[13] Harmony Centre & Its Geopolitical Uses (1)

Leaving home, the beginning of a journey from Latvia.

No Latvian who is aware that Latvia has a Foreign Ministry is unawares that the ministry is hardly a part of public consciousness, because it is profoundly dysfunctional, if it has any function at all other than a mouthpiece for NATO.

Moreover, the Latvian media hardly ever discusses the uses of geopolitics in Latvia, because it is brain dead when it comes to geopolitical thinking other than being anti anything East and serving as a distributor of NATO’s viewpoint. Being brain dead to geopolitics applies to both Latvian and Russian language media, because both are navel gazers of their particular ying, whatever the homunculus of their yang may be at the other end.

If someone wishes to dispute with me on the above, I will concede that the geopolitcs that I am bringing up is that it happens in the deep background, for example, in my brain and its image screen. As one Latvian to whom I mentioned the lack of geopolitical thought among Latvians told me: “Unfortunately, we have not yet progressed to geopolitical awareness”.

Tom Thumb, 2 years old, setting out from Latvia.

So, where does my geopolitical awareness come from? I presume that it comes from my maternal grandfather, who was one of Latvia’s first ambassadors to the Soviet Union/Russia, who theorized that the nations from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea ought to form a co-operative alliance for the sake of creating its own economic and political zone of influence.

Ambassador Karlis Ozols http://www.mfa.gov.lv/lv/Ministrija/vesture/4439/4476/  was profoundly pro-American. He was sent by the tsar’s war machinery from the famed Putilov factory in St. Petersburg, where he was an engineer, to Canada as an inspector of railroad wagons. KO became deeply involved in Latvian Relief when the fortunes of war changed. Subsequently, he met with then President Hoover, and when he was in semi-retirement, he recorded in his memoirs his ideas about the alliance which he saw possible between the nations that stretched from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea

[A sideline: ambassador Karlis Ozols claimed that he had seen men hung from lamp posts in St. Peterburg (at the Putilov factory in 1917).

Sister of Tom Thumb, Laura, leaving Latvia, too.

[While serving as Latvia’s ambassador in Moscow, Stalin declared him a person non grata, and he returned to Latvia. His hopes to further participate in the diplomatic field were dashed, when the Soviet Finance Minister Tsurupa stopped by to visit with him in Riga on his return from cancer treatment in Germany.

[Karlis Ozols' wife, my grandmother (Marija b. Ral  http://pipl.com/directory/name/Ozols/Marija ) a descendant of that tsar and tsar Kugushov), was close friends with the wife of Tsurupa, and Mrs. Tsurupa wanted to visit her friend. The women had met on Marija Ral’s uncle’s Kushov’s estate near Tombova. Tsurupa had served as knaz Kugushov’s bookkeeper, after they met in Siberia, where both were serving prison sentences for unfriendly acts vis a vis the tsar. Knaz Kugushov had not lifted his cap to the tsar during a student inspection visit.

Mother and Baby Thumb leaving Latvia behind.

[Karlis  Ozols agreed to the visit of the Tsurupas as their personal guests, even as he knew how ticklish politically it was. The Latvian media got hold of the news, created a public atmosphere that suggested that KO was a pro-communist, and this terminated for him a further career in the Latvian diplomatic corps. His personal tragedy was that he had hoped to become Latvia’s Foreign Minister in the future as he was in good standing with then President Chakste. As the link to the Latvian Foreign Ministry tells us, he was shot in a Moscow prison in 1941; so much for the Latvian press.]

Krishyan, left, arriving at RIX.

The death of geopolitical thought in Latvia is one of the accomplishments of the Latvian Trimda-Exile, the McCarthyite http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy wing of Latvian politics. While the McCarthy perspective on communism was a natural for those who had fled the communist holocaust and arrived in the United States of America in the late 1940s and early 1950s, it destroyed the possibility of a variety of geopolitical views among Latvians. When the Soviet Empire fell in 1991, all Latvians had for a geopolitical perspective was the one that was Trimda-Exile bred, fed, and sanctioned.

Karlis Ozols geopolitical perspective was sabotaged by the immaturity grown of navel gazing narcissism infecting the nations in the north-south corridor containing the nations that run from the Baltic region to the Black Sea. The instruments of brain deadness or at best of brain atrophy persist to this day in the Latvian government, even while KO’s perspective is probably moot at this point in time and history.

While the Latvian Foreign Ministry during President Karlis Ulmanis time was neither forward looking or had an imaginary worth speaking of, the Latvian intelligentsia was not yet so repressed and bereft of views on Latvian geopolitics as it is under today’s NATO regime.

Krishyan, Emil, and Laura, fingers crossed, on October 24, 2011.

It is interesting that in the fall of 2011, at the very time that a political coalition is being created to form the next Latvian government, the McCarthyite viewpoint remains prominent, this time not fingering possible communists in Holywood, but the Unity Party led Nationalist čoalition government in Riga fingering the Harmony Centre.