join the Roman Empire’s sacrificial ritual, because Rome had become polluted. We may recall that Rome—after it became an empire—lost charisma because its sacrifices became gladiators who lost their lives as part of bloody games, which could no longer be construed as anything other than entertainment. The games turned sacrifice into pornography.

It does not appear that survival of small bodies of nations and their languages is a possibility at this time, because “the financial bubble” can be made seem perpetual (inflation). In other words, money will be used to compromise any resistance, even at a time when money clearly is turning into worthless paper. Illusions do not always die easily.

Bankers are using all kinds of sleight of hand to collapse the differences between value and nonvalue: deflating value is masked by inflating price. The use of language to create of language a circus causes ordinary and not so ordinary people loss of a sense of coherence.  The resulting state of uncertainty, a state ever in suspended animation, threatens society with anihilation. This is the reason why during the last one thousand years Armageddon or Apocalypse has always roused the public’s interest.

The dissembling of reality is done by institutionalized lying by government functionaries planted within a democracy’s more vulnerable institutions. In a parliamentary democracy such functionaries are its unelected ministers, prime ministers and presidents. During election time, the Saeima (Senate) also makes its significant part by playing at being alive, while actually it is quite dead.

The Story of Crazy Jane and Clever John, Part 3 (…story begins at blog 15), in the next blog. Less the reader forget, we left Clever John despairing of discovering a pile of gold and, therefore, rubbing the ring he was given by Crazy Jane. He hopes that the maid he had let the old witch kill, may come to his rescue. Is may be a hope as crazy as is Crazy Jane.

(To be continued.)

Asterisks & Links of Interest

Unchanged Feature: What is reality, what is myth?

http://www.voltairenet.org/article167588.html

Changing Feature: In the preceding posts, I started a compilation of a series of video clips, which when seen as a linear sequence tell a story in a telling context. This is a continuous story. If it began in the past, now it is moving parallel to the day we live. Note what is happening around you. Put this clip as a tail to your blog http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxNrfZE3elM so others may see. The origin of this post is at http://the4thawakening.blogspot.com/  This is the 9^th video of a series.

The following blogspots center on a variety of subjects, which I have initiated. You are invited to look and respond.

http://esoschronicles.blogspot.com/ Not-Violence main subject

http://melnaysjanis.blogspot.com/ Temple of Janis (John) site

http://the-not-voter.blogspot.com/ Arguments for systems change

http://the4thawakening.blogspot.com/ Sacrificial crisis in Latvia

http://oedipusrexrewritten.blogspot.com/ Oedipus Rex Rewritten

I suggest you look at the links imbedded in these blogs or at the end of the blog as an integral part of my argument.

The 4^th Awakening

28 How to Tie Tongue (1)
© Eso Anton Benjamins

In the two previous blogs (26, 27), I wrote about the loss of Latvian language to officialdom as a result of government control. The Latvian government (ethnically oriented to this day) has control of the Latvian language by making it not only the official language of the government and law, but because control is augmented through the public media, education, and embrace of cultural fetish objects.

If one may ask what is wrong with that, the small overall number of Latvians virtually guarantees that the language will lack its subjective half. In short, if the subjective side of the language is missing, is the language alive or alive only as make-believe? Is such a language able to contribute to the future of the nation?

The constraints on the Latvian language are seldom taken into consideration because most Latvians speak another language, and the other language embraces a much larger geographical entity. The linguistic bipedals of a Latvian therefore do not necessarily cause him-her to reflect on the real situation (the gains and losses) facing the language. Thus (so the thinking may go), if the Latvian language happens to be under government control, a Latvian may leave it there until the day comes when the government fails in authority and the language fails along with it. If by then the citizens have transferred their subjective life onto the other language (I am for the most part thinking of English and Russian), will Latvian be missed?

The reasons for such troubling thoughts are the census figures. These indicate that of the 2.4 million inhabitants of Latvia only about 1.4 million are ethnic Latvians. This leaves 1 million inhabitants (citizens or non-citizens) be Latvians, but ones who do not identify with their country in an ethnic sense and may or may not speak Latvian. Projections of present population trends indicate that by 2050 (in forty years) the total population of Latvia may drop to 1.3 million people in total. How many of these will be ethnic Latvians in the sense this is understood today, it is impossible to tell.

The figures are not precise, because it is estimated that only about 2.2 million of the former 2.4 million people remain in Latvia. Even then the figures are optimistic, because one also hears that over 300,000 people have migrated, and more are leaving every day. The catastrophic economic situation, loss of financial sovereignty, low birth rates, and high death rates of elderly brings the body count ever lower.

Given this situation, the Latvian language has been exposed to suffering cumulative debasement, above all through the agencies that have devalued the nation’s mind meme. The devaluers are: government and its institutions; most government and private publications, i.e., media, including media in other languages; pop visuals, i.e., just about all of advertising; pop art; and, no less, educational institutions, most of which present the public with pop education or are fast decommissioning education to the lowest possible achievement level. [The argument is that the ‘big guys’ do it, though it forgets that Latvia is a small nation and its survival needs are not the same as of a country with, say, four million.]

Do Latvians still have time to resist the death of the endearing word? No one can tell. However, unless government is actively resisted at the community level, government will not implement a creative strategy on its own. I have already suggested that given the government’s control (no doubt, with considerable public support) of the Latvian language, it has the responsibility of encouraging (borrowing an idea from Japanese Haiku poetry) the subjective life by sponsoring an annual Dainas contest or whatever else the collective brain of culture guardians suggest.

However, given the nature of the Latvian political beast, and assuming that control over the Latvian language has been taken from Latvians de facto and de jure, the people have been left little but to write graffiti. Moreover, the government will continue to perform counter intuitively and may try seizing even more control of language and thought. If the government succeeds in tying the Latvian language into an even tighter Gordian knot, the disappearance of the Latvian language by 2050 (re total population reduced to 1.3 million) is assured. If Latvians do not side step the disaster by taking the Irish option or making preparations for other alternatives in case of need, then the point of no return has been reached.

While earlier I concentrated on the loss of the subjective self of the Latvian language (which I see as a loss of religion implicit in the language), I will now touch on the loss of language through yet another phenomenon known as a “collapse of differences”. Through the collapse of differences, as Rene Girard put it: “Language itself is put in jeopardy”; and so is religion; and so is the people’s control of government, and, no less, so is the control of people over their own lives.

The “collapse of differences” in a language results from such tight control of a language (for the sake of facilitating political propaganda and mercantile advertising) that it becomes impossible to identify who, for example, is a “liberator”, what is “peace”, what constitutes “torture”, and most relevantly what is “positive”. Girard observes: “in this situation no one and nothing is spared; coherent thinking collapses and rational activities are abandoned. All associative forms are dissolved or become antagonistic; all values, spiritual or material perish.”*  

If and when this stage of language debasement is reached, so is the point of no return even for Orwellian double speak. Once coherent thinking and critical thought collapses (when double speak no longer  functions), we have no longer a language, but a presumption that a solution is coming by means of some direct action, i.e., wordless violence or simply action (whatever kind) on the part of whoever has the power-money to act without consultation or holding to past agreements. One could call it unspoken discourse or discourse spoken in silence, or perhaps even liken it to animal discourse.

Yet violence or the threat of violence may not be necessary if the people—as in the instance of Latvians—are demoralized by corruption at high levels of government, religion is drained of all blood, rampant joblessness is the order of the day, debt burdens (loss of financial sovereignty) sow despair, educational quality that depresses intelligence is everywhere, poor healthcare at the end of an ambulance trip, out-migration encouraged as a “solution”, and not least governmental indifference (one would not believe it for the words) to human suffering as the actions of the current health minister suggest. In this situation, the result is the collective death of all memes of the former community. What meme comes next is almost virgin birth.

(To be continued.)

Asterisks & Links of Interest

* This quote from secondary source, The Black Commentator.

Unchanged Feature: The Witches of Ghana in Gambaga

http://www.pbs.org/georgewashington/collection/other_last_will.html

Could we have the word and name of Ghana pronounced as Yana? If so, we could then call the withches Yanas (Janas, Zhenas) of Yana (Jana, Zhena).

Unchanged Feature: What is reality, what is myth?

http://www.voltairenet.org/article167588.html

Changing Feature: In the preceding posts, I started a compilation of a series of video clips, which when seen as a linear sequence tell a story in a telling context. This is a continuous story. If it began in the past, now it is moving parallel to the day we live. Note what is happening around you. Put this clip as a tail to your blog http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3qON4NV6qA so others may see. The origin of this post is at http://the4thawakening.blogspot.com/