Friday, February 23, 2018



The Glass Ele-phant
By © Anton Vendamencsh, 2017

Chapter 8/ In The Wake Of Overt Violence 1

There will be some readers who will believe the following to be fiction. They will be partly right, because for much of it is based on memories from childhood (some very clear, some not so much) and thoughts* after the fact, sometimes called second thoughts. Even so, as the writer of this ‘fiction’, I believe that the events happened as described, but were silenced (for religiously reasons) by the Lutheran church, by an a uneducated and misinformed (as to geopolitics and history) leadership of the Latvijan state, and by the loss of self-sacrificial momentum that was once initiated by the Moravian church. The efforts of the latter initiated, then resulted in the sovereign state of Latvija.

*Second thoughts are referred to contemptuously by the academics and rationalists of our virtual world-time. Nevertheless, as dreams sometimes prove, there is another thinker within ourselves. Psychologists refer to this brain as the ‘unconscious’, whereas it is my belief that it is conscious enough, even superior in consciousness to our ‘normal’ ego sourced consciousness. The recently discovered ‘new organ’ called mesentary , may indeed be the brain that informs our dreams and second thoughts. This is not to say that the mesentary thinks as our brain does, but that it sends to our brain complex signals, which the brain then interprets differently from our visually influenced and thereafter constructed ‘consciousness’. The murder of the H pylori germ (“a biomicrobe inherited from our forebears”) by antibiotics is a case in point; male and female are a case in point; the environment within which we live and sometimes change is a case in point.

The story of my grandfather* (1860-1939) begins with his (and mine) Herrnhuter ancestors, who my dna analysis shows came from what is now called Slovenia and Croatia. I have no idea how they came to Herrnhut in Germany, though I believe it may be due to a now eradicated and forgotten connection to the Cathars, whom the neoChristian Church, aka the Catholics, eradicated in the 13th and 14th centuries. Church records show my family name appearing in what used to be Livonia-Livland from the middle of the 18th century on. Though many of the Herrnhuters lived in the geographic region about Valmiera (northern Latvija), many drifted south and westward. Thus, after getting his teacher and choir director credentials, grandfather married a young woman who sang in his choir, then—about the year 1885--settled for a teaching job in Plātere, Ogre region. This was the region that his forebears had settled into and where he was born. In the late 19th century, the Platere school was one of the best in what is now known as Latvija. Grandfather became the principal of the school from 1884-1889. Platere is but a stone’s throw from Madliena ( 1 ) ( 2 ). Given his status as an educator and the grounding of his forebears in the region, one cannot doubt that he was well informed about the history of the region and his family’s part in it.

*The link (see grandfather) has a number of inaccuracies. For example, grandfather’s mother (my greatgrandmother) was born Anna Kaktiņa on a farm named ‘Kances’ (Kanchi/Kanķi village), and his parents were not ‘farmers’ per se, but Herrnhuter preachers or what the Latvijans called ‘teicēji’ i.e. speakers, presenters. Grandfather’s father worked as the manager on the estate of a German baron. The estate was called  Bahnus or Bānužu muiža’, Taurene. His title was not manager, but starasts. The latter is also the name of an upper level (star) preacher among the now extinct Cathars. As the map shows, Taurene and Madliena are in near proximity to each other, though in the days when travel was by horse wagon the distance may have taken more than a day to cover.

What is note worthy about Madliena is that in 1840, the Hernhuter preacher Dāvids Balodis was forced by the Lutherans* from his home, which they destroyed. Indeed, ‘religious wars’ have not ceased, but have been silenced. Balodis relocated to Riga, where he continued to preach on behalf of the Moravian Church to factory workers. When again asked to cease his activities, Balodis appealed to the Russian Orthodox bishop for help, who permitted him to preach in a Russian orthodox church which was located in the Russian Orthodox cemetery. When pressure from the Lutherans did not cease, Balodis went over to the Russian Orthodox Church, causing more than 7000 Herrhuters to join him. Balodis then left Riga and went back home, even past Madliena to a village then known as Liograd, where he founded a Latvian Orthodox Church.

*Due to religious oppression dating as far back as the 12th century, the history of the Madliena Church is beset by lies and diversionary stories. The earliest of lies, disseminated by the Catholic invaders, avoids mentioning that the history of the region is closely tied to that of Jersika, the 12th century Balt kingdom, that most likely practiced the Cathar faith. The kingdom, located up stream of Daugava river, was destroyed during the Albigensian Crusade in the 13th century. It makes one realize that the Albigensian Crusade, generally believed to have taken place in Occitania, southern France, also pressed a campaign in the northeast of Europe. The Cathar practice of endura (self-sacrificial death due to illness or old age) is likely responsible for the story that the tower of the Madliena Church was built only after a maiden was cemented into its walls. No wonder that the local people flocked to the Madliena site as if it was their Jerusalem (=Jersika in local parlance). The intolerant underbelly of the Latvian Lutheran Church continues to manifests itself in the current effort of its Archbishop (Vanags) to distance the Latvian Lutheran Church from the European Lutheran Synod by joining the fundamentalist oriented Missouri Synod in America and denying women the right to minister. Not surprisingly, the Archbishop has made a numer of efforts to join Lutherans to the Catholic Church. Tnough Dāvids Balodis, the Herrnhuter preacher, is not mentioned as being part of Madliena history, a recent gratuitous diversionary lie occurs in an internet link with the mention of Jānis Balodis, a general of the nascent Latvian armed forces in WW1 military conflicts, as the liberator of Madliena. In effect, the name of the general is to erase the name of the Herrnhuter narrator a century earlier.

The pressure of the Lutheran church on the Herrnhuters had not relented by my grandfather’s time (1880s) and was one of the causes for the break-up of his marriage. Grandmother (possibly center of photo in black dress), an ardent believer, nevertheless opposed her husband’s efforts to escape the Lutheran gag order** as such could be avoided only by turning to materialism. But grandfather would not let himself be deterred. Finding his income as a principal insufficient to support his family and to continue his activities as a Herrnhuter, grandfather opened two hardware stores, one in Madliena, the county of his domicile, another in nearby Skrīveri. It was one of his first overt efforts to escape the silence imposed on him.

Unfortunately, both stores went bankrupt—not because grandfather did not pay sufficient attention to business (as deliberately falsified rumors claimed), but because of continued attempts of the Lutherans to intimidate his Herrnhuter clientele. Undeterred, grandfather turned to writing, and in 1895 won a prize for his play “Miglā”/ In A Fog. The play (belittled by critics for not being “great”) concerned itself with damage done to the people of the countryside by alcoholism. In 1904, to meet creditors demands, grandfather left his position as a school principal and relocated to Riga, where he worked as editor for a German and a number of Latvian language newspapers.

*In the winter of 1860, the year grandfather was born, his father’s inn was destroyed by fire caused by the same forces that displaced Dāvids Balodis from his home in 1840 (see link above). Incidentally, the surname Balodis means Dove in Latvijan. The name was to suggest the dove that appeared over the head of Jesus at the time of his baptism by John the Baptist. Grandfather’s mother, nicknamed Abinya/ Abiņa by her grandchildren (Abiņa possibly derived from avene/abene/raspberry) had to put her infant son onto a snowpile as she tried to salvage what could be salvaged from the burning inn. The blame for the fire was put on greatgrandmother, who allegedly was foolish enough to make candles over a hot kitchen stove. When greatgrandfather died soon after the fire, his Herrnhuter family was driven into poverty. The local German baron (I am not sure whether the one of Madliena or Taurene), unlike the Lutherans, was sympathetic to the family’s plight and rescued grandfather’s future by helping him to an education at Cimzes Seminary in Valka. The seminary was founded by a Latvijan Herrnhuter.

After coming to Riga, grandfather continued to take an interest in the theatre by associating himself with the New Theatre of Riga (Jaunais teātris). His original reason for joining and supporting the theatre was, most probably, to learn of contemporary trends in the theatre. However, the trend he discovered was tragedy, both for himself and his family.

Once in Riga granfather became interested in a young woman who worked as a volunteer wardrobe attendant at the New Theatre. Her name was Emilia. Emilia was married to one of the actors (Elks) of the theatre. Emilia was also associated with the newspaper world by working as an advertisement saleswoman for the same newspaper that grandfather was working at as an editor. Thus, one cannot be sure whether the love affair of the couple began before or after grandfather took an interest in the Riga theatre, and whether it was Emilia who introduced him to the New Theatre. In any case, Emilia was twenty years younger than grandfather, who in 1908 (the year the New Theatre reopened following the revolutionary unrest of 1905) was 48 years old.

Needless to say, the affair destroyed grandfather’s relations with grandmother. Regretfully, none of their children left a memoir that would tell details of the turmoil that grandfather’s affair with Emilia brought the family. Because of grandfather’s later success as a founder and editor of The Latest News, and reputed millionaire, all in the family achieved high social positions and feared the harm that a scandal could bring.

Madliena ( 2 )
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Saturday, February 17, 2018



The Glass Ele-phant
By © Anton Vendamencsh, 2017

Chapter 7/A President Who Failed His Country 5

For sure, the above is an unpleasant header. Nevertheless, because it is symbolcally true, I am thinking of not renewing my Latvijan pasport, which expires on April 14th this year. Partly, I am doing this in memory of my father, who died* 76 years ago on the 13th of April 1942, in Astrahan, Russia; and partly because of my maternal grandfather, who due to the unprofessional behavior of the Latvijan foreign ministry was shot at the Lubjanka prison in Moscow. I am persuaded that the death of both was not only due to thir being deported by the Soviets, but also because of a cowardly Latvijan leader. An even more distanced and cowardly leadership rules Latvija today.

*The death certificate of my father states that his death was due to “weakness of heart and poor health”. A number of people have asserted that this was a common way for the Soviets to refer to a death sentence by bullet. Father was last seen being driven out the door of the room containing some one hundred men and the guard kicking him with his boot in the back.

The nature of the Latvijas government beast has been to try sculpt a lion out of turds laid by career bureaucrats pretending to be the leaders of a nation.*.

*27 years after the fall of the Soviet regime, the Latvijan government, which was created out of former Soviet officials with the help of Latvijan-American CIA members—refuses to release the KGB documents that are likely to reveal the names of those who set in motion the ongoing genocide of the Latvian people and the elimination of their nation.

Given that some ten years of blogging by yours truly has resulted in no more than six responses, either proves the unacceptability of what I write by identity neutralized Latvijans or our strange species called ‘humans’. All appear to be accepting of a narrative imposed by centuries of worship of violence, none more so than identity neutralized leftists. The reversal of spiritual magnetic poles from south to north is apparent even in the description of anthropologists give the forebears of humankind, i.e. ”hunters and gatherers”. If anything, the false naming (it should read ”herders and gatherers”) proves how subject ‘science’ is to violence. A confirmation of the switch of spiritual poles is found in the Latvijan language, where the word for ‘hunter’ / ‘mednieks’ is a word derived from ‘honey gatherer’ ( ‘mednieks’, re med = honey). This manipulation of language is ignored by linguists and historians even when nothing is clearer. A honey gatherer was known as ‘dravnieks’. A beehive was called ‘dore’. Dravnieks was one who drew honey from a dore. Yes, dore = door. It takes little thought to realize that the word for honey was ‘drava’. In our times ‘drava’ is pronounced ‘druva’, a name that stands for a ‘field of grain’ A ‘druva’ recalls its long ago association with honey only in that painters generally paint fields of grain the color of yellow.

This is not to say that my contrarian ministry is bearing fruit (at best my blogs have but a dozen off an on readers). This is not to say that I expect more, because the origin of the blogs was to take advantage of a public space that the internet provided. I trusted that such public space would stay my ‘pareidoliac’* mind within bounds of reason and not get lost in virtual reality where the rest of the world has disappeared into. Now that I have entered the closing year of my life, my presumed radicality is not all that unusual: instead of calling the seed a seed of wheat as the link to the New Testamnt claims, I simply omit the word ‘wheat’ and call it a seed. Why? Because all seeds (not only the seed of wheat) die to bear fruit. A seed of wheat, for its part, is usually referred to in plural, and multiplies itself into a field of many ears. Moreover, fields of wheat are an innovation of government, not the people. Originally, a field of wheat was grown for purposes of making beer. Fields of wheat serve to enslave the people and make government rich, because a sack of grain is easily converted into cash. Not surprisingly, modern governments encourage us to romanticize fields of grain in order to glorify city dwellers and justify making farmers work for slave wages. The former Soviet Union was particularly good at it.

*Pareidolia—a name generally described as a negative phenomenon attributable to mind’s tendency to see faces on the moon, Mars, and in clouds. This tendency is not limited to faces, but is manifest also in the tendency of the mind to ‘slur’ or drift from one sound to another drift from one sound to another. This is also known as Grimm’s law, a tendency of words to make a shift in how they are pronunced. This is most common in the pronunciation of consonants. Thus, for example: B = V (Bitch - Witch ); L = R (AmsteRdam - AmsteLdam); D/G = J (Donau-Jonau; God-Jod); etc. The negative interpretation of pareidolia has caused linguists and historians to misread the evolution of the meaning of words as well as historical events.

The chaos unleashed by ‘democracy’ in the newly established democratic republic of Latvija (largely due to the pressure by Baltic Germans living in Riga and the Constitution of the Weimar Republic) resulted in a state in which democracy went berserk almost immediately it was given legs. What with 27 political parties vying with each other for supremacy, it was impossible to come to an agreement about anything. In 1933, the confusion led to the K. Ulmanis coup. The coup coincided with Hitler’s coup in Germany. Most Latvijans were happy with the coup, because it put to end a chaotic period in which stagnation ruled and there was little economic development. Following the coup, Latvijan bacon and butter became par with similar Danish products. When the Soviet Union occupied the country in 1940, it put an end to a country on the way to prosperity within a city based economic system.

Soviet occupation was not the only disaster that struck Latvija. The Ulmanis regime, which described its seizure of power as  “unity day” also brought disaster. Indeed, from a long-term perspective it was a disaster worse than what the Soviets brought. Ulmanis’s contribution to the disaster was his ready agreement to Soviet occupation, an agreement that contributes to a lack of self-confidence among the nation’s citizens.

The answer to the question “why the disaster?” is simple enough, but unacceptable in a virtual world, where “”pursuit of happiness” determines almost everyone’s orientation. Ulmanis (and, of course, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, et al) failed to become King in the pre-neoChristian sense of a King. Contrary to sceptics, that role continues to be best explained by the example of the now dismissed King Jesus, the man from the forest, the carpenter, the God-King who preached a social order sans government.

This author believes that the coup by Ulmanis was necessary. However, one is horrified by the cowardly surrender by Ulmanis of sovereign Latvija to Stalin. The surrender was announced by radio and the newspaper “Latest News”/ Jaunākās Ziņas, of who the editor-in-chief at the time was my father. The headline said it all: “I remain in my place, you remain in yours”. In short, ‘the King who must die’ abandons the people he presumed to lead with a cowardly whimper; the nation was abandoned to the rule of the jokers who form the government of today.

Today a ‘renewed’ Latvija lives still-born. It lives lifeless. Until recently, it was lead by a ‘democratically’ elected party, which called itself the  Unity Party. ‘Unity’ turns out to have been illusiory and a pretense. The leadership’s major concern was to fill its gerbil chops with loot, which it gained by imposing taxes*, and liquidating people from the countryside by selling the countryside to foreign buyers. Rather than being the people’s ‘best friend’ and leading the nation with self-sacrifice, a cityfied ‘democratic’ government projects itself on the people as a more legitimate parallel people. A like parallel in the U.S. is known as the ‘deep state’.

*Though I agree with Michael Hudson (see link) that taxes in Latvija are disastrous, I do not agree that the solution is in switching the tax burden on landowners. Latvians are among the last people on Earth to have had an economy based on self-sufficiency and self-government, that is to say, until relatively recently (19th century and even the 20th) the people survived off the labor on their own behalf. For this reason, increased taxes on land will not only deforest the land and turn it into an agricultural desert, but it will impoverish and cause the people to leave the country in even greater numbers than heretofore. Michael Hudson’s economic premise has to be rethought if the world is to survive. It may be adequate within a liberal economic system, but is not so in a world that has been deforested and where the surface of oceans is covered by the flotsam and jetsam of plastics. A “two people government” has outlived its usefulness. The pendulum has to return from city to Nature. Economist Hudson illustrates the conundrum that an overextention of virtual reality presents reality with. Though there is no easy solution and great sacrifice is a must, the reinstatement of a “one people government” is made difficult by the cowardice and failure of the current leadership of any government to rise to the challenge by making sacrifices.

President K. Ulmanis’s authoritarian government, though in not comparable to the aggressive and expansion oriented dictators of Europe of the 1930s, nevertheless did great damage to Latvija by extracting from its people their spiritual and psychic marrow. Today, seventy-eight years after the fact, a ‘renewed’ People of Latvija continue to be intimidated by Ulmanis’s failure. According to some sources, as many as 500,000+ have fled the country for jobs abroad, leaving no more than 1.3 million of so called ethnic Latvijans in the country. This puts Latvija next to Bahrain, Swaziland, Trinidad and Tobago. Officially listed as having 1.9 million people  , the surplus is of Russians, Poles, Lithuanians, etc. In short, the Latvian government lives in a world of science fiction and virtual reality of its own making.

The dissolution of Latvia can be summarized in the following way:

After awakening from a long sleep and celebrating their self-discovery by turning to an early form of Christianity, Latvians converts were denied sovereign expression when a it came in contact with Catholic theology and its Lutheran representatives. Both Catholic and Lutheran ecllsia were advocates of a theology that had over the centuries been overwritten by numerous secular dictates. Catholic violence had already exterminated all manifestations and memories of Cathar Christianity in Latvija and Lithuania by equating it with folklore. Roughly five hundred years later (1209+500), Lutherans repeated the process with Latvijans awakened by the Herrnhuters. By emphasizing the People’s folkloric traditions and overlooking its synthesis with early Christianity, the Lutheran eclisia exercised its monopoly of access to the media and secular government and began to call the Baltic people ‘pagans’. The renaming was accepted by a sufficient number of Latvians to prevent the Herrnhuters from consolidating their achievements and establishing their own church.

The defeat of the Herrnhuters within the movement of Awakening—which they had initiated—found its geopolitical center in the region of Madliena, where my grandfather had established his domicile (see EC648, next blog). Though the spirit of self-sacrifice introduced by the Taborite Herrnhuters was strong, due to political pressure it remained unexpressed, undefined, and for the most part silent. The spirit of self-sacrifice marched on silently and was still manifest among Latvian soldiers (strēlnieki) in the first quarter of the 20th century. Even so, it become sullied and repressed during the reign of ‘democracy’ that materialized after the acceptance of the Latvijan Constitution in 1922. Because the Spirit was never expressed in words, at the critical moment (1940) Ulmanis was left to his own subjective self. He was clearly unprepared to give his life for his country. In an interesting near-synchronistic event, the last of sovereign thinking Herrnhuters in Latvia died in 1937*.

*Karlis Ozolins, who wanted to establish an independent Moravian Church in Latvija, dies at the age of 38 in 1937. All talk of the Moravian church as an independent entity is thereafter no longer heard about. Herrnhuters are de facto  absorbed into the Lutheran Church. The church is liquidated de jure by the Soviet Latvijan government’s lackey Prime Minister Vilis Lācis in 1948. Though it is speculation on my part, the death of K. Ozolins in 1937 may be due to his deliberate murder. The Lutheran Archbishop sold the last of Moravian property in Riga during the reign of the current post-Soviet regime.

Not surprisingly, the Latvijan Moravians of today exist by playing chameleons who live by pretending to be tiny pieces of dead branches. As for the Moravian church at large, it, too, has succumbed to identity neutralization and is a chameleon few have heard of.

drift from one sound to another https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJYYtezgE_g
Constitution of the Weimar Republic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8QTUy7vyXQ
A social order sans government https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EK1NCsm0glc

Saturday, February 10, 2018



The Glass Ele-phant
By © Anton Vendamencsh, 2017

Chapter 6/Smothering The Rose 4

I have previously noted that the definition of self-sacrifice in none of the dictionaries (that I have viewed) recognizes that it may include the sacrifice of life. Instead, ‘self-sacrifice’ has been replaced by the words ‘suicide’ or ‘donate’. The latter is a word that for the most part refers to donation of money to a charity, but may also refer to a donation of blood to a victim of a catastrophic accident. In my native language of Latvijan, to donate reads ‘ziedot’, a word that has been derived from ‘to bloom’ in the sense of, both, for a bloom to open and to wilt (noziedēt). Therefore, it may be said that a soldier donated/ bloomed/ ziedoja his life to help cause his-her community to live.

If we follow the official, academic, and sanitized versions of what self-sacrifice means, we arrive at the conclusion that Jesus Christ donated his life to the cause that our sins be forgiven. Jesus’s donation is not referred to as an act of creation (remember the parable that unless a seed fall unto the ground and die, it does not bear fruit) and to maintain our community.

The New Testament presents Jesus as if He does not have a mind of his own, but is killed at the family dinner tabele  by ‘bad men’ for mysterious reasons of their own. Though the donation of Jesus may include a donation of blood, the attempt is made not to refer to it in words, but is referred to it mutely (make of it what you will) by a sip of unfermented and artificially sweetened grape juice at the Eucharist. To borrow a scene from The Godfather, when Michael, son of Don Carleone (Godfather) kills Solozzo, he reenacts Peter, who at the Last Supper draws his sword against the would be killer of his father. From this perspective Solozzo is Jesus—but only to his family. Solozzo dies for sins of his own and lives (by selling opiates) so his family may live. While the New Testament has been rewritten many times, the story of Jesus retains enough truth for a perceptive reader to realize that He did not live only for the sake of Magdalena and the apostles. Moreover, He did not ride in a Popemobile, but on a donkey as a King who has dedicated his life to his community.

Why does the Christian Church avoid mentioning that Jesus’s death was an act of self-sacfice of life and that self-sacrifice of life is part of Jesus’s predestined fate? Obiously, because it would then have to recognize that either Jesus is an ordinary man who was murdered or one who committs suicide. It would then also have to acknowledge that so-called suicide by common man-woman is not suicide, but a self-sacrificial act. This raises a vulgar question: Is an alcoholic who hangs himself a self-sacrifice? Most people would call it a suicide. Even so, one may argue that the ‘suicide’ is protesting 1) self-enrichment of government by selling alcohol; and 2) the removal by that government of the man’s born right to live in the wood and not be turned into a slave. As we know, slaves are not allowed to work for themselves (as Nature intended), but must work for profit from which government extracts taxes on the presumption that it, government, represents the better half of humankind and has the right to presume for itself life in perpetuity.

The link (live in the wood), which shows the dispossession of people from the wood by the government of Kenya is an example of what happened in Latvija after its old kingdom of Jersika (thought of as a curiosity by today’s Latvijan government and historians) was invaded by Catholic Christianity with its doctrine of taxation as the 11th Commandment: gradually the land was deforested and the people who lived there were turned into farmers or driven into cities where they were overtaxed and under the supervision of the police.

After my Moravian forebears convinced the natives of what the Germans called Livland to leave (about 1737) the wood, the natives recovered their sense of identity and discovered themselves to be  Estonians and Latvijans. Having reoccupied and survived in the wood, they also had gained a new sense of the freedoms that the wood had offered their forebears. It was not long before the natives began to attempt to evict the German barons from the land.

The barons soon realized what their former serfs were up to and did what they could to destroy their new found identify and narrative. My greatgreatgreatgrandfather Gusts (b. 1766) was married to Anna, my greatgreatgreatgrandmother (b. 1770), was born to a man who called himself Liberts, i.e, Free Man. The latter is mentioned as attending a Moravian meeting in 1743. The Catholic thelogians (reformed Lutherans by then) realizing the challenge that the Moravian Brothers offered the subservient Christianity they preached, sprang into action and persuaded the Russian tsarina Elizabeth to squelch the movement. Forced to go underground, the Moravian Church movement experienced more downs than ups, and gradually transformed itself into a secular movement, which 150 years later reemerged as “the New Current” (Jaunā strāva). This was an early (and mild) version of later uncompromising Bolsheviks. Being a secular movement, the New Current developed a narrative that denied its origins in the Moravian Brotherhood.

Most commentators on the Moravians in Latvija are sparse in their comments and circumscribed in their conclusions about the long-term effects of the movement, which resulted, after all, in the creation of a nation. Most commentators place emphasis on the emphasis the Moravian Church placed on one’s personal connection with God, pietism, which they hastened to interpret in a negative sense. Thus, a once popular Herrnhuter meeting place in Riga is now called the Coo Coo Hill. While acknowledging choral singing as a community binding activity, comentators avoid mentioning the pietist practice of leading by example, which in Latvija manifested itself by the German Brothers joining the Latvian and Estonsian peasants in the field and working with them. They also learned to speak Latvian and sang in church* in the same choir. Unfortunately, the negativity continues to this day and creates a bias in a government that is focused on city dwellers. Since all labor is evaluated in terms of money, leadership by example has become corrupted and leads by example of self-serving gutless by politicians.

*Grandfather started his career as a teacher and choir director. He took for his wife one of the choir singers. In later life, the pressure of the Lutheran Church against these activities broke him, and he left the countryside (and family) for the city and a career as a newspaper editor.


The cause that our sins be forgiven https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXVRcvT0y10
removed him from the wood  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2hO0Tf1yT4