Eso’s Chronicles 269 / 9

The King & I

© Eso A.B.

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

 

KING OF THE WOOD

 

What is criminal about a crime is the crime one does against one’s self by creating guilt.

 

However, when guilt is put on the shoulders of an individual by society on the basis of no other authority than such as preexists one’s arrival on our planet and because society has ordered itself in such a way that it causes newly arriving members (children and youths) to feel dysfunctional because they do not have job that enables them to take care of themselves and found their lives, then it is time for the young to ask for a return to the wood, where he-she always has something to do.

 

When WW2 ended, it ended not only with Germany as the obvious loser of the war, but all of Europe becoming subject to the commercial will of the United States of America. Today we hear much praise of the so-called Marshall Plan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan , through which America lent an economically devastated Europe, fifteen billion US dollars and some. One of the reasons why America initiated the plan was its fear that the war devastated European economy would fall under the influence of the Soviet Union.

 

The post-WW2 period served America as a ‘great leap forward’ (to borrow a phrase from the Chinese) not only militarily, but through being able to reintroduce liberalist policies in Old Europe, where for many centuries the princes and other ‘nobles’, using the intermediacy of the ‘religious’ class (originally founded by the siblings of secular princes who had been left, so to speak, without a job) as the spiritual supervisors of an earlier democratic population whose democracy was based on the animal freedoms found in the wood.

 

The Soviet Union, which had borne the brunt of human sacrifices during WW2, was too weak to resist the American commercial and consumerist onslaught, and soon built a barricade that came to be called an ‘iron curtain’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Curtain . Unlike the claims of the link that it was the Soviet Union that blocked itself off from the West, it is more true to say that the Soviet Union was forced to build a barrier to ward off a war that America continued to press on behalf of liberal (capitalist) ‘democracy’. Indeed, America’s ability to project consumerist delusions as happiness as mediated by Hollywood and television sitcoms, eventually infected and caused the Soviet Union to collapse.

 

And still America’s urbanite led war consumed the passions of the West against the East, where human kind shaped by democracy learned over thousands of years in the wood, continued to succumb to the hungers that torture democracy when it is cast into the environment of a desert. One of the early victims of this war—more properly called Crusade—is Latvia, the country of my birth.

 

The ‘victimization’ of Latvia began—not surprisingly—with an economic “shock” therapy advocated by one of America’s best known advocates of it, Harvard Economic Professor Jeffrey Sachs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Sachs . Though widely praised (not least for being one of the youngest (aged 28) full professors at Harvard), Sachs is responsible for the origination of an economic recovery program known as “shock therapy” (first originated by him in Bolivia). The method has brought economic misery to millions of individuals all over the world, and can be described as an attempt at leadership by economists who claim to know how to drive blind subsequent to adopting a servile attitude toward liberalism and becoming ever more passive sycophants among sycophants to commercial interests.

 

Finding no difficulties in recruiting for his shock therapy former Soviet bureaucrats (passive sycophants addicted to thievery) and easily persuading disoriented would-be Latvian politicians from the same ranks, Harvard held the hand of Latvia (and other post-Soviet countries) and led its people to a ‘democratic’ future that created them in the image of  homo sacer:  homeless and superfluous “beings that cannot be "murdered" or "sacrificed" but only killed”. I interpret the word ‘killed’ here as ‘deaded’, i.e., found killed, cause of death as if unknown and utter indifference as to what caused the death among those doing the burial.

 

Indifference to the death of a people that one is not closely bonded with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_squad is not a new phenomenon. It began with the washing of hands by Pontius Pilate in the Western version of the story of the death of Jesus. The washing of hands is continued by the ‘death squads’ that keep order in our ungovernable metropolises, where a ‘Christian’ priesthood never ceases to whitewash the man from the wood, until he-she becomes homo sacer, which he-she is then christened (and betrayed) with a kiss.

 

Incidentally, the story about Jesus being a carpenter or the son of a carpenter is because he is familiar with and comes from the wood. Jesus is not of the urban desert or out of the blue as some pretend today.

 

Unfortunately, there is little reliable information on the internet about the history of the wood http://worldwildlife.org/threats/deforestation . I distinguish between the words ‘wood’ and ‘forest’, the latter coming from Old English and French and designates a given area belonging to the King used for hunting purposes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest .

 

I insist that deforestation began only in relatively recent times, as when huge tracts of the wood were cut to bake bricks or fertilize arable land with ashes, all of which would have begun in the Middle Ages. Others insist that deforestation began at least 5000 years ago, arguing that it began with the introduction of agriculture. I dispute this, because while the invention of it may go that far back, I believe that a wide practice of it beyond limited areas began at a relatively late time, which ‘relativity’ I see starting with the uncontrollable expansion of cities, also a Middle Age phenomenon. In my opinion, so-called agriculture did not extend for a long time beyond gardening, which happened right in front of ones house in the wood and was limited to such items as carrots, which originally were not orange but white and purplish in color.

 

As late as my own childhood, my country, Latvia, though having lost its original ‘old wood’ or ‘sili’ to the rapacity of German nobility (who ruled the country until the beginning of the 20^th century) the edge of a wood could be found within a hundred or two hundred yards of a farm house. Today this is an increasing rarity.

 

As a curio, the Latvian word for ‘to buy’, re: ‘pirkt’ derives from a proto=Indo European word denoting wood: perk^wu-. To confirm, open the last link and look under Etymology. I presume the consonant ‘p’ became pronounced as an ‘f’, thus verkaufen (German for selling)—probably wood. Both words suggest a relatively late date of entering the conversational lexicon.