Eso’s Chronicles 160

 “Escaping the Death Camp of Post-Modernity” (5)
© Eso A.B.

They call us “survivors”. I put myself among the “survivors” who were never in a “death camp” of the Nazis or the Bolsheviks. I realize that there is a dispute over who may apply that term to him or herself. http://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/26071/row-over-definition-holocaust-survivor Nevertheless, the term applies to a much broader segment of humankind than the Zionist Federation through conceit for Jews suffering more than others denies others a share in.

In my own country of Latvia, where many people are survivors of Stalin’s ‘gulags’, the term ‘survivor’ has been replaced by the term ‘the repressed’. This change may have been done partially to avoid an unseemly clash between two groups of people disputing who suffered most. Clearly the word “survivor” cannot be appropriated by either myself or anyone else. It is a classic subjective word that will not surrender to Zionist superego no matter how forcefully asserted.

The decision by Latvians to designate their survivors as “the repressed”, nevertheless, indicates that fractal differences exist between the two groups of sufferers. However reluctantly one may accept the designation of “the repressed”, its acceptance suggests awareness of an irrefutable legalistic intercession on behalf of the repressor.

While Jewish “survivors” may claim that they were designated to suffer death sooner or later, “the repressed” are aware that while their repressors exercised no mercies that would or could save them from death, they were placed in the gulags as enemies of the Bolshevik led Soviet Socialist order. While millions died in the Gulags under most miserable and merciless circumstances (over 790,000 people were tried in 1937, of which over 353,000 were shot, and over 430,000 were sent to prison or gulags), the surviving ‘repressed’ cannot claim that if they had the stamina or fortune to survive, they would have ended in a sealed trailer exposed to Zircon gas.

Whatever the arguments over the choice of words, the Baltic countries (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) were undeniably unilaterally and violently occupied by the Soviet Union, and the subsequent executions and deportations were perpetrated on populations of countries which the Soviet Union had renounced as part of its territories by treaty. Thus, the dead as well as the deported and enslaved may defend themselves as a having suffered arbitrary exposure to sham trials, physical violence and death, and those who did not succumb are “survivors”. The only way the occupier of the Baltics could have hoped to escape being called ‘the repressor-occupier’ was to see itself in the position of the repressor for eternity—which repressor obviously did not succeed in.

Just like the ‘survivors’, ‘the repressed’ (a word selected by the superego, i.e., ego of law) have turned their horrific experiences in an inward suffering, and many have found solace in being able to gather as a solidarity that shares in a common experience. As such, the groups may manifest political power either on their own behalf or on behalf of the larger community about them, which in and of itself may knows little or nothing about the experiences of concentration camps and gulags. The larger community may learn about the gulags best from one who survived them: the Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn , who wrote several books which record his experiences in Soviet labor camps, including “The Gulag Archipelago”. [Excerpts: http://www.colegiobolivar.edu.co/high_school/Academics_11/11_Data/11_Data_econ_poli/THE%20GULAG.doc ]

The above “survivors” and “the repressed” belong to the time and events that happened during the first half of the 20^th century. I took part in this period as a child, during its last 17 years (1933-1950), and I claim my “survivorship” from the point of view of a child and youth (I am writing this in April, 2013).

The first defense of my claim is an unwanted and coerced participation (unerwuenchte beteiligung) in violent times and their traumatic after effects. It may surprise the reader that such an ‘unerwuenchte beteiligung’ / coerced participation is the experience of most of the children who lived or live through wars and other violent events, including extreme poverty and neglect of education. The children of our forebears, no matter how difficult their physical environment, seldom if ever experienced or had to survive such physical and psychological  neglect when making their home in the wood where they survived in as animal herders.

Today the coerced ‘beteiligung’ of children in violence brings to mind the children of Afghanistan and Pakistan (exposed to U.S. drone attacks), Palestine (subject to IDF rubber bullets and seizure of their parental homelands), and such who visit trashcans and trash heap anywhere on our planet. All such children will, if not today, then at a later and more reflective point in their life, think of themselves as “survivors” regardless of what the superego of the Zionist Federation says they may think.

When we broaden the scope and the numbers of people who may describe themselves as “survivors”, such people may soon, if not already, represent the majority of our planet’s inhabitants. When among the “survivors” are included children, and the state of “survivorship” is perceived from such a broadened perspective, it changes utterly the way society may view modern politics and its leadership.

The prevailing attitude of government ‘law makers’ in ruling and lording over society is: “It may be immoral, but it is not illegal”, i.e. immorality by way of our ‘law-makers’ achieves legalized status. Even if the superego of these ‘law-makers’ is without fault, it presents the gene of altruism with direct challenge from a sadistic superego. This means that government governs with the help of the barrel of a gun, and that such a government must be short circuited and discredited by all means at hand which do not use violence.

This is the time when the genes of altruism give a “survivor” a nudge to react to the repression with an act of resistance. Perhaps even more unbelievable is the fact that no “survivor” knows when he-she will react. Yet we may be sure that a “survivor” has the subjective tools by way of experience to react sooner or later. We may also be sure that the “survivor’s” subjective experience dictates to him-her to resist without use of violence.

Though it is less than a decade before the centennial anniversary of the establishment of the first gulag (1919) and two decades before the establishment of the first concentration camp (1933), there has not as of yet emerged a clear philosophy of action for those who survived the conditions and times of these institutions. The exceptions, emergences that are with us for all their contradictions, are two fundamentalist orientations—that of the Jews and Muslims. The Jewish reaction may be summed up in the words “never again”, backed by a determination to react with extreme violence to any threat to its community. The Muslim reaction sums up the reaction of Islamists in the cry 'Allah ek akbar'. ('God is great'),  and going on the attack strapped in a vest filled with dynamite and blowing one’s self up at a military gate or doorway or after gaining entrance into as crowded a place as possible.

The fundamentalist oriented individuals of both mentioned communities show great selflessness in their willingness for self-sacrifice, except that in both instances self-sacrifice is neither ‘pure’ nor ‘without fault’. The self-sacrifices of both groups slaughter and shed blood of innocents and leave themselves open to the criticism of being ‘cowards’, that is, “suicidal terrorists” (the Muslims on an individual basis, the Jews as a cmmunithy), both exhibiting inability to self-sacrifice themselves in or through an act of ‘pure’ protest that does not kill people by sneaking up to them from behind and killing them unaware. Why is this?

Is it some king of a merciful act of highly developed civlization to ‘kill people dead before they know it?’