© Eso Antons Benjamins

NOT-VIOLENT TERROR
41 Tiresias’ Revenge (I)

How did the seed of The “more-equal-than-others” men’s lodge gain the upper hand over the seed of the populists? Various scenarios are possible. What follows is my attempt to see the elements of society, stiffened in limb and brain already in Sophocles’ time by unhealthy traditions and pretensions of the ruling class, deal with the problem. The unhealthy elements crystallize around the figure of Oedipus, a name I sometime convert to Jahnis-John. The events take at a place in classic Thebes, but are flexible enough to allow allusions to Latvia and Riga of today.


Tiresias’ Revenge
© Eso Anton Benjamins, 2009
A play based on Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex”

Five Acts

Introduction Tiresias’ Revenge is a rewrite of Sophocles play “Oedipus King”. It shows that there is more than meets the eye to the play and the riddle it poses.

An actor friend who read my version of the story of Oedipus did not comment on the interpretation of the play (the theme of human sacrifice is, after all, a formidable subject), but commented on the rapid sequence of deaths in the last act. The actor wondered how a director would present to the audience the death of ten people in a succession that makes one want to say “Enough already with dying!” I understand. But these ten deaths (and perhaps more) are the children of one father, three deaths for his own children, the rest scattered about relatives and relations. All for one reason: Oedipus does not risk his life when he is not yet responsible for it, and self-sacrifice does not occur to him when he is old enough to think about it.

It is for the reader to decide if my thesis of what lies behind Sophocles’ intentions is the traditional uninteresting riddle (the Sphinx and all that), or whether the riddle is a clever way of disguising what the ruling orthodoxy considers essential to suppress, but the populists believe must be preserved at all cost.

Prologue The event, the telling of the story (by way of speech, body movement, sound, and spectacle) takes place before the castle of Thebes, perhaps the castle (pils) of Riga. To the right of the stage, close to an altar, near a high-standing, three-legged cauldron, stands a priest murmuring silent prayers. To the left of the stage sits Queen Ismene. The queen is very old. Before her stand or sit citizens of Thebes-Latvia.

Chorus (as it turns the palms of its hands up in a gesture of receiving):

Dearest Queen Ismene,
we are impatient to hear the story.
Tell us what ails Latvia.
We want to be healed.

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/

© Eso Antons Benjamins

NOT-VIOLENT TERROR

40 The Horror (III)

Though stories of horror are not new and have been heightened to the point where the reader can almost feel horror not only in the abstract, but as claustrophobia [Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849) is a classic example of this literary genre], the most ancient and horrific horror story is Sophocles’ famous tragedy “Oedipus Rex” or “King Oedipus”.

Heretofore, Sophocles’ tragedy has gained most of its notoriety for three reasons: 1) as a play that has a ‘perfect plot’; 2) as a story that involves a mother and son marriage; and 3) the ‘riddle of the Sphinx’. This writer would like to add a fourth reason for notoriety of the tragedy: 4) Oedipus’ rise to power causes the death of ten persons of his extended family, beginning with his (unwitting) killing of his father, and ending with the death of Tiresias, the seer. As the latter’s death is not an event that Sophocles wrote into the play, let me explain how I came to perceive that Tiresias died.

One may argue that “horror” as a subject matter in popular literature burst on the literary stage of the 19th century for a reason: it had, more or less,. become part of everyone’s daily experience. Perhaps it was the French Revolution (1789-1799) and the decapitation of the French King (1793) that triggered the Reign of Terror (1793-1794) that made terror a subject of daily discussion for the public.

Whatever the history of horror, when Joseph Conrad wrote his novella “Heart of Darkness” (1902), horror, barely hidden, had become a part of a way of life. “Heart of Darkness” is a story of a cynical romantic, one Kurtz, who goes to Africa as a Company agent to hunt for ivory and is ready to kill to get it. See http://tinyurl.com/yfqdwlc The teller of the story, one Marlow, the captain of a ship sent to return Kurtz from somewhere far up the Congo River, finds Kurtz near death. Kurtz gives Marlow some papers he wants returned to England and a photograph of his Intended (bride) in England. When Kurtz dies, his last words are: “The horror, the horror”. The meaning of these words have been interpreted variously. One interpretation is that the words refer to life itself, as for example when one has a reputation of being a writer, a painter, a musician, a universal genius (Kurtz), yet has little hesitation to kill in order to become wealthy. In short, Kurtz stands for the character of Western civilization. Our civilization is the horror.

Upon his return to England, Marlow meets Kurtz’s Intended to deliver Kurtz’s packet and tells her nothing of Kurtz’s real doings and, as if to top it off, tells the simple minded creature that Kurtz’s last words were her name (whatever that may be). Marlow does all this to save the young woman’s feelings. Thus, Conrad’s story ends on a note of the reader wanting to vomit over the delicacy of falsehood just read and unread.

The story leaves off at a point which leaves the reader feeling that something is missing. One of the obvious things missing is Marlow himself. Though he is the story teller and tells the story while on a yawl named “Nellie” at anchor on the Thames, and though he personally visits the Intended, he acts suspiciously like a nobody, a nobody who has nevertheless a mission to accomplish. What may the mission be? Let us quote some of the last paragraphs of the novella.

“The last word he pronounced was—your name.”

“I heard a light sigh and then my heart stood still, stopped dead short by an exulting and terrible cry, by the cry of inconceivable triumph and of unspeakable pain. ‘I knew it—I was sure!’… She knew. She was sure. I heard her weeping; she had hidden her face in her hands. It seemed to me that the house would collapse before I could escape, that the heavens would fall upon my head. But nothing happened. The heavens do not fall for such a trifle. …

“Marlow ceased and sat apart, indistinct and silent, in the pose of a meditating Buddha. Nobody moved for a time. ‘We have lost the first of the ebb,’ said the Director suddenly. I raised my head. …” The “I” hear is, of course, the “I” who stands behind the story teller. It is the “I” of the story teller as well as of the reader-listener.

To this reader-listener the novella seems incomplete. Something is missing. It is even obvious. But what may it be?

When I came to think about this, I was reminded of Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing, “the nurse with the lamp” during the terrible Crimean War. Florence went to the war in 1854. http://tinyurl.com/yfon9e2 This is nearly a half a century before Conrad’s own horror, which he is expressing through a faceless man named Marlow. The whole world presumably knew of Florence Nightingale. The story of the nurse giving the wounded soldier her breast may not be assignable to Florence alone, but such stories are more than telling of how some people react to violence and brutality. And here we have the male contrast to Florence—Marlow, “‘It seemed to me that the house would collapse before I could escape… the heavens do not fall for such a trifle’ [as my lies and her pain].” What else could I do, but let her die!

The Director had stood up, but now he sat down again. “There is more to the story is it not?”

Yes, I was just thinking what the Director was thinking. I knew his question too. Marlow did not answer.

“You did tell her that Kurtz also had sent you, so that he could fuck her one last time, did you not?”

Given the teller, the question was obvious. Everyone on deck burst out laughing. This is where we make the step from Kurtz and Marlow to Oedipus and the horror story imbedded in the story of Oedipus. The story, too, has a number of unexpected turns imbedded in it.

(To be continued with the 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/

© 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/

© Eso Antons Benjamins

NOT-VIOLENT TERROR
38 The Horror (I)

Populism is presumed to be a murky word, and so it is—up to the point when we dare equate it with economic equality. Then something interesting happens.

Though “populism” retains its wont to be unstable even with economic equality well understood to be at its core, our inability to remember this truth is explained by the likelihood that in the West “economic equality” remains a culturally forbidden subject. In the West populism remains a dangerous word and more often than not is used negatively in a pejorative moral sense; re: he’s a commie, a fascist, an outsider, a slum dweller, a gypsy, even an artist, etc.

When we use populism as a word with a negative meaning, it distracts the eye (our self-consciousness) of our economic order—liberal and neo-liberal democracy http://www.jstor.org/pss/25115243  (see Abstract in link)—from taking note of love turned inside out and becoming a bias that excludes all who are considered by the more-equal-than-others less equal than they.

Liberal democracy of course has its beginnings in the founding violence of an arch “more-equal-than-all-others” group. If this group is ever challenged, it retaliates by calling-naming any sovereign community “fascist” (or its presumed like) and may initiate violence against it. It is essential for the arch-community of “more-equal-than-all-others” to eliminate populists (one way or another), because if it fails to do so, it may have to accept the argument that economic equality is possible under a different asymmetrical arrangement than with the “more-equal-than-all-others” always somehow coming out on top.

If populism and populist are in fact synonyms of unequivocal economic equality and the fact is reflected in a widely accepted social order, the words would not be known. Their truth would be that obvious. In other words, old signifiers never die, they just fade away—if its hidden and forbidden meaning is recognized and realized.

Yet as obvious as it may be to those who understand what truth underlies populism, there is no way to communicate a word with a meaning that few, sometimes no one, dare think of. This has been the unhappy position of populists for a thousand years. Their alternative has been exercised by writing books and start incomplete revolts and revolutions. Yes, poets and philosophers, too, sometimes become thought and tongue tied before a word that is empty but somehow manages to exist. Such unhappy solutions must necessarily continue until populist unhappiness infects a majority sufficiently enough to force it into a desperate search for an answer that has always been before everyone’s eyes, but this time for their discovery.

Before the forbidden-empty word is discovered with a meaning, it is known among those with an interest in politics and social structures as a signifier. To understand an empty signifier, one must understand that accessing its meaning is not only an act of a revelatory nature, but that it brings with it an understanding of its importance to human survival.

Populism as an unstated yet a real demand for economic equality is repressed, but it prevails nevertheless. No doubt, inequality is found in any organization that is larger-than-life and stands against an individual or natural community. Such inequality is inevitable. But the inequality can be compensated for in at least two ways. One is our “more-equal-than-all-others” community, the model that over the last thousand years has increasingly dominated our civilization. The other is the community of officials (say, the presidents and their ministers) who earn themselves a name in history by living in a community that practices not-violent-terror, that is to say, who have become leaders by having agreed to give their lives to the community. The radical difference between these two forms of social structuring is that the former reaches its more-equal-than-all-others status through economic exploitation using violence and lies, while the latter gains its authority through not-violent terror.

What is not-violent-terror? Let me put it this way: For anyone raised with the idea that it is a mortal (and moral) sin to die a day before Nature forces you to die by bringing you death itself, it is no sin to be more-equal-than-others. On the other hand, those who practice not-violent-terror hold the social order together through the authority brought to them through self-sacrificial death. To put it in terms of our own day: When suicide is seen as a potential and then actual self-sacrifice, the event changes the word’s moral meaning and authority, and a new political order is born.

Because the Latvians experienced the full brunt of the meaning of economic equality as an ideal practiced under the Soviet Union, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Latvian elite were quick to switch to politics as practiced by the “more-equal-than-others” social group in the West. In order to switch sides as quickly as possible, the politically and economically well informed communist elite, finding itself suddenly in post-Soviet times, agreed to expose itself and everyone in Latvia to the shock treatment of capitalism. A series of former Soviet sponsored manufacturing enterprises (VEF, Alfa, RVP, RVF, Elektrotehnika) were allowed to go bankrupt. Parties of wolves, some more alpha-syndrome endowed than others, were then allowed to roam the nation.

There were elements in the switching from communism to capitalism that made the switch easy. The chief enabler of the switch was that under the Soviets (incidentally, the Communist Party—still in the grip of those who considered themselves “more-equal-than-others”—practiced unabashed violence to institute the ideal. After the population was “dumbed down” by violence and as little educated as possible, the violent ones let up on the violence, and (because they were being “humane”?) signed the death warrant for the Soviet system, which had been brought into existence with such a huge death and misery toll. The step, the one that succeeds and brings in place of the “more-equal-than-others” another order, was missed—again.

As we see, the Latvian parliamentary government for the nineteen years since its reconstitution has been as great a failure as the failure which possessed that famous clubfoot who ruled Thebes and who through no accident caused—to my count—ten deaths within the extended circle of his own family. Ecce Latvia?

(Continued in blog 39.)

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/

© Eso Antons Benjamins

NOT-VIOLENT TERROR
37 Not-Violent Populism (IX)

The Latvians have come up against an existential challenge. This challenge faces today every nation. For a number of reasons, however, it has reached the Latvians in an acute form before it has so reached others. [The situation of Iceland may be similar.] The challenge concerns the very existence of the Latvian community and nation.


While the challenge is of a do or die nature and, thus, a profoundly serious matter, the cheery side to it is that if the Latvians meet it, they may become leaders of a series of similar community revolts. Indeed, the challenge necessitates a revolt against the positivism designed to maintain the status quo in favor of neo-liberal democracy, i.e., the rule of a “more equal than others” ideology so favorable to large corporations.

At its most elemental, the Latvians [serious communities the world over are in need of a similar figure] need to lead a revolt on behalf of Johns (John in plural). Johns is a collective name of the ancient bondsmen-teachers of Latvians. The Johns bonded their communities by ever returning to them (dzimteneh) to die there. Before the dead were put in charge of a Mother of the Dead, it was Jahnis who was in charge of them. He (they) taught against the authorities who keep God in heaven and conspire to have Johns replaced by one who lives far away indeed.

If the Latvians have the will to survive, they will have to will their Jahnis back. In effect, they need to recreate him. If they do, it will be a deed loaded with political consequences for the future, their own nation and the nations of the world. If they do not bring him back, some other nation will, because the name of John remains ubiquitous, and this fact alone is crying out for attention. The true significance of the name of John will be found out; the question remains—by whom?

Ever hear of Inti? Inti is the Inca sun god, one of the most important gods in Inca religion. All Inca Emperors descended from Inti. Inti is represented by the gold of the sun disk. http://tinyurl.com/ygryje2  Inti = John = Jahnis = …… The Latvian sun is a goddess, but Jahnis, her son, is the same I[Y]nti, the king as the son of the Sun who bonds his community by ever returning to it to die. Jahnis often returns to the land of his birth just before his death. Indeed, we may claim that he returns in order to sacrifice his life to the land of his birth. Inti’s day of celebration is the Inti Raymi http://tinyurl.com/yk5g63t  , which coincides with the Latvian midsummer’s day, re Jahnu Diena (Johns Day). To translate the name Inti Raymi in terms more meaningful to us, let us read “Inti Raymi” as Inti Roma (Johns Rome) and Jahnu roma. The specific meaning raymi-rome-roma-rama may escape us, nevertheless, we can easily see a connection to round, romp, rope, and, surprisingly enough to the dom-jon, the core, the strongest point of a castle in the middle ages. The reliable (at all costs) return of Jahnis—the village boy who went to see the world—is why he represents the faith of the community.

Sounds like a desperate plan for survival? It may be. However, when all is said and done—it is the only alternative to death. A cynic may say that he prefers to drift to hell in the boat that he already is in and will not change boats and risk tipping into hell so much sooner. However, perhaps the Latvians will find that they have the will to make the maneuver, because they wish to wake up as a community again. To do so, they must—as in the fairytale—recall the sylvan forests they come from, take another look at the suburbia they either live in or dream of, and see the hole behind their house become, day by day, an ever larger and deeper garbage dump.

Neither the Incas or ancient Balts were mad, nor were the ancestors of Latvians mad because their universe went along similar lines of thought as those of all the namesakes of John. The parallels are not a paraphenomenon. John-Jahnis-Inti- all have one mother and father—the Sun, who may be a male one time, a female another. http://tinyurl.com/ygryje2

If the Latvians do not unhook from the Pop culture that grips the cusp of the 20-21st centuries, then it hardly matters if they live on for a while or die right away. One way or another, it will be apparent that the blip on the screen (too quick for easy recognition) is all that became of the descendants of this particular sylvan branch of humankind. On the other hand, if the Latvians do get John to return to Earth and he becomes John for real again (Johns Eve and Day, among other events, is a time for tragic theatre), then Ivan, Ian, Jean, Huan, Johann et all will soon follow.

So, here is the question: Are the Latvians as a people worth their measure as populists who have their own self-sacrificial God, or are all of the bonds-men and women of Latvian communities dead? This is the question and the challenge of our times, at this time most pressing for the Latvians.

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 will consider reading the previous blog and/or 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/

© Eso Antons Benjamins

NOT-VIOLENT TERROR
36 Not-Violent Populism (VIII)

If there ever was a truism, it is the one that says that the best defense against an attack is an offense. Of course, the offense that arises because of a provocation to one’s defenses has to be successful for the truism to work. If Latvia as a nation ever had a plan of defense, the current situation is one of a complete retreat and rout. At the head of the ones retreating is the government of Latvia with the president in the lead.

Not long ago, I was in Riga and went to see the controversial musical drama called “Vadonis” (Leader), composition, lyrics and direction by way of Zigmars Liepins, Kaspars Dimiters, and Edmunds Freibergs respectively. The musical has received much criticism from the elite and the left wing of right wing political commentators.

As I have stated in previous blogs, the two most hated words in the circles of Latvian politics (right or left) is populism and populist. Whether the creators of this musical drama succeeded in identifying with populism in Latvia at this time, I leave for everyone to judge for themselves, but no doubt they identified it with Karlis Ulmanis, the now often maligned president-dictator of Latvia from 1933 to 1940.

Though the musical is harsh and loud in timbre and grey in tone (performers come with grey gauze over their faces and are dressed largely in grey or black), I suspect this is so, because this is how the authors see an economically and politically humiliated Latvia. It suggests a state of war in which Latvia continues along its present government’s policies of surrender of sovereignty to the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and associates. The musical is an unpleasant cry of a country in distress. It is not meant to be entertainment.

My guest, a young woman (b. 1984) with mother, step-father, and three brothers in England, herself likely to follow, told me that she felt like standing up and singing along with the facsimile Latvian anthem, which the cast sang when in the background the red-white-red flag of Latvia descended from the stage ceiling. I told her that I had read that in the early performances, the audience did in fact rise to its feet, but this was roundly condemned in the media to be the result of calculated psychological manipulation of the audience by the authors. The audience—having absorbed this information—was reserved in its behavior (my companion including) by making no visible response during or toward the aria. The anti-populist press drew another veil over the public by way of encouraging another unrevealed emotion toward populist sentiment.

Here I must return to my blog 33. I suggested there that Karlis Ulmanis, the dictator-president-and a founding father of Latvia (1918) should have killed himself in a statesmanlike protest against the Soviet invasion of Latvia in 1940. In blog 34, I suggested that Adolfs Buķis, a middle-aged man who killed himself in front of the Freedom Monument in Riga in 1993 to protest the corruption by corporate buy-out of Latvia as a nation, could have put a stop to Karlis Ulmanis disastrous retreat. However, the police never investigated his sacrifice and never revealed the written contents of the note in his pocket as promised. Thus, Ulmanis failure has arrived at a constellation of circumstances where the nation he was a founder of is a nation whose downfall he also may be causing. In effect, the Latvian Republic has never tested the resolve of its leadership to sacrifice its own lives in defense of the country since the battles of its founding days. Karlis Ulmanis had participated in the battles and was wounded there, but his nerve failed him when the act became the responsibility of him in office as president.

“Vadonis” presents Karlis Ulmanis as the leader of not only ethnic Latvians (whatever that may mean), but of all Latvian citizens, the last probably best described as a people who live in Latvia and speak Latvian with a pure native or immigrant accented inflection. Any presumption of cultural separatism is purely by inflection, which the authors may or may not have intended.

It is at this that there occurs in the drama’s crust a crack, an uncertainty about the Latvians. It is like—who did you say they are? (Continued below.)

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

© Eso Antons Benjamins

NOT-VIOLENT TERROR
35 Not-Violent Populism (VII)


Latvian history books present the Latvians as an ethnic group that regained its self-consciousness after centuries of sleep under neo-Christian (German and Russian variety) oppression and rose out of the sleep as a branch off the aboriginal Balts, a brother and sister nation to kindred Lithuania.


The most recent geopolitical loss of the Balts was the repression and absorption of the Baltic Prussians into the German state of Prussia, with Choninpils (imagined or real, who knows) forced to change its name to Koenigsberg and then to Kaliningrad. This loss effectively destroyed the Balts as a collective of political interest groups. The Baltic tribes that survived the land grab of their former territories by numerous European kings and princes joined with the Poles as Lithuanians. The Latvians, a people with a self-identification created in conditions of the forest, family-like clans (saimes) of occupant disrupted clans, knew the woods. They had never left them and continued to identify with them.


The course of history conspired in such a way, that many of these people of the sylvan forest and arch-Christendom survived. They began to emerge as a people in their own right about the middle of the 19th century by way of song. That is, they became aware of themselves through getting together for song festivals on land cleared of forest by need or order of occupant barrons and boyars building themselves fleets of ships to exploit others as well. With a populist self-awareness of themselves as a forest people (probably sometime after the French Revolution and the deposition of the sacred king), there came self-assertion, but over the recent generations little remembrance and interest of the past left behind.


The book to initiate Latvia as a cultural and geopolitical entity is “Lihgo”, 1874, a collection of the lyrics of popular songs. The lyrics were strategically interspersed with poems meant to build community consciousness and fire up feelings of loyalty to the land and the group that speak a more or less one and the same language. The book was published by the composer-artist-poet Karlis Baumanis. [Better known as Baumanu Kahrlis, he also composed the lyrics and melody of the Latvian national anthem, and was the first to use the word Latvia.] The tsar’s police confiscated and burnt almost all copies of the book. The artist chose for its cover his own drawing. The drawing is dated 1873. The illustration shows a priest on Jahnis Eve [the popular name of the midsummer’s Eve festivities still celebrated today] lighting a sacred fire. The altar is in a forest clearing with an oak tree blessing it with its cover. The priest identifies with the forest by holding in his right hand an oak leaf branch. The drawing is on the flag of the All Latvian Song Festival, celebrated in Latvia every five years since 1873. http://tinyurl.com/ygbqp8p


We note that the priest of Johns Eve is never named John, even if he is so named in the mind’s eye of the large group of people who stand behind the oak tree in an extension of the forest clearing in the foreground. Instead, the book is named “Lihgo”, and this word is printed over John officiating at the altar, suggesting that Lihgo=John. The association must be made in silence, because not only is John the priest of Jahnis Eve, he is also an ideal representation of Latvians as they imagined themselves at that time. They could not however name themselves. Tsar and a God somewhere in the sky were trying to replace the sylvan people’s arch-Christian John with neo-Christian Jesus, who came in the image of the Russian neo(orthodox) -Christian Church doing the tsar’s bidding. By 1888, the consequences of Enlightenment and the French Revolution had reached the ears of then emerging Latvian intelligentsia. With a cleverness characteristic of an intelligentsia, the leaders of the woods people became traders of lumber and carpenters. In turn, the lumber traders and carpenters—with an obsequiousness also so characteristic of the emerging formerly repressed (to better fit in with the occupiers)—replaced the priest of the arch-Christian Jahnis with Lachplehsis, Bearjawbraker. He was a man with a bear’s ears, who, while he resembled an aboriginal Balt (still in the woods), was a copy of Sampson tearing open the jaws of a lion in Luther’s Illustrated Bible. In essence, a Latvian was identified as a Lutheran, who most likely was further identified with all things German.


In the span from 1873 to 1940, the image in the inner self of a self-conscious Latvian became so sterilized and turned into décor by the bourgeois that when it came to offering one’s life on the community’s altar, Karlis Ulmanis was torn by doubts. These doubts were sourced in neo-Christianism, Soviet universalism, the sundering of Latvian society by economic stratification, and absence of the never mentioned tradition of self-sacrifice as the glue of societies and nations. Came 1940, Ulmanis didn’t do it. In 1993, Buchis sacrificed his life for the idea of an economically egalitarian sovereign (uncorrupt) Latvia. Buchis’s act received some attention, but it turned out to be short-lived media rhetoric.


The musical drama “Vadonis” does not mention the priest of Jahnis Eve, because the authors no longer know him. The Latvians limp on caught in a death warp, trailing the “halle-luia” sound, with the “luia” reminding very much of the once ecstatic Lihgo affirming life.


Please consider reading the previous blog. The ideas therein are possibly related to those presented here.


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