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 (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?

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?