Eso’s Chronicles 150
Unprecedented Phenomenon:
Dead Men Who Breathe (9)
© Eso A.B.

My Crocodile

One of the myths being propagated by neoliberal capitalist ilk is that ‘quantitative easing’ (QE), printing money and passing it to banks, will restart the economy. http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2013-03-23/forget-cyprus-japan-real-crisis A no less pretentious opinion is being pushed by the public media by presenting society as being as hedonistic today as it was in 2008, when the zenith of capitalist plunder reached the zone of zero gravitation, and could for a short period do the ‘six impossible things before breakfast’ as the White Queen claimed she did in Alice in Wonderland.

Unfortunately for the White Queen, she turned into a sheep with spectacles and went on grazing as if she knew nothing. The White Queen as a sheep with glasses reminded herself to me, when I recently read that Yoko Ono had tweeted the photograph of blood spattered eye glasses of her husband of forty-four years ago, John Lennon http://omg.yahoo.com/blogs/celeb-news/yoko-ono-tweets-photo-john-lennon-bloody-glasses-162358549.html . No doubt, the blood on the glasses of the White Queen is the blood of innocence no less innocent today than yesterday, except that the Queen is proving to be Yoko Ono caught up in an obscene orgy of naïveté getting its comeuppance. David Bowie at least questions: “Where are we now?” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWtsV50_-p4 , and nostalgically discovers himself with his companion in a garage in Berlin (or is it Birmingham?), which he judged to be among the better moments of his life. On the other hand, Yoko Ono is right up there with Madonna fighting for “Pussy Rights”, fucking the ‘essentially dead’ of the rest of the ‘living’ world with a program of passionate intensity.

 

The recent financial destruction by the European Central Bank (ECB) of the Cypriot government sends echoes around the world. People are slowly waking up from their long dream about Money and discovering that they have no government but banks, and that the latter can take Money from their wallets anytime they can concoct a ‘good’ reason, and the government gives the ‘go ahead’ to the motorcycle police to escort the bank president’s motorcade.

As I wrote in the previous blog (149) “…governments have become ‘symbol deficient’….” and exist in a ‘void’. Governments are now effectively become interim institutions, useful to produce laws, and when necessary, to support the banks and their shareholders’ ability to make more Money—if necessary by waging war. As far as the rest of human kind is concerned—on behalf of who governments were once said to have come into existence—“They are essentially dead men who just happen to breathe…” as Lt. Col. Barry Wingard, a US military attorney who advocates for Guantanamo detainees, recently said http://rt.com/op-edge/guantanamo-bay-hunger-strike-732/ .

While this is not openly admitted as applying to the rest of humankind, the actions (and inactions) of governments give ample evidence that though the people are dead, they are still breathing. As Glenn Greenwald, a familiar name among bloggers, now a columnist for the Guardian, writes: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/04/war-on-terror-endless-johnson :

“The polices adopted by the Obama administration just over the last couple of years leave no doubt that they are accelerating, not winding down, the war apparatus that has been relentlessly strengthened over the last decade. In the name of the War on Terror, the current president has diluted decades-old Miranda warnings; codified a new scheme of indefinite detention on US soil; plotted to relocate Guantanamo to Illinois; increased secrecy, repression and release-restrictions at the camp; minted a new theory of presidential assassination powers even for US citizens; renewed the Bush/Cheney warrantless eavesdropping framework for another five years, as well as the Patriot Act, without a single reform; and just signed into law all new restrictions on the release of indefinitely held detainees.”

Two points emerge from the above: 1) ‘indefinite war on terror’ creates force majeure conditions, defines the present as a continuous line of ‘exceptional conditions’, and imposes martial law http://definitions.uslegal.com/m/martial-law/ ;  2) it destroys the community by divorcing it from the living, to the degree that respect for ‘unwritten’ laws that were embedded in inherited discipline and traditions that made communities ‘symbol efficient’ have evaporated.

As this link http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-03-24/rampapalooza-cyprus-troika-reach-deal  tells it: “UPDATE: It appears the 'deal' to default/restructure the banks has been designed to bypass the need for parliamentary votes, since it is theoretically not a tax.” Be sure to listen to the web cast embedded in the link and note the ‘cool’ manner government is transferred from government to banks, and how banks are to become governments and former government is to become a militant policing institution serving banks.

As the speakers in the link repeat over and over again, not only are governments kept from interceding on behalf of the people they were to represent, but ‘problem’ banks of the old order are to be “run down over time.” Apparently, it is believed, that this will leave a clear playing field for the banks and enable them to start using the tools that governments have written into law for some time, even as preparing their police and military as per Glenn Greenwald’s comments (above).

If the boards of the banks are indeed to become de jure governments of the world, and the population of the world is not to be the people who are living on planet Earth de facto, and the citizens of the banks are graded as to their privileges by the size of their banking accounts, the importance of the events now taking place are a series of False Flag events of no lesser significance than auto de fe-ing Basil The Bogomil (coinciding with the installment of Jesus Christ), the plunder of Constantinople, and the many slow motion tsunamis set into motion since the deaths of both Hitler and Stalin failed to leave behind them a people (and leaders) inspired by the symbolic efficiency of their leadership.

Apparently the transition to a ‘globalized’ culture cannot be achieved without eliminating all or most of the current governments in office and substituting them with Money and bankers-ushers as priesthood.

No doubt, what is happening is a disaster of momentous proportions. Few people, even among the experts, understand it. The clear winners are, of course, the oligarchs who hold billions in currency. They are the new Princes—even with fiat money at risk. The new barons and boyars are the multi millionaires driving in carriages known as Sport Lexus http://www.lexus.com/lexus-share/v2/img/models/RX/overview/overview-hero-rx-5.jpg . The rest of humankind is either going to be bottled up in cities or sent to turn the remainder of our planet’s woods into shrubbery and tend in zoos animals sent into exile thereby.

Death is unleashed and comes with a scythe the size of the horizon. As usual, the hope in such cases is the seed of the dandelion that relies on the graces of the wind and chance landings to make its fortune.

© Eso Antons Benjamins, a.k.a. Jaņdžs

NOT-VIOLENT TERROR
70 Climbing Mt. Citheron (III)

For anyone who has been away from home for a long time, returning home ought to lead through the ‘old home’ first, because the ‘new’ old home is never the same as the old home was. The problem for human kind for this kind of maneuver, however, has been that a journey to the ‘old home’ necessarily leads through the past and a forest of lies and misconceptions about what the old home looked like. The lies and misconceptions of course have been sown by those who are at the wheels of power now or were anytime between the ‘old’ times and now. In other words, there is no such thing as returning home, though you are welcome to try and find out for yourself.

Lewis Carroll’s famous story “Alice in Wonderland” may be read as an allegory of Alice wishing to visit the old home of her immigrant parents. Alice herself is too young to have ever had an old home yet. So, one day when Alice feels bored, she sees a white rabbit, she begins to chase it, and the rabbit leads her to a hole in an old tree stump. Being young and innocent, Alice sticks her head into the hole, the ground under her gives way, and down and away she falls.

Sometimes seeing the ‘old home’ (click here for a synopsis of Alice’s story) may change the picture of not only the past, but how you see the present. I do not mean that when you return, you simply will be brushing off a few leaves the moment after you believed your head was about to be chopped off on the orders of a mad queen. For all I know, you may be Ann Boleyn  and the queen is king Henry the VIII. Or you have decided to make your journey back to the old home on February 14th, Valentine's Day.

Yet another almost impossible struggle to return to one’s old home is presented by the Greek playwright Sophocles in his play “Oedipus Rex” or “Oedipus the King”. However, in Sophocles’ story, the “return” is not to discover one’s old home, but the truth to what really happened not only to Oedipus, but to a lot of people who in one way or another were connected to him.

On the surface “Oedipus Rex” is a simple riddle asked by a chimera, known to Sophocles as the Sphinx. The riddle asks who is it who walks on four legs in the morning, two legs by noon, but on three legs in the evening. The answer is that it is “man”, because a baby first crawls on all fours, then as an adult walks on two legs, but when old walks with the help of a cane, which ads up to three legs. The answer is of course correct. Any half wit can come up with the answer. However, this is the very reason why the riddle begs a deeper probing. So far, most critics of the play have not got past scratching the surface.

Nevertheless, before we go into a possible solution of the riddle, we need to ask yet another question: Why did Sophocles write a mystery to which no one seems to have the answer? That is, why is it a mystery until we discover (in the next blog) the answer? I believe that it has to do with timing. The answer can be discovered only at a “chronal moment”, when like the stars in a horoscope occultate in such a way that what was impossible before becomes possible now.

One reason why the riddle of Oedipus has been under occultation by the present for so long may be because the present has for a very long time been dangerous, life-threatening, and there was no way of avoiding the threat to one’s life except to pretend to believe in mysteries. Thus, the answer to the meaning of Sophocles’ play may be that he is telling his audiences of something that is very dangerous, and, indeed, may cost him and his audience their lives. On the other hand, everyone may recognize the danger of the topic immediately the play begins, understands the danger of it, and tells the next audience coming to the show that they will be seeing a mystery play.

People who live under the rule of dictators know this phenomenon, i.e., the hope to live long enough to experience the chronal moment, the dictator’s fall, because their poets’ heads and popularity depend on the wit used in their verbal allusions. While the people wait for this moment to arrive, there appear all kinds of guesses as to what Sophocles’ play and the Sphinx are about. The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud made himself famous with his theory, which he called the Oedipus complex. Indeed, we still hear of it, because while the salacious aspects of the theory arouse most sexually repressed people, Freud discovered that there may be secrets repressed beyond memory. However, they reveal themselves only at certain chronal moments.

It is possible that even as I am telling the reader what I know and have reconstructed, I am hiding the story by writing about it in English, which is a language most Latvian politicians fear to learn past the 800 words of Basic English, but those who speak it well are too far from their old home to care how the ball bounces in Latvia. After all, those who return to Latvia today and presume that what they see is “old Latvia”, are like King Oedipus—blind, or like Alice are arriving in Latvia on a daliisque ship with sails of made of giant pink irises.

So, where do we begin with the unraveling of Sophocles’ mystery? Let us wait for blog 71 and see.


Asterisk & Notes of Interest:

On material in Latvia. depravation in Latvia.

On the theme of “more-equal-than-others”, see Orwell's Animal Farm.

A recommended read: “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism” by Emmanuel Goldstein (A book within a book from George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, aka 1984.  

Of great interest to me is this and like articles. It presents some of my reasons for supporting the growing of Johns Grass in Latvia.

These blogs tend to be a continuum of an idea or thought, which is why—if you are interested in what you read—you are encouraged to consider reading the previous blog and the blog hereafter.

Partial entries of my blogs may be found at LatviansOnline + Forum Home + Open Forum –ONLATVIANPOPULISM vs LATVIJASLABEJIE. If you copy this blog for your files, or copy to forward, or otherwise mention its content, please credit the author and http://esoschroniclnes.blogspot.com/