Eso’s Chronicles 340 / 16
Odds and Ends 
© Eso A.B.
All comments appearing within brackets [ ] are editorial in origin.

RE-POLARIZING GOD (5)!

Several of the threads of argument throughout these blogs have been a search for the Godhead. One of them was mentioned in the immediately preceding blogs:

1.    That since more than a thousand years ago, the seed of coercive government was planted through the institutionalization of taxation. Taxation should not be confused with gifting, which gifts were meant, for the most part, for the temple and its priesthood, the healers of body and soul.

2.    The institutionalization of taxation could not be accomplished without replacing the ‘old’ priesthood with a new and obedient one. The procedure of deinstitutionalization of old traditions is well known also today. It is called ‘regime change’, and is justified through arguments that claim that the ‘old’ regimes are authoritarian in nature, but the ‘new’ ones bring democracy. What occurs in fact is that the ‘new’ introduces a globalized fascist central government masquerading as democracy.

3.    The policy of regime change began with the replacement of the ancient temple authority, a de facto non-government, or a system where people governed themselves, and where the ‘non-government’ (consisting mostly of wandering healers) taught the people what was required to sustain self-government. This author traces this process to the Byzantine Empire and its Emperor Alexis I, who demonized and torched one such Temple authority: King John Basil under the pretext that he was a ‘heretic’ and headed a heretical ‘religion’ from a Temple known as the Temple of the Bogomils or God Lovers. Indeed there never was a ‘temple’, because the Bogomils worshipped in the wood, which they regarded as their temple.

4.    The Bogomils were in fact the first Kriste-ians, aka Children of Johns (Ians). In any event, John Basil, one of the better known Healers of the Kriste-ians, was persuaded by Emperor Alexis I to leave the wood and come to Byzantium. This was done under the pretext that Alexis was interested in John Basil’s ‘doctrine’ of self-government. When in Byzantium, the real Rome of the day, John Basil was quickly declared a heretic and arrested as an enemy of the Empire. A great pit was dug at the Hippodrome, which pit was filled with firewood, which was lit, and John Basil was made its first victim.

5.    Indeed, the Empire’s act of incinerating the Healer instituted the idea of God as an immortal presence in a Raum (German or Gothic for ‘space’, aka Roma). Whereas before this institutionalization of God, God had not existed as an ‘affirmative’ Being, because eternity was thought of in terms of reincarnation, that is to say, that the Mind itself was a kind of Godhead, an invisible soul or spirit that was not called God, because it was—to put it plainly—everywhere, and could float from body to body. This was why God is, to this day, easily imaginable as a Father figure or an “aged man, but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick, unless soul clap its hands and sing and louder sing for every tatter in its mortal dress….” (Yeats), and sing itself into an “artifice of eternity”.

6.    Once self-governance and the wood were eliminated by substituting these with a proto-capitalist King, a centralized government of a verbally asserted ‘democracy’, there necessarily arose many ideas of who God is, even though before that time, he had always been ‘an artifice of eternity’.

7.    Emperor Alexis I replaced John Basil, The Healer, who never supported the tax that was paid by slaughtering the Peoples reindeer herds for their fur, with a fictionalized Healer, whom he called Chez Jesus, aka Christ Jesus. It was to be the function of this regime change, that taxation was accepted and that God was to become a unipolar figure through Jesus.

8.    Today a Unipolar God has been made—at least in theory--the spiritual head of a globally centralized government under the aegis of Washington, D.C., Brussels, and a few other ‘chosen’ and obedient vassal cities. Washington continues the ‘crusades’ begun by the Goths, who were eventually driven from Byzantium by a rebellion of the people of the wood, assuming for themselves a new identity known as mohamedans. These Mohamedans-Muslims had been pulled together from a remnant of the people of the wood by one  Mohammed, behind which name we can easily discern the name of Yohan-med, or King John.

 

9.
It is interesting that the ‘terrorist’ adherents of Yohan-med appear not to fear death, even as their method of martyrdom leaves much to be desired—especially as it involves the death of many ‘innocent’ fools living in the desserts of capitalist cities. The short-comings of the martyr-followers of Yohan-med hinder the reversal of the contest for the authority of the God-head, but retains it in favor of post-modernist capitalism.
   

10.  The rationalization of taking the life of ‘another’, no matter how sophisticated the arguments may be, can never re-polarize Religion and reestablish it as a space in an equilibrium in which the Raum of the Wood retakes some of its lost space and resettles it with the reincarnated lives of the martyrs without the blame of innocent victims putting such a burden on their souls that they cannot rise from their graves, and remain not only half-dead and unreincarnated wanderers in the desert of the Dead, but make that desert a continuation of The Dead of The Urban Empire.

Eso’s Chronicles 330 / 6
Odds and Ends  
© Eso A.B.

CITY AND WOOD DO NOT RELATE (5 of 5)

The concerns about the warming of the climate pushed by the ‘greens’ of all shades is touching, but as we all can see—of no significance in effecting any ‘real’ changes on our planet.

The reason for this is simple, but escapes notice: people who live in an urban environment differ significantly from people who used to live in the environment of the wood or countryside farm. The processes of thinking in the two environments differ radically from one another.

While we keep hearing the urban ‘greens’ argue for a ‘better’ environment, we never hear them argue that our civilization’s ‘speedy’ ‘progress’ toward ‘negative horizon’* has to be stopped in its tracks if the environment is to be prevented from collapsing and life reduced to moth and worm.

The link below leads to environmental news from China, one of the worst polluters of our planet. That country’s leadership makes-believe that it brings us ‘good news’ by issuing a new environmental ‘law’ that may somehow curb the ‘progress’ of pollution the government achieved after the meeting of ‘Mao-Kissinger-Nixon’ in 1972.  

Try as they might to revive their of Confucian tradition http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/15/china-expected-to-elevate-environment_n_5150010.html?utm_hp_ref=green , it no longer stands for reason, if the government proceeds with its plans to move 100 million peasants from the countryside into cities by the year 2020 http://gizmodo.com/chinas-ambitious-plan-to-move-100-million-people-from-1545817164 .

The ‘greens’ of China, that is to say the International Confucian Ecological Alliance (ICEA) may solicit a hundred Harvard professors to invoke Confucius (and “the classic Chinese trinity of Heaven, Earth and Man”) times 24/7/365, but if they cannot think for themselves and change the word ‘man’ to ‘life’, today even Confucius becomes inconsequential; re: http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/831535.shtml#.U014dWeKA5g .

As I see it, the problem lies in making a switch from thinking communism through ‘progress’ to thinking communism through ‘autarchy’ and self-sufficiency.

This, of course, applies to all countries. The failure of the U.S. economy ought to be a shining example of what ‘progress’ as thoughtless capitalism leads to http://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2014/04/14/the-homeless-in-nyc-are-now-living-in-tiny-spaces-in-the-frame-of-the-manhattan-bridge/ .

Virilio argues that the “negative horizon” has been instituted by a State dedicated to “indefinitely perpetuating extermination”. He explains that the ‘extermination’ began with “Athenian autochthony… [and] a ceremony leading the panathenaeans up the Acropolis from the cemetery of the Kreameikos, from birth to the public death of these ‘sons of the fatherland, for whom time is annulled in the irrevocable return from the end to the origin”.**

Perhaps my criticism of Virilio is contained in the fact that I am unwilling to follow the neo-elite of our times to whatever their Acropolis. This means that I would be gripped by fear strong enough to cause me to step out of the line winding its way up-hill and run down the hill instead.

Rather, than return to the cemetery of the Kreameikos, I am hoping that I will be intercepted by the ‘deforested’ wood ‘miraculously’ resurrecting itself before my sight and step, and that with the genes of an ancient Slav in my blood, I would fall on my knees and praise God and Mother Earth.

Yes, a humankind practicing autarchy will think radically different from todays ‘best and brightest’. And, yes, such radical thinking is necessary, but will not come without an imposition of autarchic regimes the world over. Like my sudden fall on my knees, the sylvan environment necessarily encourages superstition and fearlessness before the scientific criminals from MIT, Silicon Valley, and Southern Cal and, who knows, where else.

But how are we to make this sudden transition from violent urban capitalism to a peaceful sylvan autarhy?

I believe that we must remember the old say by John (also  Jesus): “…for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword (Matthew 26:52, King James).

As I have argued in numerous blogs, the sword was first brought to autarchic civilizations of the wood by the Vikings fleeing the harsh environment of Scandinavia by the river routes provided by the Volga, Dniepr, Donau, and other. The rivers led the demoralized herders back to the regions of the Black Sea where they had originally come from. It is worth noting that upon their return the once peaceful herders (Johns) had become zhans d' armes (from Dutch), i.e. armed men taking suck of blood rather than reindeer milk.

Instead of milking reindeer, the Vikings now killed them for their fur and instituted a thousand year long Reich of taxation. And the men and women of the wood who resisted them, they raped and then killed, forcing their descendants to take up arms, and thus creating an armed civilization. They also substituted the religion of Gods and God of the people of the wood with an agod (? Godo) born of the city in the desert.

It is not a coincidence that the forces of NATO today are led by a presumptuous Dane named Rasmussen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Fogh_Rasmussen#NATO_Secretary_General , and that this man is telling the Slavs that they are making “a historic mistake” http://www.dw.de/natos-rasmussen-warns-russia-against-historic-mistake-in-ukraine/a-17550618 by presuming the Ukraine a territory of their historical past.

It is neither Rasmussen or all the universities of the West put together that know what their history is, and that the history that they pretend is all a lie and a violence. Today history in the Ukraine acts on a psychosomatic disorder all its own.

*A term first used by Paul Virilio in the title of his book “L’Horizon Negatif”,  1984.

** Ibid, p. 175.

Eso’s Chronicles 274 / 14
34—Deaded Historians
© Eso A.B.
All comments appearing within brackets [ ] are editorial in origin.

All those who support globalization do not support nationalism, or community solidarity. The latter is a different animal. “Globalization” is of course the most recent name for the virus that was to become the bubonic plague of the post-America world order, also known as NWO or New World Order.

There are many theories of how the word came into being. Some claim that it was hatched by the Bilderberg group. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10102168/Bilderberg-Group-No-conspiracy-just-the-most-influential-group-in-the-world.html  Yet others say that it was from the Free Masons, a group that began in Britain and preceeded the Bilderbergs by centuries http://www.amazon.com/Builders-Empire-Freemasons-Imperialism-1717-1927/dp/0807830887 and made significant contributions to the process of building empires. As the building of empires proved successful for some, others, too, jumped aboard and added to the hymn that  began with the words: “The bigger the better”, words—“…is more the better.”

But with that the Freemasons encountered troubles. The world was not big enough to hold all who wanted to be bigger, and this is where the next revolution began: the words ‘bigger’ and ‘more’ were exchanged for words such as: One World, The New World Order, The Free World, A Democratic World, and last, but not least, Globalization. At this point everyone knew that the Moove-ment toward Globalization began in Europe sometime long ago, and that it remains to this today closely associated with what the writer Hemingway once called the “haves”—people who always want to have more and bigger things.

The first ‘haves’ ever were of course princes or children of Kings, who had slain their father, who had been King, and who for that reason had it ALL, but never thought of it as a toy. One of the oldest European myths about Uranus tells that the Olympic Gods of the Greeks actually came into being after years of contesting for power with their father http://ancienthistory.about.com/library/weekly/aa011398.htm. The same myth is reflected in the English story of how the English Barons won the Magna Harta (1215) from King John, who they did not kill, but tortured long and painfully (this part of the story has been deliberately lost) until the old King gave up his power for a retirement income http://minbaralhurriyya.org/h/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/qu-est-ce-que-le-liberalisme-classique_pic.jpg . Notice the clubs in the hands of the barons (one in front of and another behind the King) and the unidentified mob of military men surrounding the tent. Proclaimed as a Great Document of Liberty, the Magna Harta, the document that King John signed, the document was not actually such. It did become such, for a little more than a century, following the rise of the Age of Enlightenment and after the Industrial Age had caused havoc eliminating all the independent weavers of the countryside and moved them to live in the city slums. At the time of signing, the Magna Harta was a document of any meaning only for the barons.

However, as I note through out my blogs, the rise of ‘democracy’ as a welcome political system may be viewed as such only while the situation of the lands (America, not Europe) was such that it was for anyone’s taking, and jobs were plenty and the pay good. When one was up against a dead-end on the east coast of America, one could steal a horse from a farmer and keep riding West until one came to California and found a creek at the bottom of which lay gold.

Today, with the environment polluted, the oceans irradiated from nuclear power stations spilling radiation, and desk top machines that will make anything but a brain one can trust, ‘democracy’ again serves only a few, some say no more than 0.01% of the total population.

This is why more and more people are looking for a history that explains in greater detail why what is falling into the sea are mostly hot air balloons? Why is it that the hot air has cooled so suddenly? Why with all that fiat money being pumped into the ‘system’, the system will not refloat? Why is it that we must again learn that wet money is not something a supermarket cashier will accept gladly, but will ask you for a card that you don’t have, because according to the government, you are but a subjective mind, a hubris, one full of yourself, and not objective as you ought to be, according to which you are but a deaded bling?

So what about history?

Why do we have to listen to the historians lie (like chickens that have their beaks pressed to the white line laid by government) that democracy began in ancient Athens, when it was in existence for many thousands of years before in the wood?

Why are we not told by historians that the first taxes were extorted from people who survived off grazing animals and the milk buffalo cows and mares gave?

Why are anthropologists not telling that humans were not hunters (but only root gatherers and herders) until the barons started levying them with pelt taxes, which forced our forebears to drive their beloved herds off steep cliffs en masse?

Why are historians not telling that there was no such thing as agriculture, until the barons figured out that they could collect from agriculturalists more in taxes than animal herders?

Why do we not hear that slavery did not exist when we lived in the wood, but began only with the arrival of ‘agriculture’?

Why are we not told that the polluters of the environment are urban centers built and developed by 0.01% of the population? Would not the Earth return to wood if we eliminate the deserts that are cities?

Why are we not told that our ‘primitive’ forebears had a better economic system than the Ponzi scheme set up under the Federal Reserve? 

http://melnaysjanis.blogspot.com/2010/06/temple-of-melnays-janis-temple-of-black.html Scroll down to Older Posts if you liked this one.

Eso’s Chronicles 244/ 30
Addendum 5—Ecce Russia  IV?
© Eso A.B.

Though at this time Russia appears to have chosen the capitalist road to recovery and President Putin appears to be opposing the U.S. and NATO incursions into the territories of Russia’s former Empire as a reactionary and face-saving measure, perhaps for that very reason it carries little weight with anyone who looks at the future of capitalism with a critical and skeptical eye.

Likewise, the current demonstrations in Kiev, Ukraine http://rt.com/news/ukraine-protests-court-ban-538/ , in opposition to Ukraine President Yanukovich’s decision not to integrate into the EU economy fails to carry conviction for an outside observer opposed to globalization. There are several reasons for skepticism:

1)    on a superficial level centralization seems to have its advantages in the sense of being able to impose its authority over a wide area and, therefore, has wider support at least among the elite groups who share benefits with the center. However, its authority is weak, and appears to be choking on a fish bone stuck in its throat, because all the economic measures governments appear to be able to take involve diminishing returns for the public at large;

2)    while the EU and the West as a whole appear to be putting their bets on a future that continues to reflect an urbanized ‘Pop’ culture, there are good reasons to believe that this era of our ‘future’ has spent itself and is about ready to drop dead;

3)    from the geopolitical point of view, it is hard to deny that it appears that the West is expending an enormous amount of its resources in an attempt to surround Russia and China with military bases, and that it behooves the self-interest Russia and China to push back, even if at the expense of the nations along their borders, which, for reasons of their own, may prefer to be in the Western camp.

It is for reasons like the above why this writer, whose family roots are deeply set and identified with the spiritual, cultural, and economic recovery of one of these ‘border’ countries –Latvia—looks with expectant eyes more to the East than the West. At the same time, I see the call of some Ukranians for a “Revolution” http://rt.com/news/ukraine-protests-court-ban-538/ as nihilism of the nondeveloped (Paul Virillio’s term; see previous blog) readily subcumbing to capitalisms advertisement for itself as a result of overexposure to an urban lifestyle.

The fact that the city has replaced the nation (see blog 243) has set the stage for a Civil War, except that the war cannot be waged in terms of defense (because that war has already been lost), but must be waged to win. To win this civil war means for one of the sides to wait for the circumstances when the present victor falls to his knees through a lucky stroke delivered by an existential circumstance that is fortuitous for the health of our planet and decisively persuasive of the failure of liberal capitalism as an incontrovertible economic necessity. Of course, if one is able to analyze the existential weakness of the opponent with sufficient perspicacity http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-11-30/russell-napier-we-are-eve-deflationary-shock  for it to be persuasive, then the stroke against the back of the opponents’ knees may be delivered before the ‘act of God’ happens.

My readers know that for a long time now I have put the city and the wood at opposite poles. This is because I perceive the wood as a cross of animal and human characteristics, while I see the city as an artifice, where the latter is escaped (to some degree) only by the ruling elites, because these can indulge their animal instincts, whereas the majority of the city’s inhabitants are either slaves-castrates, soldiers, priests-astrologers, or concubines. It is in the artifice of the latter elite that politics has its beginnings as a dream-remembrance of life in the wood. Unfortunately, in the city the dream of democracy, unlike democracy in the wood, must always remain an ideal and beyond anyone’s ability to actually achieve.

Interestingly, life in the city imposes itself and imitates reality so persuasively that—even if the individual has spent his-her early years in the wood or the countryside—the community presumes its self-absorbtion to be natural and to always have been so. It is for this reason why the difference between life in the wood and the city does not become immediately apparent to those who live in one or the other sphere exclusively.

The above was dramatically illustrated by the Bolsheviks vs the peasants in the Russian Revolution, and is ever so briefly mentioned in the movie “Stalin” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxP7FNX2nqk (57-1:2.30), starring Robert Duvall. We note that as far as Stalin is concerned, it is the city people who have the priority over the people of the countryside and the wood. Though one can argue, with justification, that the reason the city had priority was because it was in the city that the factories were located and factory workers lived, and these had priority, because unless the Soviet Union industrialized quickly the West would soon take the opportunity to destroy it, yet an opposite perception was never advertised or allowed to surface either in the Soviet Union or in the West. The only ‘revolutionary’ deed enforced by the Bolshevik Party is that it never permitted consumerism (a capitalist priority) to ever take hold in the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, the prioritization of the city over the countryside and the wood became so ingrained in the Soviet mentality that as soon as the Soviet Union fell in 1991, the consumer mentality of its city people by way of Khrushchev seized the day, and party apparatchiks became the billionaires of ‘renewed’ Russia.

Even today, the Russian Times (RT), an internet news service, assumes that post-Soviet Russia is essentially in the capitalist camp, re: http://rt.com/op-edge/globalization-us-china-rivalry-478/ “…both Russia and China understand(ood) that as an economic, political and social program, Western Marxist ideology does not work, and both did well to rid themselves of it, even if in different ways.”

Which raises the question: Is an economy distinguished by whether it is East, West, North, or South, or whether it is between those who live in the wood or the city?

Eso’s Chronicles 243/ 29
Addendum 5—Ecce Kiev, Ukraine?
© Eso A.B.

When the stock market bubble of 1929 corrected itself, it fell 48%. I have heard say that when the present QE caused bubble corrects itself, it will fall by 40%. I believe that it is too optimistic an estimate by far. So, to set the reader up to be receptive to my ideas, I suggest the reader take 32 minutes and view the following clip with Grant Williams, dubbed an investment expert. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-11-30/grant-williams-flushing-impurities-qe-system . Though Mr. Grant’s perspective meshes with mine, I believe that in spite of his ‘realistic’ assessment of the present investment climate, he is far too optimistic; which means that I expect the economic climate in the world to deteriorate by some 80%. This of course means that our future will not look anything like what most of us know as the past in our lifetimes and that many of us, in fact, have no future to look forward to.

As I have been pointing out through many blogs, the foundations of the coming disaster were first constructed by the ‘liberalist’ princes about a thousand and a little more years ago, originating with the Viking robber barons, who—came fall and winter time—left their abodes in harsh northern Europe en masse to go Viking (wading) south—down the Volga, the Dniepr, the Don, Danube, and other Europeans rivers flowing south. As these Goths went south, they not only plundered, but took captive many sacred kings and held their life for a ransom. In time, the ransom evolved into a system of taxation, which held up the human population for ransom to whoever did the tax ordering and collecting.

If—as I theorize and suggest—the time before the Vikings was what Western anthropologists call the ‘dream time’ of the East and the West https://www.google.lv/search?q=aboriginal+dreamtime&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=FgSbUrPAJ4PPhAeCw4HgCQ&ved=0CEoQsAQ&biw=1093&bih=415 , a name first used for the space-time of the Australian aborigines, this ‘dream time’ (perhaps also ‘sweet sleep time’) was interrupted with a spear point thrust to the sleepers’ throats and, in case we moved and protested, actually thrust into our ribcage.

By today the descendants of this dream time have discovered and built by traveling down a highway known as Colonial Times another ‘dream time’ called America; and youths of Eastern Europe, including the Ukraine, riot for more of it http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-25173719 in great numbers with a great number of politicians supporting them. The demonstrators in Kiev, Ukraine increasingly look like Black Friday consumer rioters at a Walmart in the U.S.

The rioters who are rioting today in the Ukraine and elsewhere, are--whether they know it or not--rioting in support of the violent tactics of the Vikings, re: violence to remove the peace, calm, and in-the-wood environment for that of the consumer product trashed deserts of modern cities and surrender the future of our planet for the que sera sera of an opium pipe dream.

For a brief look at the history of the city: it began as a temple in the wood: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2252364/The-lost-churches-Russia-The-abandoned-wooden-buildings-left-forgotten-forests.html Sometimes other buildings began to accrue around the church, perhaps of people seeking the protection of the gods on whose behalf the temples-churches were built, perhaps as convenient meeting places for men and monks about to defend their homeland. In the images of the abandoned Russian churches at the link above, we clearly see that their builders perceived them as existing in dream time. Indeed, the dream time (without being acknowledged as such) continues to exist at the very center of today’s Moscow as part of the Kremlin complex: Pokrovsky or St. Basil’s Cathedral http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Basil's_Cathedral .

Unfortunately, it did not take long before ambitious princes perceived the tactical advantages of a centralized place, re temple, fortified temple, castle, walled city, until today the city, having deforested its surround, is protected by the fact that it is a humongous entity of stone, bricks, concrete, and glass. As Paul Virillio says: “…the city has replaced the nation;”* moreover, the city is not only killing the nation (Riga in Latvia—despite its shrinking population--is a good example) and devouring our biological planet.

Now the progression from temple in the wood to a megalopolis may not make any sense, except when we realize that its momentum comes from its violence and ability to force the biological countryside (including people residing in it) to its will. If we take the American spy agency NSA as an example, the city today has progressed to the point that it can extend nodes of itself into even the wood or field http://nsabackups.com/about/_images/pg_hi_res/nsa_aerial.jpg , and use these ‘hidden’ nodes to invade the last abode of the wood and the wild: the subjective mind of human beings and cause its elimination by subjecting it to terror by exposure that is as  powerful, aka deadly as the eye of the Holy Trinity.

*Paul Virillio/ Sylvere Lotringer, “Pure War 25 Years Later” (p211).

Eso’s Chronicles 231/ 2
Urban Blitz 02
© Eso A.B.

Any geopolitical overview of post-Soviet Eastern Europe, the Baltic countries especially, runs up against a glass shield that has been firmly placed between the economic realities as they are for the majority of the Balts with their boots on the ground (formerly the sod), and the intelligentsia (political and literary), the passive support of the perma frosted urban mindset and brain activity that guars urban life at the expense of life on our planet.

The link between the urbanite and the intelligentsia (intelligence services?) goes back a long way, perhaps as far back as Buddha, when his maharajah father had the castle guards open the gates for the young prince to go visit a young maid named Amrita, who lived in a leaf hut in a subtropical wood. The maharajah was anxious to debrief the young prince upon his return—not about his sexual escapades with Amrita, but about what sort of weapons the brothers of he maid had stacked against the walls of the shack.

The reason why the maharajah needed to have this information was because he planned to increase the size of his castle grounds by another 1500 housing units. To get this done, he needed to cut down a sizeable area of the wood that surrounded his castle. As it was likely to happen, Amrita and her family, too, were to lose their humble abode. The maharajah authorized his son to offer the family a shack along the outer walls of his court if they offered to provide him with information about possible resistance.

When the maid learned from the young prince the reason for his questions, while young Buddha’s head lay in her lap, the young maid placed a long nail against his ear and hit it hard with  hammer. This was the end of Buddha who was innocent and in no way to blame. Unfortunately, this marked only the beginning of the forest peoples’ troubles, who were immediately labeled ‘terrorists’. As soon as the maharajah recovered from his shock, he sent his army into the surrounding wood and cut down all the wood that grew around the castle at least a hundred yards deep. A famous story from India recounts what actually happened on the day when the maharajah sent his soldiers into the wood http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khejarli .

This terrible story repeats itself to this day. The Latvian State Forestry Service relentlessly advertises that the Latvian Wood is in fine shape, while all around the countryside, wherever the people have trees on their private property, the trees are relentlessly disappearing, because the people are forced into cutting them to cover the increasing taxes that force them out of their homes. The urbanites offer them subsidized apartments in the city, which are—as thousands of elderly people are discovering—without heat, health services, or any chance of escape other than by alcohol, or death, or both, hopefully, into a kinder parallel universe.

The urbanites are a dogmatic people, who once inside the gates of a castle become so dependent on the price’s graces, that they side with ever increasing vehemence with the prince and set themselves against subsistence gardeners in the wood. No mercies can be expected from urbanites by countryside people then or now. The countryside persons today, whether in Latvia, Russia, China, or America are completely subject to urbanite exploitation, illustrated by their treatment of horses during WW2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horses_in_World_War_II.

The pathological behavior or urbanites is vigorously denied by human rights activists, who justify their self-righteous behavior by arguing that they manifest humaneness to the highest degree. Actually, it is simply carrying on with the traditions of brutality behind an additional curtain.

Whenever anyone wonders why the Balts are so passive in opposing the dogmatic orientation of their governments, one ought to remember the characteristics of urbanism. The orientation of the Latvian government—of a Parliamentary nature--so obviously runs against the economic interests of the common people, that its very humanity is in question.

Instead, a tsunami like wall rolls forward on a debris of opinion that the Baltic people have been from the beginning of time oriented toward the West and that they despise the Russians (as heirs to all things Soviet) with every ounce of native spirit they possess. This of course is simply a lie. The very first self-acknowledged Latvian, Krishyanis Waldemahrs, who as a student dared put next to his name the designation: ‘a Latvian’, worked as a journalist in St. Petersburg, led ‘The Young Latvians’ movement, and was among those who believed that the Latvians of his day should be a more or less autonomous community within a united Russia. Indeed, Waldemars was strongly opposed to the feudal system of government then still advocated by the ruling caste of Germans.

With such a gossamer embrace of the West never questioned during the last twenty-one years of ‘renewed’ Latvian independence, the government of Latvia stands 100% for all things urban and Western: membership of NATO, membership and federalization within the EU, capitalism, urbanization, glass and cage-like castles, and elimination of small farms. As for the last, this is the reason why up to 25% of all Latvians have emigrated from the country as economic refugees, which is considerably more than the number of Latvians who fled the advance of the Soviet Army, which returned to reoccupy Latvia within a year after the defeat of the Germans at Kursk.

I certainly do not wish to deny that the Soviet order that followed for the next forty-five (45) years did not traumatize the Latvian sense of self-worth and autonomy. However, I do not wish to diminish the benefits of Latvia’s federalization within the Soviet Union. While the Ulmanis regime of independent Latvia had done much to advance the interests of the Latvian middle class, the economic problems of the country were not to be solved by short=term measures. The occupation of the Soviets was a quid pro quo: on the one hand the Soviets advanced the Latvian underclass, which was extensive, while on other hand, the Latvian middle class suffered a significant decline. The West notably added to this decline, by forcing the Soviet Union to put much of its resources in military armament. While many Latvians excelled in the areas of he arts and academia of the Soviet Union, these breakthroughs were insufficient to advance the awareness of Latvians as a micro community it had been in antiquity or since the revival of the community by the Herrnhuter movement after its collapse as the community following the Great Northern War http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Great_Northern_War_Baltic_Theater.png, which ended in the first decade of the 18^th century.

Not surprisingly, the collapse of the Soviet Union and government put into leading positions not what had been the underclass, because it was insufficiently educated and autonomy oriented, nor anything resembling a Western middle class, but the Soviet apparatchiks, who while not particularly educated, had leadership experience and little in the way of obstacles to prevent easy intrusion into areas occupied, in the West, by the middle class, neoliberal enterprisers, and politicians.

Western intelligence services (it is my guess) did not sleep. The Soviet Union was criticized and belittled at every turn. NATO or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a military alliance presumed to oppose the Soviet Union, quickly reoriented itself and attempted to gain further advantages vis a vis Russia. Western corporations attempted to infiltrate or seize Russian businesses by means of the law. Many advisers to such corporations were from Eastern Europe. They were not to be outdone by older advisors such as Zbigniev Brzezinski (see blog 217) from Poland, who served the United States as a National Security Advisor.

As readers of my blogs know, I am neither pro Western nor anti Eastern. If it comes to my preference, I rather chose the East over the West, because to my mind the recent past of the Balts relates closer to that of the communities of the East than the West—even though one would never guess that this is so from the information one gathers in the media and the actions of government.

As the reader can see, this is a long story during the telling of which I have almost forgot that I am supposed to write about the coming New Battle of Kursk, and that the northeast of Europe forms the northern flank of the Kursk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Kursk salient. So, why did I choose the name ‘Kursk’? Because next to Hiroshima, it is one of the great cataclysmic slaughter fields of all time and more is coming.