The Amazingly Slow Death of Populist Latvijans
By © E. Antons
Benjamiņš, 2017
A
definition of ‘communism’ begins from the premise that it ‘is the state of Nature-born
human being from the time human beings began until now.
2A The Beginning
When the people (loi, Leute,
ļaudis) of the Latvijan speaking language group in former Livonia, aided by German-speaking
members of the early Moravian Church, began to separate themselves out of the
undifferentiated mass of former serfs in Livonia, they began to perceive
themselves as unique survivors of an ancient culture. Everyone was amazed how
in a matter of a few decades the Latvian speaking people turned into a
community in its own right.
Where did this community
come from? There seemed to be no explanation for it. The Neochristian Catholics
were amazed and disturbed. Yet if one looked with an open mind...:
–It would have been noticed
that the Herrnhuters had to use all their skills to persuade the Livonians to
leave the forests where they had taken refuge from the Great Northern War. Clearly
the war among the elites and courts of Europe had frightened them badly. But if
they were unwilling to leave the forests, the question arises: What skills did
the Livonians posess to survive in the swamps that are sometimes found in the
forest? Were such skills natural to them because the wood was their natural domicile
and they were never meant to leave it?
One is unlikely to find an
answer, unless one turns to a muddled and perplexing story in the New Testament—the
story of two fish feeding in a ‘remote place’ five thousand people. The
heretofore explanation about this being a miracle is meant to mislead.
Something more substantial is behind the story. Is it that Jesus led his
followers to a wood where he knew a lake abundan
in fish? Those of us who know the wood also know that a wood can
be abundant in mushrooms, edible roots, and is a place where the body of a tree
will provide material for shelter.
For all the disbelief such
an explanation may generate, the explanation is not implausible . The
Herrnhuters too were of a people of the wood in German-speaking
lands. They had been chased from the wood by the kilns that baked bricks and
consumed wood in enormous quantities to build cities for the violent breed that
had inherited Earth to live virtual lives and were to be sustained by money. It
is not that paper is evil as such, but when turned into money, it brings evil by
way of the exploitation one has to engage in to get it.
In fact, the mystery of
the origin of Latvijans was right before everyone’s eyes—if one suspends one’s
credulity in modernity, and dismisses the story of Virgin Galactic
as an outrageos propaganda story by the elites.
One can accept such a
point of view, except.... The problem is that after the Herrnhuters persuaded
the Livonians to leave the forests, the cities kept growing, the forests kept diminishing,
the fields of grain were becoming ever more expansive factory floors, and everyone
was becoming ever more disembodied, spiritual, and persuaded by the efficacy of
creative violence.*
*The
author would never have come to this ‘wierd’ perspective had his own forebears
not been of Herrnhuter persuasion, who in the course of time disengaged from their
roots. When (over a century ago) the author’s grandfather decided to become a
millionaire, he started the “countryside to city back to countryside” cycle all
over again. With the advent of WW2, the fortune he made was lost, and the millionaire’s
descendants were forced to discover the countryside again. Alas, by now the
forests are gone, and the author is doing penance by replanting his property
with trees.
For the Americans, the Zeitgeist (of their creation) justifies killing a half a million Iraqi children. Nevertheless, unsure of their ground and sensing that their cities will soon turn into a desert, American financial advisory services are advising the cityzenry to “buy gold”. There remains among Americans little memory of whence they come and no inkling where they go. As one American from upstate New York puts it, the country is in a “major crisis of culture and economy”. When the crisis comes, a bar of gold will not buy even a fish.
The entropy that has
overtaken society ever since it was forced out of the wood and into the city, goes
unnoticed by a society that has persuaded itself that the evolution of violence
is progress. Economic fascism is widely practiced and no alternative is imagined.
But if fascist gold will
not save, what will? Perhaps, we need to reimagine what the Herrnhuters and
Livonians, both, understood, yet were forced to abandon. Does not the story about
the fish tell us that the Herrnhuters are a remnant of a Christianity that originated
in the wood?
In the now underrated
‘wild’, human consciousness saw not only the nature of its own spirit, but saw
spirit in the running water in the brook, in the trees swaying in the wind, in
the animals that ran and flew about. Today however the prejudices reigning in our
‘progressive’ academias ridicule this perspective as animism. As
the iconoclasts say: We embrace no tree before we fell it; we kiss no pig
before we kill it. I recall a small boy from Boston once saying, when he saw a
sow suckling her young at a farmstock exhibit in Lexington, a town nearby:
“Yech! Gross!”
2B
A Beginning Undone
But had not the rejected
and abandoned Latvians and Germans survived because a conscious spirit (perhaps
hiding in their stomachs
and throats) encouraged their survival by teaching
them how to help one another? Had the Spirit not taught them survival skills by
manifesting Itself through sacrificing Itself?.Had their survival not made them
perceive that all Life was of One Soul, and that that Soul could be captured
only if one was willing to merge one’s life with it as the Sacred King become God
had done? Volunteering to die of hunger when hunger struck was a time honored
way to die on behalf of one’s own and the community.
The Livonians had no
difficulty in identifying with the Herrnhuter mindset. Such identifying with
them was also done by the American Indians—as this link
tells us.
The revival of native Livonians
was soon perceived as a danger by the ruling powers that had been hard at work
(for many centuries) to define themselves as the true and only heirs of
humankind. In Livonia the usurpers of native lands were mostly German barons,
whose forebears had come to occupy the land from about the 12th
century on. The barons had managed to turn ancient Christianity into a science
(of sorts) by turning their physically less capable siblings into priests and
nuns and heads of monasteries and churches. The sermons on Sundays of the less
fortunate elites was not unlike the messages from our mentally circumcized militarists,
whose message is of Catholic cum universalist/
globalist ideology. Though this ideology (because of the material rewards it
brings to those who serve it) often succumbs to corruption and becomes subject to
‘reform’, it never changes in fundamental ways. For example , the ‘reformist’
Lutheran Church of northern Europe that succeeded the Catholics (following the Westphalian—peace
treaty of 1648) did not renounce the ideology of ‘the
Church Invincible’ anymore than it was renounced by the
Puritan Cromwell and the Anglican Church. The Great Nothern War, of which the
Livonians were the most bloodied victims, was consequent to a Swedish Lutheran
king, Gustavus
Adolphus, attempting to conquer Russia and Russian counter
attack*.
*One
may argue that the Swedes were but continuing a war that had been initiated by
their Viking forebears, when they briefly captured the Black and Caspian seas
region by means of shallow draft ships-boats that came down the riverways of Danube, Dniepr,
Don, and Volga .
Following recovery of
self-consciousness, Latvijans were—unfortunately—not willing to live in harmony
with the land, but began to imagine that the Latvijan speaking community might
become an autonomous national community in a federation of nations or a
sovereign nation. There began a cultural movement that attempted to prove that
Latvijans were a people of ancient origin. While there are several paths that
lead to such ancient origins, the one chosen by the Latvijans was that of folk
poetry and song. The Latvijans called these ‘dainas’.
Dainas are short
stanzas, which remind of Japanese haiku poems. The collectors
of dainas separated the short stanzas from the body of the song and read them as
poetry. With time, dainas became symbols of Latvijan identity for the state of
Latvija, established in 1918.
Alas, a hundred years
later, few Latvijans know more about the dainas than having heard of them. Few
can sing them, and even fewer can recite them. Only one Latvian poet, the
nationalist (and arguably communist) Rainis,
took the poetic form of dainas seriously. The poet’s vision of Latvians as an authentic
culture never rubbed off the Latvian government which stayed loyal to the Lutheran
sponsored Catholic ideology of globalized fascism. Among Latvian elites, seeing
how it was inherited from German barons*, state craft has remained a skill
subordinate to personal careers.
*The
name ‘baron’ may come from the French speaking Belgian territory of ‘Waloonia’
by way of shift in the pronunciation of consonants, re: W=B and L=R., and may
have its origin in the French Duchy of Bouillon that existed from
the 10th to the 18h centuries. Interestingly, the Latvian
flag may pwe its origin to the colors of the duchy.
The history-denying and reactionary
ideology of the fascist* Latvian government proves three things: a) either the
story about dainas is make-believe;
b) the ‘renewed’ post Soviet state (since 1991) has no interest in Latvijas culture
or history; or c) the origin of Latvijan identity is altogether sourced in ‘other’
events, in which case the Latvijan identity is not of its people but of the presumption
of a government that knows no better. In effect, government is the authority
that tells people who they are and who they are to become. Given that the
borders of Latvia are open to Nato occupation, the forordained fate of Latvia
(since 1991) is to become little more than additional territory to a federated
European Union.
*The
word ‘Fascist’ just as the word ‘Communist’ is much maligned. Essentially
‘fascist’ defines a community of cities that have divided a country into two
factions—the Haves and Have Nots. The fascist Haves are ever trying to make
others (mostly people of the countryside) become Have Nots, who they then rename
Communists. Currently ‘globalization’ is the preferred ideology by means of
which the Haves hope to turn the rest of the world into Have Nots. In the
author’s country of Latvija, the Haves are the government. The Haves do all the
talking. The government has practically eliminated independent thought and
writing in favor of hackery.
