Eso’s Chronicles 203/ 3
Shining   Examples (3)
© Eso A.B.

According to outward signs and surveys, the majority of the Latvian people are poor. Among the poor there are yet ‘moar’ poor: the pensioners and young mothers with children. While the pensioners are the storebox of the community’s “somewhat” memories, the young mothers make the future of the country “somewhat” real.

I use the word “somewhat” because one of its synonyms is “sort of”, while the antonym is “not at all”. Both the synonym and antonym just about describes the state of the state of Latvia.

You would not believe this if you read or listened to the statements of the Latvian politicians, bank officials, “well meaning” ministers, or walked under the banner of the Latvian media trumpeting “positive attitude”.

 

The “positive attitude” is to obscure the fact that only 20% of Latvians believe that the state is making adequate progress, while 80% believe that the state is going nowhere or sliding back.

The Minister of Culture says that by the 18^th of November (the day in 1918 when Latvia declared itself a sovereign state) the “Shining Castle” across the river Daugava from the “Presidential Castle” recently having caught fire (it was likely deliberately torched to destroy one of the last symbols in Latvia of Latvia as a sovereign state) will be 80% completed.

The Latvian media is upbeat however. According to a post by a foreign held bank (DNB): “Growth [in Latvia] in the Future to accelerate”. A spokesperson for the bank announces that though the predicted growth (GDP) for the year in Latvia by the bank has been only 3.8% of the predicted 4.5%, the bank was right on when it came to the last quarter, re 0.5%. The bank admits that annual growth in construction has declined to 5%, but blames the weather for this.

There is no statement whatsoever with regard to the increasing economic difficulties in Europe as a whole. While the German economy is the strongest and most export oriented in Europe, it grew only 0.1% in the first quarter of 2013. It also blames the weather for the low figure.
The populist retorts (at internet the site) to the spokesman of the bank: “He eats garlic and masturbates”.
As for the people themselves, according to ‘Eurobarometer’ for 2013: 55% were disturbed by unemployment, 38% mentioned the state of the economy, 21% were upset by the income taxes set by government, 5% mentioned the country’s external debt and government corruption and crime.
From the point of view of this observer, while unemployment is high, it is considerably lowered by the self-destruction employed by the natives in order to survive. Such government encouraged self-destruction, if you will, manifests itself through the gradual demolition of the inherent natural wealth, which consists mostly of wood. Self-destruction in Latvia as well as in the rest of the world manifests itself as gradual desertification of the countryside. The greatest amount of damage done by the unemployed to the natural environment is due to the chainsaw and deforestation of privatized land.

Paradoxically, the origin of the chainsaw has almost nothing to do with the countryside as such, but is a consequence of the acceleration of urbanism following WW2. The victor of WW2 was of course the capitalist West. Though the East and the Soviet Union, too, was one of the victors, Stalin was hopelessly confused and unknowing why the East as a whole supported the Revolution of 1917. While Lenin had (by way of Marx) proposed that the Revolution was on behalf of the ‘workers’, a long duree perspective better supports the idea that the Revolution was for the sake of an economy that was  subsistence and a government that was autarchic and reduced taxes to a minimum. No doubt, a great deal of the blame goes to the West, which continuously threatened post-Revolutionary Soviet Union with war and forced on the Soviets a break-neck armaments race. The weaponization of the state absorbed precious resources as well as denied the elites more mindful methods than wholesale slaughter of country people to force them into half-digested ‘revolutionary’ schemes.

The confusion by Western government’s today of what path to the future will enable humankind to survive is greatly encumbered by what these have tought themselves to believe is “democracy--the best of possible governments”. This ‘democracy’, a form of dictatorship, has been proselytized and ‘pushed’ by armchair university level academics, who arguably are the greatest and most unjustified beneficiaries of taxes placed by governments on the ‘laity’, but escape criticism by pointing a limp finger at the armaments industry.

One such beneficiary of liberal dictatorship is the philosopher Slavoy Žižek, presently the director of the Birkbeck Institute in London. The following is a little taste of Žižek’s academic phantasmagoria:

“….democracy is definitely bound up with Geselschaft (society as a mechanical, external aglomeration of atomized individuals), it literally lives on the split between the ‘public’ and the ‘private,’ it is possible within the framework of what was once, when the voice of Marxism was still heard, called ‘alienation’”. Žižek opposes this “Geselschaft” to “Gemeinshaft” (society as a community held together by organic links).

A little further down the page (p164-5, “Looking Away”, October Books, MIT Press), Žižek writes: “The subject of democracy is thus a pure singularity, emptied of all content, freed from all substantial ties….”

Žižek admits that this accommodation to democracy as dictatorship comes with “a little ‘pathological’ stain”, which ‘stain’ is nothing other than the former organic community. Unfortunately, the community metamorphosed first into a ‘nation’, surrenders to Žižek’s capitalist democracy with lots of contortions. When the community-nation twists right, it becomes ‘fascist’, when it twists left, it becomes ‘bolshevik’.

Above such little inconveniences and erasure of resistance by waterboard methodology, the professor sits in the living room on a stuffed leather pig, smiles, and says: Look what a woodsman and revolutionary I am! I even make Money here, here, and here .