“Maybe see the new “Latvian” communities in so many countries outside Latvia organized by Latvians hardly fleeing a Latvia, land and people they love, but are merely looking for work in a world of high unemployment…”

The finny bit about this statement is that the mass exodus didn’t start with the crisis. People were leaving the country en masse when the unemployment was at 6 percent. The crisis undoubtedly exacerbated the exodus, but it certainly was not the cause of it.

Aleksejs et al.,
“The finny bit about this statement is that the mass exodus didn’t start with the crisis. People were leaving the country en masse when the unemployment was at 6 percent. The crisis undoubtedly exacerbated the exodus, but it certainly was not the cause of it.”.

Nor is it restricted to latvians. It is what could be called ” Antiņs dodās pasaulē laimi meklēt” syndrome.

Why did you return to Latvia when you did ?

Visu labu,

I’m not saying that Latvians in that respect is unique. But what I am saying is that you cannot discard the exodus filled with economic migrants. It’s not just men that move, but whole families, who are unlikely to return. And that began once Latvia joined the EU in 2004 and gave people lots of opportunities to move and work abroad legally.

Bruno, considering that we have never met and I know next to nothing about you, I’m not comfortable sharing private information about why I moved back to Latvia.

This is just too funny.

Look, P. C., there’s a Tyrannosaurus rex/lakstigala’s difference between the Latvian notion of any revolution and the Bolsheviks’ version of World Revolution…

I can’t really read past that. Sorry, Ambi, but there were not a few Latvian Bolsheviks. In fact, far more bolshies here than anywhere except, I think, in some god-forsaken little oblast’, perhaps Perm. If you look at the 1917 elections, the only place the Bolsheviks won was Vidzeme. Nowhere else. Nowhere else in the entire Russian Empire. As to Latvian notions in Michigan—couldn’t you start like a souvenir shop?

/P

P.S.

We don’t have Communism but Dictatorial Regimes run by thugs like Putin living with the Soviet deformed version of everything including anything “socialist.”

I haven’t seen anything from you, over all these years of absurdist venom, to suggest that you aren’t gaga about dictatorial thugs—you just wish they were your thugs.

/P

P.P.S. I want to add a harsh note. Māris would like to scrape the red stars off the granite Riflemen. I don’t think so. Worse than moving the thing. Airbrushing out. In Daugavpils, there’s a sinister monument (see some of my old musings here), out of place. The stars were replaced with Orthodox crosses. I am not into posthumous rape. It is anyway sometimes hard to tell the difference between Stalin-gothic & Ulmanist architectural monumentalism. Auseklīši, or hammers & sickles? Ministru kabinets? Ever seen the losing designs for the Freedom Monument?

Do you really need overt symbols to feel insulted? Fabriciuss was a horrifying being, & very Latvian. “Let’s build barricades out of bourgeois bodies.” His best line. He got more medals for crushing opposition to Marxism-Leninism than anybody. That stands. And we have this private joke at the Writers’ House there—who’s that guy? “The patron saint of translators.” Tāds jauks puisis. How myths begin.

There are nuances, nay? One can issue Mark Twain to obviate a word I can’t write ‘cause this site is filtered. I’m against that. I’m against laws punishing “Holocaust denial”, too.

We have money with no faces, except that of Krišjānis Barons. I like it that way. I think the Ulmanis monument is disgusting—and it was disproportionately funded by Australian Latvians. I think statues should stop fighting. One could tear down the entire city as a monument to German, etc., oppression. One could delve into the horror of different names, as anywhere in Eastern Europe—you say Dvinsk, I say tom-ah-toe.

Aren’t there better things to do?

But revising the past in a certain way is simply vile. Don’t try to take Rainis’s socialism away from him. It is as bad as the Soviets taking his nationalism away. No, it’s worse—‘cause this is a free country. Theoretically, at least.

Visu gaišu,
/P

“A few whacks with a chisel and some spit and polish could eradicate that small problem .. Yes?
I actually do like it.”

” Māris would like to scrape the red stars off the granite Riflemen. I don’t think so. Worse than moving the thing.”

PC:
Having lived in USA for many a years, and having your eloquent loquasious ( & oft barbed) turn of phrase, I thought you would have understood a joke when you saw one.
Apparently not.
Could be my Oz sense of humour.

As for moving it ... it is in reference to a choice ... to move it to a more conducive location or upgrade the immediate environs that it presently is in. I’m not advocating moving it for political reasons.
The present immediate environment is simply awful… that’s my only reason.
As for most sculptures / statues / memorials, yes, leave alone to stand the test of time ... they are part of history (or representing history).

(And the Red stars on the hats aren’t exactly ‘overt’)
(Maybe someone might attempt to airbrush them out ... but don’t accuse me if it happens)

But the Monstr is a Monster.
Removal would not do it justice.
Destruction would.

Time for another prawn on the barbie, with a cold beer.

PC,
You just keep adding to the nonsense.  I have never supported any thugs anyplace on the face of this earth, I never will, and I can’t imagine ever doing so.  I would be a different person if that were to occur, but keep trying to make me into something I am not since it seems to be an LoL mainstay of yours.  And keep maligning my people in Vidzeme and casting them in the odd singular role as eternal Bolsheviks because they once wanted freedom and fairness to the best of their understanding.  Anyway, I would not even consider supporting female thugs.
You wrote without any basis in fact: “I haven’t seen anything from you, over all these years of absurdist venom [say what?], to suggest that you aren’t gaga about dictatorial thugs—you just wish they were your thugs.”  How you do project on “embi” from your world of relative commie thuggery.  Yes, Marx, yes Trotsky, no Lenin, no Stalin. 
I can’t blame the young, idealistic, and naive Latvian Riflemen and any Latvians who joined up with the promise of a better world, but, as I just wrote, that was appropriate idealism before one was able to know what the Bolsehvik “paradise” meant in reality and would turn out to be in Latvia with the destruction of independence - before independence was even dreamed.  It’s one thing to have been taken in by Bolshevik promises back then before there were occupations and deportations of the same families of those you delusionally think were diehard Bolsheviks or Bolshevik supporters in Vidzeme (from whence my own senci), but, hon, you had 20/20 hindsight and the family’s Latvian story when you still lost your mind in red romance and managed to overlook the call to murder from Marx and the appalling thuggery, along with grotesque barbarity, of Trotsky . 
About Rainis: I have never deprived him of his “socialism.”  I am not a Republican in the US as probably was the leaning of your Latvian community in the US when you were secretly (?) reading Trotsky.  No wonder you need to be angry at some “conservative trimda Latvian.”  On the other hand, it’s you - along with the Soviets who deformed any Latvian they could lay their hands on - who can’t deal with his passionate, unwavering, and primary “nationalism.”

You’re too absurd to bother debating, Embi, sorry. If I get some kandža, maybe.

/P

http://www.flickr.com/photos/qubodup/3923119566/

Black Death, anyone?

Kandžu, ne krutku. Bet vairs nedzīvoju Latgalē...

/P

Tecini pats…..............Kolkas stipro.

I hear Kolka Cool.

http://altcenter.org/?p=734

Maybe these protesting folk in USA haven’t ‘moved on’ yet either?

Nor the following:

“Minnesota
Program commemorates 1941 deportations
Commemoration of the June 1941 deportations in Soviet-occupied Latvia is scheduled at 7 p.m. June 14 in the Latvian Ev.-Lutheran Church of Minneapolis and St. Paul, 3152 17th Avenue S., Minneapolis. ”

William J.H. Hough, III. “The Annexation of the Baltic States and its Effect on the Development of Law Prohibiting Forcible Seizure of Territory.” 

http://www.lituanus.org/1988/88_2_06.htm