Eso’s Chronicles 218 / 4
Victory of Violence (4)
© Eso A.B.

To illustrate the difficult task ahead of the Russian President Putin, we need only to take another quote from Zbigniev Brezinski’s pretentious “The Grand Chessboard” by going to Chapter 4, which titled: “The Black Hole”, and read the last sentence from the 2^nd paragraph: “…the long-range task remains how to encourage Russia’s democratic transformation and economic recovery while avoiding the reemergence of a Eurasian empire that could obstruct the American geostrategic goal of shaping a larger Euro-Atlantic system to which Russia can then be stably and safely related.”

Such Zionist chutzpah http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chutzpah is supposed to serve America’s interests!? What savage 20^th century lack of historical perspective, either regarding former times or simply as an affront to anyone who is not ‘born’ to long outlived Szlachta bombast. We ought to remember here that Bismarck of Prussia was not a little influenced by it, because he lived right next the Poland and Lithuania. President Putin, too, must feel encouraged when reading such stuff.

One would think Putin is encouraged to plan for America (its geostrategic goals are rarely formulated by itself, but, instead, by those like Brezinski, whose abject Capitalist materialism encourages him to worm-up to the heart of the Capitalist economic system) their comeuppance a la Jacobin style. It will come in handy to remember that it was Napoleon who not only won the military battles being lost by the French Revolutionists, but went on and made his own effort to subject Russia under French rule and suffered a renowned defeat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzyH-1p9nAg .

As Ukraine (come under the influence of American ‘exceptionalism’) continues to press for closer ties with the EU by joining in a free trade zone with it http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/18/us-ukraine-eu-azarov-idUSBRE98H0HX20130918 , it will be interesting to see how Russia reacts to the NATO military maneuvers come November in Latvia, Eastern Europe http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/09/19/324761/nato-plans-maneuver-in-russian-backyard/ .

When I use the words “Jacobin style” (well known for its excesses), what I have in mind are the negative consequences that devolved from the Jacobin attempt to create a ‘Republic of virtue’, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Virtue . In this instance the proponent of such a republic of virtue is not Russia, but the government of the U.S., which claims to be operating under the privileges of ‘exceptionalism’, which ‘exceptionalism’ caused Brezinski to make his extraordinary statement with regard to Russia and the Ukraine.

Me thinks, President Putin’s speech at Valdai is a response. As I have pointed out in numerous blogs before, the history of Russia definitely touches on that of the Byzantine Empire. Putin’s statement that:
“Our entire, uncensored history must be a part of Russian identity” hints that what we today know as the Ukraine was once part of that ancient Empire and is open to scrutiny. Of course, the Russian Orthodox Church, heir to early or Arch-Christianity, having once been forced by the Crusading French (or their predecessors the Franks) to accept Western dogma may object to opening the books on this unpleasant past. Nevertheless, the Russian Academy of Sciences ought to be willing to lend its talents to the task and reassure the Russian people. After all, a member of that Academy, Anatoly Fomenko, not I is the one who has done such a reanalysis of history, and is unlikely to be opposed to further examination of it.

Given the pressures for Russia to significantly alter its own ‘exceptional’ past once again, even under the threat of another war, this is the time to reanalyze the Western model of history. It appears preposterous for Russia to surrender to American and NATO Jacobinist bluster without a reinvestigation of the premises of Western history.

The danger to the West that such an investigation may bring forth is that it could discover that the entire economic system (Capitalism) of the West is a fraud perpetrated on the psyche of humanity by an elite committed to violence. While in the early days of Capitalism the elite was composed largely of lords and princes (gradually infiltrated by the lower echelons of the feudalist order), in our own day—in the words of a famous military leader of the West, General Dwight Eisenhower—“the military-industrial complex” has seized control of the entire society http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y06NSBBRtY . While at that time the major opponent to this economic system was the Soviet Union, the real enemy was (when listening to the speeches in retrospect) the West itself. It is shocking to hear in Eisenhower’s speech on the occasion of the assassination of U.S. President Jack Kennedy http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GR5m1-5ksj0  . An interpretation of Eisenhower’s words today, re: “…for we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy…” does not lead to an interpretation that it is a conspiracy of enemies from without, but is of enemies within.

Eso’s Chronicles 202/2
How to Destroy a Nation (2)
© Eso A.B.
 

Grandfather had enough of playing second fiddle to the Latvian state (though he had bought the state a number of military biplanes (I saw them during a fly-by over his vacation home in the summer of 1938), and my father had replaced him as editor-in-chief for some time). A few years before his death, he went to consult my godfather, Mintauts, and asked his opinion about a divorce from Emiliya. The legal mind advised him to forget it, as it meant that his heirs, the children of his first marriage, might be left with little legal rights to the money he had made or properties he had bought. The heir to the Habsburg Empire, Emiliya’s adopted son George (his father was an Austrian), would most likely get to keep it.

Meanwhile, the small sovereign state of Latvia enjoyed a small economic boom. Its agricultural products: butter, bacon, wood were in demand. The country had relatively few motor engines polluting its air, because the horse still prevailed in the countryside. The car owned by my father, a Chrysler, spewed gasoline fumes so badly that I became car sick every time the family took a trip to grandfather’s estate in the region of Kurzeme. I much rather enjoyed the family motorboat, the engine exhaust being quickly dissipated by the winds of the sea.

By the time the Soviet Union crossed Latvia’s borders, I was seven years old. The Soviets quickly put a stun grenade on the family’s dining table. At the beginning of WW2 (as I was turning eight) the granade went “Boom!” and eight members of the family disappeared in the Gulags, while two (my father and maternal grandfather, a former ambassador to Moscow) were likely tortured and shot.

The country as a whole split into two halves: the survivors of Soviet carnage turned pro-German, while the former have-nots fled the country with the retreating Soviet Army, which after WW2 was to occupy the country for nearly fifty years. I, my two siblings, and mother survived, by hiding in the countryside among the relatives of my paternal grandmother. It was there that I grew to love the countryside and its direct ways: if you wished to travel, you had to yoke a horse or two to the carriage, and the eye could not avoid watching the horse raise its tail when needing to make a fart.

After surviving a string of refugee camps and forty-six years in America, I was happy by the opportunity to return to Latvia. It turned out to be an unhappy experience as political disunity heightened by extreme poverty, consequent to shock economic policies forced on the country by capitalist America gave early indications that the country would not survive as a sovereign community.

Pressures that forced the dissolution of what traditions had survived the Soviets came as quickly as the first years of so-called ‘independence’. One man (a man in early middle age) was perceptive enough to publicly sacrifice his life in front of the Freedom Monument, but his act was dismissed by the state as imbecilic and his complaints were not investigated.

Interestingly, the blade of the axe came from the ‘nationalist’ influence out of exile. In the forty-six (rough estimate) years in exile, the nationalists—most coming from Latvian urban society or, for that matter, having been born to exiles living in an urban environment—were easy converts to capitalism. Irrational denial of all notions of egalitarianism, natural to agriculturalists, forest dwellers, and fishermen coupled with easy and accustomed access to consumer goods produced at the expense of the environment and countryside, became a convenient ‘capitalist tool’. The coup de grace was delivered by the argument that Latvia was ‘unnaturally’ countryside oriented, and had a disproportionate number of people living ‘unproductively’ in the countryside.

A number of descendants of Latvian exiles, who had no familiarity with the country other than participating in folkdance groups in Western urban ‘democracies’ were let loose with their capitalist ways (their own capital or with the capital of the corporations they were employed by) on a country that had not yet had any opportunity to accumulate capital of its own. The results were pure joy to those exiles who returned to Latvia as tourists once a year for two weeks, and pure disaster for Latvians who were not prepared for such quick changes, and, worse, had no support from their own government, which for all practical purposes had turned out to be a traitor to its country as a sovereign entity.

While the traitorous nature of the government was camouflaged behind numerous legalistic excuses, the fact remains that it denied its citizens the right to hold a referendum—ostensibly over whether to forgo the local currency (lats) for the euro, but actually to deny the citizenry the right to sovereign expression and set a precedent for further such denial.

As I wrote in a post to another internet platform, it is not that Latvia will cease to exist because of this. It surely will remain as a name for a place for some time to come; there will also remain a number of indigenous people who are lucky enough to escape the squeeze to have them flee the country as economic refugees. However, as a sovereign community, as a community that yet had the opportunity to discipline itself for survival through the practice of an economy that fully or partially accords with the principles of autarky has become fodder to foreign interests and badmouthing of planetary hegemony dominated by the West.

While the following link to a description of autarky https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-8eaW3C-XY ends with a nearly full endorsement for globalization, Latvians would be wise to remember that globalization today is the result of the liberal application of violence as a facilitator to urbanist ends. On the other hand, autarky is successfully practiced by the Latvian Senate (Saeima), where autarky as in-house ‘democratic’ fascism (or do you prefer leeches to feces) rules supreme.

Eso’s Chronicles 194/ 4
Scholarship as Political Prejudice (4)
© Eso A.B.

Anyone who for whatever reasons of his-her own has read my blogs for over a period of time will have noticed I do not pretend to scholarship as such, but my perspective is that of a layman looking at the stories pursued by scholars with regard to history and religion especially.

Since the perspective of religion so obviously effects the ways society arranges the rituals of its daily behavior, which behavior has led to the destructive behavior of most of today’s governments, independent scholarship would seem essential. However, scholarly independence is obviously suspect, because the daily behavior of society at large is not dictated by religion, but by governments that have taken on the role of religion. Furthermore, the government’s role as a religion is furthered by a complaisant and pliable privately owned public media.

I have perceived my role and my story-telling of history and religion as a goad to help the reader break out of the shell of government dictates that end up constituting the materialist presumptions and ritual over our daily lives. If the reader has minimal respect for me, which he-she would show by returning to read another blog after reading one, and disagrees with my material, he-she is invited to look into the matter further by going to the library or searching the internet. On the other hand, if the reader shares my prejudice that much of what passes today as ‘information’ is information poisoned by the politics of a questionable majority loyal to a tiny violent minority, then over a period of time, we would be pushing scholarship away from government influence toward greater objectivity.

An interesting clash between a private media platform (the Fox News) and an individual scholar shows up at this interesting confrontation between one of the ‘talking heads’ at Fox News, Lauren Green and Professor Reza Aslan, a muslim and a scholar of religions: http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/fox-hosts-bigotry-exposed-reza-aslan?akid=10742.171186.EECk_R&rd=1&src=newsletter875520&t=3

As the clip shows, the Professor is first attacked for being a Muslim and therefore questioned about his legitimacy to write about Christianity, while Lauren Green presents herself as a Christian bigot and as representing (beyond question) the view of the religion of the American nation.

My view regarding Christianity does not in any way parallel those of Reza Aslan. The first difference, I would argue, is that the events concerning Jesus very likely did not occur in Palestine, but in Constantinople (I take the view of the Russian scholar Anatoly Fomenko on the matter), nor that Jesus was crucified, but that another holy man was pushed into a pit where a fiercely burning fire consumed him. The latter is not Fomenko’s view, but stems from my own conclusion that Jesus Christ is a creation of fiction to replace the now forgotten victim of a nascent capitalist government, and that one of the early sources of capitalism is to be sought in the late Byzantine Empire. Anyone interested in the source for my opinion can check out at my blog site JesustheBogomil.blogspot.com   My other disagreement with Professor Asan is that the Roman Empire that he is talking about never existed in the geographical location of present Rome, but was simply was another name for the Byzantine, aka Israel, Empire.

As I discuss in the three previous blogs, the present Rome and the fiction that it ever was the capital of an Empire, is a government supported fiction project, which began with the establishment of the Papal residence in Rome by Pope Gregory XI, who abandoned Avignon and arrived in Rome, Italy on January 17, 1377, thus officially ending the Avignon, France Papacy. As we ought to know, the Vatican itself was officially established only in 1929, when it became a ‘country’.

What the skeptical reader will have to acknowledge (perhaps unwillingly) is that from 1377 to 2013 (the hear this is being written) are 636 years, of which the early years are total fiction (probably due to the change from oral and flexible to written and rigid-legalistic communication). As I contend, the fiction begins with the creation of the capitalist system, where money and tax collecting dominates (represses) the common man in favor of the princes. The unpopularity of this system is obvious, not only because of the violence it created in social affairs (re: cataclysmic violence in Languedoc, Aragon, and the so-called Shepherds Crusade and Lepers Plot in France, but as history of long duree led to the holocaust against the Jews by the Nazi regime in Germany in the recent past.

The unpopularity of the Capitalist religion (behind the False Flag of Christian goodness) continues today in the capitalist attacks on the Muslim countries in the Middle East: Palestine, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iran, and Afghanistan. Nary is a word said that this is a religious war led by Capitalism with its God Money against Egalitarianism with its God come with the Gift of life.

Tibet socialist villages http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-23100427   

Eso’s Chronicles 174

Mother of Solutions (V)
© Eso A.B.

While philosophers such as Slavoy Žižek proclaim that there is no alternative to global capitalism: “The true message of the notion of the Third Way is that there is no ‘second way’, no alternative to global capitalism so that, in a kind of mocking pseudo-Hegelian ‘negation of negation’, the Third Way brings us back in the first and only way. Is this not global capitalism with a human face?”*

What escapes Žižek is that unnoticed by the ranks of “…professional and credentialed opinion leaders, particularly journalists and academics”,  http://www.globalresearch.ca/media-disinformation-and-the-conspiracy-panic-phenomenon/5336221 (see 3rd paragraph) the recently arrived ‘new age’ of Internet Populism is challenging the status quoers at their tame song and bringing solutions to problems unimaginable to ‘credentialed opinion leaders’ (Žižek among them).

I have mentioned this war, denied and as if behind the curtains, in previous blogs (167), when I touched on the subject of the Tibetan immolators, a type of warrior not seen in the West since the days of Jan Hus, the Christian heretic unsympathetic to Christian conventionalists (proto-capitalists Catholics). In 1415, nearly 600 years ago**, Hus chose to be burnt at the stake (in Constance), rather than surrender to the dictates of the Habsburg Emperor Sigismund. That the immolator or self-sacrifice is a warrior to be taken seriously is evidenced by the fact that the government of China has threatened to stick anyone who aids or gives succor to self-sacrifice with a charge of aiding and abetting a criminal act.

As if to underscore the issue of the reappearance of self-sacrificial warriors (whether of Tibetan or other origin), a Sri Lankan Budhist monk recently set himself on fire https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMtBikwFvyY to protest animal slaughter http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-22681763 (a crime perpetrated in the service of the inhabitants of the desert city) and the intrusion into Sri Lankan culture of minority religious faiths (such as neo-Christianity and neo-Islam), both born of and sympathetic to capitalism.

The Sri Lankan government condemns the Sri Lankan media for video taping the event and not forewarning the government about what was about to take place; and may bring charges against the video journalist. One of the reasons for the action of the Sri Lankan government is the claim (of what the BBC reporter Charles Haviland calls ‘ultra-nationalists’) that the “Sinhalese ultra-nationalist ministers in the government have praised the incident as an act of self-sacrifice for the good of the country.”

While I am opposed to immolation by fire due to the extreme pain, suffering, and body mutilation it causes, I am not opposed to waging war against government military type of violence by self-sacrifice.

Military type (gang) violence has long plagued all nations and cultures on our planet. Foremost among the initiators of this violence are governments, which enslave-recruit young men to do their bidding.

The first among overt practitioners of violence are of course they who serve in government led armed forces. These are followed by government opponents who borrow their resistance tactics from government example. Muslim terrorists who arm themselves with strap-on explosive devices, and while sacrificing their own lives in the act, know of no or have no moral qualms about slaughtering innocent people who happen to be nearby as a result of chance. While ostensibly fighting on behalf of Islam and the traditions of Islamic nations, the Islamist terrorists ultimately fight for but an Islamic form of capitalism, which as such will not bring any better solutions for Islamists than Christians.

What is the solution?

The solution stares us practically in the face. Put simply, it is a radical change in methods of fighting war. The method puts an end to violent attack or defense, and is replaced by fighting war by means of self-sacrifice. The war employs no bullets or explosives that are used against others. There are no burials of the dead accompanied by honor guard rifle salvos. Indeed, there are no grave yards, but everyone who sacrificed his-her life has their name and a short bio entered into a permanently available internet scroll accessible through a special ‘spot’ on the menu bar on every computer.

One of the missing links in the Tibetan Budhist self-sacrifice effort is the failure of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan community to provide for all to see a memorial scroll for its not-violent soldiers. By failing to provide for their own, the Tibetans fail to bring the message of their method of fighting a war to the attention of the world, at the same time as the community fails to significantly change the world for the better and do the missionary work that needs to be done.

The platform for the honor scroll can be provided by any already existing platforms, and such a platform may, beginning with the UN and the support of all ‘AntiWar’ platforms, have an almost an infinite number of sponsors representing many causes of civil society.

The sole bonding mechanism, so to speak, however, should not be the cause, but the not-violent and self-sacrificial method used to fight for the cause. Ending war as we know it, is in itself one of the great causes. However, before this can happen, humans need to change their attitude toward death.

*Slavoy Žižek, “The Universal Exception”, Continuum, p 149.

**Jan Hus was imitated by Jan Palach, who immolated himself in 1968, protesting the Soviet invasion of Chehoslovakia.

Link of interest:

Venner suicide: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-22620143
Women immolate http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-22697399

Eso’s Chronicles 171
Fascism as Deconstruction of Community (III)
© Eso A.B.

Thus (see blog 170), if proto-fascism has its beginning in a disintegrating community desiring to heal itself, for those who have the desire to heal, finding themselves being labeled ‘fascists’, further facilitates the disintegration of their community, and places the naming agent in the position of the enemy or his agent. The enemy/ agent works as a:

1) saboteur, a role enhanced by deliberate idiocy;

2) the sabotage occurs for the agent’s own good reasons; and

3) the reason for the sabotage is to access Money, because when there is enough Money, it substitutes for community; i.e., one may do without community, because one can buy an illusion of it.

4) The agent or enemy of community, therefore, is Money; because Money buys ‘freedom’ and ‘liberates’ one of the community and responsibilities toward it.

5) Money opens a new world, a wholly virtual world. As opposed to the Superego of the organic world, who projects in our dreams as a ‘medicine man’, the Superego of the wholly virtual world is a consumer item. For example, a Barbie doll https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7P_0_HfTp8. Incidentally, a Barbie doll may be had only through the agency of Money, which is God for real in our time and space. Nevertheless, this money is seldom in the hands of the community, but remains in the possession of the anti-community forces: the billionaires, the millionaires, and the military forces the oligarchs support.

Items 4) and 5) provide the reasons why capitalists sabotage a community’s effort to reestablish itself. The sabotage is accomplished by diverting the healing effort toward self-destructive ends and then call the result ‘fascism’, a word of such evil potency that the victor ‘democratic’ State forbids it to be ever mentioned again.

Among the negative consequences of communities efforts to recover are two gigantic icebergs: Hitler’s fascism and Stalin’s communism.

At their beginning stages, both fascists and communists had enormous popular support. If they had not had such support, they could hardly have succeeded in rising to their eventual dominant positions.

There were, however, forces embedded among communalists, which sabotaged their good cause and earned them ridicule and a bad name for a long time thereafter. In short, in so far as now bygone communism and fascism represented forces of the community that rose against its destroyers, the community in the end became a worse loser than when it had begun its recovery effort. The community was further diluted than it had been at the beginning of the uprisings. By our day, the community no longer exists as a tangible entity.

What has replaced the community is a wholly artificial megalopolis, a centre for the creation of virtualism, which is held together (zusammen) not through personal relationships, but through everyone’s dependency on Money. Money itself is ‘democratic’, in so far as it can be divided among community members more or less equally, but which ‘equality’ fails to become a reality, because the enemies of the community desire to keep the Money, most of it, for themselves.

It is at this stage of political developments that the leaders of the community (not having been forewarned) succumb to the temptation of either 1. Money or 2. Power (a Money substitute). The only way to then continue forward is to divert the attention of the members of the community from the ‘real’ enemy on to a scapegoat.

In the event of Hitler’s community organization, it discovered the enemy in the “Jews” (or gypsies, polaks, russen, homosexuals, avant garde artists, etc.). Because among all the above were certain anti-community factors and phenomena, the untutored have-nots were readily persuaded to turn on one or all of them. The persuasion was given roots when it was conjoined with permissive and officially overlooked killing.

Of the enemies, the community of Jews, the most cohesive community among the above, turned out to be the one which communitarians could be caused to hate and kill most readily. The reasons for why are many, but the most apparent one is that anti-Semitism was not a new phenomenon, but was grounded in an antagonism many centuries old. This ‘old’ antagonism was, in turn, grounded in the unresolved Great Schism that went back to the Civil War among Eastern and Western Christianity, its high point being the so-called Fourth Crusade of 1202-1204.

The Crusade was nominally won by the West when it sacked and plundered Constantinople, and transferred the centre of Christianity from the Byzantine Empire to Rome, Italy. The physical address change was accompanied by a power shift from an autonomous Eastern priesthood, which was rooted among a people familiar with prehistoric shamanism (hence autonomous), to a priesthood rooted as a bureaucracy under the wing of a Western secular king, turned Christianity on its head.

Eastern Christianity, known as Orthodox Christianity, was forced to adopt a Western or Catholic Christian story of the nature of the Son of God. The Orthodox or Eastern version of the story was associated with the Kabalah and the Old Testament, which texts likely had their origins in Jewish of Khazaria http://www.oocities.org/tmajlath/khazaria.gif . Needless to say, the Eastern Christian story of the Son of God differed considerably from that of the Western story. In the Eastern story, the king of Eastern Christianity is burnt by the traitorous Byzantine Emperor Alexius I at the Hippodrome in Constantinople about 1118, whereas the Western story was pure theatre and spectacle.

The community movement led by Hitler took advantage of Western Catholic bureaucracy’s (The Habsburg Empire was Catholic and centered in Vienna, Austria) antagonism toward the Jews, and subsequently identified the movement with Italian fascism, which took its name from a bundle of fascio (hazel) sticks as disciplinary tools.

Community building by Lenin and Stalin took an opposite tac, when it found its enemy not in the Orthodox priesthood (though it killed thousands of priests), but in the tsarist oligarchy, its sympathizers among the Russian bourgeois, and a peasantry (Kristi-yan) that had risen to a ‘kulak’ http://www.britam.org/pics/KhazarEmpire.jpg  status.

What was missed by Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler was that neither the ‘community’ of the Germans nor Slavs identified with industrialized workers community. What the proto-Revolutionary and disintegrating community wished for was an organic community, the one they and their forebears had had for centuries, except it had become demoralized by those seeking wealth and progress as the only way to overcome the repressive princes, boyars, and barons.

As everyone knows, Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Reich did not fulfill the dreams of the community movement, but the community movements in Europe and Russia (aided by American capital) met with a catastrophic defeat instead.

The answer for the causes of this defeat is indeed to be sought in Western capitalism, which built itself on the idea of a ruthless exploitation of our planet’s natural resources and made a huge investment in advertising and evangelizing militant capitalism. Additionally, defeat of the community was facilitated by the fact that none of the community leaders and no one in their bureaucracies or churches came to think that the rebuilding of a community requires of the leadership an ultimate self-sacrifice and that its goal is a subsistence, not capitalist, economy. The leadership of the community then and now remains all too attached to its own well being.