...she identifies the hubris of the national leadership…

Uh why is it that some Americans have such trouble with irony, pray, tell?

/P

THE-NOT-VOTER
26 Latvia’s Leaders As Geopolitical Dunces

In my previous blog (25), I pointed out the gutlessness of the Latvian political leadership. Anyone who votes for any of the would be leaders in the upcoming elections is not only acting on the irrational hope that somehow matters will improve (re: hope dies last), but that irrationality is in and of itself what hope is about. The disgusting circus in the air to a dumbed down crowd gathered on the shores of Daugava in Riga just about sums up the level of maturity of both organizers and the entertained.

While the right wing coalition of the former Prime Minister Shkehle and hyperventilating vice major of Riga Shlesers are waging an election campaign that levitates on economics turned mindless, “Vienotība” (Unity), another coalition of right wing political parties, has turned the fear of Soviet invasion in 1944 [“The Swedes are coming (to save us)”] into a hysterical fear of Russia in 2010. The allegedly non-Latvian “Russian” leadership (concentrated about Riga) offers—as its contribution to the pre-election babble—deathlessness to destitute pensioners by promising no further cuts in pensioners pensions and further daredevil air shows above Daugava. Not ot to be outdone, the leadership of Catholic, Lutheran, and Russian Orthodox has reached such ecumenical highs that Tony Blair, the former British PM, could well become the next Pope.

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In my view, party programs are like blueprints you make before building a house, except that you don’t know whether you will have the money, workforce or legal clearances to really build it, and you hope, once you do get in a position to build it, you will be able to salvage something of your original idea. The blueprint gives others an idea of where you want to go, although there are no guarantees it will end up as you all hoped. If you find yourself in a coalition government, all the blueprints get mingled together and the end result is, well, something else.

Analysis of any party program must include an evaluation of the people who wrote it, endorse it and will try to realize it. Do they really mean it? Are they capable of realizing it?

I agree with Peteris Cedrins, that the choices between blueprints and personalities are pretty clear in October.  One party wants to stay in the West, in NATO and the EU, another feels closer to Moscow, and a third will go anywhere they can to make a fast buck (or ruble or euro). And then there are some in the middle, waiting to see who gets in power.  They go with the political flow.

If I understand fantasy baseball properly (never played it), you pick the best players you can, put your team in the pennant race and hope for the best. As Cubbie fans are known to say at the end of each season, ‘Wait till next year’. In the case of the elections, we have to wait 4 years.

If you don’t vote, you let other people pick the players.

This is very interesting.  Years of renewed independence have passed where taking strong, unequivocating, and principled stands as Latvians with unquestionable integrity, intelligence, and backbones would have mattered in a step-by-step, year-by-year advance toward modernity and civilization away from Soviet-deformity— and it’s down to the wire and Peteris is panicking: “Get off it. Your vote will take you East or West, and it really is that simple. I think anybody with half a brain realizes this.” 

All those lost years spent apologizing for the bad habits of the East that impeded progress; bending backwards making welcome foreign-speaking occupants as though they weren’t - and pretending that time alone would heal the “occupation controversy;” mocking the old Latvians in the Trimda who honor their Latvian history, not necessarily blindly, and still cry when they sing Dievs Sveti Latviju on their Nov 18 holiday - but expecting them to pay for Gaismas Pils, the Occupation Museum, Lestene, “restoration” of Latvian culture, etc. - while the “new Latvia” celebrates its Russian holiday on May 9 and pays for “Soviet” sashlik culture; accepting pervasive and perverse Soviet-deformity and post-Soviet scum as leaders of banks, government institutions, business leaders.

Peteris sees the light:  “But I think we get to live here or leave if in early October people elect ex-post-whatever Soviet scum. In that sense it is indeed a simple choice to me. The evidence is available to anybody. I recall you [E.] thinking the same back when Latvia had to decide whether to join the EU or not. But now it is much, much worse because the happy family showed itself to be what it is. Casting an empty ballot now is crazy, in my view.”

It just may be too late.

It is only too late when you give up, but others don’t.

Labdien!

I’m not panicking, Ambersun. A coalition of which SC and/or PLL are a part will not bring about the end of the world. Fear not, the Freedom Monument will not be replaced by a giant matryoshka. As to your simplistic step by step “advance toward modernity”—despite my personal commitment to democratic ideals, I rather doubt that this old idea of linear progress towards “civilization” actually holds up. Even Fukuyama questions himself these days, no?

But, if we are to entertain your notion of progress, your fugal étude fails as always; to trim your florid prose a bit, you are saying I’ve suddenly seen the light as opposed to the darkness of… what? The “foreign-speakers”? I like that; it reminds of a friend who says “can’t read it, it’s in foreign” when he gets a link in another language. Occupants? First of all, it’s occupiers—this error is as grating as your incessant invocation of “Soviet-deformity.” 

You write of “mocking the old Latvians in the Trimda who honor their Latvian history, not necessarily blindly”—I don’t recall mocking “the old Latvians” in the trimda (which has a lower-case “t”); it’s your “not necessarily” that gives pause; as we know, you fail to acknowledge the blindness no matter how fascistic it gets. As to honoring “their” Latvian history—I have a problem with that, yes. The history of Latvia is not only the history of Latvians.

We’ve been through this, Ambersun—if you think integrity and unbending principles would make all the difference, you are wrong. There are plenty of unbending principles that are wrong. Integrity would make a lot of difference, but it wouldn’t necessarily change the economic model. Iceland is into transparency and ranks near the top among the incorruptible—but look at what happened to Iceland when it became a giant hedge fund.

As to principles—we also have competing visions. That’s natural. People and groups of people have divergent interests, and controversy is what democracy is about. Deciding that agriculture is not a priority—a decision made long ago, under Birkavs, has more of an effect on society than most of your trite ethnopolitical poses. As to “Soviet-deformity,” I will again recommend what Andrejs recommended—Ceplis. Corruption long predates the Soviet in Latvia.

“Soviet” sashlik culture? First of all it is “shashlik,” a Turkish word. You don’t like shashlik? I love it! It’s practically the national food, as Latvian as pīrādziņi by now—do you think Latvians invented pīrādziņi? Walk into my garden on a weekend and three or four of the neighbors will be grilling it, and I might grill it for you. You can explain to me how “Soviet-deformity” is reflected in finance. Was Bernie Madoff an “occupant”?

You prefer McCulture? I don’t. Okē, okē, I guess you don’t, either… you prefer your museum. You don’t live in it, though. If you did, maybe you would give a nod to all that has been accomplished. See, there was a step by step process in which we joined the CoE, NATO, and the EU. I thought that was an advance toward civilization, though I felt the need to salt it with a few tons of salt to begin with (see Ady’s post re Sarkozy and the Roma).

If you did live here, you would know that this is a logical conjunction—most of the people I know never bought into the “mēs atgriežamies Eiropā” construct. Turning our back on Russia, Russians, and the Russian language had only limited popularity, Ambi, circumscribed yet further by the pong of absurdities like yours, in which anything Russian is “foreign” and there is some singular, unified ideal in the West to strive for. Down with shashlik! Down with what else? I used to say, and I still will—Russian culture never threatened Latvia. The Soviet lack of culture did. Objection?

I am very sorry, but Latvians can be and are at least as Soviet as Russians. Your Disnejlande is a kind of antifrukts, combining most every totalitarian pleasure there ever was.

Vysu lobu,
/P

THE-NOT-VOTER
27 Should We Vote For A Catastrophe?

Democracy is a very nice idea, and it is even better than nice if it is put in practice. In fact, the history of democracy goes back to the very origins of human beings, even though most history books present it as an invention of the Greeks.

However, let us note that Greece is a hilly place, which means that once the forests growing on its hills were cut down erosion set it. One may imagine that the erosion was furthered by King Laius’ goats and sheep. Here is the rub: the democracy that was practiced by the people living in the woods in Greece and elsewhere (because while there were forests there also existed a natural subsistence economy that allowed a wholly natural democracy) became subject to rational manipulation in anywhere people lived without or few forests.

Deforestation in ancient Greece may be traced back to the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age. This is to say, the natural democracy that prevails among forest dwellers (we can take as an example the early inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego or prehistoric Latvians who may have invented the grammar for the endearing word) disappeared and was replaced by a rational system of an in-group of “voters”. For all the appeal that “rational democracy” may have, it did not survive for long because it is subject to rational manipulation. Though a number of experiments in democracy were made by the agriculturalists who succeeded the forest dwellers—the most notable of which experiments was the election of a sacrificial king, who through his sacrifice was to remind naked humanity of the spiritual and charismatic components that being human makes possible—the temptation to tax the agriculturalists (if you have 2 sack of grain, I will take one of them, add it to my 2 and have 3) was too great for the sacred king to survive the aggressions of kings who succumbed to the temptations of becoming secularists. The transition from sacred king (King Arthur and his Round Table is a good example) most probably happened around the 9th century of our era.

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Jaņdž, I think you kinda failed to answer a pretty plain question put to you some time ago by Džons. Trees, Jaņdž—you plant them, they grow. You plant them to get something, and Latvia’s forests have been managed since when? Duke James? Why don’t you read a bit about forestry. Take even the Ziedoņi, Imants and Rimants, and learn how forests have been managed. Stop playing with the plastic virgin forests of your mind, please.

Visu gaišu,
/P

THE-NOT-VOTER
28 Responsible Democracy Anyone?

Without going into detail concerning the reasons why rational democracy is failing in the United States, Europe, and indeed everywhere, we must nevertheless take a close look at the consequences of the Age of Enlightenment and rational Democracy in Latvia.

The advent of rational democracy in Latvia was greatly furthered by the Herrnhuter religious movement. Led by a farsighted German nobleman, Count Zinzendorf (he understood that natural democracy among the princes and barons had come to an end and wished a peaceful transition to a democracy shared with all people), the movement encouraged uneducated Latvians (as well as Africans and Americans) to learn how to read. By 1897 an estimated 92% of inhabitants of Livland (later Latvia) were literate.

Unfortunately, there was an inherent conflict in Graf Zinzendorf’s movement. Inspired as it was by the Age of Enlightenment, the nobleman championed individual freedom and a personal relationship with God. Zinzendorf’s goal threatened not only the authority of the Catholic and Lutheran churches, but the tsar of Russia. In 1742 the knighthood of Livonia with the help of the Empress Tsarina Elizabeth (in 1743) shut down the movement, and forced it to go underground. It recovered in 1764, when Empress Tsarina Catherine II restored (said to have occurred inadvertently) their religious rights. The Lutherans continued to impede the development of the movement, until Tsar Alexander I proclaimed them complete liberty in 1817. Still, the Lutherans persisted in their repression (they insisted that the state eliminate the Herrnhuter choirs, the movement’s core organizing unit (disallowing recruitment of new members), and eliminating elections by a lottery system. By 1860 the movement was for all practical purposes eliminated, and its near 70,000 members in Livland muted.

As Estonians and Latvians ought to know, if there had not been the educational effort of the Herrnhuter movement, which increased the literacy of the people, their nations would not have come into existence.

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THE-NOT-VOTER
29 Latvia Left For Dead

Last Friday evening I took yet another excursion into the Latvian Kingdom of Boredom on the Air Waves.
Not that reaching Boredom was my intent. “100. pants preses klubs” (The Press Club of the 100th Commandment), led by Mareks Gailitis, the news director of LTV1, announced in a pre-show on-air blurb that his guest will be Ainārs Šlesers, the vice-major of Riga, the same who has often been portrayed as the “bulldozer” of Latvian politics.

Granted, the only “bulldozing” Mr. Shlesers ever does is drive his tractor back and forth over a pile of rubbish of nothin’ special, then jump out of the caboose, and goes home reciting rubishy poetry for the ears of the Latvian electorate. Such a precedent does not encourage one to listen to “the buldozer” again.

Even so, this listener and viewer, though not a die-hard optimist, always hopes that there will appear a journalist, an interviewer worth his-her salt, who will sit up from his-her chair (usually of red cloth or plastic in Latvia) and ask a question with a bite. If the bite is deflected by a question arriving from God on an unrelated matter, but inspires the politician interviewed to speak in a babble of tongues immediately, the reporter will be hellish enough to ask the same question again.

The layout of the stage for the “100. pants” interviews is an inverted V, with the host sitting at the point of the V, while on his right hand sit three reporters, but on his left three interviewees. Of the latter, Ainars Shlesers (Šlesers) was the center of attention on Friday night. He was flanked by two partners from the political coalition known as “Par Labu Latviju” (Favoring A Good Latvia). These were Andris Shkhehle (Šķēle), three times former PM, and Maris Riekstinsh, former foreign minister.

The interview began with a hem and a ke-ke-rex from the host Gailitis.

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jandžs et al.,

“As Estonians and Latvians ought to know, if there had not been the educational effort of the Herrnhuter movement, which increased the literacy of the people, their nations would not have come into existence”

Do not discount the enlightement brought about by the spread of lutheranism among estonians and latvians before that.

Visu labu,

29½  THE NOT-V0TER

This post in response to a post on LOL by Bruno the Left. It is no doubt difficult to make a response to a theme discussed in blog 28, when 29 is on line. Nevertheless, it is worth a try.

The Wars of Religion (1562-1598) severely tested the concept of government that “une foi, un loi, un roi,” (“one faith, one law, one king”) could any longer hold the kingdom together. One of the rebels against the former hegemony was Martin Luther, who made the Pope his special enemy. Nevertheless, while Luther initially supported a German Peasant Rebellion, he wished them to remain under the tutelage of temporal authorities. When Lutheranism came to the Livonia, it had a priori submitted to the German authorities there. Most of the Lutheran ministers did not speak the native language, not even by the time when Livonia was reached (1729~1736) by Graf Zinzendorf and his Herrnhuter movement. Thus the Herrnhuters were the liberators of the Livonian peasants de facto, that is, they taught them how to read, become politically self-aware. Not surprisingly the peasants became demanding of their rights, which was not an attitude much appreciated by the German barons.

After the Lutherans had repressed the Herrnhuters (1860), they consolidated their hold on power, even as they had to acknowledge many of the changes brought about by the Herrnhuters. The latter had actually started into motion the national awakening, which soon became a secular and militant movement. It was under the pressure of the secular movement that Lutheran barons admitted Latvian Lutheran ministers to preach to their own. Still, even the Latvian ministers found certain things in the proto-Latvian past with which they prefered not deal with. One such figure was the figure of “John”, a figure of the ancient European forest, who had survived the Crusades in Livonia.

When in 1873 “John” reemerged from the forest by appearing on the cover of the first Latvian book (other than religious) as krivs or vaidelotis, names of the proto-Latvian priest, not only did the Russian tsar have most of the copies of the book burnt, but encouraged the removal of “John” from the stage as a Latvian hero.

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jandžs et al.,

” Nevertheless, while Luther initially supported a German Peasant Rebellion, he wished them to remain under the tutelage of temporal authorities. When Lutheranism came to the Livonia, it had a priori submitted “

This has been discusse Forum before. It was Lutheranisms claim that the faithfull should be able to read the Holy Scriptures for themselves, that led to the increase in literacy among the native homesteads in Livonia.

Visu labu,

Some helpful links as to the history of reading and writing in Latvian.

On a quick overview of the Herrnhuter movement in Latvia and its history.
http://depts.washington.edu/baltic/papers/moravian.html

The purpose of teaching proto-Latvians to write was to create a more obedient flock for the barons, something we now call the “sheeple” people.

It was the Moravians Brethren who besides reading taught writing. Writing creates critical thought, and it was the stirrings of critical thought that created out of the proto-Latvians what today are the post-Latvians.
http://depts.washington.edu/baltic/papers/literacy.htm Unfortunately, the middle segment is difficult to find these days.

By forming choirs, the Moravian Brethren attempted and succeeded in creating a community out of fragments. This is perhaps one of the reasons why the Songs of Johns, while religious in intent, have little outright religious content: they were meant to be sung, and the singing was meant to bind.

I am enjoying these historical articles in your post, especially this last one about the Herrnhuter movement and the history of the Moravian Brethren.  Here in our part of N.Carolina we have Moravian churches all over the place.  When this movement was banned in some parts of Europe, the folks settled here and farmed the land and built their churches.  One popular treat around the holidays is Moravian cookies, which are wafer thin. A bakery in Winston-Salem specializes in making them and tourists can come and watch the process. Also, popular around the holidays is the Moravian star which hangs in many, many windows, regardless if the occupants are of the Moravian faith or not.  At Wake Forest during the holidays the Moravians hold a candlelight parade, attended by many locals and visitors alike. So this article was of special interest to me because not all the Moravian decendants living here could be of Bohemian ancestry.  They could also be Baltic.
Thanks for the link.