© Eso Antons Benjamins

NOT-VIOLENT TERROR
39 The Horror (II)

(continued from blog 38.)

This is how it came to be that many Latvians who served the former Soviet Union came to serve Latvia within the European Union. The Soviet officials, who became officials in government and private companies, soon intermixed with agents who came from developed countries (Latvian-Americans, Latvian-Australians, Latvian-Canadians, Latvian-Germans, etc.) and opened banks with few credentials of their own to be bankers. They let “investors” come and invest in big supermarket chains to out-compete mom and pop shops and soak up whatever little wealth the Latvians had left. The system worked well for almost nineteen years.

Today Latvians are forced to deforest their land to survive. The butchery of the forests slows down the speed of Latvia with which it falls into the abyss. But it does not alter the direction to economic and cultural oblivion set by the political elite of parliamentarian Latvia. The method—slowing death in the near term, but doing nothing to ensure survival over the long-term, enables the liberal democratic establishment to justify “progress”. The doctor—as it happens, the current President of Latvia happens to be a doctor of medicine—needs only point at the patient and say: But, hey, he’s still alive! The Saeima and its ministers are doing just fine.

In order not to upset the populace and arouse populist unhappiness among its own, the haves of the European Union have guaranteed, the Latvian politicians a good living by paying no attention to their anti-populism, a near obsession with right wing (labējo) politics and near absent understanding why populism has become almost a hate word. But this does not seem to matter. Europe does not understand. Europe after all, is not only the home of the tradition of the Sacred King, but its victorious successor, the order of those who are “more-equal-than-others”. In short, the message from Brussels is that the Latvian political elite may continue to dumb down Latvia as the Latvians who served the Kremlin had done before them, just a little less obviously. They must do it “humanely” now, perhaps by encouraging the demographics of the country to go into a death spiral rather than sending Latvians off to the gulags. The old will get a pension cut to make them die sooner. Painful as all this may be to Latvians, the “more-equal-than-other” groups (whether in Latvia or elsewhere in Europe) will be in their life rafts and not feel the pain of Latvia’s catastrophe.

This is why the so-called “Bauska incident” with the Alfa special police unit rushing from Riga to confront ordinary men and women protesting the closing of their city’s hospital (not far from the Lithuanian border) is so telling. http://tinyurl.com/yl2psyq  The local police, unsure of how to confront their neighbors, was slow in clearing the bridges in Bauska. Traffic had been backing up for a few hours. Some truck drivers were said to have been angry. So, the local polioce was more than glad to let Alfa come and do the job for them. Even so, no one in the government has yet said or admitted who is responsible for such unseemly overreaction in what we are expected to presume is a “normal” country.

Alfa came dressed in black and plastic with only eyes showing, a force breathing the wrath of a parliamentary government serving business interests against an awakening Latvian populism. They carried no shields this time against which to bang their batons. Nevertheless, the repressive apparatus so impressed the government officials in Riga that the police plans an Alfa group in every region of Latvia now. This to ensure that the cordon sanitaire (also known as alienation) that exists between the elites and the folk who still make part of their living gathering wild mushrooms in forest clearings and cranberries in the swamps is not breached.

A vision of a future for Latvia has long escaped the Latvian politicians’ and bureaucrats for the simple reason that if they looked in their people’s faces, they would know that populism was rising and turning into bile. Yes, so better shove the head of government in sand and hope that the threat of violence will suffice and keep the government’s arse safe. Maybe like during the days of the Soviets, the men and women of the commons will keep their cool by getting dead drunk on “krutka”, elsewhere known as “moonshine”.

Liberal democracy has all the handles of the advertising and information media by being one with the advertising media. Just last week the media made a big to do about legalizing “wine”-making in Latvia on the farm or at home and selling same to the public. This was a clever way to play the climate warming trend in a country where the winters are still more wintry than not. Alas, the sovereignty of everyone’s subjective self is threatened not only by the ways of the neo-capitalist world as such, but also by the repressive spirit their own Latvian government breathes their way. Latvia is a good example of the result of neo-liberal democracy in action. The “free world”, which is under the leadership of the well known “more-equal-than-others” faithful, found ready friends among many here.

Another example (ad hominem): If I build myself a private temple to the Latvian arch-Christian Jahnis, the traveler-teacher—the one of many who once traveled the roads of the Latvian countryside—my effort goes unknown. Why? Because state supported radio broadcasts neo-Christian sermons just to prove that John still sits calm and collected in heaven under the name of Jesus, while John on Earth represents the lighter-than-Earth-brained-ancestors of Latvians, which Latvians are presumed to have been and become. There is no equal time for rebuttal, because I cannot afford it and the media celebrates year-round the victories of Latvia’s neo-liberal parliamentary democracy as if there is no other.

(There maybe a follow up on the theme in next blog.)

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

If you copy this blog for your own files, or to be forwarded, or its content is otherwise mentioned, please credit the author and http://esoschronicles.blogspot.com/

Copyright Eso Benjamins, aka Jaņdžs

NOT-VIOLENT TERROR
29 Not-Violent Populism (I)

The urban slum dwellers are over a billion people or 1/6th of the population. Another billion people, who overlap with the slum dwellers, are the informal working class. The latter is composed of the so-called “denizens” of the neocolonial city, the rag pickers, hawkers, child laborers, prostitutes, sweatshop workers, and like. Together these two peoples make for two billion people or roughly 1/3rd of the total human population of Earth.

Add to the aforementioned two billion unfortunates another billion of subsistence level rural workers, and we see that fully a half of the human population on Earth lives outside of the formal economy. As the word “denizen” indicates, these outsiders are not “citizens” in the sense of being among the politically accounted. Denizens are a people of no account. Many denizens live in dens, spaces below the ground level. If they also find their way to the above ground, they are found at such unlivable places as near-city swamps, desert dunes, decrepit lower-end housing projects, and railroad tracks.

As current global financial and economic difficulties prove, denizenship is not the affair of some third world republic trying to raise ostriches in the northern climate of Northern Europe. The problem is the result of a global systemic failure (think of an electric grid) at a time when things cannot be fixed as per usual—not even by a large country such as the United States of America or America, Europe, Japan, China, India, Russia put together. As the words “system failure” indicate, the fault is in the system, and it is reasonable to believe that the fault is part of the system from its inception. However, whereas the fault could perhaps have been corrected in the early days of the system, today the fault dominates and has become the system’s destroying angel.

No doubt, we are shocked, because we have an idea of what it means. If we do not believe that it means doom or The End, we suspect that we will die in great numbers, indeed in such great numbers till humankinds early death driven creativity returns. It is only then—after the great dying of those inside and outside the moneyed circles—that the dead will succeed in winning Utopia for those who remain. The dead will then reinstate a death that is again worthy of the starving Buddhist monk in sculptures in public places in far away lands in bygone times. (http://tinyurl.com/n6dwmv )

If one seeks to discover intelligence from another planet, one ought to begin with searching out one’s own. Even so, it is not possible to look and see one’s self when half the populations lives in mega cities that surround their habitat in a cocoon of virtual reality. It puts the populations of cities completely out of touch with the worm that airs root and soil.

An unwritten law of the mega city is a prohibition to discuss or encourage death. For example, death was not allowed as a subject matter between patient and doctor in Belgium before 1998. Because the law was changed at that time, an increase in requested euthanasia cases has been noted, though no great rush of them either. However, the numbers of deaths resulting from high doses of pain killing drugs have increased more significantly, because at the time of changes in the euthanasia law, restrictions against pain killing drugs, especially morphine, were also reduced. The latter, while easing pain also slows breathing. Be this as it may, what is important is that when it comes to determining one’s hour of death, the state presumes to have a greater right over you than you yourself. It is this very presumption that lies at the root of the system’s collapse and the anger of the destroying angel.

This series has argued that the Russian mathematician Anatoly Fomenko is quite right to say that history is chronologically accurate only since the 16th century. It was at that time that a historian named Scaligeri created the history of before the 16th century from fragments of uncertain chronology. Scaligeri glued the fragments together in such a way as to provide Roman Catholic ecclesiastics (who authorized Scaligeri’s chronology) with an antiquity they and their church otherwise had no right to. The one thousand years or so that the church gained because of Scaligeri’s manipulations increased its authority greatly. This is why the Catholic Church could present itself as time tested and the only religious authority worth taking seriously. With nothing more than force of bias (when needed enforced by the military, the arm of secularism that hid the mailed fist of neoChristendom), the neo-Christians could and did present archChristianity as a pseudo religion, pagan, and, thus, irrelevant.

Since Jesus replaced John (a native healer who healed with water), who was also the prototypical man wandering the Earth looking for Truth, Jesus (whoever he was) was made God and put in charge over the human species dumbed down by violence. As a result, John (sourced in Everyman) no longer had the psychological supports necessary to live the life of a self-sacrificial warrior saint and keep his followers from being turned into nobodies.

At this time, the people of “developed nations” are unaware that they, too, are the dumbed down ones. A reliance on the nuclear bomb has propped up for them the illusion of power and control for too long. Nevertheless, the people of the developed countries are becoming aware of the denial of death by their governments, and they have taken the first steps to check them. The manner of resistance may seem shocking, but on consideration, maybe it ought not to be. These steps of resistance take shape as assisted “suicides”. http://tinyurl.com/nasgtl


*The word “God” is in itself meaningless, but depends on its charisma by a collective subjective self, which is imposed on the collective from an outside, supposedly objective authority. The imposition of one subjective God over another is reflected in the words of Psalm 67: “Rise up O Lord, and may thy enemies be dispersed and those who hate thee be driven from thy face”. The “enemy” of God are the Johns of archChristendom, who have their own God Yan, one who is Everything within and outside of All in the now and the past.

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Copyright E. A. Benjamins aka Jaņdžs
NOT-VIOLENT TERROR
24 A Function of Awe

The civil war that began round about the year 1117, when Alexius I threw Basil (according to my theses also known as Jesus or John) into the pit of fire continues to this day.

After killing Basil (and the subsequent destruction of the empire of Alexius I by the French in a “Crusade”), Basil-John’s Holy Office was removed (1305) from Constantinople to Avignon. Seventy-three years later, in order to make the priesthood in Avignon look less French, the office was moved once more, this time to Rome. The Byzantine people were not happy, but perhaps this spiritual violence was mitigated by a promise that Basil-John would sit in Rome, where western princes would surely protect him from oriental despots like Alexius I. The protection, if such was offered, proved a lie. No Pope has ever sacrificed his life as John-Basil and his retinue of Johns routinely did before secular kings put them to death. Instead, the early popes—the brothers or in-laws of kings—called (actually renamed) John Jesus and wrote a new myth about his divinity.

While today neo-Christianity is a show that entertains a dead God, western thinkers stubbornly cling to western (Scaligarian and Petavian) chronology of history. Even atheists cannot shake off this lighter than air God and remain bound to a God, they claim not to believe in.

From the very beginning of this religious civil war, which essentially polarizes people in two economic camps, the allies of Jesus have had the upper hand. It is thus that they are able to impose on the world their version of the story-history of John. Indeed, the princes invented the story about Jesus we know. At the same time, this invention is the reason why the fire pit death of Basil is practically unknown.

The civil war is at its bloodiest today, even though to one of the economic poles it may appear to be bloodless. No matter how many thousands of images of dismembered and dead men, women, and children are shown on the internet and television they are as if not seen. This is because such scenes take place far away from the viewers living inside the protected zones of the powers-that-be.

Being the apparent winner of the civil war, the successors of Alexius I (symbols of state power and righteousness) claim to speak in the name of love and peace, and let the bloodguilt fall on unnamed secularist armies (their own and that of their enemies) as though these appeared outside the bounds of western foreign policies. Worse, the oligarchs (or their like) have not only killed Basil-John and changed his name to Jesus, but have installed Jesus-Basil as the ruler of heaven, where all his energies are consumed trying to sit on air.

Perhaps the “victory” of the successors of Alexius I will be carried forward yet another thousand years. However, there are reasons to doubt this. The torn social bonds that are the price of appearing to be victor of this war have turned the populace into an army of the dumb. This is not without its corrosive effects. Unable to resist the oligarchs, the poor play a waiting game. That is, they wait for the rich and their own to exhaust the resources of our planet, because it is only after the resources are exhausted will everyone be able to let the Earth go fallow and gradually resume a normal life again.

Poets, often true, but physically weak seers, have watched—real time and their mind’s eye—ignorant armies http://tinyurl.com/qk7mqr rush to be devoured by chaos http://tinyurl.com/2lhyc4 . Brazen men with brazen promises are in leadership positions http://tinyurl.com/pdujkd . Mountaintops (bald for loss of snow and forest cover) and deserts (jumping from Africa to Europe) have replaced the ancient Johns with Apocalypse sans Jesus in real time.

Waiting still, the poets see no sacrifice charismatic enough (whether by John, Jesus, or anonymous soldiers blowing their heads off in the field) to save humankind. Governments with high decibel sugars glaze all protests.

But wait! Is it not curious that the present winners of the civil war appear to hate most “suicide terrorists”? Is it not a “suicide terrorist” one who takes not only his-her own life, but the lives of everyone around, the lives of the innocent as well as the guilty? Does not such self-sacrifice speak of utter moral depravity, which gives the ruling elite moral authority by default? Most likely this is because the powers-that-be presume such moral authority as much as the terrorists do.

At this time, the losing side, the poverty stricken and superfluous, use tactics that they have learned from the winning elite, who camouflage their violence from the eyes of the ordinary citizens by controlling the communications media. We hear of remote controlled drones killing the opposition leader, but it takes a long time for the news to reach us that along with the leader, the dead include the bride, the groom, and most of the wedding guests. http://tinyurl.com/ncgx2m . While the tactics of both sides of the civil war are roughly the same and equally brutal, it nevertheless appears that only the side of the poverty-stricken and superfluous ones, has the option to practice true self-sacrifice. At a time when the internet is replacing newspapers, radio, and television as primary media as the disseminator of news and other information, the tools are available that will record and broadcast the self-sacrificial deed and censure it and keep it anonymous. The failure to express protest by using self-sacrificial death as a tool (what John-Basil-Jesus taught), may be seeing the end of its days.

Slavoy Žižek, a Slovenian philosopher and at this time the director of the Birbeck Institute in London, approvingly cites Brecht, the German playwright. Writes Brecht (in “Baden Learning Play on Consent”): “To encourage a man for his death, the interveningly thinking one (der eingreifend Denkende) asks him to give away his goods. When the man gives away everything, what is left over is only life. Give away more, says the thinking one.” The ‘interveningly thinking one’, one assumes, is one’s own inner voice. [No doubt, the language is a bit heavy.]

Žižek then writes (“The Monstrosity of Christ”, pp 300): “This ‘give more’ is a true ethical answer to the false spirit of sacrifice: it hits the narcissistic satisfaction provided by sacrifice in the eye. Brecht’s real target here is the pathetic gesture of sacrifice….”

Nevertheless, one may object: What if sacrifice is essential, a kind of mirror of the Big Other mentioned in a previous blog, so that human kind will be reminded of itself by reminding itself to mind, which reminder is essential to the formation of a larger-than-life or virtual society?

What if with the mirror, which reflects back to one one’s true terror of death, puts the same one in awe of the (“pathetic”) sacrifice and breaks down the refusal of one’s otherwise ungovernable ego to submit to the compromise that is necessary to create a society larger than one’s immediate family and intimates?

If you copy this or otherwise mention the content of this blog, please credit the author and http://esoschronicles.blogspot.com/

Copyright E. A. Benjamins aka Jaņdžs

NOT-VIOLENT TERROR
21 No Mirror, No Terror, No Consciousness

The second half of the 20th century saw newspaper articles and discussions on television about “leisure society” on almost a daily basis. The economist Maynard Keynes coined the idea of a leisure society in the early 1930s. From about the mid 1960s, the phrase seemed to be on everyone’s tongue. In the 1980s the talk stopped.

While the rich and well to do continued to enjoy their leisure, it was apparent that the mirror that mirrored the future—a mirror that reflected back to ordinary Americans the fantasies they projected forward—knew that leisure society was not to be after all. Rather, the future arrived as a gradual but steady economic decline loaded with ever-increasing anxiety and stress.

It is very possible that the mirror of the future reflects onto the mirror of the past, which then returns what it knows or sees of the past onto the future again. The innocent and unlearned are the ones trapped in the middle of this play of mirrors, while the not so innocent (the ones who have the power to manipulate) manipulate the mirrors in such a way that the theatre of Truth, the act of life, becomes a circus. While Daliesque distortions of images are possible under any circumstances, malicious distortions that benefit a small clique will, if practiced for a generation or more, cause the forgetting of the real and result in a catastrophe for all. Like it or not, the manipulators cannot influence the real (written with a small r rather than a large one), because it has its own agenda.

The real is limited by what it is. For the real nothing else is real but it. For example, the real accepts (lets happen) that a cat in realizing itself a real cat will hunt and catch mice. My cat obviously delights in catching mice. I can tell this by watching her in an excess of joy playing with the mouse she has caught, even when it is already dead. However, how can I really tell this is so? Actually, I cannot tell, but in the process of being a witness to what I am describing, I try to imagine being my cat. I try to mimic her feelings by a kind of inward dream process. Outwardly, I am horrified by what appears to be sadistic behavior. On the other hand, by imagining myself in my cat’s place (in dreaming myself to have become a cat), I stop myself from calling her a “bad cat”.

Something similar appears to be happening, when I dream of the hieros gamos ritual in a city and bar which I have never before visited. While my public self hesitates from acknowledging the dream as my own because of the moral laws of our civilization, my dreams protect me from humiliation by substituting for me another figure—a stranger. Only then does the dream proceed: the Goddess with the pearly breast and a man’s genitals comes to me to enact our union. Strangely, I become a curious bystander and a witness to someone else sucking the milk of kindness unhesitatingly offered by the Goddess. Thus, the cat hunts and kills, and I let nature take her course in spite of the censorship my conscious mind imposes on my cat’s kill.

Does perhaps death happen in the same manner? After I have done pleasuring my mother (as much as I may refuse to acknowledge any pleasure from living a life which ends in capital punishment), do we continue to embrace as lovers? My subconsciously created dream and my conscious projection of it through acknowledging its existence onto the mirror (the big Other), answers yes. This is why the real needs the big Other—even as we know the big Other is a mirror and an illusion.

To suggest as psychologists and philosophers Žižek and Lacan do, that full consciousness of the real does not need a mediator (heretofore known as God or “the big Other”) is like saying the body has no need of sleep. One common method of torture is sleep depravation, just as the easiest method of making a person look an idiot is to deprive him-her of a mirror.

The need for a big Other may be explained by a feature of the real that has heretofore gone unrecognized, but which we may call “the real of the undead”. That is, when we die, we enter a zone of activity that runs parallel to quantum mechanics: when because of dying a human being becomes a zero (0), he-she simultaneously crosses over, to a greater or lesser degree, to the minus (-) side, meaning that his-her activities take place in a negative environment. It means that the dead (0) become undead (-) and begin to reconstruct reality from scratch.

When after billions of light years of activity in minus territory, consciousness again arrives at zero (inevitable chance happening as understood by dandelion seeds flying over a large forest), he-she may cross over into plus territory. In effect, he-she eventually arrives at the limits of knowledge possible to arrive at by the minus side and which then self-instructs that time has come to try a quantum jump to the Other side. Once on the plus side, he-she again begins to figure out how the real fits together, then tries to advance the interests of consciousness with no less exertion of patience and not-violence than the undead.

Therefore, it is on the Other side (which ever side) that the real enters the evolutionary process, through which we arrive at an understanding of All, the Being that in the interim many knew only as God.

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