[5] Darkness As Seen Through Tiresias’ Eyes (2)

Preelection appearance of politicians running for office,

When President Karlis Ulmanis vanished from the government in Latvia, Spidola did not jump after him into the Daugava River as she had done after Lachplesis.

As Menesnīca, impersonated moonlight that illumines night and is said to have once guided proto-Latvians in night-fighting tactics, Spīdola did not see Ulmanis as a reincarnation of her mythic lover, Lachplesis.

The failure of Ulmanis/Lachplesis to mate in the netherworld with Spidola [who among other things represents the subjective (re democratic and populist) nature of the psyche] is at the root of the political troubles of Latvians in 2011.

As noted in many earlier blogs (see http://the4thawakening.blogspot.com/  among others), the word “populist” is belittled and repressed by all officials and media in Latvia.

The Latvian state rules as a rhetorical democracy, one which uses rhetoric not as proto-Latvians had it by putting the endearing word in the forefront of communication, but by using rhetoric as a persecutorial (vajāšana) device. A lie is no less persecutorial even by another name.

The tactics of the Latvian government are imitative of the tactics of persecution practiced by the neo-Christian (Catholic, later also Protestant/ fundamentalist) church. That is to say, the subjectivity of the individual and collective (populists created such subjective language as is represented by the endearing word) is repressed in favor of an official story, the ‘good news’.

The first line of control of the state is government rhetoric with regard to history—history not as actual, but as created by government. Thus, for example, the betrayal of the Latvian myth and state by Karlis Ulmanis is never mentioned, but the brutality of the Soviet authorities is. The failure to mention the failure of the Latvian myth results in a cultural stutter and a further weakening of communal bonds.

The right course to pursue is....

The second line of control is rule of the country by “parliamentary” democracy. The rhetoric of the government insists that ‘parliamentary’ is synonymous with ‘democratic’, even while the government is democratic only for the ruling elites. Latvians essentially have no idea (either suggested or taught) that the greatest degree of democracy is identified with populism, which stands for the people (right, left, or center).

Thus, President Andris Berzins was elected and put in office without the participation of the Latvian people. Though as a former banker (he receives the highest retirement benefits in Latvia), Berzins is compromised by suspicions that he is a proxy of Swedish banks. There is no mention of the latter fact in public space.

Insofar the Lachplesis character is reflected in the highest office of Latvia, President Karlis Ulmanis effectively reduced the President’s mythic role to one of empty rhetoric. Indeed, the authority of the President since Ulmanis has not been confirmed as anything other than make-believe because unrealizable. At the same time, any potential leader from the ranks of the populists has been suppressed

There is nothing strange about the repression of democracy, if we remember that Lacplesis died fighting with the enemy, while Karlis Ulmanis died of circumstances created by the outbreak of WW2.

For all of Ulmanis’ achievements in raising the state of economic well-being among Latvians in the 1930s, Spidola, the helpmate of Lacplesis, refused to recognize the former President of Latvia as representative of the Latvian community and to this day has not found any Latvian leader to warm her bed.

These circumstances leave the Latvian soul (foundation rhetoric here) enduring a tense, essentially intolerable time.

The soul of the community (nationalist or no) wants to know if it, too, is but government rhetoric or whether behind the rhetoric stand men and women, leaders, who are willing the certify their rhetoric as meaningful authority by giving example. The example must necessarily include very real sacrifice if government officials ask the public to sacrifice. At this time the level of sacrifice among Latvian government officials is not even that of a car driver in a car race in Tunisia.

If I remember right, a Korean teenager projected Lachplesis http://www.eurotales.eril.net/quiz2/lat8.jpg as a character in a comic book. This—though never admitted by political authority or mentioned in the news and information media—is an accurate projection of the character of today’s politicians in Latvia and other countries.

The audience and the empty screen.

However, as acute as the problem of democracy and equality is in a country of 1.9 million people, our civilization has reached a time when its governments are basically without authority in all countries.

For Latvia, the political and economic suffering was first brought it by the ‘Harvard boys’, the club of academic ideologues, who in the early 1990’s instituted in the Baltics the official ideology of the West, re liberal neo-capitalism. I am sad to say that this came about through Latvian “exiles”, who after nearly fifty years abroad had lost their culture as ‘natives’, and had become missionaries on behalf of the West. Therefore, the Latvian people were encumbered by, both, the laws of their first republic and the post-Soviet “victors”. To this day they see “no exit”.

The exits continue to be sought by the Latvian people, while the officials play games of mirrors and sleigh of hand. While these tactics are evidently successful in terms of keeping government in office, communal chaos is the real result. What can be done to avert extinction?

How is one to change the economic system and the anarchistic civilization encouraged by corporations with the right to act as individuals, a presumption it borrowed from the church http://procinwarn.com/whatchurch.htm ? While one may always hope that a church has the authority of sacrifice to back it up, the corporation has replaced sacrifice with money.

The hard question no one is willing to answer.

Who is producing the irresponsible individual? Is the Federal Reserve and similar institutions a corporate individual?

In some respects Latvija is not all that different from Greece.

See STRATFOR report http://www.youtube.com/user/STRATFORvideo#p/u/0/zDINQ6k9jYQ

Complete text of post at http://rigacapital.blogspot.com/



126 wild cranes circling above my house in Braslava on September 25, 2011



[3] Into the Tunnel without A Light; or

The Liberal Neo-capitalist Destruction of Latvia

It is unlikely that the political leadership of Latvia is unaware that its actions are destroying Latvia, because the destruction is occurring very visibly, not to say painfully, with lack of food causing ill health and often death being the logical result among all age groups, especially among the young and old.

This morning (Sunday) this email via my mobile phone:

“Good morning, Mr. A…. May I ask you for help? Can you lend me Ls 20 for food, because K. cannot at this time send me money? I also would like to know whether you are driving to V. on Thursday. I have to be at the court, and would like to go with you. In July, I submitted papers to have the father of my child provide support money. I will wait for your answer. Have a nice day (Jauku Jums dieniņu).”

I know the family for many years, thus, I have contacted the mother and will find the Ls 20. She also asked me to wait for her until the end of the court session, because the father of the child has said he would beat her up, but was not likely to do so if someone was with her.




It looks that the cranes are ligning up.

 

Be that as it may, after seventeen years in Latvia (after 46 in America), I am near broke. Living on a fixed income (SS from America) and a reserve from old family property sold during the ‘fat years’, the reserves have been depleted, both, due to some investments having urned ‘bad’ by the financial and economic fiasco in America and elsewhere and due to the great need among so-called lower economic classes in Latvia even during those ‘fat years’. I still have my shirt on and enough to find Ls 20 for the mother (if only because I know the family's circumstances personally), but this does not mean that I sleep easy. 

Needy families are in every corner of the Latvian countryside. The mother above is not the only one I know. Just a few weeks ago, I called and received help from a television program (“Without Tabu”) to monitor the progress of the renovation of a couple of mildewed rooms that a municipal government of a small town has assigned to a poor (trūcīga) mother and her three children (1.5, 4, & 8 years). The circle of people whom I help is a private and subjective one, but includes such mothers and children as above, alcoholics (believed by me to be rehabitable), not to mention occasional trips to take some kid to the hospital, and of course encouragement.

My tomato crop after a bath.

Why do I write about this? Some readers of my blogs may recall that I have called for the resignation of the President of Latvia Andris Berzins, one who receives the highest pension of anyone in Latvia, and one whose arrival to the office of the Presidency may be judged to be wholly illegal if one uses wholly honest (godigus) standards.

The way I see it: when the former President of Latvia Valdis Zatlers called for the dismissal of the Latvian Saeima on grounds of corruption, that same Saeima did not, as was to be expected, reelect Zatlers, but pulled out of the high hat of corruption one Andris Berzins. The Latvian people endorsed Zatlers’ judgment in a Referendum vote. However, the corrupt Saeima had already successfully projected itself forward through Berzins, a former bank president, who, though suspect of being a proxy of Swedish banks, is not questioned about it by the timid and the extreme right wing (i.e., almost the entire) Latvian media.

Among the people for whose resignation I have called is also the Minister of Finance Andris Vilks, another proxy of Swedish Banks. There are others who, given their liberal neo-capitalist views, should be resigning. The President of the Bank of Latvia Ilmārs Rimšēvičs should be given the boot. He is the first line enforcer of the “internal devaluation” program, which makes the Latvian lats an increasingly worthless piece of paper, not to say tool for pauperizing the Latvian people and facilitating the takeover of Latvia by Swedish/Scandinavian banks. At least one Norwegian politician has been caught using Riga as his house of prostitution.

An article in the Latvian newspaper “Diena” [(23.9.11) re ‘Latvijas veiksmes stāsts’ by Sandris Točs] brought my attention to an article in The Guardian by the economists Jeffrey Sommers and Michael Hudson. Titled “Latvia and the disciples of ‘internal devaluation’”, the article

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/sep/16/latvia-anders-aslund-austerity bring to our attention the implicit complicity in the destruction of Latvia by PM Valdis Dombrovskis, who in collaboration with the liberal neo-capitalist Swedish ideologue Anders Aslund has authored a book called “How Latvia Came through the Political Crisis”. [Read the link to whiff the stink.]

We can only boo Aslund, but surely, PM Dombrovskis ought to be given the boot, too. Once a student of physics, he ought to bring up his perception of complexity to the level of instead of saying “abracadabra”, he will also know the meaning of cadabraabra or caradababra. The genee just may be hiding in the last two versions, because he surely is not with Dombrovskis.



Sunshine in the sink.



I do not deny that ideologically, I am opposed to liberal neo-capitalism and to the present Latvian government and those who constitute its leadership (ex-president Zatlers including). My opposition to the neo-liberal cabal of Latvian politicians and the media can be supported by economic and financial arguments. However, most convincing are the screams for help coming through the above cited letter from a poor mother on behalf of her child. I can assure the reader that such letters can be multiplied by the thousands—ultimately all of which testifies as to the physical and spiritual pains that come with the destruction of my nation.