Eso’s Chronicles 268 / 8

The King & I

© Eso A.B.

All comments appearing within brackets [ ] are editorial in origin. This blog series begins at 264.

 

A KING FOR HOME SACER

 

A summary of a summary of the meaning of “Homo Sacer” at the following link:  reads as follows http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/summary/v003/3.1r_panagia.html: “To most Anglo-American readers, the term homo sacer is probably unfamiliar as it refers to a juridical category of ancient Roman law where an individual accused of a crime cannot be sacrificed for having committed said crime. However, from the Roman writer Pompeius Festus, we learn that what is crucial about homo sacer is that although "it is not permitted to sacrifice this man, yet he who kills him will not be condemned for homicide.”

 

While the term ‘homo sacer’ may be interpreted as pointing to an individual, nevertheless, it may also encompass many individuals who have not committed a crime, but who have been in one way or another separated from a given society. As the link points out, it also includes “…the status of the right of entry for refugees, the debate over health care in the United States, the right of individuals to bear arms in order to protect themselves….”’; and I would herewith include the status of some 900,000 Latvians who have been forced by their government to depart Latvia as economic refugees. Though the Latvian government insists that it wishes these people to return, the fact remains that ridding the nation of these citizens has been a priority over declaring a state of emergency which would attempt to decrease the pressures that force them (adults and their families) to depart from Latvia.

 

Because Latvia is a member of the European Union, its citizen may, under the terms of the Schengen Treaty, travel freely anywhere within the territories of member states http://europa.eu/legislation_summaries/justice_freedom_security/free_movement_of_persons_asylum_immigration/ . The authority of the Schengen Treaty comes from duly constituted “authorities” of the member states. However, there is no single Authority as such at this time, the Union being without a Constitution and a ‘federation’ only within the subjective imaginations of its leadership.

 

After a brief period of independence (1918-1940) Latvia was merged by 1941 into the Soviet Union. It reemerged as a ‘sovereign’ nation in 1991 and joined the European Union in 2004 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latvian_European_Union_membership_referendum,_2003 . In a referendum held in 2003, the populace approved joining the EU by about a 2/3 majority of voters. As the link shows, the opposition challenged the joining on grounds of loss of sovereignty and as inopportune for the economy, Latvia’s economy being the weakest among EU’s 26 member nations.

 

What the opposition failed to do was to question Latvia’s membership in the EU on grounds of political compatibility. The failure to do so may be explained very simply: 1) Latvia had emerged from the clutches of the Soviet Union only in 1991, and Russia (rather, Moscow, as the seat of the former Union) was still feared; 2) liberalist pro-consumerist propaganda (Latvia had a liberal PM at the time of the referendum) allowed little critical discussions to emerge regarding the merits of the EU. Also, while patently untrue, 3) the previous government of Latvia (the so-called Ulmabis regime) was later frequently and with malicious political intent compared to a Hitler-like dictatorship.

 

As I argued in my previous blog: “Latvians made a serious attempt to recapture for their political estate the King.... even though the word was seldom used in a contemporary political sense. This experiment was enjoined by one of the founders of the nation, Karlis Ulmanis, who became President of the country as a result of a coup d'état in 1934….”

 

An interesting, but derogatory (belittling) commentary on the search by Latvians for a king is by historian Gustavs Strenga in the journal “Rīgas Laiks” of 2008—reproduced at http://www.delfi.lv/news/comment/comment/gustavs-strenga-spelet-karalos-un-pazos.d?id=22309611 . Unfortunately, the historian does not appear to take himself seriously and his statement appears to be ‘tongue in cheek’. Still, the article gives significant evidence that Latvians felt an intuitive need for a king-like authority, what with their political bureaucracy having turned authoritarian not as an authoritarianism per se, but as a totalitarianism of a politically dysfunctional government. A few translated (by this blogger) sentences follow:

 

“Following the 1934 coup d’état the need to fortify the legitimacy of State authority increased. Kings began to be discovered. Where to look for them? Right where they were lost—the 13^th century…. One may doubt that Ulmanis, while looking for a Latvian aristocracy, wished to declare himself a Latvian king, but, no doubt, the search for ‘kings’ in ‘a free Latvia in antiquity’ corresponded to the desire of Latvians to strengthen their legitimacy… In effect, the Ulmanis regime efforts reflected the trauma of the Latvian nation—weakness with regard to a political past.”

 

Such ‘weakness’ with regard to a political past does not delegitimize Latvia as a nation. This is a problem for most “new” nations, which in our post colonial days are many. However, it does point to the fact that Latvia did not have (or had only as of recently) an institutional infrastructure that was strong enough to hold up to the responsibilities of government. This weakness was compensated for by overloading the newly created bureaucracies with personnel. (True to this day!) Of course, it was this ‘personnel’ of the bureaucracy that in a short time created a dysfunctional government, which created an ‘exceptional’ situation, which needed to be rescued through the introduction of an authoritarian government.

 

Following the renewal of Latvia (1991) after the fall of the Soviet Union nothing has really changed from the way it was half a century before. With no institutions that Latvians could call their own (other than the arts), and with many Latvians trained to serve Soviet bureaucratic institutions, the new ‘democratic’ government continued to function as a form authoritarian government with a notable difference: the emphasis was not on socialistic forms of government, but liberal ones.

 

Indeed, over a short period of time the last became worse than the socialist ones, because under the capitalist system making “money” becomes a priority; and with no native institutions or social networks in place, the old networks continued to function for some time, and the paradox of rich former communists became the norm. Such a turn of events brought the Latvian people to their economic knees and many of them sought escape by way of finding employment in a country other than their own. The government was happy to see them leave as it meant less challenge to its authority at home.

 

Who is most responsible for turning a happy event into a disaster?

 

Without a question, the primary responsibility lies with the United States and the European Union (as the unprepared ‘victors’ of an ‘open ended’ Cold War) who perhaps understandably, but erroneously, put commercial interests as the most important ones. It was a lamentable ‘victory’.

 

And what is the most lamentable ‘disaster’ of the ‘victory’?

 

It is homo sacer. The majority of the Latvian people abroad and in their own country are criminals through the fact of having become economically homeless and unemployed. Whereas ‘King’ Ulmanis had put agricultural reform as one of the essential ingredients to Latvia’s economic recovery, the liberal ‘democratic’ Parliament put urban commerce as the leading interest of the revived nation. As a result, one of the most successful economic programs in Latvia is deforestation.

Eso’s Chronicles 267 / 7

The King & I

© Eso A.B.

All comments appearing within brackets [ ] are editorial in origin. This blog series begins at 264.

 

NEITHER GOD, NOR NOMOS, BUT KING

 

Having begun this series on the ‘King’ with Slavoy Žižek’s mischievous conjoining of the King with bureaucracy (The King and his Bureaucracy, Ch6, ‘Interrogating the Real’), it is only proper to conclude with the no less mischievous comparison that the pop philosopher makes of subjectivity with “dangerous hubris”, insisting that the claim to “authentic essence of humanity” lies “outside the domain of subjectivity”. Žižek posits the subject of authentic essence in Antigone and its human counterpoint in her sister Ismene.

 

I would call the other name of the “subject” that Žižek imagines—a “mask”. However, Žižek quickly becomes inconsistent and contradicts himself, when he decides to dedicate his book to an old Slovene communist, who in 1943 led an uprising of some 2000 starved Yugoslav prisoners against 2200 Italian soldiers who are their guards.

 

The Slovene prisoners succeed in disarming the Italian soldiers. After the war, the Slovene communist is arrested (no reason given why--by the succeeding communist-Stalinist government) and ten years later, he is forced to participate in the building of a monument that celebrates the uprising he led.

 

It is an ironic story, surely.

 

Knowingly or unknowingly, Žižek then tops off the irony by putting Stalin into role of the ‘King’, while the role of the ‘bureaucracy’ passes to Stalinist  communists, those who are enforcing Stalin’s ‘will to power’.

 

This leaves the reader confused as to why Žižek holds an old communist in such high esteem, for obviously the man revolted against the guards of the prison on the basis of his subjective feelings and decisions. The problem resolves itself only if one assumes that Žižek contradicts himself or Stalinists are the new Catholics.

 

I agree that the monument, the ‘subject’ of the ‘’monumental building project, stands for the ‘mask’ of the old communist and his rebellious comrades, who, I assume, are meant to stand for the ‘authentic essence’ of humanity.

 

But why should one believe that the monument stands also for ‘dangerous hubris’? Is that not like a Catholic priest demanding a pagan to renounce his old Gods (who up to the moment are a part of the man’s subjectivity) for the authentic subject of an ‘outside’ God, aka Nomos https://www.google.lv/#q=meaning+of+Nomos ? And is not Nomos synonymous with such repressive organizations of pacification as the Inquisition, the Gestapo, the KGB, and the CIA/NSA? Is not dismissing subjectivity as ‘hubris’ a matter of continued repression and denial of privacy? Therefore, is the monument not a monument to Homo Sacer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_sacer --the man who cannot be murdered, sacrificed, but only killed, because all he is is naked?

 

This brings us to “god” with a small ‘g’, because Catholicity (and Christianity derived from globalist Catholicism) surely discredited god when written with a capital G, and here Žižek and Schmitt discredit him with a small g. So, why not replace the missing figure of Trust with the long neglected figure of King?

 

Would not a King serve the 900,000 Latvians forced into economic exile as de facto ‘homo sacer’ better than the bureaucratic totalitarian democracy, which with the backing of the totalitarian democracy of the EU takes upon itself the authority to make them de facto homo sacer or, in other words, homeless?

 

There will be those who will claim that I would reinstall subjectivity in place of an objective (rational law) government that a Hegelian http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hegelianism bureaucracy presumes itself to represent. As Schmitt asserted: “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts”. Here we may remember that Catholic Christianity spent many centuries violently persecuting and inquisitorially repressing an earlier Christianity now identified with Bogomils, Cathars, and Krist-Yans.

 

The repression was necessary because like Žižek (a Hegelist), Catholicism believes human subjectivity to be a hubristic element rather than an inherent element of being human. In short, we have biocentered human beings http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biocentrism_(ethics) opposed by virtual or ‘man-made’ human beings, who are created by words imbued with violent attributes gained through innumerable acts (? 900,000) of de facto (unacknowledged de jure) murders.

 

To discuss the means by which the King may return is a task beyond these blogs, which are meant to argue against the totalitarianism of liberal democracy in an attempt to overturn its dictatorial order that has taken the helm in Latvia. Even so, we may say—in agreement with Carl Schmitt—that the nature of democracy is to behold the rights of the rulers and the ruled as one. In other words, this is what makes democracy a charismatic force, whereas today it has become an alien and an enemy.

 

I have argued for the return of humankind to the wood and leaving urbanism as a minimal element, an element to be determined by none other than the post-urbanist age itself (certainly not by a carbon tax).

 

I am arguing that Latvians make a serious attempt to recapture for their political estate the King. In a preceding State (1918-1939), though not the post-Soviet Latvia, Latvians did indeed experiment with the notion of the ‘king’s’ return, even though the word was seldom used. This experiment was enjoined by one of the founders of the national community, Karlis Ulmanis, who became President of the country as a result of a coup d'état in 1933.

 

Ulmanis was condemned as a dictator, and many hold him such to this day. I argue, however, that Ulmanis was ahead of his time, and that political science had not yet made such strides as it has made by our time. Be that as it may, a great many Latvians praise Ulmanis’ leadership, but suffer not expressing the praise because they find themselves under a totalitarian liberal democratic regime, which in turn is under the umbrella of a liberal totalitarian ‘democratic’ regime in European Union.

 

Eso’s Chronicles 201/ 1
An Autoholograph (1)
© Eso A.B.

I was born in Latvia in July of 1933, which was two months after control of the failing state was taken over by a patriot willing to risk his life to save it from self-destruction by politicians hypnotized by the rights of politicians to absolute ‘democratic’ rights. This is to say, politicians who, hypnotized by post Enlightenment illusions and encouragement of capitalist economics, had little or no regard for the people of Latvia as a community which had survived for thousands of years.

It was a time when the state of Latvia had just survived falling apart, because its ‘authority’ figure, the first President, Jānis Časkte,  died five years earlier (1927) at the premature age of 68. When I was old enough to comprehend something of politics, I heard some wag tell that if the man had not died that early in years, he would have become my godfather. As it is, my godfather became his oldest son, who was a judge at the Latvian High Court.

The Ariadne’s string for this labyrinthene connection derives from the fact that my paternal grandfather was a descendant of Herrnhuters, a religious offshoot of the 14-15^th century Jan Hus movement (especially concerned with the education of common man) which came to Latvia to rebuild a society destroyed by the Great Northern War (1700-1721). At the time these forebears came to Latvia, much of Europe was still under the rule of the Habsburg Empire, which made many of the lands rather interactive with their Germanic overlords. Not surprisingly, an analysis of my dna indicates that my great-forebears 5 generations removed came from the area of Herzogovina, an area once known for its religious hereticism and as home of an ancient Christian Church the members of which were known as Bogomils and Cathars.

The Herrnhuter method of reintegrating a destabilized and decimated society was to bring it together by integrating themselves within that society, then bringing everyone together by song and forming choirs. Education and preaching was another method. Dabbling in the mysteries of the Kabala was not excluded. In any case, my grandfather was a teacher, a choir master, and a moralist in that no one was allowed to speak ill of another person at the dinner table. When the Herrnhuter Church was repressed by the Latvian Lutheran Church (during the process of taking over the leadership of the Lutheran Church from its earlier German preachers), my great-grandfather Janis Benjamins lost his inn to a fire (said to have been caused by his wife, but more likely maliciously torched), and himself suffered shock and soon died. My grandfather, at the time was not yet ten years old. He and his sister were left in their mother’s charge, who earned her keep as a common farm worker.

As he grew older and proved an earnest student, the German baron (whose manager Jānis Benjamins had been) helped grandfather to get his higher education at a then well-known country school: Cimzes Seminars. Grandfather graduated to become a teacher, a choir master, married, had five children, and became a school director. However, his Herrnhuter background and Herrnhuter orientation kept him from being fully accepted in the by now recovered Latvian and fully lutheranized society, which though not denying him (he was given as consolation the third prize for a how-to play, but kept from the choir directors’ podium) kept him (probably with his irked yet tacit agreement) at arms length.

 
When the burden of his ambitions, social blocks (imagined or real), and economic situation became unbearable, grandfather chose to make a willful and radical step: he left his wife and five children, and went to the capital of then yet Germanic, Riga, where he became editor at a number of newspapers, finally founding his own. He was helped in the founding of the newspaper by a young woman then working for a German newspaper. Because grandfather had suffered bankruptcy in a hardware business he had attempted, and bankruptcy laws of the day were of a punishing nature, the young woman became the publisher of the newspaper. It is rumored that as the new couple left the employ of the German newspaper, they took with them its subscriber list.

Through an editorially supportive position for Latvians as a community (after WW1 the newspaper published ‘free’ ads for refugees looking for their dispersed relatives, had many Latvian Herrnhuters as editors, and greatly furthered literacy among the Latvian people by publishing popular novels) and favorable turns of fortune, the newspaper “Jaunākās Ziņas” (Latest News) became very profitable and made grandfather (editor-in-chief) and his partner one of Latvia’s first millionaires. In its heydays, the newspaper was a de facto bond for Latvians: though its maximum circulation (weekends) reached only two hundred thousand, the newspaper was read by up to five people, which brought to it virtually every Latvian.

Nevertheless, the long-term destructive forces borne of Enlightenment (and trust that Reason was reasonable) and Capitalism continued their destruction of society sub rosa, so to say.

‘Reason’ had dictated the founders of the Latvian state to trust that ‘reason’ would dictate every man and woman to come to basically the same reasonable conclusions. It did not. Instead, reason led to war, and war led to economic destitution, one consequence of which was near absolute self-isolation among impoverished individuals, and not surprisingly disregard of community interests.

The disintegration of the community first became visible in politics and gradually filtered itself to the community. Ulmanis, a politician, with his roots in the war for independence and military contacts, organized a successful coup and prevented the nation from disintegrating and dividing itself between the haves and have-nots. Ulmanis economic policies extended the base of the haves. His interest in the culture of folklore united Latvians in a culture that was based more on the culture prevalent in the countryside than it being overrun by urbanism.

Whether grandfather sympathized with the Ulmanis Regime, I do not know, except that the newspaper had to toe the line delineated by the State Information Ministry. As for his wife, Emiliya, she took great pleasure in dressing for and playing the role of the First Lady to a President who was an unmarried single man and often appeared in public with her.

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

© Eso Antons Benjamins

NOT-VIOLENT TERROR
36 Not-Violent Populism (VIII)

If there ever was a truism, it is the one that says that the best defense against an attack is an offense. Of course, the offense that arises because of a provocation to one’s defenses has to be successful for the truism to work. If Latvia as a nation ever had a plan of defense, the current situation is one of a complete retreat and rout. At the head of the ones retreating is the government of Latvia with the president in the lead.

Not long ago, I was in Riga and went to see the controversial musical drama called “Vadonis” (Leader), composition, lyrics and direction by way of Zigmars Liepins, Kaspars Dimiters, and Edmunds Freibergs respectively. The musical has received much criticism from the elite and the left wing of right wing political commentators.

As I have stated in previous blogs, the two most hated words in the circles of Latvian politics (right or left) is populism and populist. Whether the creators of this musical drama succeeded in identifying with populism in Latvia at this time, I leave for everyone to judge for themselves, but no doubt they identified it with Karlis Ulmanis, the now often maligned president-dictator of Latvia from 1933 to 1940.

Though the musical is harsh and loud in timbre and grey in tone (performers come with grey gauze over their faces and are dressed largely in grey or black), I suspect this is so, because this is how the authors see an economically and politically humiliated Latvia. It suggests a state of war in which Latvia continues along its present government’s policies of surrender of sovereignty to the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and associates. The musical is an unpleasant cry of a country in distress. It is not meant to be entertainment.

My guest, a young woman (b. 1984) with mother, step-father, and three brothers in England, herself likely to follow, told me that she felt like standing up and singing along with the facsimile Latvian anthem, which the cast sang when in the background the red-white-red flag of Latvia descended from the stage ceiling. I told her that I had read that in the early performances, the audience did in fact rise to its feet, but this was roundly condemned in the media to be the result of calculated psychological manipulation of the audience by the authors. The audience—having absorbed this information—was reserved in its behavior (my companion including) by making no visible response during or toward the aria. The anti-populist press drew another veil over the public by way of encouraging another unrevealed emotion toward populist sentiment.

Here I must return to my blog 33. I suggested there that Karlis Ulmanis, the dictator-president-and a founding father of Latvia (1918) should have killed himself in a statesmanlike protest against the Soviet invasion of Latvia in 1940. In blog 34, I suggested that Adolfs Buķis, a middle-aged man who killed himself in front of the Freedom Monument in Riga in 1993 to protest the corruption by corporate buy-out of Latvia as a nation, could have put a stop to Karlis Ulmanis disastrous retreat. However, the police never investigated his sacrifice and never revealed the written contents of the note in his pocket as promised. Thus, Ulmanis failure has arrived at a constellation of circumstances where the nation he was a founder of is a nation whose downfall he also may be causing. In effect, the Latvian Republic has never tested the resolve of its leadership to sacrifice its own lives in defense of the country since the battles of its founding days. Karlis Ulmanis had participated in the battles and was wounded there, but his nerve failed him when the act became the responsibility of him in office as president.

“Vadonis” presents Karlis Ulmanis as the leader of not only ethnic Latvians (whatever that may mean), but of all Latvian citizens, the last probably best described as a people who live in Latvia and speak Latvian with a pure native or immigrant accented inflection. Any presumption of cultural separatism is purely by inflection, which the authors may or may not have intended.

It is at this that there occurs in the drama’s crust a crack, an uncertainty about the Latvians. It is like—who did you say they are? (Continued below.)

These blogs tend to be a continuum of an idea or thought, which is why—if you are interested in what you read—to consider reading the previous blog and/or the blog hereafter.

If you copy this blog for your own files, or to be forwarded, or its content is otherwise mentioned, please credit the author and http://esoschronicles.blogspot.com/

© Eso Antons Benjamins

NOT-VIOLENT TERROR
35 Not-Violent Populism (VII)


Latvian history books present the Latvians as an ethnic group that regained its self-consciousness after centuries of sleep under neo-Christian (German and Russian variety) oppression and rose out of the sleep as a branch off the aboriginal Balts, a brother and sister nation to kindred Lithuania.


The most recent geopolitical loss of the Balts was the repression and absorption of the Baltic Prussians into the German state of Prussia, with Choninpils (imagined or real, who knows) forced to change its name to Koenigsberg and then to Kaliningrad. This loss effectively destroyed the Balts as a collective of political interest groups. The Baltic tribes that survived the land grab of their former territories by numerous European kings and princes joined with the Poles as Lithuanians. The Latvians, a people with a self-identification created in conditions of the forest, family-like clans (saimes) of occupant disrupted clans, knew the woods. They had never left them and continued to identify with them.


The course of history conspired in such a way, that many of these people of the sylvan forest and arch-Christendom survived. They began to emerge as a people in their own right about the middle of the 19th century by way of song. That is, they became aware of themselves through getting together for song festivals on land cleared of forest by need or order of occupant barrons and boyars building themselves fleets of ships to exploit others as well. With a populist self-awareness of themselves as a forest people (probably sometime after the French Revolution and the deposition of the sacred king), there came self-assertion, but over the recent generations little remembrance and interest of the past left behind.


The book to initiate Latvia as a cultural and geopolitical entity is “Lihgo”, 1874, a collection of the lyrics of popular songs. The lyrics were strategically interspersed with poems meant to build community consciousness and fire up feelings of loyalty to the land and the group that speak a more or less one and the same language. The book was published by the composer-artist-poet Karlis Baumanis. [Better known as Baumanu Kahrlis, he also composed the lyrics and melody of the Latvian national anthem, and was the first to use the word Latvia.] The tsar’s police confiscated and burnt almost all copies of the book. The artist chose for its cover his own drawing. The drawing is dated 1873. The illustration shows a priest on Jahnis Eve [the popular name of the midsummer’s Eve festivities still celebrated today] lighting a sacred fire. The altar is in a forest clearing with an oak tree blessing it with its cover. The priest identifies with the forest by holding in his right hand an oak leaf branch. The drawing is on the flag of the All Latvian Song Festival, celebrated in Latvia every five years since 1873. http://tinyurl.com/ygbqp8p


We note that the priest of Johns Eve is never named John, even if he is so named in the mind’s eye of the large group of people who stand behind the oak tree in an extension of the forest clearing in the foreground. Instead, the book is named “Lihgo”, and this word is printed over John officiating at the altar, suggesting that Lihgo=John. The association must be made in silence, because not only is John the priest of Jahnis Eve, he is also an ideal representation of Latvians as they imagined themselves at that time. They could not however name themselves. Tsar and a God somewhere in the sky were trying to replace the sylvan people’s arch-Christian John with neo-Christian Jesus, who came in the image of the Russian neo(orthodox) -Christian Church doing the tsar’s bidding. By 1888, the consequences of Enlightenment and the French Revolution had reached the ears of then emerging Latvian intelligentsia. With a cleverness characteristic of an intelligentsia, the leaders of the woods people became traders of lumber and carpenters. In turn, the lumber traders and carpenters—with an obsequiousness also so characteristic of the emerging formerly repressed (to better fit in with the occupiers)—replaced the priest of the arch-Christian Jahnis with Lachplehsis, Bearjawbraker. He was a man with a bear’s ears, who, while he resembled an aboriginal Balt (still in the woods), was a copy of Sampson tearing open the jaws of a lion in Luther’s Illustrated Bible. In essence, a Latvian was identified as a Lutheran, who most likely was further identified with all things German.


In the span from 1873 to 1940, the image in the inner self of a self-conscious Latvian became so sterilized and turned into décor by the bourgeois that when it came to offering one’s life on the community’s altar, Karlis Ulmanis was torn by doubts. These doubts were sourced in neo-Christianism, Soviet universalism, the sundering of Latvian society by economic stratification, and absence of the never mentioned tradition of self-sacrifice as the glue of societies and nations. Came 1940, Ulmanis didn’t do it. In 1993, Buchis sacrificed his life for the idea of an economically egalitarian sovereign (uncorrupt) Latvia. Buchis’s act received some attention, but it turned out to be short-lived media rhetoric.


The musical drama “Vadonis” does not mention the priest of Jahnis Eve, because the authors no longer know him. The Latvians limp on caught in a death warp, trailing the “halle-luia” sound, with the “luia” reminding very much of the once ecstatic Lihgo affirming life.


Please consider reading the previous blog. The ideas therein are possibly related to those presented here.


If you copy this blog for your own files, or to be forwarded, or its content is otherwise mentioned, please credit the author and http://esoschronicles.blogspot.com/

Copyright Eso Benjamins, aka Jaņdžs

NOT-VIOLENT TERROR
33 Not-Violent Populism (V)

In 1938, Georges Bataille, wrote a famous essay called “Obelisk” in which he discusses Nietzsche’s and his own ideas about the death of God in our time. http://tinyurl.com/yevy24b The librarian-philosopher ends his essay with these words:

“For it is the foundation of things that has fallen into a bottomless void. And what was fearlessly conquered… is not an isolated creature [like the dragon by St. George]; it is the very void and the vertiginous fall, it is TIME. The movement of all life now places the human being before the alternatives of either this conquest [of TIME] or a disastrous retreat. The human being arrives at the threshold: there he must throw himself headlong into that which has no foundation and no head.” While the observation by Bataille is meant for the entire world to hear, this writer would like to apply the threshold challenge to the Latvians specifically.

When in 1939 the Soviets occupied Latvia, the Latvians faced the void—“the foundation of things… fallen into a bottomless void”—in real terms. The Latvian dictator-president Karlis Ulmanis, one of the founders of the nation (1918) who seized the reigns of government from the Latvian Saeima in 1933, surrendered the country and himself to the Soviet ultimatum of surrender or die. Latvians surrendered, but died in war and gulags all the same. Ulmanis failed the challenge, because his surrender was equal to Bataille’s “disastrous retreat”.

What would have been victory? Both Nietzsche and Bataille, while of the same mind about the nature of the challenge, offer no specific solution of how one is to meet “…that which has no foundation and no head.” It is this writer’s opinion that the challenge of a world whose God is dead can be met with self-sacrifice. Hence the name of this series of blogs, re: Not-violent Terror. Self-sacrifice, the sovereign right of every individual, and the overcoming of the terror (and dread, and fear) of death in its contemplation, reestablishes sovereign power lost—when human beings killed God—through the charisma of a deed not because it is driven by conviction (though it may be), but the needs of God who is a yet unknown Entirety. Meeting the challenge does not necessarily offer victory in conventional terms, i.e., the stock market will go up and the economy will bloom ad infinitum, but offers believability crowned with charisma. In fact, the step provides a continuum (either new or to the old) whether one wins or loses any specific battle.

In the context of this blog, the argument is that if K. Ulmanis would have killed himself in self-sacrificial death*, he would have conquered time by creating upon it a memory that would have stayed with the Latvian people for a very long time. As the Latvians were being sovietized, that is, as their community was ever more exposed to demoralization and was thrust into the void by their conquerors, they would have had a memory that proved their will to be.

Unfortunately, the Latvians have no such memory. By failing to act as a true sovereign on the behalf of his people, K. Ulmanis betrayed the people that he presumed to lead. The betrayal (the failure of memory before the stream of time) continues to our day, to the very president of Latvia, Valdis Zatlers. This is not to say that either this author or the public expect this president, a former surgeon, to become an anchor of faith in a time of possible dissolution of Latvians as a sovereign community. It is to say that V. Zatlers has not put his sovereign imprint as a leader of Latvians. His is a symbolic presence. He is an apple in a dish on the table where apples should be, but he has done nothing more than look apply presidential. In effect, the healer is proving himself to be no healer to the Latvian community, but a career surgeon, who (failing a sovereign diagnosis that fits the situation) retains all the marks of a two-dimensional figurehead. Such passivity is a sign that Latvians cannot expect their government leaders to do more than imitate the failed democracies (see previous blogs for argumentation) of the West. In effect, unless they take up the challenge that Bataille speaks of, they are doomed for another failure http://tinyurl.com/y8uaotq , this time a possible extinction.

It is in the nature of sovereign self-sacrifice that the act is an individual one, even if such individual acts, were they to become a reality, could become part of a populist movement against government maintaining itself in power through the threat or use of police and military violence. The Latvian government did in fact send a special police unit, Alfa, to remove demonstrators who had gathered and blocked traffic over several bridges in Bauska, a city in Latvia close to the Lithuanian border. The demonstrators were protesting closure of the hospital of their city. The demonstrators were peaceful if determined. Alfa, this time restrained in its actions, merely proved that the current government’s only recourse to the discord it itself has sown is violence.

Providing the dire financial and economic situation in Latvia, what action should the current Latvian president take? The question is not easy to answer. However, in the context of government by corruption ever since a post-Soviet government took charge, this writer’s answer is to suggest a call for a popular referendum.

I.e.: the president of Latvia should call for a referendum that would increase the executive power of the president and—because of the current exceptional and extraordinary situation—increase the presidential term (on a one-time basis) to eight years. The increased presidential powers and length in office would permit, among other things, the president to dismiss and replace the Cabinet of Ministers and reduce the status of the Saeima to advisory status. It would also authorize the president to call for a Constitutional Council, which over a period of years would provide Latvia with a new constitution, possibly a replacement of parliamentary democracy with a participatory democracy, and a declarative reinstatement of the rights of the individual to sovereign death. The latter may prove to be the key to the revolution of revolutions.


*There are two famous suicides or self-sacrifices within living memory, which approach the challenge of sovereign decision.


One is that of Jan Masaryk, the foreign minister of post-World War II democratic Czechoslovakia, who died in Prague in 1948, in a fall out of the window of his Foreign Ministry residence. Many people, including Masaryk’s relatives, believe that he committed suicide (self-sacrifice). There are also those who believe that he was tortured and killed by the NKVD. In any event, the Czech people think of Jan Masaryk as a hero.


The other possible sovereign decision, derisively dismissed by international officialdom, but one that has held up in spite of the dismissal, was the suicide of Adolph Hitler, the Fuehrer of Germany. Hitler came to power in 1932. He and his wife Eva Braun are believed to have died in early 1945 by poison or self-inflicted gunshot wound in a bunker in Berlin on the eve of Soviet victory over Germany. A recent laboratory examination (2009) of what allegedly was a fragment of Hitler’s skull with a bullet hole in it was proved the skull of a woman. The doubt the lab tests cause among those who believe that Hitler’s suicide was a sovereign decision, may prove those who dismiss him as a coward to be correct. Nevertheless, at this time—until it is proven that Hitler fled to a country unknown--we must hold open the possibility that Hitler did indeed die as a self-sacrifice in atonement over the holocausts his sovereign decisions had caused.


In passing, we may recall that when death came to Stalin, he tried to take as many of his John-Jew healers with him as a religiously demoralized terrorist today. Ultimately, Stalin proved that as a political party Communism is no more persuasive than any other political party in our time, because it opposes sovereignty and enforces its will by way of violence.

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Copyright Eso Benjamins, aka Jaņdžs


NOT-VIOLENT TERROR
31 Not-Violent Populism (III)

The most rejected word among Latvian politicians, media people, sociologists, political experts who call themselves politologues, and even the public at large (due to the influence of the afore mentioned) is not communism as the country’s history would make think, but “populism” and “populist”. One arrives to this conclusion when one discovers that the only context the word is used is a negative one.

While populism has many meanings to many people, the reason for the Latvian slant is that its elites (of which the media consciously or unconsciously have made themselves part) do not care to analyze the country’s past except in a very narrow range of political clichés written by outsiders from “developed” countries. Even in the face of an economic and financial scrubbing that is presently polishing Latvia to its bones, no scrutiny of deeper causes of the whyfores of its troubles has occurred.

One of the reasons for the universal negative attitude toward populism in Latvia has much to do with the fact that for a half century Latvia was occupied by the Soviet communist regime. Under the communist regime, the communist party—at least in theory—was the representative of the working people, i.e., the party presumed itself to be the working people’s populist bastion. This is why in some ways, the communist party was the parliamentary representative of the presumably homogeneous people of the Soviet Union. Of course, the people saw through the charade.

When the Soviet regime collapsed (1991), a very real populist movement took advantage of the turmoil. http://tinyurl.com/ycbznyu  With support from the West, Latvia, along with other central European countries, became a sovereign nation again. However, the parliamentary democracy, which took over from the communist party, was democratic only in a formal sense—elections notwithstanding. In fact, being “parliamentary” in Latvia means to be elitist, which is why the word “populism”—from the Latvian president (Zatlers) down—has come to be used to beat down any notions of a populist democracy and to equate populism with irresponsibility and worst social elements in the nation.

No doubt, one may find a wholly negative definition of populism. http://tinyurl.com/yeznett However, the definition of populism used by this author borrows that of Albertazzi, Daniele and Duncan McDonnell (see: Twenty-First Century Populism: The Spectre of Western European Democracy, 2008, New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, p.3.). Re: [Populism is] "an ideology which pits a virtuous and homogeneous people against a set of elites and dangerous ‘others’ who are together depicted as depriving (or attempting to deprive) the sovereign people of their rights, values, prosperity, identity and voice.” http://tinyurl.com/ybaw8zg
In any event, the Latvia parliamentary democracy is no less elitist than the communist party ever was. The people once again see through the charade, but are kept from exercising their powers by having their brains washed by a negative attitude of elites and the media toward their solidarity. However, even with distrust of government reaching 80% plus, the people remain passive. No matter how much they are in solidarity about the current situation, the people are prevented from gathering and forming a protest movement, for want of ability to name the movement for what it is: populist. In other words, a populist reaction against the theft of the Latvian government by the elites for the elites does not take place because the people do not dare use the name “populist”. If a tree falls in the forest and no one sees it falling, it falls nevertheless; but when human resistance is prevented from naming itself, it fails to resist.

Another set of circumstances preventing a populist democratic revolt against the Latvian parliamentary democracy has to do with past existential experiences of the Latvian people. There are two main events that define these experiences.

The first is the coup of 1933 by Karlis Ulmanis. Ulmanis, one of the founding fathers of Latvia (1918), staged a coup to check the anarchy prevailing in the Latvian Saeima (parliament), which kept the country from economic development. Ulmanis promised to rewrite the Latvian constitution and—at a later date—to hold new elections. Neither took place, because of the invasion of Latvia by the Soviet Union in 1940.

The second event has to do with the fact that K. Ulmanis offered no resistance to the Soviets. It is true that resistance by the tiny Latvian military forces could not result in prevention of the invasion and occupation and would have caused the loss of many lives. However, instead of sacrificing his life for the country through a selfless sacrificial act, Ulmanis told the people: “You stay in your places and I will stay in mine”. Because the order came from a man whose word had been law for seven years, it meant that the people obeyed and did nothing. Of course, Ulmanis’ order caused profound communal unease and sense guilt.

When in 1941 the Germans attacked the Soviet Union, the sense of guilt resulted in an overcompensating event. Since the German attack coincided with mass deportations by the Soviets of the cream of Latvian society, Latvians greeted the Germans as liberators. The anger and guilt of Latvians was ready and waiting to take advantage of the situation without any deeper analysis of it or its consequences. Many Latvians joined the war against the Soviet Union. Ever since, outsiders (for their own unprincipled political reasons) have interpreted this populist act as an act by fascists.

The above xperiences have left Latvians with great aversion to violence. At the same time, they are unable to discover a compensatory outlet for their rage against the return of a parliamentary government not only as government by anarchy, but as government of outright theft of the nation’s wealth and, if you will, honor. The thievery by government involves, no less, a de facto bankruptcy of the nation, which has brought upon the Latvians not only suffering among its sick and old, but a dumbing down of the young by way of offering them no adequate facilities or motivation to seek higher education. The situation is existential. Whatever sense of community remains among the people, the abandonment of communal events for lack of money (and lack of elitist motivation to encourage such events), is yet another obstacle that keeps this small nation (2.5 million) from taking charge of their community.

The Latvians are reacting to their helplessness and passivity in two ways. At the present either amounts to hitting one’s head against a wall in hopes it will fall.

I. Latvians have a sense that their state is disintegrating. The great number of people who are leaving Latvia illustrates this feeling best.

II. Many Latvians are enraged. Under normal circumstances, they or any other people for that matter would want blood. However, the Latvian experience with violence and their small numbers (indeed, Latvians are in demographic death spiral) prevents them from effecting action. Even so, the anger and frustration linger, and since these have no vent, the result is a sense of defeat, which manifests itself as passivity. In short, the majority of Latvians feel (and hope they do not believe it) that it is but a matter of time before Latvia no longer matters.

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