A Dead Chicken at Latvia’s Doorstep (XIV)

“But we cannot regain contact with meaning if we rely on the fallacious base that persists from the past. The critical thinking that we have absorbed [as a civilization] is opposed to dead meaning, ….” –Jean-Michael Oughoirlian in “Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World,” by Rene Girard.

The above sentence, taken from the concluding chapter of the above mentioned book, struck me apropo the elections coming up in Latvia on September 17^th.

Rene Girard, to whom the above statement is directed, has just made a remark with regard to the state of our global civilization. Girard claims that our contemporary patterns of thought have fallen into a pattern of “Puritanism [that] dessicates every text and spreads the most deadening boredom even in the newest situations.”

Girard goes on: “It is important for us to rediscover something in which we can believe, but there must be no cheating, either with the conditions that are forced upon us by the terrible world in which we live or in terms of those that dictate that the most rigorous research must do without any form of ethnocentrism, or even any form of anthropocentrism.”

Ethnocentrism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnocentrism

Anthropocentrism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocentrism

What this has to do with the recent dismissal of the Latvian Saeima, the election of a President by the dismissed Saeima (the result of which is that the country is presided over by a man likely representing the interests of foreign banks), and a election campaign for a new Saeima that both looks and smells like a week old chicken on our doorstep, is that “dead meaning” taints every Latvian with its stench.

On the other hand, it is maybe not so extraordinary after all, because all of Europe today stinks like “dead meaning” might.

In Latvia, as well as the rest of Europe, “civilization” has come to an end, not by the will of humankind as a whole, but by “dead meaning” thrust upon it by about 0.1% of the total population. This unique minority is the so-called corporate individual, sometimes called “oligarch”, but in fact a relentlessly mindless corporation said to have a human face. This grotesque individual, “dead” by the fact of straight faced delusions, even if some see them as a group such as the Bilderbergers, for example. A Latvian, Andris Piebalgs, acts as an advisor to the Bilderbergers. Balloons were floated to find out if he would be a candidate for the presidency. He declined on career considerations. He is the Energy Commissioner for the EU.

The “dead meaning” floats past this writer’s eyes as the dead body of a man he saw from a tourist’s boat on the Ganges rowing past Varanasi.  With that body floats Europe and Latvia, the latter a dead-Soviet state, but with a western face.

Glory be to sanctimonium. In Latvia, it is not possible to replace the word  “God” with the word “Sun”, because the anthem is “sacred” and the Sun is unimportant compared to it. The humour of it is that proto-Latvians, the Latvians who lived before 1918 (the year of the founding of Latvia) had the Sun as their female Dearest Goddess. The post-1918 Latvia is firmly established in the mind of nearly every Latvian as the collective “dead meaning”. The future is to keep going on the basis of inertia, a new Saeima to follow the dismissed old one as readily as a hen lays two eggs, one after the other.

If one is looking for a revolution in Latvia or Europe, one has to think of how to disassemble the corporate individual protected on all sides by phallanxes of attorneys and minds dedicated to legality over egality. There have been many proposals over the years, but all made sure that everything was “democratic” and that “human rights” are respected so much so that neither corporate individuals nor soldiers with the country at war should be sentenced to death. The “dead meaning” (the over-justification of why the corporate individual should not be given the ax) gives the reader the chance here and now to go—as they say in Latvian—“Ka-plunk!”.

So, what can the Europeans and Latvians whose minds have been clogged with “dead meaning” do?

In practical terms, I will stick with what I have advocated before: Go vote, but drop into the ballot box an empty ballot. Another thing, the proto-Latvians lived among themselves much more democratically when their habitat was the wood and the small clearing they made there for themselves. In terms of human habitat, Europe then was a much better place on Earth than it is today.

The world today, too, would be a much better place if human beings took back their right to be human without corporate advice or interference. Latvians and Europeans could be among the first in the world to take the Earth back from the not so virtual infantiles.

Go drop into the box a blank vote and get rid of "dead meaning".

Chickens Running in All Directions (IX)

Judging by the ubiquity of the endearing word in the Latvian language (a number of languages share in this facility), a ubiquity that is now reduced to a potential rather than actual use, the proto-Latvians may be judged to have once been a peaceable people.

At some point in their history this peaceable people became subject to great violence. This violence appears to have been a prolonged affair, causing Latvians to become the victims of violence. That is to say, the victimization of proto-Latvians turned their descendants into a violent people as well.

If one follows Professor Rene Girard’s thesis  (this writer to a great extent does so), then the founding violence of the proto-Latvian community—that is to say, their recognition of themselves as a community through the killing of a scapegoat—occurred a long time ago. This initial violence through victimizing, likely, an innocent fellow human, was thereafter transformed into a profoundly felt guilt. Though, no doubt, I make what is known as a ‘forward looking statement’, it may be that the proto-Latvians projected their sense of guilt into their language. I.e., to avoid conflict among themselves, the proto-Latvians enabled their language to endear every noun and even soften verbs.

When speaking, the forebears of Latvians made the use of the endearing word a ritualistic practice by frequent insertions of words of endearment into their conversation. This practice reached a point, when such an insertion of endearments became automatic. This is a time when proto-Latvians and no doubt many of their neighbors created a unique not-violent http://esoschronicles.blogspot.com/2009/11/eso-antons-benjamins-not-violent-terror_25.html culture.

One may cite as proof of the endearing culture the fact that the Latvian language does not have such phrases of swear terms as “mother fucker” (widely used by the English speaking peoples) or “yobt via mat” (the same in Russian). Interestingly, the latter expressions belong to people co-opted by empires, which make frequent use of war and prepare their people for it by surrounding them with bare existence conditions. According to the generals of empires, the enemies of empires never value their life, which is, so to speak, ipso facto, why the enemy’s people fuck their mothers. The empires never have peace through conciliation or re-conciliation, but through violence. To the proto-Latvian mind this kind of behavior is a sin against human rights. Such swearing means that (in loose translation) ‘God fucks his mother!’ To imagine such a thing is not worth sacrificing the proto-Latvian language for.

Today the Latvian language is not yet a total sacrifice for the dump, but with the media and officialdom having largely eliminated the endearing word, the Latvian language is being presented as a kind of bastard that can be sold as a slave to whoever is the oligarch of the moment. And when a writer’s novel pays no more than a few hundred lats, it leaves the language to the publicity pimps, who are this very the moment pimping it for whatever it is worth. It is known as the positivist mode.

When I (LOL) laughed out loud that Latvia had become an Administrative District in the European Union, I found it more than funny that the first bureaucrats administering the district are foreign bankers even as they play footsie with proxies like the President and Finance Minister of Latvia.  

In short, dear Latvians, the administrators predicted by ol’ George Orwell in his novel ‘1984’ are our overlords. We share them with their equivalents in Greece, Ireland, England, France, Germany. In fact, they are all over the world.

This then comes to the question whether Administrators have the right to send people, any people, to war? Can those, who guarantee themselves death in a down bed, send others to die in their place in wars they have declared? Can the President of Latvia be among the receivers of the highest pensions in Latvia? By what right does a foreign proxy send Latvians to war and leave men who hardly have visited Latvia decide Latvia’s domestic and foreign policy? Is the foreign policy of Latvia anything but a charade?

Talking about a charade—is not the tiff with Russia over whether Latvia was “occupied ” by the Soviet Union (1939) based on the (unspoken) fact that President Ulmanis offered the Soviets no resistance, but knowing that resistance was futile, did not offer his own life in lieu of it and as an affirmation that it was not futile? Did Latvia avoid becoming an administered district of the Soviet Union by offering no resistance to it?

If the Latvian legionnaires who joined the Germans against the Soviet Union in 1941, whether they volunteered or whether were conscripted, did so for patriotic reasons and in defense of Latvia and the Latvian community, did they also not step into Ulmanis do-nothing trap: Ulmanis did not re-found the State of Latvia by giving his life for it. He left the community fend for itself. The community, left without leadership fell into a legalistic trap: try as they may, they cannot extricate themselves from accusations of being trusted by the Waffen SS and all it implies.

A great many Latvians died, were sent to Gulags, fled to near and far abroad, but are not requited by the government of Latvia with a government that knows what it is doing.

#

The following article by George Friedman at Statfor is an excellent summary of the political-economic situation in the world—not excluding Latvia.

http://app.response.stratfor.com/e/es.aspx?s=1483&e=334626&elq=f8bc5d7750824e1c851e140ca5937993

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.

Chickens Running in All Directions (VII)

As the desacralization and deconstruction of Latvia’s sovereignty continues apace, Latvia may already no longer be a nation, but an area under the administration of proxies working for foreign banks.

Two of the proxies 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/ .

Both of said men are former employees of Swedish banks. Both men support the “system” of neo-liberal economics, even though that system is arguably a manifest failure. Both men are among the core of men and women who have the privilege to put Latvia on its feet, but who instead stand for abysmal failure of example. Indeed, today a public example from the leadership may be the only thing that may inspire the despised ‘populists’ (re people) to endure as Latvians.

The difficulty facing Latvia as a sovereign nation is touched upon by Imants Lancmanis, director of the Rundale Castle complex in the Zemgale region. http://ltvzinas.lv/?n=video&id=4903 [Interview is in Latvian. The part relevant to this text begins at the 3:12 min mark.] However, this writer is not persuaded that the ‘new generation’, which the director mentions, will bring about anything more than continued deconstruction of the community and cement a naked money based secular administration more securely in place. Some will say, well and good, because, after all, all of Europe is in the process of being denationalized. Perhaps so.

However, the answer of those who are not persuaded that fiat money is able to create a community that lasts and can endure an economic crisis through the strength of its communal bonds is to point out that a pseudo community necessarily worships exponential growth.  Dependency on such growth necessarily leads to a catastrophe and collapse.

While the world of our culture is only at the beginning of its final catastrophe, the event is of a nature more felt than critically perceived. The situation brings about an intensification of mimetic rivalry, because in better days an increase in such rivalry was said to give rise to progressively more elaborate and humanized forms of culture. In other words, while a complete rollover in exponential growth has not yet occurred, but tremors and quakes of it are clearly felt, many people continue to opt for frenzied exponential growth in personal ‘liberty’ in the mistaken belief that it may prevent the crisis or that it does not even exist.

Alas! Exponential growth of “humanized forms of culture” (human rights as absolute rights), when such growth is based on debased former cultures and fiat money, cannot escape the moment at which it must reverse direction. It is at the peak (the hour of it no one knows) of this phenomenon that our fiat culture must either launch the societies under its umbrage into wars of surrogate victimhood that re-found or allow for changes in said culture or in order to avoid war, it must find a re-founding mechanism that allows for the substitution of mass victimhood with a reconciliatory event.

The reconciliatory event however must be an event of death (a symbolic death can be stretched only so far), because only death has sufficient charisma to impress and persuade the skeptical.

The least damaging death to all concerned is a single death. As Rene Girard points out in his work (“Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World”), such a death in past societies was discovered by seeking and finding a victim who was then stoned and killed. Indeed, the scapegoat or victim enabled through his-her death to increase the time necessary to think things over. Thus, a re-conciliatory death (a delay or cessation of the death threat) encouraged from times way back, both, a growth of the human brain in a child and development of human culture itself.

In the previous blog [Chickens Running in All Directions (VI)], I suggested that in spite of the fact that a surrogate victim may be found by the lottery method [Adolfs Buķis http://www.politika.lv/508/did/16931/ , a publicly unacknowledged self-sacrifice, may serve as an example if we allow that chance may become a synonym of the unexpected], Latvia now has the opportunity to substitute the unacknowledged man with two well known men, President Berzins of Latvia and the mayor from Ventspils, Aivars Lembergs. Both men are millionaires. Occasionally people call both men oligarchs. However, in terms of money, the President of Latvia is worth a few million, whereas the Mayor of Ventspils is said to be worth a few hundred million.

If the story that Lembergs had the first and last word as to who was to be Latvia’s next President (after the incumbent Valdis Zatlers was passed over) is true, it becomes intriguing to learn whether the voting public will side with Lembergs http://www.apollo.lv/portal/news/articles/245657  in his choice of who is to be Latvia’s surrogate victim and reconciliator (the President of course), or is the President of Latvia going to be able to foist the cadaver onto Lembergs.

Some people may mistake blood money for blood and blood in office for prestige, when in fact the option may be that 1) that a certain sum of money from the Ventspils mayor will to go to the restoration of the North Vidzeme Biosphere Region (starting with a 200 million lats contribution), and 2) the President of Latvia will resign from (sacrifice) the Office of President lest he be impeached by the new Saeima.

Incidentally, the election of the new Saeima is less than two months away on September 17, 2011.

Chickens Running in All Directions (V)

The Latvian people have a saying that—to paraphrase—goes something like this: “We Latvians are a hardy people. We have survived many catastrophes before; we will survive this one also.”

What the people forget is that the origins of the phrase come from a forest and agricultural society, a society that is no longer in existence. Though the Latvian people have indeed survived many catastrophes in the past by hiding in the forests, today most of the forests are gone and the people have been driven off the land by modern technology and the requirements of market mercenaries. While in the past one could hide in the forest and survive on game and the milk of a cow, the same people today have been forced off the land into an urban society.

Forcing the people off the land is not a new phenomenon in the world or in Latvia, but in Latvia it has taken its most dramatic turn during the last twenty years, the very years since the renewal of the Latvian Republic in 1991. Worse, the Latvian people have not migrated to Latvia’s urban centres, but have bypassed these by moving directly to foreign lands. The abandonment of Latvia by its own has never reached such numbers before. While the precise figure awaits reports from the Census Bureau, the loss of people to Latvia is estimated to be anywhere from 250,000 to 500,000; in short, about 20% or one fifth Latvians have gone abroad, most of them for good.

Given that the demographic loss has happened accompanied by silence, with the Latvian government giving the phenomenon no attention except for the last year or so, and the Latvian media taking its cue from the government, the knowledge of events and trends by the majority of Latvians is notable for its absence.

In effect, while the Latvian government takes umbrage from criticism by insisting that it is the mirror of Latvian society (you get what you elect), it is the Latvian government that imitates a democracy of chickens let roam the field. It is freedom embodied in anarchy. Given the absence of a rooster and an experienced farmer, the hens and the chickens soon become pray to the first hawk to notice them.

The hawks that noticed the Latvian chickens first were foreign banks. Seeing that the government of Latvia was acting like a rooster without a head (in effect, leadership has been nonexistent), the hawks dove for the Latvian pocketbooks. While the robbery did not occur in broad daylight in order to avoid legal complications, it occurred by a sort of paradox: the foreign banks deliberately loaned the Latvians more money than they could repay, even as they knew repayment was legally binding, and would be enforced by such institutions as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Central Bank (ECB).

The logic of the manoeuvre by the foreign banks somewhat resembles that of a shrike impaling a mouse (the logic is of course not that of a shrike, but entirely human): See, I am not eating the mouse raw, but I am impaling it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zq8MAEBP8Ac in order to marinate it in legal chicanery. Or to put it another way: Look, we are not depriving the Latvian people of their sovereignty; we are letting them cook in their own juices before we come to eat them.

The example of the bank shrike’s way with the Latvians (surely an ethologist’s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethology observation) is a good place to insert another observation by Rene Girard (see previous blog) concerning the uses of stones:

“The reduction of canine teeth to their current dimensions occurred a long time before the appearance of homo sapiens, suggesting that stones had replaced dentition in most of their uses, including inter-species combat.”

Peace is not however at hand. Girard continues: “Animals are capable of engaging in rivalry and combat without fighting to the death because instinctual inhibitions assure the control of natural weapons, the claws and teeth. One can hardly believe that the same type of control was automatically extended to stones and other artificial weapons the day that hominids began to use them. The violence that goes unchecked by instinctual inhibitions… will become fatal the moment these same adversaries are armed with rocks.”

What makes Rene Girard’s work interesting is that through a combination of ethology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethology and

ethnology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnology , he perceives coming into being  a uniquely human culture of, if you will, mimetic diasporas. To put it in another way, Girard enables us to see how from the actions of the shrike and the users of stone, we arrive at the rigid symbolic rituals of early hominids, from which—in due time—arises the symbolic framework that allows human beings to engage in mimetic rivalries that the rigid rituals of earlier times forbid.

However, the increase in mimetic rivalries brings with it an increase in crises that lead to violence. According to Girard, such violence could be averted only through the mechanism of finding a scapegoat, which was then murdered by the whole community participating to preserve communal peace. This is why [see previous blog (V)] the first human pyramid was the result of a stoning of the scapegoat. It was through such sacrifices, which averted greater communal conflict, that there arose what we today call a complex society.

Let us now think back to the actions of foreign banks in Latvia, and of similar actions by the banks in Greece, Ireland, Iceland, and others. Though these actions are camouflaged by legalisms, they have brought Latvia (and others) to an existential crisis. Does this not suggest that we are living at a time that is looking for a scapegoat?

However, if scapegoating is a matter of times past as many allege, then what is the mechanism by which it is to be averted?

Chickens Running in All Directions (IV)

Breaking down political stagnation is not necessarily a ‘natural’ thing that happens because people may be sick and tired of it and in a mood for rebellion. Sometimes it takes hard work to dissipate the stagnant pools of water that move neither hither nor thither, but grace a pond with green slime that administrators in a house on the hill admire and even bless by occasionally dipping in it their walking stick.

A potential leader among the Latvians to lead and shape the people’s antipathy toward their government (95% voted for the dismissal of the Saeima in the recent Referendum) emerged recently when a former President of Latvia formed a new party in his name, re the “Zatlers Reform Party”. Alas, Zatlers is neither a liminal http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/liminal figure nor an agitator whatever his own subjective fantasies may be, and the new party was stillborn even as it registered its presence.

According to political analyst Joseph Lowndes http://yalepress.yale.edu/book.asp?isbn=9780300121834 , such a situation of stagnation, in his case among New Deal Democrats, faced America in 1964. While this writer has little sympathy for George Wallace, Lowndes analysis of Wallace’s tactics in breaking down the old coalition and his analysis of politics as such is most interesting and comparable to the current political stagnation in Latvia.

Writes Lowndes: “The fashioning of this [Wallace’s] new anti-government populism was a moment of founding violence for the new right, and its power was the result of its opposition to the existing political field as a whole. The Wallace juggernaut was successful to the degree that it was politically disruptive, because creating a new collective political identity involves rending people out of old traditions and political identifications. Wallace did so by combatively cutting new cleavages across the electorate, dissolving old political bonds and forging new ones.”

Former President Zatlers did not take advantage the three weeks available to him (after he initiated the Referendum vote and after a vindictive Saeima voted him out of office) to agitate and stir the Latvian people (long praised for their docility by internal and external observers) into action. Though it is impossible to be certain that the result of agitation would have resulted in re-‘founding violence’ (in the sense of Lowndes, see above), Zatler’s lameness (he had stated on many previous occasions that he was opposed to ‘populism’) is the death knell of Latvia as a state able to rise from the social chaos following the demise of the Soviet Union.

No doubt, the death knell that has been sounded by Zatlers may be in fact recognition that the bell had been tolling all along, and it took a lame man at this particular time to make it obvious.

Whichever answer we may favor, we can be sure that currently there is no re-‘founding violence’ afoot, even if it were the kind of symbolic violence as in George Wallace’s case. And while Zatlers’ had the nerve to describe the inclusion of his name in the party (ZRP) as a sacrifice by him to rally supporters, his use of the word ‘sacrifice’ reveals that he has no understanding that ‘founding violence’ is a synonym for ‘founding sacrifice’. In other words, the current ‘renewed’ State (Republic) of Latvia is basing its authority (spiritual) and ‘potestas’ [military—pautiņi (balls) as the Latvians might say] on thin air or, better if cruder, masturbatory fantasy.

Neither moral authority nor power (written, juridicial, police, military) are today able to reconcile the chasm separating the government from the governed, because there is yet no death that has appeared as the healer. The absence of death as a healer and reconciler plays a major role in the Latvian diasporas that have existed at least since the failure of President Karlis Ulmanis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C4%81rlis_Ulmanis of the original (as opposed to the current ‘renewed’) Latvian republic to oppose the occupation of Latvia by the Soviet Union by either declaring war against it de jure if not de facto, and in place of war de facto, seal its de jure aspects with a sacrifice of his life.

President Karlis Ulmanis failure to offer his life for his country, in spite of the fact that he claimed that he was “married to Latvia”, has played a decisive role in the separation of the Latvian people from their government.

While the Latvian elite suffered relatively few losses (Konstantins Chakste being a notable exception http://latvianhistory.wordpress.com/ ), the sacrifices of the Latvian people (just because they were Latvians) were massive while participating in wars of liberation (1^st and 2^nd WW) or due to executions during numerous repressions which included mass deportations.

The last civilian death among Latvians who opposed the corruption in their government occurred in April of 1993, when a tool and dye maker from Jelgava took his life on the steps of the Latvian Freedom Monument in Riga. The Latvian government took immediate steps to repress the event by not mentioning it once the storm of initial news of the death were past and the police promised an investigation. Of course, no investigation ever happened.

Because few Latvians have ever been exposed to either the anthropologists’, or theologians’, or psychologists’, or politicians’ views of the role of death in human affairs, especially in the building of a society, this writer here offers a lengthy quote from Rene Girard, a French literary critic and university professor in America. Since the quote is an answer given as part of a dialogue among several academicians, I trust the reader will absorb the gist of the argument, and go for details to the book (Rene Girard: “Things Hidden Since The Foundation of the World””) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Girard that I lift the quote from.

Says Rene Girard: “What is essential is the cadaver as talisman, as the bearer of life and fertility; culture always develops as a tomb. The tomb is nothing but the first human monument to be raised over the surrogate victim, the first most elemental and fundamental matrix of meaning. There is no culture without a tomb and no tomb without a culture; in the end the tomb is the first and only cultural symbol. The above ground tomb does not have to be invented. It is the pile of stones in which the victim of unanimous stoning is buried. It is the first pyramid.”

This writer will delay his comments on the quote until the next blog, here suggesting only that while the pile of stones may indeed be the result of having sought a scapegoat to fix (reconcile) whatever wrong society felt deserved fixing, was followed by a pyramid of smoothed stones, because the first founding violence was almost immediately followed by the first founding sacrifice.