EC 504

Upon Whom the Ends

of the Ages Have Come…

^{a fantasy for an apocalypse}

© Ludis Cuckold (2015)

13 What Made You Come Back to Latvija?

As I wrote in the opening blogs, I first met Daisy through her friends, whom she had joined to come help me with my household chores.

One of Daisy’s friends, Inta, a young woman whose family I had been introduced to by neighbors, brought Daisy with her as an additional helping hand. As the property which I had bought was overgrown by brush and had been neglected for many years, I had no reason not to hire Daisy.

I valued the friendship of Inta and her family, because I sensed that through them I would get to meet the local people and learn of local customs in some depth. Already, soon after our introduction, Inta’s mother had come to visit me and by her suggestive actions offered me her sexual services for the price of fifty lats.* In retrospect, the price was high, but I realized that she did not wish to humiliate me by offering herself for less, as that would diminish the presumption that was being spread about me throughout the neighborhood, i.e., ‘a rich Latvijan expat from abroad’.

* I did not take up on the offer, not because I was not tempted to explore what lay behind it, but because I was new to the countryside and was fearful of compromising my ‘reputation’ before I had learned what was what.

The offer of sex by Inta’s mother is worth mentioning for the light it throws on the state of the social fabric in post-Soviet Latvija.

To me the most surprising thing about post-Soviet Latvija was that it had less to do with the Soviet Union than I had imagined. On the other hand, the people were hugely impressed with America, the consumer values of which had poisoned the Latvijan Commons by introducing it to idolization of imagined desires. The situation reminded me of the story of Pontius Pilate, who, when he asked the public whether he should release from prison Jesus or Barabbas, was asked by the public to release Barabbas, a common thief, while Jesus be damned, i.e., crucified. In effect, the Latvian Commons was hypnotized by the promises of capitalism made through the ^disservices of the Harvard School of Economics. The consequence was that the Latvijan Commons chose to act against the interests of their nation by asking for the release from prison of Barabbas the criminal.

In anticipation of joining everyones’ consumer society, the greed level among Latvijans rose exponentially. It went from 1 to 1000 in a flash. The fairy-tale about the magic table cloth was becoming real. Roasted piglets flew through the air with knife and fork conveniently stuck in their deliciously sizzling skin. The only thing unacceptable was death, but Big Pharma was advertising a significantly increased life span and cure for every imaginable disease. With the wonders of the Industrial Revolution and the worst of America compressed, conflated, and kaleidoscoped into a few years, the excitement over the imagined wonders of capitalism became palpable to the point of criminality.

Though the Commons was disintegrating by its own choice (there were no government officials to advise to the contrary), it was not a conscious death wish. The public (an amalgam of raw desires that did not necessarily identify themselves as solely Latvian) did not perceive that the more its members joined consumerism, the sooner death would take them and their community. It was as if everyone had simultaneously stepped into a garden of roses. During my first years in Latvija, there were moments, when I, too, joined in the exclamation breathed by the Latvijan media: “Awesome!”

Fortunately, I had unhappy, sobering and unforgettable childhood experiences of WW2 to question the desirability of human life itself. These questions soon brought me back to a critical perspective.

Nevertheless, following a 51 year absence, I was rather ‘Americanized’ (I left Latvija—age 11—in 1944, some eight months before the end of WW2) and was accustomed to the negativism, even hatred, broadcast by the Latvijan media about Soviet ‘barbarism’. It took a while for me to realize that the less critical Latvijans were toward western barbarisms, the more of a rubbish heap became its Commons. The longer I stayed in Latvija, the more I learned to dislike the sound of the tin drums its suckered media imported from the West.

I was also surprised that after 51 years away (46 of them in America), I had retained about myself tell-tale marks that echoed to my coming of age in war torn Europe. However tentatively, I was thrilled to discover that I had something of the courage needed to ‘try fitting in’. It played a role in my decision to extend my stay in Latvija permanently.

Not only was the first postcard that I bought in a used books shop in Riga, one that showed “Zerstoertes Dresden” (bombed out Dresden, which bombing I had watched from a small hillside west of Weimar—roughly a hundred miles away—on two successive nights in February 1945), but was shocked by the mindless  exuberance which Latvijan media showered on ‘democracy’ and attached Latvijan culture to western culture: German knights, once an occupying force, were redrawn as Latvijan knights (one with bared sword, bare kneed, without a steel helmet, and gay is currently prominently displayed at the entrance of the Latvian Saeima building in Riga).

The Latvijan media’s admiration for the West, from the perspective of personal experience, was a gross exaggeration of reality and the interests of the Latvian people.

By 1985 it become clear that my opportunities in America were diminishing. Having chosen a ‘no career’ way of life at a time when jobs in America were plentiful, my chances at survival had been diminishing for at least ten years. The fact that my wife began to threaten me with divorce for the economic risk that I had become—not to mention my own fears about the consequences of my choice—caused the money thing to prevail and made me seek an extension of my auto-cephalous career in ‘zerstoertes’ Latvija.

Whether to return to Latvija was a wise choice, I do not know, even as I suspect that it was my only chance to survive and not become a homeless person on the streets of America. However, once I made my choice, it brought to my table a number of non-career alternatives. Indeed, a non-career alternative was all that was left after I decided that I would not enter upon a political career that the status of my forebears entitled me to.

At first, it was on the basis of intuition and reading between the lines that I came to perceive that post-Soviet Latvijan government was not looking toward the future in terms of retaining sovereignty for the Latvijan Commons. The leaders of the new government (likely with the ‘help’ of intelligence agencies in the West)—quickly disposed of ‘true believers’ who had manned the barricades during the last days of the Soviet Union. The official Latvijans, such as of the government bureaucracy, did not seek to moor the small battered ship of State to safe piles, but sent teams of gravediggers to exhume the corpses of Stalin’s victims to sooner rekindle feelings of hatred rather than a Will to rebuild a shattered community.

The long-range plan of the West, as I came to perceive it, was to rebuild Latvija as a copy of the Zionist state of Israel. While the holocaust experienced by the Latvian country side ‘kulaks’, middle class and nascent elite, in Soviet Gulags was not the same as that of the Jews, the consequences that fanatical communists exposed them to were a close approximation. The eight people of my extended family, who were to become victims to the Soviet regime*, are in my opinion comparable evidence.

*I cover this period and some personal history in greater detail in my Latvian language book “Under God’s Shadow” (Dieva Ēna, Jumava, 1998). Something of that history is repeated in the last chapters of this book.

Still, my contrarian nature resisted my being swayed by the idea that the plans of the West were wise. Nor did I believe that Latvians ought to be swayed by the policies of the West imposed on the regime that followed once the ‘true believers’ of the ‘days at the barricades’ were pushed to the sidelines.

The government of ‘renewed’ Latvija appeared happy enough to seek escape from the realities of governing an impoverished country in a mindset resembling that of the Zionists. This turn of events overwhelmed me with despair and disgust for the government of ‘renewed’ Latvia. I could not help foreseeing the future of Latvija as another catastrophe (alike to an eschaton), which is why I turned into an ‘Old Believer’, and began to grow a beard to protest the betrayal.

The political leadership of ‘renewed’ Latvija had forgot all about the fact that Latvija had come into being as a result of the efforts of such religious believers as the Moravian Herrnhuters, who rebuilt a society torn apart by the Great Northern War (1800-1821). Their rebuilding efforts were from the ground up, as opposed to from top down of today.

The post-Soviet government had no sense of Latvian history*, and how a devastated community of people who had been terrorized by Swedish and Russian militaries had been extracted from the wood and brought in from less devastated areas of eastern Livonia to repopulate western and central Livonia. While there was little evidence for government indifference on the surface (because studied silence ruled the media), the restructuring of the country, led by the CXA (Central Xtelligence Agency), with the help of America-born individuals of Latvijan parents, whose renewal efforts went no deeper than a cosmetic covering of fire-charred walls with a coat paint. The effort to Zionize the periphery of the European Union was notable enough to anyone of a critical mind. In this instance, Zionization also meant deconstruction of sovereignty and the transubstantiation of the resultant shards into parts of an empire.

*The post=Soviet Latvijan government does not have the fortitude of the first Soviet Latvia (1918-1919), which had wished (by way of the ‘Stuchka doctrine’) to remain as an independent (autocephalic) Soviet in an independent Soviet Union. Instead, jobless former and post-Soviet bureaucrats, submitted to the enticements of Western intelligence agencies, and, sure they would be supported, as the first step to Zionization ran helter-skelter for cover to the European Union and NATO.

The new Latvijan government became office space filled with former Soviet apparatchiks desperate not to lose economic ground in the new Harvard inspired capitalist order. The officials of the new government stole everything that ‘democratic’ laws permitted them to steal. The ‘new’ laws satisfied the bare needs of the Commons by encouraging deforestation of private properties, while the government propaganda apparatus claimed Latvija to be one of the ‘greenest’ countries in all of Europe.

‘Democracy’ was taken advantage of to its fullest extent by George Soros’ sponsored non-government organizations (NGOs) pretending Soros’s and their own hallucinations to be solutions and foundations for the future. A hydra headed form of free speech, limited to secret government cabals, was reserved for government officials and bureaucrats only. The ‘free’ press of Latvia was about as free as a fig leaf pressed over Adam’s pubic hair to hide ‘ugly’ reality.

Hoping to learn, at first hand, the real nature of the post-Soviet Latvijan psyche, I married the widow of a former Soviet police apparatchik. I did not realize that I was marrying a Soviet secret—a nice enough woman unable to proffer thoughts on her own initiative and subject to trust questionable informants.

After a few years, my Latvijan wife sued me for divorce on the grounds that I was seen taking a young woman to a restaurant. The insinuation was that I was sleeping with her. Taken by surprise, and my attorney’s suggestion that I was being divorced in order to extract money from me, I did not contest the divorce.  The court shortly granted it.

After selling my inherited property in Riga, I had the wherewithal to try rebuilding the social fabric of the community as I saw fit. My initial step was to shift my living space (as my forebears had done) to the countryside. By the way, this is easily accomplished when one pretends to be a writer and lives alone.

About ten years following her rape and five years after she had given birth to her first child, Daisy gave birth to a second child. Whether an abortion had intervened, I am not sure. Again the community had no doubts over who the father of the child was. Again little or nothing was said.

Daisy’s girl-friend, Inta, who I had supported and helped finish high school, and with who I had also been accused of sleeping with (a favorite sport of any society bound to economic instability and stagnation), left Latvija to work in a factory in England. My advice to continue her education in England was not taken. It was not long thereafter that Inta gave birth to a child conceived from a fellow factory worker. Life moves on as they say, Master Jack, in surprising ways.

After giving her second child suck and after it was one year old, Daisy took an opportunity and also left for a factory job in England. She left her two children in the care of her mother and stepfather. She was to stay in England for a year and a half.

A common question asked me by young Latvijans of the time was: “What made you come back to Latvija?”  At first the question took me aback. Why should I not have come back?

My stock answer was: “To connect with the past. To give recognition to the pains suffered by my predecessors, who had been among the nation’s creators and founders, and (it remained untold) rediscoverers of a long lost kingdom of Cathars among the Balts.”

After being asked the question all too many times by youths, who came to me and asked for money to leave Latvija, I began to realize that they knew something that I did not, and that we had sharply differing orientations. While I had returned to observe the country being rebuilt, they did not see Latvija as a country with a future. While I was moving back in, they were not only thinking of moving out, but were doing it.

Soon word came from England that Daisy had quit work and was living on the streets of London with a young man, who she claimed to be in love with. A little later another message told that she was working at a London hotel. Later still, I heard that she was with a child, her third.