EC 622 at http://esoschronicles.blogspot.com/

How They Shut Down Populist Latvijans

By © E. Antons Benjamiņš, 2017

A countryside Populist is employed by Nature all day long; an urban Populist chokes and enslaves Nature until it dies.

8 The Last Days Of A Populist Household

(Part 1)

The year is 1941. Word came from the city by telephone (I do not know from what city, but possibly from my maternal grandmother, possibly paternal aunt, both of Riga) to prepare to be deported. Flight was not advised. If we try to flee, the farm can be burned down, perhaps people will be killed. We are to pack and wait for the arrival of the truck that will take us to the Jacobstown railroad station.

So, mother packed several suitcases and flour sacks full with whatever she believed was necessary to survive in Siberia. Father had already been sent there from Riga a day before. Maybe this is what informed our informers and what informed mother that we were on the list, too. Father’s crime was that at the age of twenty-five, at the time of the Russian Revolution, he had been a supporter of the tsar, and his loyalties instead of turning to the reds had turned to the whites. A Cheka officer is said to have called him General Kolchak’s denchic, which word stands for ‘servant’. Mother had an idea what Siberia would be like from her childhood days spent east of the Urals and then in Krasnoyarsk, where at nine years of age, separated from her mother and nearly frozen to death, a railroad switchman’s family gave her and her siblings shelter.

We packed our suitcases and sat on them and waited. I do not remember whether we sat the entire day or just a few minutes. I was only eight years old at the time. But the truck did not come that day, and the following day the highway, which we could see from the window of our room on the second floor of the farmhouse, was clogged with an endless caravan of refugees and Russian military units. Something was going on. Someone said that we were saved, because war had begun.

But one knew for sure. During the day mother stayed in the house and told her children to do the same. We children moved from our room to downstairs to the back of the house, and went to play in the carpenter’s room. The room was just to the right of the common room, where there was the big bread oven and in late fall and winter the loom and spinning wheel stood by the back window. Our aunt boiled some eggs, and we were to crumble the eggs and feed them to the chicks that were, for the time being, kept in a small pen in the room. It was early afternoon. The sun was high in the sky.

Then we heard an airplane. I remember sitting on the floor of the work room at the time and pecking with my finger on the floor, and calling: “Here chick, chick!” The chickens were running between my hands, but I got up off the floor and ran to the window to look at the plane. It was flying rather low in what appeared to be a loop, and was about to disappear behind the north end of the house. Just as it disappeared, there occurred I knew not what. The entire house shook and swung from left to right as if it were a sailboat. All the windows shattered and fell out of the window frames. Explosions swallowed what had been a quiet scene on a farmhouse floor but seconds before.

This is how I remember the first day of World War 2. That was seventy-six years ago.

It is not the only adventure that I remember of those days. After the bombs fell (we later counted 43 craters as wide across as the big kitchen table and deep enough to hide a grown man standing) we gathered up the glass and the women covered the windows with sheets, rugs, and what ever. My uncle, the farmer, and his brother, a retired sailor from England’s merchant marine, drove all the cattle (25), sheep (35), pigs (10), and horses (12), altogether over eighty heads of farm animals, into the wood. The only animals that remained on the farm were the cats (2), dogs (2), rooster and chickens (some dozen), and Brunis, the stallion who was stud for fillies for many miles around.

Brunis not only has his own story, but can connect to stories about much more. He causes me to recall my grandfather, both of my grandmothers, aunt Emma, the owner of the farm, and all kinds of things, including the fact that today nothing remains of the farm. It caught fire from a cigarette negligently discarded by those abandoned by the shock that introduced a ‘renewed’ Latvija (1991). A kindly man from the future and another country, who purchased the land, has now bulldozed the remains of Soklēni into the ground—for a plow to better level it to the level of a field of what is now Never-was-everland.

Another story that the remembering Brunis brings to mind is the founding of Latvija, in 1918. This was fifteen years before I was born.

By my birthday (four years after the 1929 stock market crash in America) the democratic and city oriented Latvijan government (working in mindless concert with our times) had managed to nearly destroy the country’s economy. The country was rescued from total ruin by an agronomist, who many years before Latvija’s independence had visited the United States of America and made acquaintance with how things were done in the state of Nebraska and Texas.* After taking the reigns of the Latvijan government into his hands, K. Ulmanis strengthened government support of the peasants.** Unfortunately, the American Civil War was long over, and Americans had turned from self-sufficient Populists of the countryside into a virtual people of the city, who were so to speak ‘into’ crude and snake oil. The age of the ‘quick buck’ was on its way with a gallop, and so was the 1929 Crash. For all his good intentions, Ulmanis’s coup was part of events in a time given over to human engineers.*** Full scale engineering of society began with the philosopher Locke. While Locke is thought of as one of the main philosophers of the age of Enlightenment, it is interesting that he came along in an age when cities had gained an incontrovertible ascendancy over the countryside.

*Given that history in the state of Latvija is grossly (but understandably) neglected by those in political power and its historians are among the most timid academians, Ulmanis biography is incomplete and leaves much to be researched and explained. One question: How come when most of Livonian native people lived in conditions of poverty, he came from a well to do farmer’s family. Where did he get the money to purchase a ‘dairy business’ in Texas?

**While Ulmanis is credited with establishing the Latvijan Farmers’s Party, the question remains why it was the Bolsheviks who first had the greatest support of the peasantry and volunteer soldiery. Ulmanis gained support of the farmers only after the Bolsheviks shot themselves in the foot by transferring their support from Populist peasantry to Populist workers in the virtual space of the city.

***Locke’s ideas about private property immensenly strengthened the power of the city managers and everyone in position of power. Locke may be called the father of all who make a living by speculation, i.e. he is theoriginator of the ideology that caused the 1929, 2008, and presently (2017) economic catastrophies.

K. Ulmanis returned to Latvija and was present at the founding of Latvija in 1918, and thereafter headed the country’s provisional government. However, after the 1922 general elections, and after my de facto Godfather* became the country’s First President (1922-27), the country began a rickety passage (13 changes of government in a decade) through the 20^th century tunnel of semi-virtual and city dominated nationhoods.

*This is a complicated aspect of my biography. I discuss it at greater length in a previous book of this series. The First Latvian President’s son, who was a justice of the Latvian Supreme Court (Senats), was my de jure godfather. The unusual arrangement was the result of intra-family politics from both paternal and maternal side. On the paternal side: my father’s youngest sister became the wife of my de jure godfather; on the maternal side: my grandfather was ambassador to Moscow during President Chakste’s time in office, and had frequent contacts with him. Because of the Latvijan government’s ‘deep background’ connection with entante governments, the Latvijan Foreign Ministry was hostile to its Moscow ambassador and fired him as soon as President Chakste died (1927). To reestablish the links broken by my father’s late marriage (I was born six years after the First President’s death), the son of the late President was chosen to become my de jure godfather. Once when during  the middle of WW2, I asked him whether he could tell me who God was (I had heard that word mentioned all too many times), the judge responded by saying “You will know that when you grow up”. He could hardly have expected that I would take that as a directive to pursue the question for the rest of my life. Though I surely do not know who God is yet, I do know that He is of Populists of the countryside.