Tuesday, April 27, 2010

© Eso Antons Benjamins, aka Jaņdžs

POSTSCRIPT 4 / Summary 2
101 The Sail

These blogs tend to be a continuum of an idea or thought, which is why—if you are interested in what you read—you are encouraged to consider reading the previous blog(s) and the blog hereafter. http://esoschronicles.blogspot.com/


Partial entries of my blogs may be found at LatviansOnline + Forum Home + Open Forum –ONLATVIANPOPULISM vs LATVIJASLABEJIE.

The blow-up within the West is the end result of what the former President of the United States, Bush, described as the "crusade" . While for Bush the “crusade” meant war on terrorism, which he claimed was begun on-the-cusp of the 21st century by a Saudi Arabian Muslim prince named Bin Laden, curiously enough, the “crusade” actually began with the so-called Fourth Crusade (according to A. Fomenko actually the First Crusade) of 1204.

The First Crusade followed the death of Jesus, the itinerant story teller, who a decade or two earlier (? 1184) was thrown into a pit of fire (no, he was not crucified; crucifixion is a neo-Christian invention to throw the listener off the scent of what really happened) in Constantinople by Alexis I, a Byzantine king, one of the first such to overturn the sacred nature of his office in order to exploit wealth and power for the sake of—as Taussig tells it about the colonizers—“[the] gratuitous, end in itself”.

As I have often stated in earlier blogs, the chronology of history as presented by the West is unreliable for the reason that is was established as a result of the Council of Trent (1545-1563), which selected one Joseph Justus Scaligeri to set straight a chronology that did not favour the Catholic Church. The Council of Trent was the main event of the Counter Reformation. While Martin Luther, the founder of the Lutheran Church and the Reformation movement hardly sympathized with the Catholic Counter Reformation, the Council’s historical revisionism suited well enough all neo-Christian sects. At the same time, many scholars have questioned the veracity of the chronology, among which doubters were Isaac Newton (1643-1727) and is Anatoly Fomenko (1945- ).
The “crusades” by the West that followed the First Crusade (1204) were the result of the rapid spread (by way of mimesis) of the desire by secular princes to expand their wealth and power. This rise of the importance of power became a scramble. The scramble took place not only among kings and princes, but at the same time involved attempts to discover ways to eliminate the arch-competitor—Constantinople, the seat of arch-Christianity some 900 years ago. This was accomplished by letting Constantinople fall (in 1453) to the Turks.

The First Crusade was made possible by rousing the “Children of Johns” (I prefer to put all arch-Christians under this description, because the name “John” is ubiquitous in all European and many more languages) against those said to have slain Jesus, the Children of Johns believing Jesus to have been one of their own. The outrage of the arch-Christians was then redirected by the secular princes against the Kingdom of Israel, which at that time was not located where a nation called Israel is located in our time, but the Israel of Byzantium as Byzantium was then known among the Children of Johns. Following the plunder of Constantinople (1204) by the West, the Children of Johns were turned against themselves by introducing a new sect, re: Catholics or neo-Christians, who distinguished themselves from arch-Christians (who referred to the Divine by touching the Earth) by claiming—in the beginning almost beyond anyone’s belief—that their “John” was not mortal and lived in Heaven. By 1209, the Western princes had sufficient violent force and could use the written word in a sufficiently sophisticated a manner to confuse the population of Europe (the Children of Johns were largely of an oral tradition) to such a degree that credibility accrued to those who practiced violence, that is, to neo-Christians.

It follows from the above that arch-Europeans and their religion were repressed and the European people were turned against themselves—as they had first been turned against Constantinople. The new world order of secular kings and princes rode on the backs of the European people. The only sect of arch-Christians or Children of Johns who survived was the Jews. The reason the sect was not destroyed has to do with their service to kings and princes—most likely as tax collectors. The ability of the sect to survive against the onslaught of Catholicism attracted to them many Children of Johns making an escape from the Inquisition. Most of this happened post-?1184. Unlike the flight of the Waldensians to Bohemia and the freedoms of the Hussites (15th century and earlier), the flight of the Children of Johns by ritualistic or self-confessional conversion to Judaism remains repressed information.

Let us return to Michael Taussig, our authority on memesis and alterity, and repeat the quote that I already gave in Blog 99. Taussig writes (pgs. 70,71): “As the nature that culture uses to make second nature, mimesis cannot be outside of history, just as history cannot lie outside of the mimetic faculty…. As the nature that culture uses to create second nature, mimesis chaotically jostles for elbow room in this force field of necessary contradiction and illusion, providing the glimpse of the opportunity to dismantle that second nature and reconstruct other worlds—so long as we reach a critical level of understanding of the play of primitivism within the mimetic faculty itself.”

Let us now think of the Latvian Children of Johns back in 1209, when Bishop Albert of Riga in tandem with Pope Innocent III in southern France, Languedoc, and the Albigensian Crusade there, attacked Jersika (a local name for Jerusalem), up river from Riga on the shores of Daugava (Dvina), and put an end to arch-Christianity in the territory that became known as Livonia, and later yet as Latvia.

And now let us think of the anti-Semitism, not admitted to, but lingering on among the materially and educationally repressed Latvians. [For proof of material and educational repression, all one has to do is visit the more popular internet sites for the flavor of their content and take a look at the children’s teeth in the countryside to see the material need.] Even so, I believe that more than half a century after Hitler and the Nazis, the time has come for the “opportunity to dismantle that second nature and reconstruct other worlds”, i.e., an updated mimesis of the Children of Johns of old. It could begin in Latvia.

How is this to be accomplished?

I will quote Taussig once again. In his book "Mimesis and Alterity", the anthropologist and doctor writes (2): “…[Let us] see anew the spell of the natural where the reproduction of life merges with the recapture of the soul”. Nice sentiment, right? Then Taussig tosses us a brick: “But just as we might garner courage to reinvent a new world and live new fictions… so a new devouring force comes at us from another direction, seducing us by playing on our yearning for the true real.”

And what might the “true real” be?

It is fascism, the make-believe of neo-Christianity falling apart, yet held together by the force of violence. And violence—as Latvians of any ethnic origin ought to know—causes long-time terror. The terror lasts not just for one life time, but it lasts for many lifetimes—if possible with but occasional refreshers by way reminders. This is a perfect way to intimidate people and affect their behaviour. The terror of violence seeps into the bones of the violated ones by way of a negative mimesis and represses human nature. The entire world is infected by this mimesis of terror in our day. It is rather disingenuous of academic historians to adhere to the Scaligeri chronology when the chronology of Anatoly Fomenko fits the shoe better. Moreover, government and academia disingenuosity denies the people their right to shed the terrors of violence.

And just how does one shed the terrors of violence and the PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) not only of soldiers back from war today, but the population at large, the one that has violence imposed on it for a thousand years?

For the answer, I invite the reader to Blog 1 and the beginning of my long series of blogs under the title “Not-Violent Terror”. However, the little dirty secret (and you may imagine it right after you read this) is “Not-Vote”. The act is not-violent terror. Not-violent terror to whom? Hint: to the enemies of not-voters.

Saturday, April 24, 2010

© Eso Antons Benjamins, aka Jaņdžs

The small secret
(which you may learn as soon as you read this)
at http://esoschronicles.blogspot.com/ is
“Not-Vote!”
It will be an act of not-violent terror. To whom?
To the enemies of the “not-voters”.

POSTSCRIPT 3 / Summary 1
100 The Enemies of the “West”

Photos: The beginnings of mimesis: Life mimics life: Frogs eggs

These blogs tend to be a continuum of an idea or thought, which is why—if you are interested in what you read—you are encouraged to consider reading the previous blog(s) and the blog hereafter. http://esoschronicles.blogspot.com/
To say that political thought and engineering in the West is simplistic is to understate the problem. A better word to describe it is “sick”. Like many illnesses, sick politics took time for a human agency to set up. It then incubated, to infect further, and then reached its virulent stage in the 20th century.

Many of my preceding blogs touch on the schism in Christianity, that is, between arch- and neo-Christians. Such a dual Christianity is not acknowledged by either the intelligentsia or historians of the West (or East), yet someday it will be obvious to anyone who understands that the rise of Catholicism was accompanied by short- and long-term repressive violence. As a consequence of the violence, of the arch-Christian sects (the Cathars, Bogomils, Waldensians, Johns Children, etc.) only the Jews remain, however and alas! no longer recognizable as their former selves.

Among the Latvians, it is the Children of Johns, the once arch-Christian sect, who are no longer remembered for who they were. All that remains of the Children of Johns is the Midsummer’s Solstice celebration at which time the celebrants may occasionally refer to the event as “Johns Eve” and even with lesser occasion refer to themselves as the Children of Johns. More specific interest in the Children of Johns it is apparent no longer exists.
To explain the simplistic political thinking in the West (of which Latvian politicians believe themselves to be a part), I will return once more to Michael Taussig and his anthropological studies. I believe Taussig to be right-on in his explanation concerning anti-Semitism (see quote below), nevertheless, I would like to take anti-Semitism a step further and include among its transgressions anti-self-ism or anti-European-ism. By extending the reach of the anti-Semitic meme, we arrive at the insight that anti-Europeanism among Europeans (in effect, anti-Latvianism among Latvians), too, remain as much a force of fascism as ever, especially because the Latvian people (and of course the Europeans as a whole) never really understood fascism. The repression of the European people by the European elite has lasted for so long as to cause both the people and the elite to forget their history and allow it to be replaced by an artifice or as Taussing describes it—“history… outside the mimetic faculty….”. In other words, history is no longer a written history making an effort to come alive, but an artificial history written by scholars whose experience of history is as much bookishly self-referentialist as it is experientially nonexistent.

The path from colonialism to fascism is illustrated in Taussig’s book, “Mimesis and Alterity”. Though Taussig is writing of the Indians living in the Putumayo in South America, we may learn much by substituting another group of people (through a wilful act on my part) for the Indians, re the arch-Christian/Europeans. Here iTaussig (65):
“…the imaginative range essential to the execution of colonial violence in the Putumayo at the turn of the century was an imagining drawn from that which the civilized imputed to the Indians, to their cannibalism especially, and then mimicked. It should also be pointed out that while this violence was doubtlessly motivated by economic pressures and the need to create labour discipline, it was also… very much a passionate and gratuitous end in itself.

“This mimicry by the colonizer of the savagery imputed to the savage is what I call the colonial mirror of production and it is… identical to the mimetic structure of attribution and counter-attribution that Horkheimer and Adorno single out when they discuss (in “The Dialectic of Enlightenment”) not the violence of the twentieth-century colonial frontier but the blow-up within modern European civilization itself, as orchestrated by anti-Semitism.”

Taussing then quotes Horkheimer and Adorno: “There is no anti-Semite who does not basically want to imitate his mental image of a Jew, which is composed of mimetic ciphers: the argumentative movement of a hand, the musical voice painting a vivid picture of things and feelings irrespective of real content of what is said, and the nose—the physiognomic principum individuationis, symbol of the specific character of an individual, described between the lines of his countenance.”

There are several things in the above quotes which I would like to point out further and add to my own observations.

Let us turn to what Taussig describes as “the blow-up within modern European civilization”. It is my perception that the blow-up is not over. It continues in the effort of NATO to try maintaining pre-eminence of the West through the war in Afghanistan (Latvian military forces including). It also continues by means of the economic catastrophe that now spans the globe. The catastrophe was temporarily averted as a result of a temporarily successful diversion of social tensions caused by secular princes (nee neo-Christians) to Conspicuous Consumption. The mechanism through which Conspicuous Consumption was accomplished was to loosen—following WW1—the gold standard, and then replace it by fiat money in the latter half of the 20th century. The world is familiar with the consequences of fiat money through the parliamentary democracy and inflation in the Weimar Republic of Germany in the 1920s and more recently in Zimbabwe, Africa.

Though Taussig does not connect the repressions of arch-Christianity with colonialism or colonialism with fascism, he comes close enough for my purposes. Writes Taussig: “Fascism… is an accentuated form of modern civilization which is itself to be read as the history of repression of mimesis—the ban on graven images, gypsies, actors; the love-hate relationship with the body; the cessation of Carnival; and finally the kind of teaching which does not allow children to be children. But above all, fascism is more than outright repression of the mimetic; it is a return of the repressed, based on the ‘organized control of mimesis’. Thus fascism, through the mimesis of mimesis, ‘seeks to make the rebellion of the suppressed nature against dominion directly useful to dominion’”.

Even if fascism ceased being virulent as the result of physical exhaustion of societies due to WW2 and a subsequent release of tensions by taking advantage of a combination of machine production and fiat money to squelch unresolved tensions and aggressiveness, it did so also by absolving the carnal sins of sin, now identified as Conspicuous Consumption. However, fascism did not disappear (even if it sometimes so appeared), because “organized control of mimesis” (through apparent release of control over Conspicuous Consumption) cannot be sustained over the long-term.
This is why I agree with Taussig that we need to seize “…the opportunity to dismantle… second nature and reconstruct the worlds”.

This is a time when a small nation like Latvia has the opportunity to be shrewd and set its sail toward the future “within the buffeting of history” (Taussig). However, before the vessel called “Latvia” can take advantage of its small size and sail past the sinking ocean liners, it needs to deconstruct its parliamentary democracy and the Constitution which are tied by hidden ties to fascism. The most obvious way this can be accomplished is to encourage the people of Latvia to “not-vote”, dismiss the parliamentary partidocracy, and then reconfigure the future in a manner that will encourage mimesis not only among their own, but throughout the world.

The setting of the sails into the winds of history requires a radical jibe, that jibe being the “not-vote”.

Saturday, April 17, 2010

© Eso Antons Benjamins, aka Jaņdžs

POSTSCRIPT 2 / Epilogue
99 Let Us Have Alterity or
Come The Alternative —….

These blogs tend to be a continuum of an idea or thought, which is why—if you are interested in what you read—you are encouraged to consider reading the previous blog and the blog hereafter. http://esoschronicles.blogspot.com/  

First, as to the word "alterity" in the title. According to the dictionary “alterity” means: otherness; specifically the quality or state of being radically alien to the conscious self or a particular cultural orientation

Second, I have mentioned in my blogs in the past Michael Taussig, the anthropologist. I acknowledge my debt to Taussig here by citing him and his analysis of Walter Benjamin’s thought from his own thought provoking book, “Mimesis and Alterity”, Routledge, 1993. I am referring specifically to Chapter 3, ‘Spacing Out’ (Latvians would probably use the word “iedomāties”, to think into).

Taussing quotes Walter Benjamin: “The gift of seeing resemblances is nothing other than a rudiment of the powerful compulsion in former times to become and behave like something else.” I cite this passage, because I do not believe that for Latvia today those “former times” are past, but are of profound relevance and need to be exercised today.

This is because as things are in Latvia now, it is a state with a failed government. While there are many mundane administrative functions that can be fixed without a change of government, the chief problem is that the state’s would-be orthodox reformers et al, are insufficiently alive in their imaginations and articulations to probe and try alterity. Indeed, at a time when it is clear that the “West” (capitalism) is as failed an affair as the recent “East” (communism), and yet the ossified model of the former inspires the Latvian reformers in the midst of ongoing social turmoil—even death (suicides) and pain (look at the teeth)—one has to wonder whether the inarticulateness of the ‘picture’ of the state of Latvian society (such mimesis of the community’s self as there exists) is not in fact a process realizing the intolerability of the situation by acting out a communal dying.
Of course, the “good” reformers will not admit that the old Latvia is dead or shout with me “Long live the other Latvia!” They will ask: “What other Latvia?”
This bloggers proposal of how to achieve the “other” Latvia is suggested in Blog 98. I suggest that the only hope of projecting Latvia into alterity that is other than a dying present is to wage a successful “not-vote” campaign. It is possible for 700,000 not-voters to do so. I do not mean that being “successful” must necessarily end in a victory (though it is desirable), but that a “not-vote” campaign draws sufficient attention to itself to become the kick-start (the electric shock to a stopped heart) necessary to assemble a Constitutional Revision Assembly, a Referendum Committee, empower an Interim Government to do all that is possible to do to stop Latvia from bleeding empty of its people by out-migration and demographic death-spiral put into motion by a series of failed governments, and of course many more issues.

In order to survive, Latvia needs to imagine itself a survivor. This survival must include the possibility of seizing on radical direct not-violent actions as means to survival. The Latvia of tomorrow must shed its dead orthodox skin. This skin—a distorted history of pagans, peasants, and neo-Christian preachers—has been let overwrite a people who were in their proto-Latvian stage artisans (weavers, carpenters, potters, smiths, cobblers, gardeners, etc.) and were better known as Johns Children (Jāņu bērni). These were hobbled in the recovery of their identity, when in 1888 the figure of the itinerant teacher John (still visible on the Lihgo flag of 1874) was replaced by one Bear-Slayer, a figure lifted out of Luther’s Illustrated Bible (where he appears as Samson the Lion-Slayer).

The switch away from John in favour of Bear-Slayer happened not only because in 1881 Tsar Alexander III came to power and provoked pogroms against the Jews, but because he threatened many of the people living in the tsardom by attempting to have their language replaced with Russian. Among these people were Latvian speaking people. The tensions exploded under Tsar Nicholas II with what we know as the “1905 Revolution”. While dissatisfaction with economic development was one of its motivating forces, there were other motivations not tied to economics. This is the reason why the image (and the alterity) of Bear-Slayer, a macho character, found fertile soil in what had formerly been a kingdom held together by itinerant story tellers, who served equally well as saints. By making Bear-Slayer the hero and then leaving him to replaced John was a fatal mistake.
Indeed the institutions that diminish the proto-Latvian people (the populist substrate always at odds with a government presenting itself as neo-Christian) have a long history. And this is why the life of the Latvian community’s subjective self was permanently at odds (and often not for the better, though the why-fores are understandable) with democracy under the direction of a parliamentary government. Today direct participatory democracy is still spoken of only in the context of a President directly elected by the public rather than the Parliament. The Parliament remains a club of and for “political” parties.

At the same time, the death rattle may be just what the doctor ordered if we understand the anxieties of the subjective self of Latvians as they enter the death spiral caused by out-migration, an increasingly low birth rate, and not least by a parliamentary government believing itself to know better, though responsible for the time of troubles. This may be an opportune moment for Latvians to recapture the moment of self-identification lost in the last half of the 19th century and—with the help of alterity—re-identify themselves.

To cite Walter Benjamin (by way of Taussig) again: “If the theory is correct that feeling is not located in the head, that we sentiently experience a window, a cloud, a tree not in our brains but, rather, in the place where we see it, then we are, in looking at our beloved, too, outside ourselves. But in a torment of tension and ravishment.”

If the people who once knew themselves as Johns Children still retain in themselves something of the power of “mimesis”, that curious desire to be someone, something or somewhere else, an alterity remains a possibility. Though one cannot accomplish this directly of course, one can feel one’s self into it, and there are many ways of doing it. The copy machine is as much a mimesis machine as a wreath of grasses and flowers on one’s head. The latter was how the Latvian Children of Johns felt themselves into the role of being the children of John, their hero, the maternal male storyteller come on Johns Eve to keep them awake and make sure the Sun rises on Midsummer morning. Today, however, we have for alterity the young Latvian woman, who imagines she comes from impoverished peasants (perhaps kolhozniks), who conceives a child in England with the seed of an irresponsible Latvian boy also imagining he has endless generations of impoverished peasants in his background. Such is the result of the alterity that the parliamentary government of Latvia presents its people with.

Walter Benjamin is writing about his “ravishment” (his feeling his way into an alterity) while thinking of a young Latvian woman, a theatre director, (“a Russian revolutionary from Riga”—circa 1920s) with whom he is infatuated. Asja Lācis is an object out there in Walter Benjamin’s field of vision, that—to paraphrase Benjamin in first person singular—…cuts a one-way street through me, and by that cut stimulates my commitment to Marxism…. Walter and Asja live together for two years in Berlin (no doubt this is the time when Asja cut through Walter Benjamin with arguments that she makes ever so much more profound than words on paper). An intellect bound together by love (be it infatuation) is able to make the quantum jump from singer to linden tree in blossom time, to the song of bees in the blooms, and to the Revolution. So can’t government acting as if it has the rights of state and can go riding piggy-back on the wagon of history pushed onto the steel rails of a neo-liberal capitalist economy.

An important point raised by Michael Taussig is Benjamin’s perception of history. Writes Taussig: “The radical displacement of self in sentience—taking one outside of oneself—accounts for one of the most curious features of Benjamin’s entire philosophy of history, the flash wherein ‘the past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at an instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.’ Repeatedly this mystical flash illuminates his anxiety for reappraisal of past in present, this understanding that ‘to articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.’”

Taussig continues: “This flash marks that leap ‘in the open air of history’ which establishes history as ‘Marx understood revolution’ as ‘the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the ‘now’.’”

The government of Latvia, the one in office for the last twenty years, perceives the history of Latvia as a homogenous empty time. By so doing, the government causes the Latvian people to perceive their history as an “empty time” as well. The Latvian government of today empties the people of their “now” as a community and replaces it with visions of conspicuous consumption. In the end, conspicuous consumption is a form of cannibalism performed by the government on the people so that when everything else has been consumed, they consume themselves. The subjection of and then the limitation of the peoples’ subjectivity to Pop globalizes the world for freedom to be a Conspicuous Consumer, but it fails to impress the community of proto-Latvians, 200,000 of who have voted with their feet and left Latvia.

The Latvian people describe the consumption of their state with the phrase “the stolen state”, a word combo that is one of the top ten in Latvia. It is  "the stolen state", the nicely crisped body with green garnishes on the long dining room table, that is the centre piece of attention of the guests.

I trust this explains what alterity has to do with vision, with tomorrow, with a people at peace and a purpose. The “not-vote” campaign continues. To not-vote must be done to ensure humankind an alterity beyond that of the Conspicuous Consumer. It is worth as a consciousness raiser. My 99 blogs lead toward it.

Copy leaflet at 98 and pass it on.

Saturday, April 10, 2010

98 POSTSCRIP (1)

These blogs tend to be a continuum of an idea or thought, which is why—if you are interested in what you read—you are encouraged to consider reading the previous blog and the blog hereafter. Photos: The juices are flowing.Tapping the birch.

The NOT-VOTE as Debt Nullification.

Thomas Jefferson proposed that the states have the right to “nullify” unconstitutional federal laws. Virginia supporters of the Constitution (1788) insisted that the Constitution possess only the powers “expressly delegated” to it. Jefferson included the world “nullification” in his draft of the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798.

The “NOT-VOTE”, an action proposed by this blogger for the upcoming elections in Latvia (October 2, 2010), is a form of citizen opposition to the seizure of the government by a consortium of corporate populists. The seizure is made possible (not only in Latvia of course) by having the courts of law recognize corporations as individuals, giving them the rights of individuals. The corporate “individuals” then create a form of corporate populism, sometimes known as partidocratic democracy. Of course, the corporate populists condemn citizen populism. Indeed, in Latvia the word “populism” has been forced to become a synonym of “chaos”. This is how corporations manage to shift the blame for the chaos caused in Latvian society from themselves to the people.

There is an urgent need for the citizens of Latvia to act on the NOT-VOTE if the destruction of the community of Latvia is to be avoided. The community of Latvia must insure—among many other things—a Constitutional Revision Assembly, which hopefully will fence in the heretofore Conspicuous Consumption free-for-all endorsed by corporate interests, which has brought economic ruin to the country. One hopes it will be replaced with community oriented long-term economic policies.

Not least, a NOT-VOTE by the citizenry of Latvia may nullify the IMF''s and their own government's imposed debt slavery, because a NOT-VOTE constitutes an act by a sovereign people against the ills brought their community by a “foreign body” (be it one of their own or other).

The term “nullification” has a long history. One may argue that a not-voter acts as a member of a jury. Here * is a link to one interesting discussion of the topic.

Below is material for a popular flyer. You are encouraged to forward it to your contacts.


AN INVITATION TO NOT-VOTE
(a translation in Latvian below.)

Not-Voting In Latvia

What Does “Not-Voting” mean? A not-vote means that you vote with your feet and do not visitt the poling station.

Who is organizing the “Not-Voting” campaign? The not-vote is being organized by UPNoVo, United Populist Not-Voters. Everyone who has ever not-voted or thinks so doing in the future is a potential member.

What is the purpose of “Not Voting”? The purpose of a not-vote is to free the people of a corrupt government that has imposed itself on a society and nation by a number of pseudo-legal schemes. “Pseudo-legal” means clever lawyers and politicians twisting the spirit of the law in such a manner as to achieve the opposite of the law’s intent. In the instance of the State of Latvia “pseudo-legal” acts by partidocrats have “stolen the nation” in order to exploit it to their own ends.

How was Latvia stolen from its people? Latvia reemerged from occupation under the Soviet Union in 1991 under the aegis of a movement known as The People’s Front. However, as soon as The People’s Front passed its populist authority to the reconstituted government, government adapted a policy of Conspicuous Consumption as its near- and long-term goal. The new “vision” (never explicitly stated) by government not only fragmented the aforementioned populist movement, but became an occupation force in its own right. The government hid its “vision” of the future behind academic jargon. Conspicuous Consumption became known as “shock capitalism”.

Where is it written that Latvia’s politics is devoted to “conspicuous consumption”? There is no  “written” law, but it functions de facto, that is,

a) it has made many politicians and ex-politicians rich;
b) government has supported MACRO (big) businesses over MICRO (small) businesses;
c) government has sold the people of Latvia into debt-slavery, because it knew beforehand that if it had to be bailed out by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), this would be the result;
d) all the bail out money went to cover the losses of mostly Swedish and Danish banks; nothing went to Latvian business; not only the debtors, but the entire citizenry of Latvia must now pay off the debt to the banks;
e) the government has no real “vision” of Latvia’s future. In fact, it refuses to envision a future, because “conspicuous consumption” suits those in command positions.

What happens if I “not-vote”? In spite of the to be expected arguments by the government to the contrary, the members of UPNoVo (United Populist Not-Voters) may set up assemblies to rewrite the Constitution, discuss and debate the development and long-term goal of Latvia, discuss future public referendums, organize interim government, all this and more aware of the economic difficulties the world is in and is likely remain in for a long time. A different mind-set is necessary if the government of a sovereign people is to enter the future with confidence. Act by “not-voting!” The whole world will be watching.

Because the economic crisis was invited to happen not only by Latvian neo-liberals, but also the International Monetary Fund (IMF), there exists the possibility that upon the establishing of a majority not-vote, it may be possible to nullify the loan (repudiate the debt) accepted by a corrupt government.

UPNoVo, United Populist Not-Voters

* P.S. The following a quote from above link is most relevant to the NOT-VOTER: “Those whose interests lie in maintaining government control of social behavior may argue that the Constitution provides the necessary protection of liberties. But legislative bodies will always confirm the constitutionality of their own acts. And the oaths sworn to uphold the Constitution by judges and public servants have historically been only as good as the power to enforce such oaths. Nor are free elections adequate to prevent tyranny without jury veto power, because elections come only periodically and give no guarantee of repealing the damage done. Additionally, the second body of legislators are likely to be as bad as the first, since they are exposed to the same temptations and use the same tactics to gain office.”




AICINĀJUMS NE-BALSOT


Ne-balsošana Latvijā

Ko nozīmē “Ne-Balsot”? Ne-balsot nozīmē, ka jūs balsojat ar kājām un nepiestājat pie balsošanas iecirkņa. Jūs ne-balsojat.

Kas organizē “Ne-Balsot”? Ne-balsošanu organizē VPB vai ViPoBa, Vienota Populistiska Balss. ViPoBā iederās ikviens pilsonis, kurš kādreiz ir ne-balsojis. Ne-balsotāji ir žūrija, kas vērtē valdības nedarbu.

Kāds ir iemesls “Ne-Balsot”? Dotā brīdī ne-balsošanas mērķis ir atteikties no korumpētas valdības, kura ir iesēdusies valdības krēslā izstumjot no tā sabiedrību. Šī “okupācija” ir panākta ar dažādu instrumentu palīdzību, ieskaitot pseido-juridiku. “Pseido juridika” nozīmē, ka advokātiem un politiķiem tiek dota iespēja izbēgt no likuma gara un izveidot tam kaut ko pretēju. Šī aicinājuma gadījienā “pseido juridisks” akts nozīmē “nolaupīt valsti”, lai to izmantotu savtīgām interesēm par labu.

Kā nozaga Latviju no tās iedzīvotājiem? Latvija atbrīvojās no Padomju okupācijas 1991. g. To vadīja populistiska kustība Tautas fronte. Diemžēl, tikko Tautas fronte atdeva savu populisma mandātu officiālai valdībai, valdība noteica populismu šķēlošu mērķi: Pār-tērēt; tulk. angļu valodā: Conspicuous Consumption. Akadēmiskais žargons pār-tērēšanu slēpa ar vārdu frāzi “šoka terāpija”.

Kur ir rakstīts kā Latvijā valda “pār-tērēšanas” princips? Nav tāds rakstīts likums, bet tas darbojās de facto:

a) tas ir padarījis dažu labu esošu vai bijušu politiķi bagātu;
b) valdība galveno kārt atbalsta MAKRO (lielos) uzņēmējus;
c) valdība ieveda Latvijas iedzīvotājus parādu verdzībā, jo zināja, ka ja būs jāprasa Starptautiskais Valūtas Fonda (SVF) aizdevums, rezultāts būs tāds kāds viņš ir;
d) visa SVF aizdotā nauda tika dota, lai glābtu zviedru bankas, kuras veicināja valsts parādus. Parādi tagad jāatmaksā ne tikai parādniekiem, bet visiem Latvijas iedzīvotājiem;
e) valsts vīzija par Latvijas nākotni kā nav tā nav; fakts ir, valdība ir izvēlējusies “pār-tērēšanu” kā valsts mērķi, un šis mērķis pilnībā saskan ar pie varas esošo partidokrātiju interesēm;

Kas notiks ja es “ne-balsoju”? Neskatoties uz dažādiem valdības pret argumentiem, VPB biedri pārrunās tālāku Tautas Frontei līdzīgu iedzīvotāju organizēšanos, ka piemēram, sasaukt Satversmes pārrakstīšanas konferenci, diskutēt un debatēt par Latvijas attīstību īslaicīga un ilglaicīga laika ietvaros, organizēs pagaidus valdību, un atcerēsies, ka ekonomiskā krīze notiek kā Latvijas, tā pasaules mērogā. Citiem vārdiem, sekmīga ne-balsotāju akcija iespaidos visas pasaules politisko nākotni. Pasaule vēro!

Tā kā ekonomisko krīzi veicināja ne tikai “pašu bālēliņi”, bet arī arzemju bankas (SVF ieskaitot), pastāv iespēja, ka ja ne-balsotāji ir pārliecinošā vairākumā, pastāv iespēja SVF “aizdevumu” apstrīdēt un nullificēt.

Latvijas iedzīvotājiem laiks atcerēties “dziesmoto revolūciju” un izmantot tās garu “ne-balsojot”. Domāsim par pagātni, tagadni un nākotni ar drosmi un pašapzinību. Ziedosim savu drosmi “ne-balsojot” par stagnāciju vai pār-tērēšanas principa turpināšanos.

ViPoBa, Vienota Populistiska Balss
P.S. Sekojošais links šeit  [http://www.isil.org/resources/lit/history-jury-null.html]  (angļu valodā) sniedz saīsinātu vēsturi par žūriju spēju nullificēt likumu. Datora tulkojums ne visai precīzs, tāpēc blogotājs pats mēģina tulkot raksta priekšpēdējo paragrāfu. Nepārprotami, te ir nepieciešams pieredzējis tulks, tomēr jēga ir pietiekami skaidra, lai lasītājs saprastu, ka tikai vara, kura pieķērusies pie likuma radīšanas kā tikai savu tiesību, noliedz žūrijas principu latviešiem. Tā tad, NE-BALSOTĀJI ievērojiet:
“Tiem, kuru interesēs ir uzturēt valdības kontroli pār sabiedrības uzvedību argumentēs, ka Konstitūcija satur [visu], kas ir nepieciešams, lai aizsargātu cilvēka tiesības. Tomēr, leģistratūras vienmēr apstiprina pašas savu aktu likumību [konstitutionalitāti]. Vēsture [pierāda], ka tiesnešu un valsts darbinieku zvērasti ir vienmēr uzticāmi tikai tik, cik likuma garantētājs ir spējīgs zvērastu īstenot. Brīvas vēlēšanas nav pietiekamas, lai novērstu tirāniju, [tādu] kura atsakās no [absolūtas] veto varas, jo vēlēšanas notiek tikai laiku pa laikam un nedod nekādu arantiju, ka tās atcels iepriekš pielaistās kļūmes. Toties, jaunie ievēlētie [varas locekļi] iespējams būs tik pat slikti kā iepriekšējie, jo viņi būs padoti tiem pašiem kārdinājumiem un lietos tās pašas [izvairīšanās] taktikas [kā iepriekšējā vara].
Datora tulkojums: Tiem, kuru intereses atrodas saglabāt valdības kontroli pār sociālās uzvedības, var apgalvot, ka Konstitūcija sniedz nepieciešamo aizsardzību brīvību. Bet likumdošanas iestādes vienmēr apstiprina konstitūcijai savu rīcību. Un zvērestus zvērējuši ievērot Konstitūciju, tiesneši un valsts ierēdņi ir vēsturiski ir tikai tik labi, kā pilnvaras īstenot šo zvērestu. Tāpat arī ir brīvas vēlēšanas pietiekamas, lai novērstu tirāniju bez zvērinātajiem veto tiesības, jo vēlēšanas nāk tikai periodiski un dot nekādas garantijas atcelšanu darīt bojājumus. Bez tam, otrā ķermeņa likumdevēju, iespējams, ir tik slikti, kā pirmajā, jo tie ir pakļauti tiem pašiem kārdinājumiem un izmanto to pašu taktiku, lai iegūtu biroju.

Sunday, April 4, 2010

© Eso Antons Benjamins, aka Jaņdžs

AN INTERMISSION  
97 To Be Continued at Another Time (2)

I     Mythology, when understood to be more than about ghosts, vampires, and dragons is a set of images whose complexity give evidence of having once been a well thought out and well told. The story of Oedipus, re-presented in my blog series “Tiresias’ Revenge” (see blogs 68-81), and my re-construction of “The Story of Clever John and Crazy Jane” (blogs 92-95) give support to the belief that these stories are profoundly spiritual in content. Unfortunately, in both cases, the world dwells on fragments and easily and often misinterprets them as a convenience to forgetfulness.


No doubt, my interpretation of the story of King Oedipus (“Tiresias’ Revenge”) puts emphasis on something passed over by Sigmund Freud’s interpretation. At the same time, the knowledge of how a story can be constructed and deconstructed and constructed yet again—rather than one example being the only example for all times—tells us that many examples may be tried and not always the best model is chosen. The story of King Oedipus clearly bends the plot of the play more to my reconstruction than that of Freud. Sophocles’ version of the play masks some disturbing events in the background that Freud and most everyone pass over.

Both of the aforementioned stories (“Tiresias’ Revenge” and “The Story of Clever John and Crazy Jane”) give an interpretation of The Real that we are not accustomed in perceiving. Most of us know the Real as a Western positivist projection. While the positivist advertisement best points its finger at the Barbie Doll, the Real of Oedipus and Clever John gives evidence that their creators knew how to chop wood. For a king to discover that it is not for having slept with his mother that ten of his family die, but for him not having suffered the risk of sacrifice is devastating. It is devastating for all who trusted the king’s (or government’s) authority. Clever John (clever in the sense of the unhesitatingly using his wit in an invidious manner when opportunity allows) gets taught the priorities of the Sun in no uncertain terms.

It is through the story of Clever John (a story very likely from before the written word) that we discover that proto-Latvians knew what the price of a wagon load of gold was. It was the “Clever Johns”, the  kaupos, who came to replace the itinerant Johns of arch-Christianity. Crazy Jane became crazy because Clever John could not be trusted though it cost him the spectacle of the lights going on just in time to discover that in return for a wagon full of gold, he has the pleasure of making love to a straw doll.

The people who formed the Latvian governmentwhich followed the “singing revolution” and exposed Latvia to the shock treatment of neo-liberal economic policies, betrayed the people and the state of Latvia by seizing it for conspicuous consumerism. One may argue that they neither knew nor understood better, and were mere kaupos on behalf of neo-liberalism. Ought they to not know now? There is no evidence that they do. The recent appearance of a group that calls itself “The Meierovic Group for Progressive Changes” (whose initial members count 43 prominent names) proves that the fault is not only with the government, but the intelligentsia of Latvia. Perhaps it is mute; perhaps it does not exist, though it is mentioned frequently as if asserting it makes it so.

Describing itself as “non-political”, the Meirovic Group has announced that its members are “…ready to give their time and energy to make of Latvia a dynamic, self-aware and honorable 21st century Western nation” (re Press Release of 21-3-2010). Are they joking? Does not the word “Western” represent—implicitly and explicitly—a political orientation?

If before the disintegration of the Soviet Union and with it the orthodox Left in the West, one could argue that “West” (or Western) was a word that contained both the Left and the Right political wings, today this is no longer true. Anyone who follows politics today knows that politics has been captured by money that favors a neo-liberal orientation. True, the latter pretends to be an all embracing “Western” political ideology. But it is unlikely that the members of the “non-political” Meirovic Group do not understand that “Western” has come to stand for the creation and maintenance of weak citizenship. What else is the Latvian government, but a bought off conspicuous consumer partidocracy making a gross spectacle of itself with the “positive” political support of its corrupt self? The Latvian people stand outside this glass bowl with but one orange fish in it and watch the fishy wiggle its tail as a form of reform.

The Maeirovic Group asks citizens to be “demanding” and suggests that this demandingness will metamorphose into a demand for schools and health care. Have the Latvian people not been demanding this all along, but have been yoked by their government to debt and tax slavery and banks instead? The political winds of today blow people not toward benign globalization, but toward more neo-liberal exploitation of the politically weak and uninformed populations said to believe in something the government and its cronies call “populism”. The “growth” of the consumerist Humpty Dumpty goes on uninterrupted even in a crisis that is as permanent as the war on terrorism by “democratic” and “freedom (loving)” consumer nations. Even Alice (in Wonderland) knows that Humpty Dumpty falls off the wall; not so, it seems, the said Meirovic group.

II    It would have been politically more neutral for the Meierovic Group to say that it stood for an East-West neutral 21st century nation. This evidently did not occur to the group. Why not?

The answer is only a guess, but the ones who should have questioned the politics of a “non-political” group should have been those with links to the “old left”. The Maeirovic Group does have members with such links. However, apparently these members stand for that particular “left” which has no ideas of its own and finds primitive accumulation an apolitical act. In short, the Meierovic Group sees the war currently being waged on the behalf of and to further the cause of Conspicuous Consumption as an end in itself, and of course as destined to win. Therefore, so the logic goes, why oppose “Western” political ideology which is a Winner from the word go? Did not the so-called Cold War happen between the Soviet Union and the West? Did not the “West” win and provide proof of a successful depolarization of politics?

What the Meirovic Group does not say is that the “West” unambiguously supports Conspicuous Consumption with the military forces of NATO. Only a decade after the fall of the Soviet Union, the symptom of Conspicuous Consumption broke out in an acute event, which we know as “9/11”. A group of young people, saturated by, with, for, yet unaware that they had been poisoned by the bacillus of Conspicuous Consumption, motivated by jealousy (and angered by delay in the instant gratification promised in televised soap opera ads), they attacked one of the financial centers of the West. For all its paradoxes, it was a chronal moment. The events ocultated (sorry; a new meaning to the word ‘occultation’), occultated in such a way that paradoxes met, shorted, and something humongous happened: the sick unknowingly retaliated on those who made them sick more profoundly than they had dared imagine. [For backup of this hypothesis of the new polarization see “Afflicted Powers”, Verso, 2005, by Retort, a group of San Francisco Bay area that describes itself as “antagonists to capital and empire”. An interesting read; see Ch 5 & 6 to be sure.]

The crisis of Latvia is that of a community without a purpose, dreaming of conspicuous consumption, financially poor, psychologically adrift. The present Latvian government (a partidocracy controlled by businesses wholly committed to conspicuous consumption) sells conspicuous consumerism to the people without reservations, because the government emerged from under the Soviet yoke as a political a tabula rasa. A moment after this reconstituted entity rid itself of the inspired romanticism of “liberty” explicit in the “singing revolution”, it instantly morphed into a failed imagination. The imagination fails the Meierovic Group. This does not mean that its surreal presentation of itself as “not a political party” does not continue the romantic notions of the “3rd Awakening” of Latvia. Indeed, it does continue it. However, this suggests that the crisis which the group perceives and of which it is born is more serious than the group knows. This will present the group or whatever may emerge from it with either a strategic failure, i.e., a continued preoccupation with a fake present, or the emergence of the only alternative—a revolutionary act.

As this writer has suggested many times, one such revolutionary act (or, if you will, not-violent terror—see blogs 1-81) is a “not-vote” in the upcoming elections in Latvia in October. Unlike the pean of peacemakers: “They declared war, and no one came”, which is far too soon to predict to be soon doable, ‘not-voting’ is doable. The members of the Meierovic Group have not only the potential talent and influence to carry off the act, but to prepare for its success (of which there is a good chance) by preparing forums for the necessary debates, conferences (to rewrite the Latvian Constitution for one), and install a temporary government while the house of Latvia is debated over and put in order. This kind of effort will surely be worth joining and its growth will send chronal echoes through all political spectrums of the world.

P.S. Spring is icumen in. I write this on the 30th of March, 2010. The cranes, storks, geese, and starlings returned a day or two after the spring solstice. The first butterfly was seen at a local cemetery—as one rose, but the other went from being a point to becoming a wave as the holographic model of the universe suggests. Immersed in an affliction known as ‘lack of time’, I take an intermission to do other necessary things. From time to time I may return with yet another Postscript. I hope the readers found the above essay interesting enough to back up to the early blogs, even back to the beginnings. The build-up through all that boring stuff was necessary to erase the orthodox and calcified image of both “ancient” and more “recent” (proto-)Latvians and create the beginnings of an alternative.

P.P.S. For all those of you who did not care a wit for any of my blogs, I send you herewith the greetings and “apologies” of Clever John and Crazy Jane. See here. I have a feeling that you will want to see this twice.

Last but not least: a link to a workshop of “How to start a populist NOT-VOTE movement” or
any-other-such and to “"Eso's Chronicles" for a philosophical trump over the usual “a Not-Vote is Sin” sweats (see blogs 96 & 97 to get the idea): It is the only way for people to recover the State.

Asterisk & Notes of Interest
On material deprivation in Latvia.
On the theme of “more-equal-than-others” see George Orwell's "Animal Farm".  
A recommended read: “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism” by Emmanuel Goldstein (A book within a book from George Orwell's "1984".)  
Of interest to me is this  (news on the California elections to legalize Johns Grass) and this article (coca politics in Bolivia). The articles express some of my reasons for supporting the growing of Johns Grass in Latvia.
Interesting material  relating to Johns.
A provocative and stimulating news-analysis-opinion site (from someone very American): http://emsnews.wordpress.com/  
……………………………………………………..
These blogs tend to be a continuum of an idea or thought, which is why—if you are interested in what you read you are encouraged to consider reading the previous blog and the blog hereafter.

Partial entries of my blogs may be found at LatviansOnline + Forum Home + Open Forum –ONLATVIANPOPULISM vs LATVIJASLABEJIE. If you copy this blog for your files, or copy to forward, or otherwise mention its content, please credit the author and http://esoschronicles.blogspot.com/ 

Thursday, April 1, 2010

© Eso Antons Benjamins, aka Jaņdžs

AN INTERMISSION     
96 To Be Continued At Another Time (1 of 2)

The time has come to end this series of blogs on which I started about three years ago at www.LatviansOnline.com under the topic of “Latvians On Faith”. At first this was a series of entries under the topic of “The Janis Festival and All About Jānis”. [Jānis = John.] After I concluded that thought-cluster, I moved on to my own blogspot at http://esoschronicles.blogspot.com/  I availed myself of the opportunity to introduce my blogspot via the Open Forum at LatviansOnline. On the average, I wrote two blogs every week. The number of clicks per each entry (according to my rough log) was from a low 33 to a high 350, with the average somewhere around a stable 100 + a 20-30 variable.

My interest in the Johns Eve Festival (hence to be abbreviated as “Johns”) began when I was seven years old and moved from Riga to Ērgļu pagasts (about 100 km east of Riga), where an aunt (Emma Melbārde, nee Jurjane, the younger sister of my grandmother) and her husband had a farm. The move (1940) was necessitated by the occupation of Latvia by the Soviets and the rise to political power of Vilis Lācis, a writer become Chairman of the Latvian SSR, who forced our family to move from our home at Juhrmala so he could move in. Vilis Lācis’s move was very much a symbolic gesture of “trumping the boss”. Mr. Lācis came to fame as a writer with the help of “Jaunākās Ziņas”, founded (1911) by my grandfather Antons Benjamiņš, of which Emilija Benjamiņš (nee Simsone, my grandfather’s second wife) was the publisher. At the time my father, Jānis (John) Benjamiņš was the newspaper’s editor-in-chief. The bad taste exercised by Lācis in removing my family from its home for the sake of a questionable political gesture was ultimately too obvious a vendetta of a proletarian-(of-pretension) and Lācis subsequently thought better of it and moved out. Presently the house, sans its once pleasant garden, is the residence of the Russian ambassador to Latvia.
To return to the itinerant John or Johns, one of my favorite topics. Though I was familiar with the Johns Festival as it was celebrated at Juhrmala, the well-known beach-side suburb of Riga, I was unprepared for the tradition as it was celebrated in the more native (less cosmopolitan) countryside. The difference in the manner of celebration of the festival, especially the sense of community that the visits to and from neighboring “saimes”, brought to the senses of an seven year old not only a strangeness, but also a delight. Such an impression has lasted to this day. It was this unstated ritual (along with the Lihgo songs) that aroused in me a special interest, and when I lived in the U.S., I thought of trying to discover the origins of the festival.

My interests in Johns lead me to educate myself about mythology. While the natural inclination of my mind is to weave thought as a surrealist (I owe this observation to Robert Lowell, the late American poet), I was drawn to mythology, because besides the obvious surreal elements in any mythology, mythology is hierarchical as well. Not being familiar at that time with Jacques Lacan’s concepts of ‘the Real’ and ‘Mirror Stage’ and like possibilities (Lacan befriended French surrealist artists before he turned to the study of the human psyche), and finding America not only surreal but bizarre (in its aimless agitation to say the least), the structure implicit in mythological stories provided a sort of anchor for me. I could dip my own string into the sugar or salt water of stories and draw to light my own crystals.
My early experience with political violence and war initiated by some of the “major” States made me skeptical of State governments to the limits such skepticism takes. I distrust any State, even though—some may be surprised—I recognize the need of it in a religious-moral sense. The question, for me, revolves around trust, i.e., who to trust? This puzzle only fed my interest in mythology and introduced me to the now often dismissed studies of it as presented in “The Golden Bough ” by Sir James Frasier and “The White Goddess” by the poet Robert Graves. Both men gave special attention to human sacrifice. Whatever the specifics of these two men’s personal orientations, I found myself in broad agreement with their material and approach. With the help of these and other authors (I especially like Michael Taussig), I perceived that one cannot speak or do politics without taking into account the “ultimate sacrifice”, the latter not so much in terms of the common soldier, but of the politicians themselves. As perhaps Lacan would agree: an oath that is but one’s word must be guaranteed in the Real (unchangeable) by acts.

I attribute much of the vileness of contemporary politics to the absence of public demand that politicians sacrifice their lives at the end of their lives if their names are not to be removed from public records and/or declared unmentionable. I believe that the absence of public demand for such sacrifices from the political parties is due to the dumbing down of the public that began with the destruction of arch-Christianity by neo-Christianity. This is what ‘disappeared’ the itinerant preachers, the Johns, among the Bogomils, the Cathars, the Children of Johns, the Muslims, Jews, and others. This happened a thousand years ago, plus or minus a hundred years. Incidentally, such a contra neo-Christian chronology of history is suggested by Anatoly Fomenko, a Russian mathematician (topology) and historian with whose arguments I am in sympathy with.
However, while in the United States of America, its status as an empire unquestioned and promoted by all possible positivist means of control, the mindset kept my thinking within the boundaries of neo-Christian mythology.  There were not many in my youth who did not hear the Christian myth and the Bible first. While one may say that in terms of open spaces and free market policies America presents no limits to thought, the very same prevent thought from solidifying enough to press back at a boundless and irresponsible positivism with something resembling solid opposition.

Nevertheless, I gradually discovered that the failure to find a point from which to leverage was the dilemma of our times for all: nowhere—anywhere from America to Latvia—can one find a point to leverage from. In a system where corruption is imbedded in law, an honest death cannot escape being called a suicide, and therefore it loses the political tension an honest death had in times when no written word interfered to corrupt the spoken word.
After returning to Latvia [after a total of 51 years abroad (4 in Germany, 46 in the U.S., 1 in South Korea—the latter as a U.S. Marine right after the signing of the armistice in 1953)], I noted with profound regret the changes and demoralization of the community of Latvians. Understanding by now that even the community of 1942, or 3, or 4 and earlier had lost much of what it had formerly possessed (I am thinking back to the Lihgo flag of 1874, and 1209 when Bishop Albert went on a crusade against the proto-Latvians in the kingdom of Jersika), yet because it was so much smaller than America, I was prepared to look at the Johns Eve Festival and image it as the night of human sacrifice on Midsummer Eve—for the reason that there should be no doubt that the Sun would rise on Midsummer Morning.

The stage of human sacrifice in the development of a society is dismissed by Westerners as belonging only to the Inca, Maya, and a few other pre- and post-aboriginals. I submit that such a tradition in Europe was practiced not that long ago, until just before the arch-Christians arrived to replace it with traditions of fasting and sexual abstinence, but retained the ‘endura’—fasting unto death—as a way to prove one’s earnestness about life. The Children of Johns were one of a number of like-minded groups. The widespread use of the name “john” (jahnis, iannis, ivan, johann, hans, huan, aengus, andžs, etc.) in an almost endless chain of offshoots, gives evidence of ubiquity when all was yet one or nearly so. The origin of arch-Christians has nothing to do with neo-Christian Jesus. The word “Christianity” itself tells us that it originates in “Krust” (for cross) + Yahnis (John) = Krust-iyan. Jesus is forced to displace the Johns in order to accomplish—on behalf of secular princes—a total moral flip-flop.

The rise of neo-Christianity has everything to do with and nothing to undo secular politics compromising all convictions. As the used car dealer used to say to his salesmen: “Tell them how they just missed a great “Sale” yesterday, but you promise that you will see to it that they still get a bargain today”.

The neo-Christians replicate the car dealer through a similar practical cynicism: ‘…tell them that they can have everything they want, including God, Bliss, Sex, and Heaven, and they will come to you, shut their eyes to the violence about them, and eat out of your hands, because your force and violence can accomplish this “miracle”’. There is but one qualification: it can be done only as long as the Earth can absorb the cost of “the-willing-to be-violent” and they pay nothing. When the illusion of paying nothing is withdrawn, then as W. B. Yeats wrote: “...the blood-dimmed tide is loosed” at the next step. Is this what humankind wants?

As I see it, modern politics dares not answer to the question: Is self-sacrifice so out of place in politics in our times? As I word-pictured it in Blog 90: While Jesus and Mary have been found to be guilty by the Inquisition and must be burnt at the stake for thinking differently, the Pope is thinking hard of a substitute sacrifice—and does not discover it. For the last thousand years the leadership of humankind has not taken an oath not to take an oath in order to prove that one’s word is real. The reason for this is that in arch-Christian times the spoken word accepts death as a way to keep the truth of the word intact. The politicians of our day are not used to that kind of a commitment to the people of which they are the government of.

Last, but not least, how to start a populist "NOT-VOTE" movement:
http://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_how_to_start_a_movement.html
If interested, acknowledge with a note.

Asterisk & Notes of Interest:
On material depravation in Latvia.
On the theme of “more-equal-than-others” George Orwell's "Animal Farm".  
A recommended read: “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism” by Emmanuel Goldstein (A book within a book from George Orwell's "1984").
Of great interest to me is this and like articles. It presents some of my reasons for supporting the growing of Johns Grass in Latvia.
A provocative and stimulating news-analysis-opinion site (from someone very American): http://emsnews.wordpress.com/ 
...............................................................
These blogs tend to be a continuum of an idea or thought, which is why—if you are interested in what you read—you are encouraged to consider reading the previous blog and the blog hereafter.


Partial entries of my blogs may be found at LatviansOnline + Forum Home + Open Forum –ONLATVIANPOPULISM vs LATVIJASLABEJIE. If you copy this blog for your files, or copy to forward, or otherwise mention its content, please credit the author and http://esoschronicles.blogspot.com/