Eso’s Chronicles 273 / 13

33—What Does ‘Deaded’ Mean?

© Eso A.B.

All comments appearing within brackets [ ] are editorial in origin.

 

The dictionary tells that the word “deaded” means to be singled out. Someone on the internet originates the word in the year 2003 http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=deaded . The reader may imagine it as deriving from the word ‘dead’. The dead ‘deaded’ means the dead have been made dead—they have for some reason been singled out—by an activating agency. There is a killing agency loose somewhere that ‘deads’ those it encounters.

 

While the word ‘dead’ stands for a state of being. that is to say, someone whose state of being was to be alive once, has been  turned into a non-being, deaded; at the same time ‘deaded’ suggests a state of dead but not quite, but deaded only. I see deaded subjects all about me. The visibility of the ‘deaded’ depends on one’s perspective on life and society. It appears to be the normal of our time.

 

Surely, the most deaded thing is a politician and a bureaucrat. Yet I would also include among them scientists and interviewers.

 

The first two of the mentioned (politicians and bureaucrats) are the living dead that sit in a chairs and draw pay for making look like manikins. We have seen them http://www.pinterest.com/pin/314829830170627051/ . The same manikins (are they?), when imagined as homo sacer (“the man who cannot be murdered, sacrificed, but only killed”), enter into our dreams as deads http://www.pinterest.com/pin/314829830170517322/ . Most of us hardly notice how little the world changes if these deads, aka homo sacers. are in fact killed. Is this because being ‘deaded’ is the nature of post-modern humans? In that context, the following clip is worth watching, at least from the 34^th minute forward https://www.youtube.com/user/VPROinternational?feature=watch .

 

Let us assume that it is in the nature of post-moderns to turn old cemetaries into new towns. Then what is this ‘nature’ of the post-modern? Is the ‘nature’ of post-moderns to arrive into the world already deaded? http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/53/City-of-the-Dead.jpg Well, yes, maybe, but probably not.

 

But it is likely that as soon as we arrive in this world, we are as soon abandoned http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/photography-blog/2013/may/29/china-baby-59-rescue-ultimate-abandonment . This is not the fault of the mother, but circumstances the mother is exposed to. While poverty plays a large role, the way I see it, it is more often the result of a broken community, which is a fact written all over the face of Latvia, my country, and if we look closer, also the rest of the post-modern world. The ‘broken’ state of the community is the result of living in an alleged age of ‘reason’, where culture is made by money. And while much of the responsibility goes to politics, politicians, and capitalist sponsors, no less responsible for it are the priests of the age: scientists.

 

In fact, it is the scientists who are the least morally responsible humans of our age. It is the scientists, who—like the Western Christian priests who lived befogged by the myth of Jesus of the Middle Ages—live most befogged by the myth of an all powerful science. It is these well paid ‘motherfxs’ who along with their laboratory staff (the altar boys and girls of the church) perpetuate the myth that all is right with science and if something is missing, it will be better by tomorrow.

 

Because generalities alone spread only prejudice, let me tell of the mindset of a myth befogged scientist (remains unnamed) of considerable standing, the myths he perpetuates, and his interviewer. While I take little issue with the scientist’s observations in his field (I find them interesting), nevertheless, his seeming unconsciousness of the ramifications of his subjective speculations (which go ever unchallenged by the interviewer) tell of human beings abysmally limited in their concerns and raise questions about their nature as a being with ‘brains’. The information is from a recent interview in a Latvian journal, which not surprisingly specializes in issues irrelevant to Latvians as a community.

 

Since the issues are many, here is a sample of what a ‘scientist’ thinks about tomorrow even as millions of people on our planet live in poverty and physical misery.

 

Scientist X (my translation): “We already have the technology to feed nine billion people and to secure for them a comfortable life-style. But the international political scene does not respond to even elementary ethics—for example, how to improve the life-style for the poorest billion of the population. I am an optimist when it comes to believing that we can create a world where no one suffers from hunger, where everyone may gain benefits from modern technology and globalization. Nevertheless, I am no optimist when it comes to seeing this actually happen; which is why I believe that it is important to speak about the (optimistic) scenarios, so that people at least know that it is in our power to overcome our problems.”

 

Interviewer X: “A linguist from Los Angeles told me that the only thing that will remain of our civilization are gravestones. All the information in our computers will be wiped out in one electro-magnetic storm. How concerned are you that we save our knowledge in increasingly unsafe data conservation devices?”

 

Scientist X: “…I think it is wonderful that 600 million people in Africa have mobile telephones… I agree with you that we should insure our data in more secure data libraries in the event of a cathestrophe….”

 

The interview thusly staggers from one topic to another, never stopping at one issue long enough to analyze its implications or truthiness. For example, does not ‘globalization’ demand the suppression of human subjectivity in favour of the all seeing triangular eye now being implemented by the NSA (National Security Agency)? Are not the billion poor, therefore, the only insurance that we have against the greed of government protected bankers?

 

The Saw Cross https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPI4FceVgDDSuUxIJcVFT6TfjBf6IQwE5T0nZB9xmrUUFmPppkD7WJte8Z2M4Hr6pCOlMRAGQ34oPcCr8n3WQK-j-acV7Yrd0kWyLS6qNQrRzzKrt2dsS-iDrr3GVqgtgSkpeSzXxbAc0i/s220-h/DSCF7743.JPG

 

Eso’s Chronicles 272 / 12
32—Latvia Deaded
© Eso A.B.
All comments appearing within brackets [ ] are editorial in origin.

When I was still a child, Latvia was still a smelly country. It was difficult to escape this phenomenon, unless one was born in a wealthy family. This, indeed, was my good luck, but, unfortunately, this ‘luck’ lasted only until I was eight years old. When I got to that age, those terrible Ruskies (actually of the Soviet Union) took over the country, and all my family had was taken from it, and within about a year eight of them were shipped to the gulags (including my Russian maternal grandmother and aunt).

To try save what he could, my father (a newspaper editor) sent his family to the smelly Latvian countryside, where one of his aunts (his mother’s sister) and her husband owned a farm. It was summer time. The barn, a complex of two buildings was less than fifty yards from the main house. It housed twenty-five cows, a dozen horses, thirty-five sheep, a dozen pigs, and a henhouse that included ducks. The feature on the kitchen table was amanita muskaria or the fly agaric, its cap lay flat on a white dinner plate with its under side immersed in purplish alcohol. This was meant for the flies, which lay dead on the plate around the mushroom by the dozen.

In about a week’s time, after becoming familiar with all the farm’s inhabitants and having walked the wood surrounding it, I was apprenticed to the cow herd, who was the thirteen years old stepson of my aunt, and was deemed too valuable a hand to waste his time looking after the farm animals that were let out in the morning from the barn to graze in the fields and returned hence in the evening. I was to take over the job as soon as I had lost my fear of the cows and gained enough confidence to stand up to the dozen or so horses that were not hesitant to take advantage to boldly come up to me and give me a push with their nose out of sheer curiosity: Whuur you?

Anyhow, I was to be in charge of (including the sheep) and the shepherd dog of over seventy farm animals. I viewed it as quite a promotion and advance in status, when only a month or so before, I had myself been the charge of a nanny, a young woman, who had not yet left the country under Hitler’s out-migration program for those of German descent.

I give this lengthy account, because only a few days ago, a Latvian internet site carried an as if outraged account of how the Bloomberg news service had stated that the Latvian metal euro featured on the face of it a “milk maid”, that is, a maid who milked cows. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-31/latvia-becomes-18th-euro-area-member-as-public-animosity-lingers.html Bloomberg is said to have later changed the description of the figure to that of a “Folk Maid”*. Not a few email respondents protested such low regard for the sensibilities of the Latvian urbanites. After all, in only twenty-two years of independence, the Latvian government has almost destroyed Latvia’s formerly robust countryside culture, and made the people (at least 300,000) become economic refugees in other European countries or move to Riga, the capital, where they either become impoverished urbanites or brainwashed molecules carrying a happiness virus for all things of consumerist nature. The authoritarian manner of introducing of the Euro, too, is designed to make Latvians forget their biocentered origins in favour of the EU urban melting pot.

The ‘public animosity’ to the euro, mentioned by the Bloomberg link, is a mild word for the outrage some Latvians feel toward their own government for deconstructing their culture and replacing it with Nothing, certainly no significant economic development except as advertisement of promises that consumerism is about to recover without fail, and the PM, under whose government the Latvian money, the lats, was abandoned and the euro introduced, is soon likely to leave the country for, as the urbanites so proudly claim, a bureaucrat’s job in Brussels.

Since the destruction of Eastern Europe has not a little to do with American Foreign policy, with significant contributions from the likes of Harvard Business School and professor Jeffrey Sachs (see previous blog for more), this writer (a Latvian and American citizen) wishes the pox on American foreign policy: May the ‘polar vortex’  http://rt.com/usa/us-canada-weather-snow-191/ do its deconstructive best on the American cityscape, and may the semi-urban countryside reclaim the wood it abandoned in favour of urbanite Wall Street’s worthless promises.

* “Folk maid”—there is no such maid in Latvia. There used to be “the Sun’s daughters”, who used to dress in what are now called “folk costumes” http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/young-woman-folk-dress-5688241.jpg . Actually, these ‘folk costumes’ are the dress of the once deified Sun’s priestesses. The globalization theology of the Christian church forced the Latvians to abandon their culture in favour of a religion invented by princes from the West.

Eso’s Chronicles 271 / 11
31—Our Deodorized Elite
© Eso A.B.
All comments appearing within brackets [ ] are editorial in origin. This series begins with Blog 264.

OUR DEODORIZED ELITE

With the arrival of a Christianity with pretentions to globalization (actually Catholization; originally meaning ‘universalization’ today exchanged for ‘globalization’) acame also written law and dogma--the first evidence of which in the West began with is the Code of Hammurabi http://img.docstoccdn.com/thumb/orig/37137458.png , which through the evolution of the idea of putting everything into writing (thus causing writing to become an objective ‘thing’) ultimately shaped the West as we know it today: something of a blank page, a desert actually, but decreed to be a ‘thing’ through the magic of legislation by a ‘democratic’ body that decreed Nature subject to human will that was willing to accomplishing its will through violence. We ought note, that the link above dates the cutting of the stone as 1280 AD, whereas the Magna Carta that deposed the the English King was cut in 1215 AD, a gap of 65 years separating the ‘thingifying’ of a new and uncharismatic way of exerting control over human natureand Nature itself.

One of the mysteries to about the Code of Hammurabi is its insistence on direct retribution and literal interpretation of judgement. In short, if you put a spell on me as in the very first law of the code. re: “1. If a man [you] has accused another [me] of laying a nertu (death spell) upon him, but has not proved it, he shall be put to death.” Note, that it is ‘I’, the man in power, who says that you have put the spell on me, whether you concur with it or not; and it is ‘I’ who puts you to death.

The authority that actualizes the death sentence is the King (or has his power-of-attorney); the King is imagined to be the sole authority behind the law, which then gets written and thereby turns into ‘law’ over any and all of my objections. It is the King and his advisors, who decide whether the ‘laying of the spell’ is a valid or invalid act.

Before I move too far ahead, let us be clear that the King is you, the reader, and I, the writer. This remains true whether we agree with each other or not, and though we are standing in our birthday suits and know that neither of us has the authority to put anyone to death unless put under the spell of an ‘exception’ as a soldier under orders to kill those that ‘I’, the King put under a spell of being my/ our enemies. If I refuse to obey such a ‘direct order’, I will be executed. After the King is deposed, his arbitrary ‘spell’ is replaced by a ‘written’ monument known as the Constitution, which, again, may be interpreted by ‘lawyers’ as arbitrarily as their power to do violence permits them—if there is no ‘law’ that demands him to replace his life for those of other lives.

It is obvious that the ‘problem’ with “the law” begins and ends with the attempt to limit the King’s authority to make decisions. The ‘problem’ has everything to do with whether or not you and I agree on the ‘law’ and its interpretation. In our own day the ‘problem’, ostensibly to make decisions more easy and just, is divided between three authorities: a) subjective authority (your or mine personal); b) objective authority (determined by the authority of the Constitution and its interpretation of what makes a transgressive act); and c) authority by ‘precedent’ (previous decisions of like or similar events, even if it is as preposterous as cutting off one’s left ear with one’s right hand).

The ‘problem’ of law becomes ever more complicated when there cannot be a ‘clear cut’ decision, because of a split opinion among the Constitutional or other ‘authorized’ decision makers. This is a time when the ‘law’ may be sent to an upper court for review and this is where the choice of a death sentence may on occasion be scratched from the law. This occurs when the law-making authority does not feel that it has the authority to choose death over life for an individual(s), because it may sense that (as a result of some fortuitous circumstance) the entire community is closely following case, that opinions among the public are divided, and that the authority’s existence may be at stake if society-at-large becomes outraged by its decision.

The latter instance is the reason for building up police and military powers (and sometimes giving the police the weapons of the military) to give the police autonomy and enable it to practice arbitrary or authoritarian law.

All of the above was understood in the distant past also, for which reason, the authorities then chose the authority of the King over the power of a Senate, Parliament, or Committee—given that the King did not lose his charisma (on which depended his authority and legitimacy). The only way the King could keep and not lose his charisma, and pass it on to his successor was if at the end of his reign, he sacrificed his life, an act through which he proved his sincerity as the keeper of communal order. It was as if to tell us: If I am responsible for sentencing you or someone near and dear to you to death, by my self-sacrificial act I show and prove to you and yours that I did so knowing that I would not escape suffering the same kind of fear, anxiety and uncertainty as everyone else.

Many will argue that if I or you ordered to their deaths hundreds of thousands or millions of people, the number is too large to be cancelled out by a singular self-sacrifice. However, implicit in my, the King’s, self-sacrifice is a social contract: all of society expects self-sacrifice from all the authorities who have presumed to be its leaders and whose decision making task may include sending people to their death by enforcing peace or making war. If such a sacrifice is not forthcoming from such an authority, then the King and anyone of his administration becomes homo sacer: “the man [naked, sacred and accursed] who cannot be murdered, sacrificed, but only killed.” It is when a King refuses to self-sacrifice himself that anyone in the kingdom has the right to kill him—because at such a time the authority of the society as a whole and the individual are conflated as one.

‘Killing’ the King is not (cannot be) anything but existential in its implications, because implicit in the definition of homo sacer is that God or Gods may kill the King—because he is unfit to be among them, yet he is forbidden to kill himself (in that suicide today is described as violence against one’s self). Nevertheless, a King may declare himself as having beomce ‘homo sacer’ and then take his own life as ‘homo sacer’.

By doing so, the King (and any individual who declares him-herself a sovereign being will deny ‘democratically’ established authority, because it is self-sacrifice (not ‘democracy’) that bonds a community.

  

Eso’s Chronicles 270 / 10
30—Decharismatized...
© Eso A.B.

Sometimes I have difficulty concluding a series, because once the ‘last’ blog gets written, there come yet another idea that needs saying. In this case it is my objection to Slavoy Žižek’s attempts to destroy human subjectivity by making it synonymous with irrationality. While I find Žižek quotable, I also discover him often enough an opportunist, who will not hesitate to in-verse his own arguments to further his ‘pop’ fame, as he does when he defends the anarchistic Pussy Riot (…”They are conceptual artists in the noblest sense of the word: artists who embody an Idea.”) with a government he calls Prick Riot simply because he likes to kiss with the West for pursuing the war against the East. Here is a quote (at length) from the ‘pop star’ in which, when all is said, he ends up supporting the Prick Rioters:

“Constitutional monarchy is a rational Whole, at whose head is a strictly ‘irrational’ moment: the person of the monarch. The essential thing, here, is the irreducible abyss between the organically articulated rational Whole of the rational State, at whose head is a strictly ‘irrational’ moment: the person of he monarch. The essential thing here, is the irrationality of the person who incarnates supreme Power, by which the Power receives the form of subjectivity….” Žižek concludes: “The essential thing… is the irreducible abyss between the organically articulated rational Whole of the constitution of the State, and the irrationality of the person who incarnates supreme Power, by which the Power receives the form of subjectivity….” Žižek ends his argument by quoting Hegel: “….in a well ordered monarchy, the objective aspect is solely the concern of the law, to which the monarchy merely has to add its subjective ‘I will’.” In short, let monarchy be dictated by a ‘democracy’ or, to put it another way: “Chaos, Thy will be done!”

Since Žižek is retained by the Birkbeck Institute in London, I presume that the closest example he has in mind with regard to the ‘irrational’ is the British monarchyas represented by Queen Elizabeth and her son Charles. This writer is more interested in Charles than his mother, because Charles, in an establishmentarian way (the same as Al Gore), is interested (subjectively no doubt) in protecting the environment, which includes forests, such as the Amazon, England’s own, and perhaps in an indirect way also that of Latvia. My trouble with Prince Charles subjective interests is that I do not sense him projecting the kind of charisma and attention, which I feel the subject requires and that his office accords him. In other words, being King within a ‘democratic’ establishment means nothing today.

I assume that Prince Charles is merely implementing his passive “I will” that Hegel and Žižek say he is good for. Nevertheless, the constraints put on a monarch’s subjectivity by Hegel and Žižek and the bureaucratic totalitarianism they both support acts as a constraints on all who would just as soon be rid of all three, which takes me back to the idea expressed by Carl Schmitt that the nature of democracy posits the identity of the ruler and the ruled as one—even if in practical terms the unity may be blurred in favor of the elite (the bureaucracy in this case). This is why in the event of an emergency or exceptional case, the bureaucracy can only deliver Chaos, while the King’s ‘exceptional’ and decisive word, is dismissed by the ‘mechanics’ (the lawgivers) of democracy.

Our time has quite forgot that a King’s decision was called ‘divinely inspired’ because at the end of his life the King nullified his  transgressions (incurring of ‘wrong’ decisions) through a no lesser sovereign and charismatic act--self-sacrifice of his life.

This course of action chrism (charismatic action) was followed by the ‘damned and vilified’ German Reich’s Chancellor Hitler in 1945, but was not followed by the ‘damned and vilified’ Stalin (1953) who may have been assassinated (1953) by someone of his inner court, likely the head of the secret services Beria http://www.marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/1953/beria-purge.htm . The possibility that Stalin was assassinated, just as the fact that Lenin requested poison to end his life, despite their failure to execute a clear-cut self-sacrifice, saves their reputation from clear-cut condemnation as murderers (which slur is typical of  the political elite of our times).

Protest as much as we may against the acts perpetrated by either of the mentioned dictators, their death as a self-sacrifice in one case, and a self-sacrifice denied in the other, cannot be judged any individual’s personal and ‘obscene’ judgment (a word Žižek uses often). The act of self-sacrifice straddles the word ‘sacer’, in the sense that it encompasses the meaning ‘sacred’ and ‘accursed’, and denies anyone the authority to judge either Stalin or Hitler, even when placing them at the edge of ‘obscenity’, the mass graves that evidence the results of their wills.

As in the last paragraph of the following link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Schmitt  its anonymous writer states: “The direction all this leads, and the reason why Schmitt has been taken so seriously by political theory, is to the theorization of the crisis and state of emergency not as exceptional moments in political life, opposed to some stable normality, but as themselves the predominant form of the life of modern nations.”

This writer agrees that ‘political life’ in our times projects a state of ‘crisis and state of emergency’ and predominates in the life of nations. The desertification of the biosphere and elimination of ‘naked life’ by technology continues at an ever greater pace http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-25599249 .

Political life today—as evidenced by the Soviet Union, the German Reich, the United States of America, and China--is too much for any bureaucracy to handle. While the U.S. emerges as the last of the crisis obsessed and state of emergency torn super states, it has been able to survive only as a result of taking part and being an obscene ‘victor’ in the annihilation of the German Reich and Soviet Union. By making an attempt to ‘globalize’ (the better word would be to ‘catholicize’) the planet under its one ‘democratic’ political system, which is little more than finding another name for slogans synonymous with: “workers of the world unite” and “Lebensraum”, the U.S. confirms itself as ‘Chaos in Charge’. If Žižek’s argument on behalf of repressing subjectivity has discovered some instrument that makes appear that ‘democraacy’ can prevail for a while longer, we may be sure that death will number in the  billions.

 

 

 

Eso’s Chronicles 269 / 9

The King & I

© Eso A.B.

All comments appearing within brackets [ ] are editorial in origin. This blog series begins at 264.

 

KING OF THE WOOD

 

What is criminal about a crime is the crime one does against one’s self by creating guilt.

 

However, when guilt is put on the shoulders of an individual by society on the basis of no other authority than such as preexists one’s arrival on our planet and because society has ordered itself in such a way that it causes newly arriving members (children and youths) to feel dysfunctional because they do not have job that enables them to take care of themselves and found their lives, then it is time for the young to ask for a return to the wood, where he-she always has something to do.

 

When WW2 ended, it ended not only with Germany as the obvious loser of the war, but all of Europe becoming subject to the commercial will of the United States of America. Today we hear much praise of the so-called Marshall Plan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan , through which America lent an economically devastated Europe, fifteen billion US dollars and some. One of the reasons why America initiated the plan was its fear that the war devastated European economy would fall under the influence of the Soviet Union.

 

The post-WW2 period served America as a ‘great leap forward’ (to borrow a phrase from the Chinese) not only militarily, but through being able to reintroduce liberalist policies in Old Europe, where for many centuries the princes and other ‘nobles’, using the intermediacy of the ‘religious’ class (originally founded by the siblings of secular princes who had been left, so to speak, without a job) as the spiritual supervisors of an earlier democratic population whose democracy was based on the animal freedoms found in the wood.

 

The Soviet Union, which had borne the brunt of human sacrifices during WW2, was too weak to resist the American commercial and consumerist onslaught, and soon built a barricade that came to be called an ‘iron curtain’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Curtain . Unlike the claims of the link that it was the Soviet Union that blocked itself off from the West, it is more true to say that the Soviet Union was forced to build a barrier to ward off a war that America continued to press on behalf of liberal (capitalist) ‘democracy’. Indeed, America’s ability to project consumerist delusions as happiness as mediated by Hollywood and television sitcoms, eventually infected and caused the Soviet Union to collapse.

 

And still America’s urbanite led war consumed the passions of the West against the East, where human kind shaped by democracy learned over thousands of years in the wood, continued to succumb to the hungers that torture democracy when it is cast into the environment of a desert. One of the early victims of this war—more properly called Crusade—is Latvia, the country of my birth.

 

The ‘victimization’ of Latvia began—not surprisingly—with an economic “shock” therapy advocated by one of America’s best known advocates of it, Harvard Economic Professor Jeffrey Sachs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Sachs . Though widely praised (not least for being one of the youngest (aged 28) full professors at Harvard), Sachs is responsible for the origination of an economic recovery program known as “shock therapy” (first originated by him in Bolivia). The method has brought economic misery to millions of individuals all over the world, and can be described as an attempt at leadership by economists who claim to know how to drive blind subsequent to adopting a servile attitude toward liberalism and becoming ever more passive sycophants among sycophants to commercial interests.

 

Finding no difficulties in recruiting for his shock therapy former Soviet bureaucrats (passive sycophants addicted to thievery) and easily persuading disoriented would-be Latvian politicians from the same ranks, Harvard held the hand of Latvia (and other post-Soviet countries) and led its people to a ‘democratic’ future that created them in the image of  homo sacer:  homeless and superfluous “beings that cannot be "murdered" or "sacrificed" but only killed”. I interpret the word ‘killed’ here as ‘deaded’, i.e., found killed, cause of death as if unknown and utter indifference as to what caused the death among those doing the burial.

 

Indifference to the death of a people that one is not closely bonded with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_squad is not a new phenomenon. It began with the washing of hands by Pontius Pilate in the Western version of the story of the death of Jesus. The washing of hands is continued by the ‘death squads’ that keep order in our ungovernable metropolises, where a ‘Christian’ priesthood never ceases to whitewash the man from the wood, until he-she becomes homo sacer, which he-she is then christened (and betrayed) with a kiss.

 

Incidentally, the story about Jesus being a carpenter or the son of a carpenter is because he is familiar with and comes from the wood. Jesus is not of the urban desert or out of the blue as some pretend today.

 

Unfortunately, there is little reliable information on the internet about the history of the wood http://worldwildlife.org/threats/deforestation . I distinguish between the words ‘wood’ and ‘forest’, the latter coming from Old English and French and designates a given area belonging to the King used for hunting purposes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest .

 

I insist that deforestation began only in relatively recent times, as when huge tracts of the wood were cut to bake bricks or fertilize arable land with ashes, all of which would have begun in the Middle Ages. Others insist that deforestation began at least 5000 years ago, arguing that it began with the introduction of agriculture. I dispute this, because while the invention of it may go that far back, I believe that a wide practice of it beyond limited areas began at a relatively late time, which ‘relativity’ I see starting with the uncontrollable expansion of cities, also a Middle Age phenomenon. In my opinion, so-called agriculture did not extend for a long time beyond gardening, which happened right in front of ones house in the wood and was limited to such items as carrots, which originally were not orange but white and purplish in color.

 

As late as my own childhood, my country, Latvia, though having lost its original ‘old wood’ or ‘sili’ to the rapacity of German nobility (who ruled the country until the beginning of the 20^th century) the edge of a wood could be found within a hundred or two hundred yards of a farm house. Today this is an increasing rarity.

 

As a curio, the Latvian word for ‘to buy’, re: ‘pirkt’ derives from a proto=Indo European word denoting wood: perk^wu-. To confirm, open the last link and look under Etymology. I presume the consonant ‘p’ became pronounced as an ‘f’, thus verkaufen (German for selling)—probably wood. Both words suggest a relatively late date of entering the conversational lexicon.

 

Eso’s Chronicles 268 / 8

The King & I

© Eso A.B.

All comments appearing within brackets [ ] are editorial in origin. This blog series begins at 264.

 

A KING FOR HOME SACER

 

A summary of a summary of the meaning of “Homo Sacer” at the following link:  reads as follows http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/summary/v003/3.1r_panagia.html: “To most Anglo-American readers, the term homo sacer is probably unfamiliar as it refers to a juridical category of ancient Roman law where an individual accused of a crime cannot be sacrificed for having committed said crime. However, from the Roman writer Pompeius Festus, we learn that what is crucial about homo sacer is that although "it is not permitted to sacrifice this man, yet he who kills him will not be condemned for homicide.”

 

While the term ‘homo sacer’ may be interpreted as pointing to an individual, nevertheless, it may also encompass many individuals who have not committed a crime, but who have been in one way or another separated from a given society. As the link points out, it also includes “…the status of the right of entry for refugees, the debate over health care in the United States, the right of individuals to bear arms in order to protect themselves….”’; and I would herewith include the status of some 900,000 Latvians who have been forced by their government to depart Latvia as economic refugees. Though the Latvian government insists that it wishes these people to return, the fact remains that ridding the nation of these citizens has been a priority over declaring a state of emergency which would attempt to decrease the pressures that force them (adults and their families) to depart from Latvia.

 

Because Latvia is a member of the European Union, its citizen may, under the terms of the Schengen Treaty, travel freely anywhere within the territories of member states http://europa.eu/legislation_summaries/justice_freedom_security/free_movement_of_persons_asylum_immigration/ . The authority of the Schengen Treaty comes from duly constituted “authorities” of the member states. However, there is no single Authority as such at this time, the Union being without a Constitution and a ‘federation’ only within the subjective imaginations of its leadership.

 

After a brief period of independence (1918-1940) Latvia was merged by 1941 into the Soviet Union. It reemerged as a ‘sovereign’ nation in 1991 and joined the European Union in 2004 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latvian_European_Union_membership_referendum,_2003 . In a referendum held in 2003, the populace approved joining the EU by about a 2/3 majority of voters. As the link shows, the opposition challenged the joining on grounds of loss of sovereignty and as inopportune for the economy, Latvia’s economy being the weakest among EU’s 26 member nations.

 

What the opposition failed to do was to question Latvia’s membership in the EU on grounds of political compatibility. The failure to do so may be explained very simply: 1) Latvia had emerged from the clutches of the Soviet Union only in 1991, and Russia (rather, Moscow, as the seat of the former Union) was still feared; 2) liberalist pro-consumerist propaganda (Latvia had a liberal PM at the time of the referendum) allowed little critical discussions to emerge regarding the merits of the EU. Also, while patently untrue, 3) the previous government of Latvia (the so-called Ulmabis regime) was later frequently and with malicious political intent compared to a Hitler-like dictatorship.

 

As I argued in my previous blog: “Latvians made a serious attempt to recapture for their political estate the King.... even though the word was seldom used in a contemporary political sense. This experiment was enjoined by one of the founders of the nation, Karlis Ulmanis, who became President of the country as a result of a coup d'état in 1934….”

 

An interesting, but derogatory (belittling) commentary on the search by Latvians for a king is by historian Gustavs Strenga in the journal “Rīgas Laiks” of 2008—reproduced at http://www.delfi.lv/news/comment/comment/gustavs-strenga-spelet-karalos-un-pazos.d?id=22309611 . Unfortunately, the historian does not appear to take himself seriously and his statement appears to be ‘tongue in cheek’. Still, the article gives significant evidence that Latvians felt an intuitive need for a king-like authority, what with their political bureaucracy having turned authoritarian not as an authoritarianism per se, but as a totalitarianism of a politically dysfunctional government. A few translated (by this blogger) sentences follow:

 

“Following the 1934 coup d’état the need to fortify the legitimacy of State authority increased. Kings began to be discovered. Where to look for them? Right where they were lost—the 13^th century…. One may doubt that Ulmanis, while looking for a Latvian aristocracy, wished to declare himself a Latvian king, but, no doubt, the search for ‘kings’ in ‘a free Latvia in antiquity’ corresponded to the desire of Latvians to strengthen their legitimacy… In effect, the Ulmanis regime efforts reflected the trauma of the Latvian nation—weakness with regard to a political past.”

 

Such ‘weakness’ with regard to a political past does not delegitimize Latvia as a nation. This is a problem for most “new” nations, which in our post colonial days are many. However, it does point to the fact that Latvia did not have (or had only as of recently) an institutional infrastructure that was strong enough to hold up to the responsibilities of government. This weakness was compensated for by overloading the newly created bureaucracies with personnel. (True to this day!) Of course, it was this ‘personnel’ of the bureaucracy that in a short time created a dysfunctional government, which created an ‘exceptional’ situation, which needed to be rescued through the introduction of an authoritarian government.

 

Following the renewal of Latvia (1991) after the fall of the Soviet Union nothing has really changed from the way it was half a century before. With no institutions that Latvians could call their own (other than the arts), and with many Latvians trained to serve Soviet bureaucratic institutions, the new ‘democratic’ government continued to function as a form authoritarian government with a notable difference: the emphasis was not on socialistic forms of government, but liberal ones.

 

Indeed, over a short period of time the last became worse than the socialist ones, because under the capitalist system making “money” becomes a priority; and with no native institutions or social networks in place, the old networks continued to function for some time, and the paradox of rich former communists became the norm. Such a turn of events brought the Latvian people to their economic knees and many of them sought escape by way of finding employment in a country other than their own. The government was happy to see them leave as it meant less challenge to its authority at home.

 

Who is most responsible for turning a happy event into a disaster?

 

Without a question, the primary responsibility lies with the United States and the European Union (as the unprepared ‘victors’ of an ‘open ended’ Cold War) who perhaps understandably, but erroneously, put commercial interests as the most important ones. It was a lamentable ‘victory’.

 

And what is the most lamentable ‘disaster’ of the ‘victory’?

 

It is homo sacer. The majority of the Latvian people abroad and in their own country are criminals through the fact of having become economically homeless and unemployed. Whereas ‘King’ Ulmanis had put agricultural reform as one of the essential ingredients to Latvia’s economic recovery, the liberal ‘democratic’ Parliament put urban commerce as the leading interest of the revived nation. As a result, one of the most successful economic programs in Latvia is deforestation.

Eso’s Chronicles 267 / 7

The King & I

© Eso A.B.

All comments appearing within brackets [ ] are editorial in origin. This blog series begins at 264.

 

NEITHER GOD, NOR NOMOS, BUT KING

 

Having begun this series on the ‘King’ with Slavoy Žižek’s mischievous conjoining of the King with bureaucracy (The King and his Bureaucracy, Ch6, ‘Interrogating the Real’), it is only proper to conclude with the no less mischievous comparison that the pop philosopher makes of subjectivity with “dangerous hubris”, insisting that the claim to “authentic essence of humanity” lies “outside the domain of subjectivity”. Žižek posits the subject of authentic essence in Antigone and its human counterpoint in her sister Ismene.

 

I would call the other name of the “subject” that Žižek imagines—a “mask”. However, Žižek quickly becomes inconsistent and contradicts himself, when he decides to dedicate his book to an old Slovene communist, who in 1943 led an uprising of some 2000 starved Yugoslav prisoners against 2200 Italian soldiers who are their guards.

 

The Slovene prisoners succeed in disarming the Italian soldiers. After the war, the Slovene communist is arrested (no reason given why--by the succeeding communist-Stalinist government) and ten years later, he is forced to participate in the building of a monument that celebrates the uprising he led.

 

It is an ironic story, surely.

 

Knowingly or unknowingly, Žižek then tops off the irony by putting Stalin into role of the ‘King’, while the role of the ‘bureaucracy’ passes to Stalinist  communists, those who are enforcing Stalin’s ‘will to power’.

 

This leaves the reader confused as to why Žižek holds an old communist in such high esteem, for obviously the man revolted against the guards of the prison on the basis of his subjective feelings and decisions. The problem resolves itself only if one assumes that Žižek contradicts himself or Stalinists are the new Catholics.

 

I agree that the monument, the ‘subject’ of the ‘’monumental building project, stands for the ‘mask’ of the old communist and his rebellious comrades, who, I assume, are meant to stand for the ‘authentic essence’ of humanity.

 

But why should one believe that the monument stands also for ‘dangerous hubris’? Is that not like a Catholic priest demanding a pagan to renounce his old Gods (who up to the moment are a part of the man’s subjectivity) for the authentic subject of an ‘outside’ God, aka Nomos https://www.google.lv/#q=meaning+of+Nomos ? And is not Nomos synonymous with such repressive organizations of pacification as the Inquisition, the Gestapo, the KGB, and the CIA/NSA? Is not dismissing subjectivity as ‘hubris’ a matter of continued repression and denial of privacy? Therefore, is the monument not a monument to Homo Sacer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_sacer --the man who cannot be murdered, sacrificed, but only killed, because all he is is naked?

 

This brings us to “god” with a small ‘g’, because Catholicity (and Christianity derived from globalist Catholicism) surely discredited god when written with a capital G, and here Žižek and Schmitt discredit him with a small g. So, why not replace the missing figure of Trust with the long neglected figure of King?

 

Would not a King serve the 900,000 Latvians forced into economic exile as de facto ‘homo sacer’ better than the bureaucratic totalitarian democracy, which with the backing of the totalitarian democracy of the EU takes upon itself the authority to make them de facto homo sacer or, in other words, homeless?

 

There will be those who will claim that I would reinstall subjectivity in place of an objective (rational law) government that a Hegelian http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hegelianism bureaucracy presumes itself to represent. As Schmitt asserted: “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts”. Here we may remember that Catholic Christianity spent many centuries violently persecuting and inquisitorially repressing an earlier Christianity now identified with Bogomils, Cathars, and Krist-Yans.

 

The repression was necessary because like Žižek (a Hegelist), Catholicism believes human subjectivity to be a hubristic element rather than an inherent element of being human. In short, we have biocentered human beings http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biocentrism_(ethics) opposed by virtual or ‘man-made’ human beings, who are created by words imbued with violent attributes gained through innumerable acts (? 900,000) of de facto (unacknowledged de jure) murders.

 

To discuss the means by which the King may return is a task beyond these blogs, which are meant to argue against the totalitarianism of liberal democracy in an attempt to overturn its dictatorial order that has taken the helm in Latvia. Even so, we may say—in agreement with Carl Schmitt—that the nature of democracy is to behold the rights of the rulers and the ruled as one. In other words, this is what makes democracy a charismatic force, whereas today it has become an alien and an enemy.

 

I have argued for the return of humankind to the wood and leaving urbanism as a minimal element, an element to be determined by none other than the post-urbanist age itself (certainly not by a carbon tax).

 

I am arguing that Latvians make a serious attempt to recapture for their political estate the King. In a preceding State (1918-1939), though not the post-Soviet Latvia, Latvians did indeed experiment with the notion of the ‘king’s’ return, even though the word was seldom used. This experiment was enjoined by one of the founders of the national community, Karlis Ulmanis, who became President of the country as a result of a coup d'état in 1933.

 

Ulmanis was condemned as a dictator, and many hold him such to this day. I argue, however, that Ulmanis was ahead of his time, and that political science had not yet made such strides as it has made by our time. Be that as it may, a great many Latvians praise Ulmanis’ leadership, but suffer not expressing the praise because they find themselves under a totalitarian liberal democratic regime, which in turn is under the umbrella of a liberal totalitarian ‘democratic’ regime in European Union.