Saturday, August 3, 2013

Eso’s Chronicles 196/ 6
A Hologram in Motion (6)
© Eso A.B.

At the time of death, the history of one’s life (really known only to one’s self and God) freezes into a hologram. This hologram then becomes the plaything of biographers if the deceased was an important enough personage to warrant further public interest. If more than one biographies are written, then each biographer is likely to make different associations between this or that past event and the actions it influenced the biographed personage to engage in years later.

On the internet there are many examples of ‘frozen’ holograms. There are also examples of moving holograms and bioholograms”: http://sangreality.weebly.com/helix-to-hologram.html The latter are particularly interesting, because they hint at the possibility that for all the killing that science and capitalism have helped expedite, it has also opened a door to a better understanding of Life and Mind, which is likely to be necessary in the near and medium distanced future as post-modern man faces up to the damage that he has done to nature and himself.

Historian Edmund Burke III, brings a sense of holography to history by taking ‘long duree’ history a step further and transforming it into ‘big history’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHROAmkOZ-w . The holographic perception of history is essential to, both, a better understanding of societal traditions and culture as well as to world peace outside the capitalist elite’s tendency to impose its views on the population by force.

An excellent example of how to ignore an old culture and devastate it in a very short time is my country of origin==Latvia. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the great hopes of the population to return to independence and all that this implies, the mythical Ugly American, supported by Latvian exiles from WW2 times, was imposed as the model to strive for. In a very short time, the Latvian political elites (often with extensive backgrounds as Soviet apparatchiks) downloaded the capitalist model, fully aware that the imposition of the model would come as a ‘shock’ to a populace acclimated to Soviet ways for forty-six years or about two generations, yet despite this was aware of its roots in ‘old’ history. The latter awareness was indeed what in the late 1980s and early 1990s activated the Latvian drive for independence.

In this case the model for the Ugly American was Harvard University’s School of Economics, led by professor Michael Porter, an avid supporter of competion as a model of economic growth. Without any direct experience with the culture that he was to lead into the abyss by his recommendation of ‘shock’ economic therapy, the professor and his team of economists recommended a rapid (‘shock’) elimination of Soviet institutions and an instant substitution (‘shock’) with capitalist institutions.

The results were what one could expect: the country reeled. Former communist officials with experience and access to Soviet institutions (= property) almost immediately formed rather large private enterprises and in the name of democracy took control of political institutions. Naturally, there was no call for revealing the names of the persons who had previously taken their orders and done the will of Moscow.

Strangely, the Latvian exiles and descendants supported this ‘shocking’ of their countrymen or the countrymen of their forebears in the name of ‘freedom and independence’. At the same time, hardly anyone returned from America (or other places in the Western world) to live in the countryside. Most of those who did return established themselves in the political sector or tried to establish a foothold in business for their corporate employers. Very few returned to the countryside or wanted to learn anything much about it--other than a decoration.

The result of this idiocy as reform was that over 300,000 Latvians (including emigrants from the former Soviet Union), some say more, left the country and are still leaving it. The total population once was over 2 million. Today the population is closer to 1.5 million. In fact, one may say that the people of the countryside were evicted from their domicile by the policies of the Latvian government in collaboration with America’s interests to push successor governments of the Soviet Union as much as possible to their knees. The result twenty three years later is that according to a recent survey, about 20% of the population more or less supports the government’s economic policies, while 80% see no economic improvements following the 2008 financial and economic crisis that was, for Latvians, a crisis on top of a crisis.

The divide between the Latvian people and their government may roughly be measured by the above percentages. This 20/80% split and the difficulty to sustain it in the face of a rapidly approaching collapse of government and the economy was recently illustrated by the government’s refusal to hold a referendum over whether the country was willing to accept the euro over their own lats as future currency. This refusal was an obvious governmental tour de force in using force to accomplish compliance with the capitalist policies of Harvard, and U.S. (also NATO) strategy to repress (in fact eliminate) the long duree or big history that was and remains ‘on the mind’ of the country (this writer including).

Not surprisingly, the weapon of priority for the government’s policy to remain in power has been to attack citizens of Russian descent as a major factor that is sabotaging a more successful access to prosperity. The Latvian media, too, largely corporate owned (no one knows who the owners of the Latvian newspaper ‘Diena’ in Riga are) collaborates in the destruction of what is a cultural hologram. Rule and divide is the clear  policy of the Latvian political, business, and media elite.



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