Children Must Not Know or Remember
By © Anton
Vendamencsh, 2017
Chapter 13/ In The Wake Of Overt Violence 6
Who but an idiot would claim that war is interesting and
comes as a blessing?
But what if the idiot’s claim is not without foundation?
What if only terror, death, and chaos are the only way that a civilization of
conceit can extricate itself from a world of its creation? Of course, I have in
mind a ‘civilization’ of the city that is no longer able to distinguish the difference
between the realities of Nature and the artifice of the City. What if all the
UFO sightings and meetings with Extra Terrestials are hallucinations of a mind
caught up in a city? What if the city inhabitants have for too long carried their
heads inside a box without holes in it for either sight or breathing? Is this
not what the ‘intelligence’ of American college students illustrates?
Political anthropologist Pierre Clastres (see blog EC652) appears
to be in support of such a claim on behalf of pain of war. Arguing that among
so-called ‘primitives’ and people who lived before the written word, the ‘law’
of social behavior is inscribed by initiation rites for youth, Clastres puts in
a good word for ‘tough love’. Initiation rites, sure to include pain to enhance
memory, are—so argues Clastres—for the purpose of inscribing social law not
only on the body of the individual, but also the body social. Writes Clastres (”Of Torture in Primitive Societies”, p
186): ”The law they come to know in pain is the law of primitive society, which
says to everyone: You are worth no more
than anyone else; you are worth no less than anyone else. The law,
inscribed on bodies, expresses primitive society’s refusal to run the risk of
division, the risk of power separate from society itself, a power that would escape its control. Primitive law, cruelly
taught, is a prohibition of inequality that each person will remember....”
(Italics by Clastres.)
My experience of the years 1939-1942 (when I was 6 to 9 years
old) was not set up by a medicine man of the Brazilian Indians, but by extreme events
emerging out of our own mentally sick civilization. The lesson the horrific events
taught me (without necessarily my being conscious of it at the time) was: ”You are worth no more than anyone else; you
are worth no less than anyone else.” The first time that I became conscious
of the effect of the law was in 1958 at the age of 25, when my English profesor
at Boston University, and I ran into each other at Kenmore Square in Boston.
Said the profesor: ”You are a bright young man. Why are you dropping out? Why
not finish college?” I remember my answer as clear as if I were to make it
today: ”If I graduate, I will be locked into a career. I believe that I can
educate myself by myself.” In effect, I was rejecting the imprint a sick society
wished to make on me.
I was so convinced because war had already dropped me out
of my family*; out of Latvijan society (a once upon a time communityreduced to
insignificant numbers by its own government and thrown to ministerial dogs ministring
to secularism); out of European society (to Americans postWW2 Europe meant
flogging Hitler, praising Churchill, and supporting Zionist Israel); and at
that point (in the middle of Kenmore Square, still only 25 years old) not fully
understanding the reasons, but finding America of rather puffy substance, ready
to leave that society. Still, circumstances* compelled me to remain in it. When
some thirty years later (1990) my wife decided to divorce me, I discovered
myself to be like a balloon without a string in a rootless America.**
*We arrived in America exausted, both, of inner spiritual
and outer material resources. As for the latter, Emilia’s stepson, mentioned
above, had managed to abscond with everyone’s inheritance, was deep-sea diving with
Jacques Cousteau, and having under water caves named after himself.
**Because mother could not support her three children on
her own, I was placed by our good intentioned sponsors as a kind of junior
assistant in an orphanage. Though it was not so intended, it made me feel very
much like an orphan, even stubornly so. Not surprisingly, my favorīte book in
1958 was Colin Wilson’s ”The Outsider”.
In any case, by 1959, ten years after arriving in
America, it was clear to me that America was not the answer for my tomorrow.*
*Nevertheless, the decision to drop out of America [it
was not only a matter of rejecting its educational institutions and Elvis Presley (click 10:30) oriented culture], exacted
a toll. I was pursued thereafter by a recurring nightmare. The dream found me looking
for a job and walking through long corridors to the unemployment office. At
first, I was merely annoyed by the dream, then later realized that what it was
telling me was that I was not of the world where ‘a job’ is the norm. I then
realized that there is a world, where ‘a job’ is not the norm. Such a world existed
in the world where I had begun my working day life as a cowherd at the age of
nine. My aunt was not exploiting child labor or me, but was raising me into a
world that had always been such.
After leaving (1958) Boston University (yes, I did take a
course presented by Professor Howard
Zinn), I went to work as an Emergency Ward clerk at the
Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, then took a job as an order clerk at
Hayden Stone brokerage firm, and then as a typesetter who wrote a weekly column
at the Boston Ledger, a weekly Boston area newspaper. Because none of my jobs
were demanding, I had time to give myself to reading, making acquaintance with
the Boston area art world, and trying my hand at sculpture (though personally I
remain fascinated with objects out of sight—a zig-zag object placed in a box or
a log under water are good eamples—my favorīte sculptors are early Brancusi and
Henry Moore in gypsum at the Ontario Museum, Toronto). In my mind I was living
an waiting life. This continued until my
wife and I decided to move to the Washington, DC area.
It was then that I realized that in the context of a
society born of Enlightenment, esconced
on the shores of Chesapeake
Bay pursuing world conquest on behalf of materialism, I had
come to a dead end. I had little interest in Washington other than its
Smithonian museums. Moreover, I was no longer young, had no job security, could
not look forward to a pension that would take me other than to a cardboard box
in the desert, and, in the end (today), be left to subsist in a God forsaken
corner of the Latvijan countryside, where I justify my dharma as an
occasional helpmate to those in need of medication, groceries, and like minutiae.
As the decade of the 1980s drew to a close in America, Providence
came to my aid—again. Though atheists may call it a delusion, for those who
have no career but are left to trust fate, it seemed
like an event brough about by someone looking through the window from the
outside in. The window and curtains had remained open just enough to let
through a breeze fanned by events far removed from immediate ken.
The democratic cum demonic fascist State of the United
States* had long ceased to be a self-sustaining domestic economy and has become
an economy that makes its living through an externally expanding economy. The
expansion goes by various names, such as ‘manifest destiny’, ‘exporting
democracy’, ‘free trade’, ‘globalism’, and not least ‘exceptionalism’. A
combination of plentiful resources (for a limited time) and Soviet failures
(the last not least because of a failure to differentiate between countryside
and cityside), had succeeded in undermining the Soviet Union, the government of
which—in order to avoid another civil war, bloodshed, and uncertain chances of eventual
recovery—disintegrated. The country of my origin, Latvija, was then proclaimed
by its fascist sponsors to be emerging as a sovereign country again.
*The definitiion of ’Fascist State’ is incomplete in that
it limits itself to a small State, such as Germany of Hitler’s time and definēs
a nation as an aggressive entity toward its neighbors. However, a fascist State
cannot be limited by size because in all cases it operates in the same manner:
it fails to live within the means available on its own territory, wherefore it
either seizes or lives off other territories. Nevertheless, America’s expansionist
policies closely approximate Hitler’s drang
nach Osten for more ‘Lebensraum’/ living space, which is to say, America
has made the concept of ‘free market’ and ‘free trade’ synonyms of Lebensraum.
The casualties among the civilizan populations of Libya, Iraq, Syria are no
lesser atrocieties than those committed by the Germans against the East Europen
and Russian civil populations during the Hitler era. Needless to say, this
definition of ‘fascism’ includes the former Soviet Union, present day Russia
and China, which is why I conceive the present state of the world as an
undeclared federation of fratricidal fascist states.
In December of 1991, at the age of 58, still confused
about the meaning of the word ‘fascist’, I returned to Riga and visited the Ergli countryside
(1) (2), where
in late summer of 1944 some 60,000 men died fighting over a neighborhood where
I had once herded sheep and cows. Everyone was euphoric over the fall of the
Soviet Empire. But no one asked the critical question: Why did the Soviet
system fail? Did not the Latvians themselves support it—at its beginnings? The
question was not allowed, because the answer had been formulated in the fascist
West many years ago. It was only after several years of observing the presumed
recovery that I realized that the ‘recovery’ was not happening, because former
Soviet officials—having been encouraged by the West to become turn-coats—had
seized the reigns of control of the nation (community) and were transferring
the common good into private hands of former Soviet officials. One way the
latter is accomplished is by saddling the population with a victim mentality:
just like Israelis (backed by the US.) blame the Palestinians for their voes,
so the Latvijan government (backed by NATO) has turned the Russians into the
Palestinians of the victimized Latvijans. The victim mentality is most popular
among the middle class.
In 1995, at the age of 62, I retired, and applied for my
Social Securiy pension. When it was granted, I relocated myself to Latvija.
From the perspective of political science, it was one of the better decision I
ever made: it enabled me to confirm (in my own mind) the difference between the
way human beings think when residents of the countryside and when residents of
the city. While the first could not live without God, the second could not
believe in God, wherefore it repeatedly met with itself at a Dead End, where it
prepares for Armageddons of a great many varieties.
EC652 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8BrmkehZF4 Enlightenment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CP8k_f3PFq8
