Eso’s Chronicles 231/ 2
Urban Blitz 02
© Eso A.B.

Any geopolitical overview of post-Soviet Eastern Europe, the Baltic countries especially, runs up against a glass shield that has been firmly placed between the economic realities as they are for the majority of the Balts with their boots on the ground (formerly the sod), and the intelligentsia (political and literary), the passive support of the perma frosted urban mindset and brain activity that guars urban life at the expense of life on our planet.

The link between the urbanite and the intelligentsia (intelligence services?) goes back a long way, perhaps as far back as Buddha, when his maharajah father had the castle guards open the gates for the young prince to go visit a young maid named Amrita, who lived in a leaf hut in a subtropical wood. The maharajah was anxious to debrief the young prince upon his return—not about his sexual escapades with Amrita, but about what sort of weapons the brothers of he maid had stacked against the walls of the shack.

The reason why the maharajah needed to have this information was because he planned to increase the size of his castle grounds by another 1500 housing units. To get this done, he needed to cut down a sizeable area of the wood that surrounded his castle. As it was likely to happen, Amrita and her family, too, were to lose their humble abode. The maharajah authorized his son to offer the family a shack along the outer walls of his court if they offered to provide him with information about possible resistance.

When the maid learned from the young prince the reason for his questions, while young Buddha’s head lay in her lap, the young maid placed a long nail against his ear and hit it hard with  hammer. This was the end of Buddha who was innocent and in no way to blame. Unfortunately, this marked only the beginning of the forest peoples’ troubles, who were immediately labeled ‘terrorists’. As soon as the maharajah recovered from his shock, he sent his army into the surrounding wood and cut down all the wood that grew around the castle at least a hundred yards deep. A famous story from India recounts what actually happened on the day when the maharajah sent his soldiers into the wood http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khejarli .

This terrible story repeats itself to this day. The Latvian State Forestry Service relentlessly advertises that the Latvian Wood is in fine shape, while all around the countryside, wherever the people have trees on their private property, the trees are relentlessly disappearing, because the people are forced into cutting them to cover the increasing taxes that force them out of their homes. The urbanites offer them subsidized apartments in the city, which are—as thousands of elderly people are discovering—without heat, health services, or any chance of escape other than by alcohol, or death, or both, hopefully, into a kinder parallel universe.

The urbanites are a dogmatic people, who once inside the gates of a castle become so dependent on the price’s graces, that they side with ever increasing vehemence with the prince and set themselves against subsistence gardeners in the wood. No mercies can be expected from urbanites by countryside people then or now. The countryside persons today, whether in Latvia, Russia, China, or America are completely subject to urbanite exploitation, illustrated by their treatment of horses during WW2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horses_in_World_War_II.

The pathological behavior or urbanites is vigorously denied by human rights activists, who justify their self-righteous behavior by arguing that they manifest humaneness to the highest degree. Actually, it is simply carrying on with the traditions of brutality behind an additional curtain.

Whenever anyone wonders why the Balts are so passive in opposing the dogmatic orientation of their governments, one ought to remember the characteristics of urbanism. The orientation of the Latvian government—of a Parliamentary nature--so obviously runs against the economic interests of the common people, that its very humanity is in question.

Instead, a tsunami like wall rolls forward on a debris of opinion that the Baltic people have been from the beginning of time oriented toward the West and that they despise the Russians (as heirs to all things Soviet) with every ounce of native spirit they possess. This of course is simply a lie. The very first self-acknowledged Latvian, Krishyanis Waldemahrs, who as a student dared put next to his name the designation: ‘a Latvian’, worked as a journalist in St. Petersburg, led ‘The Young Latvians’ movement, and was among those who believed that the Latvians of his day should be a more or less autonomous community within a united Russia. Indeed, Waldemars was strongly opposed to the feudal system of government then still advocated by the ruling caste of Germans.

With such a gossamer embrace of the West never questioned during the last twenty-one years of ‘renewed’ Latvian independence, the government of Latvia stands 100% for all things urban and Western: membership of NATO, membership and federalization within the EU, capitalism, urbanization, glass and cage-like castles, and elimination of small farms. As for the last, this is the reason why up to 25% of all Latvians have emigrated from the country as economic refugees, which is considerably more than the number of Latvians who fled the advance of the Soviet Army, which returned to reoccupy Latvia within a year after the defeat of the Germans at Kursk.

I certainly do not wish to deny that the Soviet order that followed for the next forty-five (45) years did not traumatize the Latvian sense of self-worth and autonomy. However, I do not wish to diminish the benefits of Latvia’s federalization within the Soviet Union. While the Ulmanis regime of independent Latvia had done much to advance the interests of the Latvian middle class, the economic problems of the country were not to be solved by short=term measures. The occupation of the Soviets was a quid pro quo: on the one hand the Soviets advanced the Latvian underclass, which was extensive, while on other hand, the Latvian middle class suffered a significant decline. The West notably added to this decline, by forcing the Soviet Union to put much of its resources in military armament. While many Latvians excelled in the areas of he arts and academia of the Soviet Union, these breakthroughs were insufficient to advance the awareness of Latvians as a micro community it had been in antiquity or since the revival of the community by the Herrnhuter movement after its collapse as the community following the Great Northern War http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Great_Northern_War_Baltic_Theater.png, which ended in the first decade of the 18^th century.

Not surprisingly, the collapse of the Soviet Union and government put into leading positions not what had been the underclass, because it was insufficiently educated and autonomy oriented, nor anything resembling a Western middle class, but the Soviet apparatchiks, who while not particularly educated, had leadership experience and little in the way of obstacles to prevent easy intrusion into areas occupied, in the West, by the middle class, neoliberal enterprisers, and politicians.

Western intelligence services (it is my guess) did not sleep. The Soviet Union was criticized and belittled at every turn. NATO or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a military alliance presumed to oppose the Soviet Union, quickly reoriented itself and attempted to gain further advantages vis a vis Russia. Western corporations attempted to infiltrate or seize Russian businesses by means of the law. Many advisers to such corporations were from Eastern Europe. They were not to be outdone by older advisors such as Zbigniev Brzezinski (see blog 217) from Poland, who served the United States as a National Security Advisor.

As readers of my blogs know, I am neither pro Western nor anti Eastern. If it comes to my preference, I rather chose the East over the West, because to my mind the recent past of the Balts relates closer to that of the communities of the East than the West—even though one would never guess that this is so from the information one gathers in the media and the actions of government.

As the reader can see, this is a long story during the telling of which I have almost forgot that I am supposed to write about the coming New Battle of Kursk, and that the northeast of Europe forms the northern flank of the Kursk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Kursk salient. So, why did I choose the name ‘Kursk’? Because next to Hiroshima, it is one of the great cataclysmic slaughter fields of all time and more is coming.