Saturday, March 24, 2018

Children Must Not Know or Remember
By © Anton Vendamencsh, 2017

Chapter 12/ In The Wake Of Overt Violence 5

The existential threat to my family becomes real with the 1939 Mutual Assistance Treaty between Latvija and the Soviet Union. The Treaty, forced on Latvia by the Soviet Union*, was immediately followed by occupation. The Latvian government showed no opposition. By 1940 we are disposessed of our home. By 1941, eight members of my extended family are arrested and deported to the gulags, five of them (my father, Emilia, my maternal grandfather, an uncle, and cousin) die by 1942. While some of the deaths are due to Soviet policies, a contributing factor is the War, which forces the Soviet government into a survival mode that results in measures that costs many lives.**

*This is what our government ordered or fake ‘history’ tells us. But one ought seriously doubt that it reflects what really is at work here. More than likely, the Bolsheviks are influenced by the self-assertive Moravian Church.which is  forced to abandon its Populist Christian theology in favor of Elitist and Catholic theology.The Moravians metamorphosed into Bolsheviks and returned under the leadership of Peter Shtuchka in 1919. Again they were driven off by the combined forces of volunteer German barons and right wing Latvians. The defeat pf the Latvian Populists or Peasant Communists follows the fate of the Finnish Communists. What throws off conventional historians is the fact that the radical metamorphosis of the Moravians causes the aborted Moravian movement to reemerge as Atheist Bolsheviks, which is why they have no recollecton of their origins—in spite of the fact that being Atheist remains a form of religios.

**So, yes, absent WW2 many would likely have survived.

But getting killed may have been the easy part. It takes many decades before the survivors, the victims, and the heirs and remnants of the Herrnhuter tradition receive the coup d’grace. In so far as Herrnhuters held to the Biblical belief that the eldest son of a family is the heir of the male lineage, it falls on me to be the one who must gather up the  blood of my forebears. I also must bear the cowardice of the Christian image bearers*, who forget that wealth corrupts. These blogs are part of the process of revealing what this ‘Christian history’ hides.

*A short while ago, on February 24, 2018, I attend an event at the Valmiera (LV) public library, ostensibly organized by a local Herrnhuter Church. I am interested, because the event purports to present a history of the Herrnhuter movement in the area. A number of high level academics have promised to attend. Unfortunately, upon arrival, I disciver that three of the presenters are absent due to pulmonary infections. The only historian present is a Lutheran minister who has presumed to minister history to those present. Typically the lecture consists of blah blah blah facts to about a hundred gathered sheep. The attendies are given no opportunity to ask questions, even though none—apparently cowed into silence by the reputations of the presenters—raise hands. Typically, the history profesor cum minister fails to connect any of the facts to the religious war waged against the Herrnhuters by the Lutheran Church (for example, why is the Lutheran Church of Valmiera still standing, while all traces of the Herrnhuters have been eradicated? Why did the Latvian Lutheran Church sell—following the collapse of the Soviet Union--the last Herrnhuter property in Riga? To mince no words and not to accept any of the excuses: surely to eradicaate all traces of them.). When during a break, I suggest to the profesor that Herrnhuter theology is unlikely the same as that of the Catholic theology (which is followed also by the Lutherans), he acknowledges this, but abruptly removes himself from my presence. This proves to me that the absolutist arm of Missouri Fundamntalist Synod has sufficient secular influence to silence dissent as far as Valmiera, Latvija. The message that I receive is as clear as it was in the 18th century: no  challenges are desired, leave the box that decorates the head of the establishment undisturbed.

My family is provided shelter by a heretofore overlooked branch of the family—that of my paternal grandmother, specifically her youngest sister, aunt Emma. Aunt Emma, who up to that time I had never met before, owns a farm that is located at the very center of the Moravian crescent that once stretched across the map as a rising moon from Valmiera east to Smiltene, then south to Vecpiebalga, Ērgļi, Madliena, then westward to Ogre. I am not sure how my father, who up to then had been compromising himself in favor of his nemesis Emilia by denying his mother, rediscovered his past. I suspect it was his youngest sister, aunt Martha (daughter-in-law of the first president of Latvija), who had kept her family ties intact by visiting with them frequently. Most likely, it is she who makes the arrangements for her brother, wife and children.

In any case, there I was, a few days before my eigths birthday, in the garden of a farm in an area of Latvija that I had never visited before. It was a sunny  day. A white enameled tin pan filled with water was set on a wooden block for us to wash off the dust accumulated during the three hour 120 kilometers drive. In those days driving took a long time as the roads in Latvija were made for horse drawn wagons, not cars.

A long wooden table in the garden was set for lunch. Birch juice (the traditional Latvijan summer drink that replaces lemonade), home made bread, bacon flavored cottage cheese, butter, boiled eggs, ham, and a jar of honey awaited us at our new home. After a brief repast and everyone meeting everyone all aound, we were shown what was to be our room for the next four years: upstairs on the north end of the farmhouse, second floor, gable to gable, two windows looking north, a round, massive floor to ceiling stove next to the door that would heat the room in winter, two childrens’ beds against the wall on the left, a double bed for mother and father on the right. We set our suitcases in the middle of the room, and untied the sack with our Siamese cat Yurka. Pure chaos ensued as the cat  jumped out of the sack with a howl, circled the walls until exhausted and protesting its fate with continuous fierce miouws crawled under a bed, wherefrom it continued to protest against those who in Siam had bred his jungle ancestors down to a cat. Surely, Yurka also miouwed for us.

My future was decided in the next few days. Because I was new to the farming way of life, I was to spend the summer learning the cowherder’s trade by accompanying Gunars, aunt Emma’s stepson, who until then had been the herder. Gunars was five years older than I, which was old enough to start taking on more adult responsibilities.

Because the plan had been to raise me as a wealthy man’s son in the city, the idea had been to school me at home with the help of nannies and tutors. For this reason, I had not attended public school, and was not anxious to be sent to one now. It made me ill to think of being left on my own among strangers. It was then decided to keep me home yet another winter. Because home tutoring had been done with the aim to prepare me for Oxford (I am not sure whose idea this was, but it went with the pretentions), my handwriting skills were not up to the standarts of Latvian elementary school. Thus, I spent the fall months sitting in the small library* of the farm drawing endless series of letters (a, b, c...) in a notebook printed for that purpose. It was the first time, I truly felt the presence of my father, who sat next to me and made sure that I did not slack off. Perhaps this was the first time that we really got to know each other a little.

*Due to the Latvian Herrnhuter effort to educate themselves and other Latvian peasants, Latvijan farm houses, built from the 18th century on, included a small room that served, at first, as a room for prayer and reading the Bible, but in later years the room became a small library. As a consequence of such farm libraries, the Latvian people became, at one point, among the most literate people in Europe. My aunt Emma’s small library contained along with the Bible many classics (Cervantes, Dante, Dostoyevski, Goethe, Homer, Turgenev, Jules Verne, Baumanis, Grīns, Pumpurs, Rainis, Skalbe, etc.), all which books I read without any sense of discrimisnation by the age of ten while herding cows and sheep. Indeed, some of the literature, I did not get to reread until twenty or so years later,while some I refresh through the internet library now at my fingertips.

Father stayed with us until the end of the year (1940). I remember him lifting bales of hay, which when placed on small birch trees that had been laid on the ground made a kind of sled, which when tied to ropes, I, sitting on horse back, then drew across the field and up a ramp to the attick above the cow barn. In winter, all men went to the forest, where we cut spruce trees, the logs of which the horse (Max) then pulled by slay home. When the logs were cut into blocks, these were split into fire wood, some fagots of which I split into thin strips, which—given there was no electricity and little petrol—were used at night as torches to light one’s way around the house or read books.

For the next half a year life seemed normal. Then in January of 1941, in order to participate in the upcoming elections, father had to return to Riga. A newly issued Soviet law demanded that the head of every family cast a vote. This was a way for the new government to claim it had become occupier as a result of a democratic vote.*

*The ‘democratic vote’ exacted by the Soviet government served the same purpose as ‘christening’ had once served the Globalist-Catholic eclesia. The aim of the Globalists, no less than the Soviets, was to distance the people from democracy as it was practiced in an environment of nature. Indeed, Nature was at that time the environment for the majority of the Latvian people. The Soviets wished to replaced Nature by an idealized democracy defined by a (Soviet or Catholic-Capitalist) Central Committee in the city. To paraphrase (rather extensively) the French political anthropologist Pierre Clastres (”Society Against the State”, Zone Books, 1987; p 188): Although the origin of the People is to be sought in a society without written laws, they were forced by (written) law to submit to a series of distant,separate, and despotic orders—the last two of which were a) a ‘democratic’ Soviet Union and b) an ideologically and militarily berzerk United States of America and European Union.

Once in Riga, father was arested, interrogated, and accused of being unfriendly to the Soviet Union. He must have had some inklings of what awaited him. One of the letters he sent mother addressed her as Solvega, the ever patient woman who waited for the return of her ever wandering Peer Gynt . Ever curious and ready to stick my nose in matters held secret and forbidden, I read the letter. Father pleaded that mother take care of the children and forgive him his meanderings. He also wrote that he would write a book when he returned.

In June of 1941, just a few days before the Germans attacked the Soviet Union, the Soviets put father and many thousands of others of the Latvijan intellegentsia and elite aboard cattle cars and transported them out of Latvija. When we were notified of this by remaining relatives in Riga, I took the news as a death sentence not only for father, but also myself. It was the first and last time that I remember myself and mother embracing each other with emotion. Because mother had early on surrendered me to the care of nannies, as privileged wealthy parents were wont to do, it was a happening that never happened again. What passed between us, at that moment, was the result of momentary melt-down of barriers raised by ‘upbringing’. Because that upbringing continued thereafter by the estrangement that such upbringing result in, I expressed my sense of abandonment by retreating into hysterical prayers and schizophrenia*. Mother occupied herself with my young brother, the first of her brood to receive her full emotional attention.

*Autism in my case is self-diagnosed more than seventy years after the fact. The diagnosis is based on remembrances of events described in these blogs. My brother, or more likely my half-brother, who has a PhD in psychology, however, never noticed anything that he would so diagnose or describe. Aside from the fact that autism today may have increased due to vaccinations poisoned by additives, my theory is that the real increase in autism is due to an ever accelerating exit from Nature-based realism (where succor is provided by God), into a virtual and city based unnatural environment where pain is cured-released by resort to violence, either real or fantasized in derams or in movies. The consequent paranoia, while a disorder. is, nevertheless, solely the result of virtual reality attempting to usurp the reality of Nature. Though psychologists attempt to persuade us that this is a personal factor, in fact this is a cultural factor of our time. This dichotomy may appear in such dreams as the following:while I am fishing in a small stream, the dream introducēs next to the steram a highway where armored personnel carriers rumble. In my childhood, both Hitler and Stalin were asserting a city based virtual reality over nature-based reality, thereby tipping humankind into a world of violent fantasies, re: tanks, howitzers, stukas, jets, automatic rifles, atomic bombs, etc.

After discovering that my mother cared little over my sense of loss (she surely lost much herself), there occured times when my behavior toward her became wilfull and, sometimes, cruel. On occasion, I would take advantage of a conflict and deliberately drive mother to lose control of herself and into hysteria. She then fell to the floor as if struck by an epileptic fit. I would then rush to her side and offer her a glass of sugared water. I had heard that sugar calmed the nerves.

I was recently reminded of this, when a friend told me that an acquaintance of hers, who works as a prostitute and who ten years ago had given birth to a son, had called her and with some alarm told that her son had attacked her. After taking a few days to think the matter over, my response was that the only way the matter can be resolved is if the mother takes her activities a step beyond the usual and introduces her son to both sex and God. Such advice is based on my experience of unrequited mother love. Though I had become detached from mother, this does not mean that she did not matter any more. Perhaps because of it, she continues to appear in ny dreams as a sexual subject—even after her death twenty years ago.


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