EC 477 Hiermalgamated History
Change the World! Think It Through! Do not Vote! Remember:
What if they declared war and no one came? Don’t go.
© Eso A. B.
The Russian Tragedy 1

Hieros Gamos means Holy Marriage, and ‘hiermalgamy’ means a forced or unholy marriage by secular authorities of people to governments through the act of taxation or other violent and unnatural join-tings or divorces.

When my aunt Emma, the youngest sister of my paternal grandmother, kneaded dough for the bread which she baked in a brick oven made especially for baking bread (long fagots of wood were burned in the maw of the oven for several hours to bring the heat of the bricks to proper temperature), she never failed to extract from the risen dough a small amount—about the size of a softball—which she shaped into a small loaf, and after the rest of the dough was turned into loaves or were still baking deep in the maw of the oven, placed at the bottom of the ‘abra’.

The abra was a solid wooden vessel, was made to be carried, and was held to be near sacred. It is a synonym of the ‘ark ’, because bread was held to be the staff and maintainer of life and community (saime). The residue of the dough was the ‘starter’ or the yeast that made raise the dough for next week’s bread. This ‘starter’ seemed to have an endless life. It was the Divine tablet. It stood for continuity. It was not uncommon to hear stories that it originated in the abra of ‘saimnieces’ (mother of the community of saime) parents, even grandparents.

The story of the loss of the abra and the starter loaf is synonymous with the replacement of history with negahistory. This loss took a long time and was a long process, beginning sometime in the Byzantine era, which perverted itself from a self-sustaining economic system supported by ‘gifts’ of the wood (berries, mushrooms, roots, plants, nuts, wild apples, fish, crayfish, etc.) to a system of taxation imposed on the population by a violent ruling class. Step by step, sometimes faster, sometimes slower, the ruling class transformed itself through ever greater ‘democracy’ to where it increasingly exploited (was forced to exploit by its ‘humanitarian’ pretensions) the gifts of nature (among which it came to hold nature bound humans, whom it turned, first, into serfs, then slaves and mine workers, then peasants), until it turned the green of grass and leaves into cement and human being became an artifice of eternity made no longer of red soft clay, but concrete with iron bars for ribs.

For Russia, at first limited to the west side of the Ural mountains, the full brunt of this tragedy arrived with Tsar Peter 1, who, as the link explains, expanded Russia beyond the Urals, westernized it, and killed the sacred content of the Russian ark (творило-tvorilo) so it no longer could yeast history for a new day, but brought a negahistory that mirrored a punk’s intelligence. If traditions remained alive in the countryside, Peter’s ‘reforms’ translated the upper classes and those below it into a class unto itself. For all practical purposes, Russia and all of Europe came under the rule of a class that marked itself—as certain Hindu castes still do--with a red dot (here, here,  and here ) on the forehead and preferred to live in cities.

The ‘reformation’ of the Russian upper classes by Peter 1, did not readily percolate down to the common people, who held on to the ‘ark’ of tradition. This tradition was abetted by the Russian Orthodox Church, which while forced by the Great Schism to adopt the Catholic interpretation of Christianity, had done so reluctantly. Indeed, in many localities on the fringes of Imperial Russia, catholization was avoided altogether.

Stalin, who had been aided in his education by Eastern orthodox clerics, was informed of their avoidance of modernity. He was of two minds about it. On the one hand, while responsible for the death of thousands and thousands of Russian Orthodox monks and clerics, he was extraordinarily kind and supportive of a few, and did not appear to hold their beliefs against them.

Eso’s Chronicles 325 / 1
Odds and Ends
© Eso A.B.
All comments appearing within brackets [ ] are editorial in origin.
 

EFA: POLITICS AT ‘WOUNDED KNEE’ (7)

I am intrigued by Russia’s suggestion that there ought to be a referendum in Ukraine, and that the Ukraine ought to become a federation of states http://pennyforyourthoughts2.blogspot.com/2014/03/kerrylavrov-to-meet-today-federated.html  subordinate to a central government in Kiev or Moscow. My interest arises, because the suggestion ought to be easily turned around and asked of Russia itself, as it and its many states, too, are composed of many regions with their own history and geopolitical lay.

In the end, the Russian suggestion is not only on behalf of many member nations of the UN, but also for the Federation of Russia itself. It raises a question that may appear to be a paradox: Why propose a Matrushka https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoKodHqRoD9FONUigqUMt-pccXEtIyNPUUGq-qILdGoOB-Z7t7nAdSYUTvTU8ofPITwxsyOQodsOKxXhuzyVUIeOZPY6HLiVUXgRtd0Ar7G4r4HMMSA7zbHXKltqATzL0NZPghBcI7m7g/s1600/EggDoll.jpg  style government for Ukraine, when it is more impressive to lead by example?

By what synechism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synechism does the  legislature of a Federation, its ruling body composed in the main by the ‘intelligentsia’ of hominids born into a hominid created urban desert, created out of a living planet laid prostrate by chemical and nuclear explosives, declare that an organization such as the UN Security Council http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Council  has the right to define the nature of peace for our planet’s biosphere?

Surely, if peace is constructed on the ability of continuous militarization to deter war (keep pulling the rubber band)—is it not subject to a delayed, but even a greater catastrophe?

The band of wannabe scientologists ensconced in the legislature of the EU, holds that joining and supporting an Empire formed of federalized and somaticized States is the best guaranty for prosperity and peace. Yet, the band has apparently forgotten that though the beginnings of the European Empire are

from “… 1950 [on, when] the European Coal and Steel Community begins to unite European countries economically and politically in order to secure lasting peace[;] …the six founders… Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands….” http://europa.eu/about-eu/eu-history/index_en.htm refuse to introduce democratic elections in the body politic of the EU that could legitimize its dictatorship.

Unification in Europe was largely achieved not by an economic and political agreement, but on the insistence of the United States of America, which had begun the Cold War on behalf of Capitalism against the Communist Soviet Union that very year.

Before ‘unification’ there was no such thing as a referendum to see if the people of Europe wished to make Europe an Empire. Instead, the EU legislation from that year on has been dominated by exo-parliamentarians, rather than elected officials. Whether elected parliamentarians would be any better than American legislators, most of who are elected, is to be doubted as long as lobying is permitted. The system of exosystemic appointment of the EU Parliament is operative to this day and is doing great service in maintaining a militarist monopolist government in power—including my country, Latvia.

Paul Virilio, an observer and social critic of governments, describes the results nicely*: “…entire countries are progressively becoming sites of social extermination, training zones for … an insiduous form of ‘militaro-police’ coalition comparable to Interpol [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpol ], an interarmy conspiracy destined to sacrifice the civic and political power of the people, where… [in] place of self-sacrifice for the sake of the Nation, these states sacrifice their own population in the name of a state of generalized passivity….”

While such a function may lead one to believe that the opposition of Tibetans to the repression of the Chinese government is terrorism, I note that no such ready accusation can be made against the behavior of government. For example, in Latvia, the government has got rid of near half of its population (about 900,000) by choosing membership in the EU over sovereignty, but no accusation of a crime against it by the Latvian people can be made . The ways the crime is accomplished are too many to count, but one way that facilitated it was for the Latvian Bank to give credits to private clients in Euros rather than its own currency (the Lats). As a result, at the time of economic crisis, Latvia could not devalue its currency and, thus, lessen the economic impact on its people.

Not that the dangers of federalization are a secret. Many states that have been federalized into a centralized government in Europe are members of the European Free Alliance (EFA)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Free_Alliance . Unfortunately, the EFA, too, manifests a case of ‘generalized passivity’, notably by remaining silent on the issue of referendums by not taking advantage of such cases as Latvia and Russia offer by calling for criminalization of attempts to form a centralized (and fascist) globalized government.

*Paul Virilio, Negative Horizon, Continuum 2005, p 167.

Eso’s Chronicles 247/ 33

Addendum 8—1^st Post-WW4 Event

© Eso A.B.

 

Given that in my previous post, I stated that the U.S. appears to have agreed to pull out of Europe and Asia, because though its military might may deter aggression against it, it is not strong enough, given modern weapons, to deter the destruction of its own or Europe’s infrastructure if it itself were to become the aggressor. The recent posturing by the U.S. and its allies in the Middle East gave rise to suspicions that indeed the West had chosen the aggressor’s path. This is also the reason why the sudden pull back from an outright attack on Syria and hence on Iran makes suspect that it was met with a warning by the powers native to Europe and Asia that was no less determined to prevent such an attack.

 

Not surprisingly, the U.S. change of mind not to press war (it may be interpreted to be a 2^nd version of the so-called Molotov-Ribbentrop Nonaggression Pact http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/230972/German-Soviet-Nonaggression-Pact , renamed as the Kerry-Lavrov Pact 75 years later, has upset many of its allies who had mistakenly believed that nothing could deter the U.S. from attacking if it so decided. Their mistake was to make-believe that the U.S. was not—for delusionary reasons—vulnerable. Now they know differently, which changes many things, and is cause for resetting many expectations as to the developments in the future.

 

It is not surprising; therefore, that many high officials of the U.S. and EU governments are currently in the Middle East and Eastern Europe giving reassurances. In this context, the following statement by US Defence Secretary Chuck Hegel, is interesting:

 

"Going forward, the Department of Defense will place even more emphasis on building the capacity of our partners in order to complement our strong military presence in the region." http://rt.com/news/us-mideast-iran-nuclear-hagel-878/

 

A nice try, but… it does not acknowledge the vulnerability (presumed by this author) of the country that stands behind “our strong military presence”. An admission of vulnerability, if not made in earlier times even in secret, is taken for granted today by every analyst, because time has done its levelling best to put everyone’s military hardware on a more or less equal footing. As for the “partners”, these are the six oil exporting nations of the Gulf Cooperation Council.

Bahrain, one of the nations of said Council or Congress (aka Manama Dialogue security forum) and the host to the conference may indeed buy additional military equipment from the U.S. military industrial complex. However, the same reasons why the U.S. paid attention to Russian cautioning are also operative with regard to Bahrain. As the readers who may be sceptical with regard to this writer’s reasoning know best: We will believe only if we witness a demonstration of the ‘truth’; that is to say, a demonstration is pending and awaiting its day. All this writer can say to this is: We will see: after all, the predecessor to the suspected Kerry-Lavrov Pact is infamous for soon being betrayed.

 

Indeed, with the U.S. shifting “… its military attention, not to mention the bulk of its assets, to Asia,” as the RT article states, and because the secret agreement between Russia (and China) and the U.S. has not been officially announced, a demonstration may be an event one or all of six nations may expect to be the guinea pigs for. Just what form and shape a demonstration will take is for military experts to decide, but this author has always been impressed with the ability by some nuclear weapons to cause surges of electromagnetic pulse that may target a nation’s electric systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_electromagnetic_pulse , knocking out unprotected power grids. If such weapons may emit a directed  pulse, the demonstration may be a ‘test’ that deliberately ‘goes wrong’ yet provides the ‘proof’ for those who suspect but are uncertain of the existence of a secret treaty. Who will risk the prolonged (it may be years) recovery of one’s infrastructure?

 

The statements by Chuck Hegel are well within the bounds of face saving posturing—if such posturing is part of the agreement “with Iran”. It hurts no one if the cat scrapes the sand in his box obsessively: “We have deployed our most advanced fighter aircraft throughout the region, including F-22s, to ensure that we can quickly respond to contingencies,” he [the cat] said. “Coupled with our unique munitions, no target is beyond our reach.”

 

What the response of the F-22s may be to a ‘contingency’ that blows all the fuses and burns the electrical wiring of Saudi Arabia and Israel will be is unknown, but we may guess: nothing special, except for the panic in the offices of government historians that the first and last shot of WW4 went as unnoticed as the nonaggression pact proves itself (this time) to be trustworthy.

 

Still, we may expect that the Great Powers, knowing that a ‘test’ (just as a military manoeuvre) may metamorphose into the ‘real’ thing, will be watching events closely and tensely. The U.S. Defense Secretary has already told the world that all 40 naval vessels that were transferred to the Middle East are spending their time criss-crossing he Hormuz Straight and other bodies of water; while Russia advises the news media that it is withdrawing its naval fleet, even as everyone knows that ‘withdrawal’ is an ancient battle tactic; even as China, with its planned futuristic military base on the moon not yet ready http://news.ninemsn.com.au/world/2013/12/06/13/32/china-to-turn-moon-into-death-star , has  satellites or ‘death stars’ armed with missiles circling the globe for sure.

 

Eso’s Chronicles 246/ 32

Addendum 7—WW4

© Eso A.B.

In my blog 240/ “Addendum 3—Ecce Russia!” I ventured to suggest that Russia’s President Putin recently issued an ultimatum to the United States, re: stay out of Syria and Iran or else….

By all appearances the U.S. heard the message and desisted. How else is one to explain the sudden deflation of the war rhetoric, and the sudden unhappiness of Saudi Arabia and Israel, the two major hawks of war, both appearing disappointed  and threatening who knows what unilateral actions of their own.

If one listens the article contributed by Thierry Meyssan “The Abdication of Iran” at Voltairnet.com http://www.voltairenet.org/en one is led to think that the price of peace was that Iran was coerced into submission by the U.S. and Russia, both. Nevertheless, the events may have been more complex that that, because at the same time, not only did Russia stop the West from thrusting a spear into its own belly, but compromised the interests of Iran in such a way that, though it was needed to persuade the country to submit to certain U.S. demands, it was able to pull Iran back into its sphere of influence. That is to say, if Iran abdicated to the West, it could not do so without the acquiescence of Russia. Yet why would Russia acquiesce to the abdication of Iran to the West?

The answer is to be found in the fact, that it itself was put under threats by the west, especially by being surrounded by missile batteries ostensibly directed at Iran, but actually directed at Russia. Given this situation, Russia had no alternative but force the West to show its hand. Instead of a royal flush, all America held was a pair of aces, which was not enough of a trump to prevent, in case of a war, the infrastructure of its power lines from being knocked out, which would reduce the activities of it as a country to a standstill. In other words, all things considered, the West decided that it will not fight a war that leads to Armageddon.

This result is apparently understood by a broad circle of geopolitical strategists. For example, just a few days ago: a) NATO issued a statement that its forces will not stay in Afghanistan if the U.S. forces do not stay. I.E., Europe has no intention to confront either the Russian or Chinese military forces on its own; b) President Karzai of Afghanistan gave the U.S. something of an ultimatum of his own: no more drones, which suggest that Karzai is onto the fact that as a consequence of Putin’s challenge echoes are heard also in the East. If the West will not fight WW3 with Russia, why should it fight it with China? c) Europe and NATO issued an announcement that its forces will not remain in Afghanistan beyond 2014 if Afghanistan does not permit the U.S. forces to stay in its country http://www.nation.com.pk/national/04-Dec-2013/karzai-failure-to-sign-pact-would-end-mission-nato ; d) it did not take long for China to announce that http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-25062525 it extended its air defense zone over East China Sea; and it was not many more days before it sent its only aircraft carrier through the Taiwan Straights. e) The Defense Department of the U.S. itself has issued an announcement that in five years time the military expenses would be reduced by 100 billion dollards. In other words, though unacknowledged by the Western Media, the news is going around that consumer economics has brought our planet to such a point that WW3 is at a practicalend and deterrence prevents WW4 from being fought.

As readers will know, it is my belief that WW2 and WW3 occurred within the brackets {[( )]} of WW1, which began a little more than a thousand years ago when the Goths (formerly Vikings) were forced out of the Black Sea area and reestablished themselves in the northwest of Europe, then began a prolonged war to recapture the East it had been forced to leave. The early wars of WW1&2 began as the Crusades. The last wars of WW3 are known as Wars of Arab Awakening or ‘Democracy Crusades’. These last of these wars centered on Syria with an aim to seize one of the flanks of Iran, then take advantage of the strategic location to make further inroads against the East. In short, by Russia calling the West’s bluff, WW1, WW2, and WW3 may now be considered as ended; and WW4 (unless…*) has been averted.

The short circuiting of WW4 brings to an end a major geopolitical threat waged against our planet by the West. It removes, once and for all, the U.S. sphere of influence from Europe and Asia, and returns these continents to the influence of Russia and China. The loss of these continents to the U.S. is acknowledged at this very time by the trip of the U.S. Vice-President Biden to China http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/12/05/21769284-biden-i-was-very-direct-with-china-president-over-air-defense-zone. No doubt, none of this could have happened without previous and secret agreements between the Russians and the Chinese as to the power arrangement over the area of their two adjoining continents.

Though military posturing may continue for some time http://rt.com/news/us-mideast-iran-nuclear-hagel-878/, we should expect significant changes in the tactics of European and Far East Asian countries. A notable event has already occurred when Ukraine chose to remain within the economic zone of Russia. Similar realignments of position are likely to occur in Moldova, the Baltic countries, and the German-Russian economic cooperation is likely to be renewed. Though the public may be puzzled over these changes, it can be brought to an understanding through the long overdue revelations about Europe’s ‘hidden’ history. This writers ‘rewrite’ of Oedipus Rex, re “Oedipus Rex Rewritten” may play a role in it, as its redacted ‘modern’ version is clearly designed to abolish the death penalty for the highest government officials of the West.

While it is too early to predict how these changes will revise the map http://htekidsnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/World-Map-1.gif , we may venture a guess: 1) Russia will draw its borders along a line that begins at Vladivastok, moves west across northern China, then curves down the eastern border of Afghanistan, then curves west again along the Arabian Sea, Persian Gulf, Iraq, on to the Mediterranean, then along the eastern borders of Egypt, Sudan, then the southern borders of Chad and Cameron, to the Atlantic Ocean, and then in a broad curve that moves north and embraces Europe to Russia’s own part of the Arctic Circle. China, for its part, may include in its sphere everything to its immediate east and south as far as and including Indonesia and Australia, and may include Madagascar and the southern half of Africa. As to the continent of South America, it may be left for the future to decide whether it attaches to the North American continent or prefers to retain its links with Europe.

* Saudi Arabia and Israel are two countries which find this realignment onerous to say the least, which is reason to be wary that they may instigate an incident that, they hope, may lead to broader conflict.

 

Eso’s Chronicles 239/ 25
Addendum 2—Putin’s Misidentity
© Eso A.B.

While I have the greatest respect for the difficulties that beset post-Soviet Russia in its efforts to make an economic recovery, and have generally perceived Russian President Vladimir Putin’s (b. 1952) http://eng.putin.kremlin.ru/bio efforts in this perspective, I remain skeptical of the direction Putin is taking.

One of the reasons for my skepticism about Vladimir’s leadership is not because I suspect him of dishonesty and lack of transparency, but—as readily noticeable in the above link—his obvious identifying of himself as an urbanite. True, his parents, identified themselves not only with St. Petersburg, but also with Pominovo, a village in the Tver Region, where Vladimir’s grandmother came from. Nevertheless, this is Putin’s family history, not a matter of personal experience.

The reason, why I emphasize Vladimir’s lack of experience with the Russian countryside is that while I was also born in an urban setting, the Soviet occupation of Latvia (1939) forced my family a year later to seek refuge and survival in the countryside, which is why at the age of seven, I became a country boy. At that age, I was still young enough to switch identities. That I identified with the city, at first, is evidenced by the fact that as a ‘city’ boy, I picked a fight at elementary school with a country boy, and paid for it with a broken front tooth. It introduced me to having new respect for the people who were dominant in my new environment.

More than seventy years later, I hold my ability to identify with the countryside as an essential ingredient for my geopolitical and economic orientation with regard to the future. My distancing from the urbanite set began early, at about the age twelve thirteen, when in Displaced Persons camps, I discovered that all the patriots of Latvia there were Latvian urbanites, mostly from Riga—even if they were born in the Latvian countryside. The latter can be ascribed to the fact that in those days the movement of countryside people to the more promising urban setting ended in Riga (up to the time of independence—1918) a German city. Of course, today a similar movement to an urbanite setting uses Riga as a city of transit only. Riga itself is dramatically losing population, down from about a million inhabitants to slightly over 600,000.

So, alright. What makes the countryside so important for the future, and what does it have to do with the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin?

Briefly this: While the movement of people from the countryside to the city was already notable in Latvia in the 1920s and 30s, emigration as such had no yet reached popular levels. Such took place for the most part only within the context of religious belief; for example, many Baptists moved from Latvia to America and South America, because not only were many from the countryside, where the economic conditions were less promising for the future than in the city, but because religious discrimination by then dominant Lutheran Church was demeaning of personal achievement simply because of one’s religious affiliation. Incidentally, this same religious intolerance forced my grandfather (a descendant of Herrnhuters, now said to have morphed into the Moravian Church) to leave the countryside for Riga and almost never speak of religion. The way that I know of his religious affiliation with so-called dualist theology is that one of his sayings, passed down by an oral tradition, was—when urged not to work late at the office: “Don’’t worry about me, worry about my Devil.” Evidently, for him, the Devil was not a theological reality, but personal energy. Interestingly, that same saying has survived in America http://www.thefreedictionary.com/like+the+devil , re: “Work like the Devil.” Later Catholic Christian orthodoxy changed this to: “Work like the Devil for the Lord.”

When I am arguing that President Putin may not be the man to save Russia from the attacks of the West, I base my doubts on such small differences or what French historians call longue durée (long term) influences on history. That is to say, in the present economic setting, where the economy of the future is explained by the media and politicians to the public as more of the same as in the last hundred years http://www.bbc.com/autos/story/20131125-rebuilding-the-future , moreover, in an increasingly urban setting, is likely himself suffering from the longue durée cultural virus in that he has no idea of country life and that it suffered a Stalinist like repression from a modernist movement known as urbanism.

It is worth while mentioning in this context that Pope Francis and the Vatican (an urban site since the 15^th century) have just identified capitalism (largely to be identified with urbanism) as tyranny http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-25102720 . Of course, the Pope may have made the statement because of Israel, which (according to an article at voltairnet http://www.voltairenet.org/article181169.html claims: “It [Iran and its former President Ahmadinejad] feined “ignorance about the direction of the conference [planned to be held in Iran], which was to show that Europeans had replaced their Christian culture with the religion of the Holocaust.) Not surprisingly, Pope Francis may agree; well knowing that it was the Franks and the French who established the Vatican to try a hand at reestablishing the Holy Roman Empire of the East (Jerusalem cum Constantinople) in the West.

Eso’s Chronicles 233/ 4
The HKG-RIX Axis 04
© Eso A.B.

Hong Kong-Riga axis: the first a part of China on the Europe-Asia south east end, while Riga is on the north-west end of the two continents that dominate the largest remnant of the huge landmass once called Pangaea. If one draws a straight line between the two cities, one transects Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, located perfectly in between.

This observer has been arguing for some time that the present capital of Europe, Brussels, has outlived its usefulness, for the simple reason that the business activity of Europe has moved eastward, from England and France to Germany—an eventuality that two world wars tried to prevent. At this time, no one questions the claims of Hong Kong, though by comparison Riga seems a small provincial city. But is this likely to remain so into the future?

Of course, the plans to make it so go ahead:  http://rt.com/op-edge/eu-us-pact-devastating-566/ But it need not.

If the leading nation of Europe in the future is Germany—as many signs cause one to believe—then Riga, arguably the city which Germans once may have planned to make their capital (see blog 228)—may soon revive. True, unlike in the past, Germany is no longer directly linked with Latvia by way of Prussia, what with Poland, Lithuania, and Russia occupying the middle distance http://www.harveypowers.com/eller/Kaliningrad_map.jpg ; but then Canada separates the mainland of the U.S. from Alaska, and that does not stop Alaskans from being Americans. Given the sell-out of Latvia by the current government of Latvia to Brussels and little good coming of it for Latvians, it is likely that Germany would find most Latvians ripe for the picking.

There is not only TAFTA, but some other geopolitical arguments, which insist that it is not Riga, but Russian Konigsberg that should take the prize of the dominant city in the area. But given the unhappy experience of Latvians with the Soviet Union in the not long ago, and the propaganda barrage against Russia by the Latvian government during the past twenty-one years, the people will feel safer and be less reluctant to consider their future if it comes to them with Germany as mediator. As for the Germans, they can choose TAFTA or an independent course.

The reason for this potentially sudden turn-about in the fortunes of Riga is not Riga of itself or Germany, but the fact that Riga is perfectly situated for a German-Russian relationship and has a similar past relationship to relate to. Moreover, the foreign policy direction of the Latvian government for the past twenty years plus has been a disaster when it comes to hewing a direction that can be considered as promising. Indeed, most Latvians are only superficially aware that there is such an institution as the Foreign Ministry. For the most part, the FM has been an arm of Brussels and/or NATO, which has no interest in the Baltics except as a frontier that abuts Russia it considers its potential enemy.

Russia has for a long time faced serious problems vis a vis NATO, which does not have economic well-being of Europe as its major interest, but subordination of Russia as its chief aim. As Zbigniev Brzinski wrote in his book, “The Grand Chesboard”, in discussing the Ukraine and the nations belonging to the Turkic languages groups (p148): “Russia is too weak to regain imperial domination over the region or to exclude others from it, but it is also too close and too strong to be excluded.”  Brzinski recognizes that the U.S. is “…too distant to be dominant”.

The very same words can also be used with regard to the north-east region of mittelosteuropa, where the Baltic nations are located.

The great danger in the present situation in the Middle East is that instead of acting as if is “too distant to be dominant”, the U.S. by supporting the interests of Israel, Saudi Arabia, Georgia, Turkey, Kurds, and others, has appeared to want not only to dominate, but to undermine the belly of Europe-Asia (Russia-China) with a pepper plaster compress so hot that similar to Soviet Russia, the nations so embraced would expend the greater part of their wealth in armaments, which—like in the case of the Soviet Union—would cause permanent discomfort to their people. One may hope that at this time the financial and economic situation in the U.S. has somewhat corrected American aggression and will cause it to reconsider its strategy.

For the last twenty-one years, the Latvian government has favoured a similar U.S. tactic in the Baltic region. While it has no support of its people for this strategy other than their fear of a repetition of Soviet style dominance, it can be easily seen that with regard to economic policies, this strategy is not only a failure as such, but has exposed the country to existential dangers, re: economic outmigration, demographic decline, chronic under education, chronic poverty, chronic amorality at all levels of society, chronic absence of a positive self-generated culture, and this is only the beginning of the list of compacted social ills, not to mention the  suffering of the people.

So, why not think of a HKG http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hong_Kong_Airlines_B-KBE_taking_off_at_Hong_Kong_International_Airport.jpg -RIX economic axis? If at this time Riga http://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/00/13/bc/0c/riga-old-town-in-the.jpg  is nowhere near a comparison with Hong Kong, then the industrial capability of Germany and the Scandinavian countries more than compensate for the yet undeveloped infrastructure.

Eso’s Chronicles 230/ 1

New Kursk 01

© Eso A.B.

 

The following link by “Battlefields” on the battle of Kursk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22xpNBJCS4U  in 1943 is lengthy and leaves something to be desired, nevertheless, it shows how the battle took a long time being prepared by both Germany and Russia. The preparations and their length by both sides are most impressive, not least, because they show that both sides had their apprehensions about coming out on the winners’ side. In this writer’s opinion, another such battle (not necessarily of tanks, which may have become an outmoded weapon) is being prepared for in the Middle East and in the Baltic; in other words, a battle across a very wide front indeed.

 

While I cannot give any actual outlines of the battle to come, I will present its rough outlines and raisons d'être in the next few blogs.

 

Just yesterday there was a news item in the Reuters News Service, that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has warned Israel http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/07/us-palestinians-israel-kerry-idUSBRE9A60P220131107  that if it does not join the American-brokered peace negotiations in the Middle East, it was likely to be soon facing a Third Palestinian Intifada and other geopolitical problems in the not too distant future.

 

The Secretary of State’s warning comes in the context of a reassessment of recent American and NATO strategies, which likely caused all the Great Powers who form on what was once Pangaea http://geology.csupomona.edu/drjessey/class/Gsc101/Plate.html , the original land mass of our planet, to tickle their nuclear buttons. In other words, Europe, Asia and all the abutting lands, have for approximately a thousand years been facing a concerted Western strategy to occupy the land whence they themselves originally came from. Wishing to shed the spiritual discipline of their forebears, the Westerners decided that they would create a history of their own, albeit a history of fiction, which would allow them to attack the descendants of the powers that remained in charge of their own ancient homelands.

 

In the thousand years or so since the Carolingian kings the divisions and regroupings occurred among the various powers in the Western lands have been many. The original attacks by the West on the East can be identified with the early Crusades, starting about the 11^th and 12^th centuries of the 2^nd millennium. In these attacks only the peripheral borderlands of the East were chiseled from it, and some beachheads captured, notably at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea and northeastern Europe.

 

My own country, Latvia, is part of the chiseled part of the East. Originally, the Germans, part of the great migration of the Goths (first as Vikings to the Black Sea region, then as various tribes of Goths backing away toward the northeast of Europe (the so-called Benelux countries), under the pressure of the advancing Turkic tribes or, as some prefer to call them—Huns. In the Benelux area, the Goths split up in three four main branches: the Germans, French, English, and Scandinavians. Latvia, then part of a geographical area known as Livonia, has its origins in the German desire to be independent of French Rule and the burden of French Paris as their capital city. Thus, early German warriors, known as Teutonic Knights, ventured into the relatively sparsely settled wooded lands of the European northeast, and established a city we now know as Riga. Originally, Riga was slated to become the future capital of Germany.

 

Riga was founded in 1201 by cannon Albert of Bremen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_of_Riga, who was elevated to the rank of bishop by his uncle Hartwig archbishop of Bremen and Hamburg. Bishop Albert also founded the Teutonic Knights with whom he subjugated most of the Baltic tribes native to the area.

 

Though seldom mentioned and for political reasons never pressed, one of the reasons for the founding of Riga was to found a future capital city for the Germanic people.  One of the subtitles that Bishop Albert gave to Riga was Jerusalem, which indicates, at the very least, that in his mind’s eye Riga in the future was ‘up there’ with Constantinople and other major cities of the West and East. Again for political reasons, this high status for Riga remains unrealized and is reason why the subject is deliberately muted. Nevertheless, those powers, which have an eye on the future, of Europe as a federated state, retain an interest in Riga as a city founded by Germans. Not least among these are Latvians come under the Anglo-Saxon influence and are linking their future with NATO, which in one way or another is replacing the Teutonic Brotherhood.

 

Russia, too, has a no less greater interest in Riga than the West. To understand this better, we have to remember the trading history of Russia, which begins above the polar circle in Murmansk, moved south to Novgorod the Great, and later--with the building of St. Petersburg—moved even further south. By the beginning of the 20^th century, Riga, then still part of tsarist Russia, had become the third largest city in Russia. While today Riga has lost its glory, the recent military maneuvers by Russia and NATO http://www.independent.ie/world-news/europe/tensions-rise-with-russia-as-nato-to-stage-biggest-war-games-in-seven-years-29733358.html  suggest that its geopolitical importance is not being overlooked in the centers of power and is the cause of considerable hubris in government circles of Latvia itself.

 

Eso’s Chronicles 223 / 9
Before the Polis
© Eso A.B.

When around the small ancient temples in the wood there began to congregate solitary wanderers and herders of forest animals, who eventually became the inhabitants of this new ground, there came a time when the new residents forgot that they owed their new abode, its ground and the surrounding wood special reverence. The reverence was by virtue of the fact that beginning with the temple http://ultima0thule.blogspot.com/2012_02_26_archive.html , which evolved out of the shaman’s shack, the succeeding city and landscape became a virtual, and no longer an organic entity.

When the inhabitants of the virtual city forgot that their home (a cave, a lean to, a tent) was built on what at its origin was believed to be sacred ground, they, noting the size of their congregation, puffed up with conceit, at first only to dangerous, later, to catastrophic levels. The catastrophe arose from the fact that as the city expanded—or as some say ‘sprawled’—it forgot that its origins were not organic, but were founded on a virtual space. In due course, mechanized vehicles, known as ‘cars’, small houses on wheels, radiated out of the city on roads which consumed the wood and the countryside, and persuaded the inhabitants of the wood to desire a city’s luxuries, which could be got only by moving to the city. In practical terms, this meant exchanging simple sandals for spit-shined shoes; because women were invited to support the army city-zens (zens=gens=jens=Johns*), their shoes were raised on high heels, so that the Johns could prick then more easily. Some of the saints castrated themselves in disgust.

However, the passage to the city even by a -zens had to be earned; first, by paying to the city’s king or prince taxes in the form of animal pelts (which meant slaughtering the reindeer cows which the wood people had heretofore herded only for the sake of their milk), later, by axing trees and replacing them with what was called ‘farm country’, where the reindeer were replaced with castrated buffalo known as oxen, and trees were replaced by stalks of grain, which, when compared to the wood, were easier to exploit and tax. The pet frog of the shaman, which he kept in the swamp because of its oracle-like croak and which he called The Sphinx, was driven from her abode and transferred to the desert that evolved out of the city’s dump in the image of a lioness cut our of sandstone rock.

As human beings were driven from the wood, they naturally wished to bring their form of political life known as polycracy (later ‘democracy’) to the city. It was not an easy thing to do, and indeed was never accomplished. As we know, as a consequences of such regimented structures, which some call ‘little boxes’ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlSpc87Jfr0 and are taken advantage of by spy organizations such as the NSA, readily attach themselves as leeches to them, and writers of detective and spy novels gain popularity as they try to figure out how the murder was done. Of course, with the arrival of the ‘victorious’ NSA, we are witness to the death of spy stories. When a society reaches the point where a government installs an agency such as the NSA, it becomes a political failure. This is the situation facing us today: in the cities of our day neither democracy or urbanity are any longer possible--not even in our wildest dreams.

If my thesis is correct, must we now return to the wood? Yes, in a sense. Even some economists at the Rubini Ecomonitor blog argue that the Tea Party is made up largely of Old Confederates for whom the Federal Government remains the ‘enemy’ http://www.economonitor.com/blog/2013/10/the-decline-of-the-united-states/?utm_source=contactology&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=EconoMonitor%20Highlights%3A%20Armageddon%20Here%20We%20Come%21  

The wood is the origin of democracy not only for human beings, but wildlife, too. Unfortunately, hunters from urban areas have never heard that the wood stands for humankind’s original home. In the area where I live, just a week ago some young men, on opening day of the hunting season—so I am told—shot two moose calves, and were so exited or ashamed of their ‘success’ that they so completely wasted themselves on alcohol that, fortunately, they did not go hunting the following day. However one thinks of such manifestations of barbarism, one cannot escape noting that violence continues to be acceptable to a significant element of Latvian society even though it has itself been repeatedly violated by wars and occupations. The long duree of history (also maladie longue duree) of culture apparently continues to believe that ‘progress’ can be had for ‘free’ with just a ‘little’ applications of violence. After all, hunting moose hurts no human beings, and what is the life of the calf of a moose or a Palestinian when compared to the life of a Latvian or Israeli? As yet—so the imbedded thinking goes—if a government claims itself ‘democratic’ and says that hunting is okay; it must be so, and I can play at being dumb without consequences.

Our response to such a attitudes ought be a prayer for catastrophe, because not a few wise men have said that significant changes occur only when humankind is faced by a catastrophe. At the time of this writing, such a catastrophe has two ongoing pathways, one signaling to the right, the other to the left: 1) through a war on Syria and then on to  Russia http://www.infowars.com/top-nuke-commanders-fired-following-missing-nuclear-warheads-report/ ; or 2) through the U.S. government not raising the debt ceiling, declaring the government bankrupt, http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-shutdown-of-the-u-s-government-and-debt-default-a-dress-rehearsal-for-the-privatization-of-the-federal-state-system/5354066 and therewith privatizing war. In the event of the last, some private corporations are likely to announce recruitment drives for a private army, promising to ‘pay’ only through plunder of ‘enemy’ assets. As the Syrian crisis appears to have abated as a result of Russian fears of war, it is not surprising that 2) is in ascent.

And then? I would opt for regress in time and a return to government led by a shaman, who when all his magic potions failed him, reversed himself and became a self-sacrificing king.

*zens=gens. Those who have followed my blogs will know that I believe these cognates to originally have stood for the name of God, re: Gans, Ian, Ivan, Jans, Jean, Gans, etc.

 

Eso’s Chronicles 221 / 7
A Waterless Flood I (7)
© Eso A.B.
 

The title of this blog comes from Margaret Atwood’s novel called “MaddAddam”, a story of global disaster in the near future http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/maddaddam_20130920.

Though I have not read the novel, which on other occasions would disqualify me from making further comments, for all that this is not unusual. This is not the first time that I have met up with the problem, when a sidebar tells the reader “to see long excerpts from “MaddAddam” at Google Books, click here” ; but when I click here all I get is a short bio of the author and no ‘long excerpt’.

In short, the reader is left with this blogger’s own version of ‘a waterless flood’—words ad infinitum.

‘A Waterless Flood’  is a reference within Atwood’s book, offered to us through its reviewer, Michael Dirda, to one “… Adam One, who has long foretold the coming of a Waterless Flood that will cleanse the sordid and polluted Earth...”, (www.truthdig.com).

In any event, to return to the theme of the preceding blog: Zbigniew Brzezinski’s geopolitics as expressed in his book “The Grand Chessboard”, which example I was using to facilitate a discussion of the future of Russia.

What complicates the situation for Russia is less American geopolitical ambition, but a reawakened China making claim on the natural resources of Eurasian territories such as Kazakhstan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%E2%80%93Kazakhstan_relations formerly subordinated to the Soviet Union. China is also said to want to lease some 6% of Ukrainian soil to grow harvests for itself. What makes China’s claim not only potentially violent, but also Revolutionary is Brzezinski’s attempts to reduce Russia and China vis-à-vis the U.S.A.—to ‘regional’ powers; which neither of them intends to be reduced to.

Interestingly, in the long term, protesting their status as ‘regional’ powers, causes the interests of Russia and China coincide. If they enter into a conflict with each other, they act in the interest of the U.S. and its European allies (military and corporate). The Revolutionary potential in the conflict of interests is for Europe, Russia, and China to radically change their geopolitical perspective (Europe, after all, too, is no more than a ‘regional’ power from Brzezinski’s perspective), and work toward integration of their political entities into a vast new geopolitical landmass called Eu-Ru-Chi http://www.livescience.com/18387-future-earth-supercontinent-amasia.html . This makes vastly better sense than a bank led geopolitical structure such as TAFTA http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-us-eu-transatlantic-free-trade-agreement-tafta-big-business-corporate-power-grab/5352885 currently in the making.

Impossible as integration of Europe and Asia may seem, it is not an impossibility.  The real obstacle to it is the imbalance of populations, the Chinese population being some six times larger than that of Russia. However, this problem can be overcome is Russia sees a way to integrate with the nations of Europe.

There may be no way around such an integration because the U.S. has military superiority many times over the military power of Russia and China combined and is implementing a strategy of surrounding Ru-Chi with military bases and missiles capable of delivering nuclear explosives. To short-circuit the military threat, Ru-Chi need to discover other means of undermining American and European military strategy. One such way is to reexamine the historical chronology concocted by both these ‘false flag’ powers. This brings us back to the Russian mathematician and historian Anatoly Fomenko http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0U7OUULZs4 .

Of course, I am not saying that the claims by Fomenko do not need to be further examined. Nevertheless, Fomenko’s research leaves little doubt that the chronology of history as presented to us by the academies of the West need reanalysis, which is likely to bring about a historical scandal, a reset of chronology, and a likely rearrangement of sequence of events.

If as this writer suspects, the chronology of history is closer to Fomenko’s proposals than that of the Council of Trent (1545-1563) and the Catholic Church,  the nationalisms brought into being by Enlightenment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment (an unwelcome and unintended consequence) and communal loyalties centered on language, may be replaced by loyalties to the the organic environment, which is in a state of collapse at this time.

In Memoriam: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-10-05/man-who-lit-himself-fire-national-mall-has-died