7 A Latvian Latvia for Latvians?

A Russian Russia for Putin?

The last paragraph in my previous blog read: “The question that remains is—just how much did the Reformed Church, the Herrnhuters, the Lutherans, the spiritually revived proto-Latvians succeed in ‘reforming’ the collaboration between secular and religious forces? If we are to judge by results—the liberal neo-capitalist world order of today—the result of the ‘Reform’ of religion has been nil and on the minus side.”

The following clip is an excellent come-back to the accomplishments of the “Reformation religion” now come to rule America, and trying to bring the “Arab spring” to Russia and China. http://www.truthdig.com/holiday/message/ If I read it right, the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church, , too, has chimed in against the commercialization http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/26/rome-revolt-billboard-jungle of Christmas http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-16328318 .

If we look for the deep-sourced-cause for the “wealth virus”, this writer recommends to the reader a history of the wealth virus as presented through the eyes of economist Michael Hudson http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/12/06/the-baltic-tigers%E2%80%99-false-prophets-of-austerity/, who takes us back to the Romans decimating democracy in ancient Sparta.

In any event, by traveling through many of history’s labyrinths, the virus found its way to Latvia, first brought by the (good for nothing)  religious vassals--relatives not fit to direct a secular oligarch guided government--of French and German kings. The vassalage (or knighthood) originated  at the Cluny monastery in France http://www.medieval-spell.com/Medieval-Church/ and its subsequent imitators. This 'religious' route was of oligarch lineage. It led to Latvia through  Bishop Albert of Riga a city on the coast of proto-Latvia or Livonia. Six centuries later the religion lived on through the well meaning efforts of the Herrnhuters in the 18^th and 19^th centuries converting all proto-Latvians to the religion of liberal capitalism. Not surprisingly, Latvians to this day do not have a left political wing. The repression of the left in Latvia since at least the 12^th century, and, thus, with no mitigating agency in conflicts between  an oligarchy and the poor, with the only “left” ever in power being Stalin and his supporters among the Latvian Bolsheviks.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, essentially because the violence of this once in a life-time “left” made people sick and disgusted with it, Latvians quickly reverted to the dictates of the capitalist dna, now channeled by English-speaking Latvians and Latvian-European pathways.

For AB and Made Jurjane the capitalist virus began to break down their “ģimene” (family) on the very cusp of the 19^th and 20^th centuries. The hammer of coincidence hit the nail, their “ģimene”, smack on the head, and killed it.

After AB had served some twenty years as a director of the Platere school (I am not sure what grades it taught), his boast made at an inn in his youth that “someday I will be a millionaire”, made him open two hardware stores. Either through AB’s lack of experience as a shopowner or because of inexperienced and/or slowenly employees, the stores went bust. These bankruptcies made AB become a virtual slave to his creditors, there being no protection for the bankrupt in those days.

If AB ever wished to realize his dream of becoming “a millionaire”, he would have to entrust his next business venture to another person, one whom the creditors could not touch and whom he believed he could implicitly trust.

The next venture led AB to leave his job as school principal and move to Riga. When in Riga, AB found a job as an editor of a German newspaper. AB had learned German from his father, who in turn had probably learned it from his father, and which language at the age of four this blogger spoke as well as he spoke Latvian.

In 1904, in Riga, AB also met Emilija Elks, a young woman, twenty-one years his junior, who worked selling ads for the same German language newspaper AB was editor at. Emilija was married at that time to an actor by the name of Elks. It was not a happy marriage. Family stories have it, that AB met Emilija when she submitted for publication a review of a play at Riga’s Jaunais Teātris, (Riga’s New Theatre). AB let the review be published. This was about 1904, when AB was forty-four years old, and Emilija was twenty-three. They began to live together in 1911.

By supporting Emilija, AB did not only give backing to a yet fragile young woman, but through that woman, found for himself the next leg to his dream of “a million”. Emilija, young and pretty, and now because of AB’s backing also self-assured, sold ads so successfully, that AB began to dream of becoming a newspaper tycoon or magnate.

As the link to Emilija Benjamins http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Em%C4%ABlija_Benjami%C5%86a

at Wikipedia tells it, AB and Emilija, increased their collaboration, did some obvious scheming among themselves, and using the owner’s (Blankenstein) absence from the newspaper as an opportunity for themselves to in due course take the newspaper over.

Because of his earlier bankruptcies, AB could not sign on as a publisher of the newspaper, now renamed Jaunākās Ziņas (The Latest of Late News), and began to distribute it throughout Riga as a “for a kopeic” newspaper). This was one of the first ever NEAR FOR FREE publications in the world. The idea for such a newspaper traveled the America to St. Petersburg to Riga route. My father and uncle Karlis both were students in Peterburg, and Karlis brought the idea of a penny newspaper to Riga. The idea itself began in England through the development of ballad broadsides, which made some of the publishers of words to popular melodies rich

and sometimes tragically misused by their valet, man or woman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tragical_Ballad_18th_century.png . “The Latest of Latest News” does not look all that much different from a ballad broadside.

 “Jaunākās Ziņas”, took Riga by storm. In the short time of ten years, both AB and Emilija (they married in 1922) were millionaires. In twenty years, Emilija Benjamins was playing on occasion the role of Latvia’s First Lady for the Ulmanis (unmarried) regime.

6 A Latvian Latvia? By Way of Mime or Alterity?

When Made Jurjane met Antons Benjamins (henceforth AB), he had just arrived in Ergli (actually it was Vecogre) from his first year as a teacher in Rujiena (about 1881). As AB was also a choir leader, and Made had a nice voice and musical relatives, she joined the choir.

As people say today, AB and MJ started ‘dating’ and in the course of time married. AB moved on to a teaching post in Platere, a small village then near Ogre. In the course of time, AB became the choir director for the entire region of Vidzeme. He and Made had four children. My uncle Karlis, was he oldest son, but he died years before I was born. My father, Janis, was second in line, followed by two sisters, Anna and Marta.

The trouble that was lurking for my grandmother was a kind of hidden bacillus infecting the social arena of the time. As I pointed out in a previous blog, I think of this bacillus as a wealth virus, a kind of a flue of the time.

The infection arrived with the Herrnhuters in the years that followed the Great Northern War, which ended in 1711. The first Herrnhuter (in English this may be translated as Top Hat) arrived in Latvia about 1739. My first ancestor’s name was one Andžs, from which I take my pen name of Jandžs. Andžs is known in the English language as Angus. The Irish Poet Yeats has a wonderful poem called “Song of Wandering Angus”. I cannot read it without thinking about the wandering proto-Christian preachers known among Latvians as Jahni or Johns. Such wandering preachers or Angus were common in the early centuries of the 2^nd millennium also in Languedoc, now southern France. Known as Cathars, these early Johns were wiped out by the Inquisition in the latter part of the 13^th and early part of 14^th centuries. The Cathars were infiltrated by pseudo-Christian spies of then rising Roman Church. An account of the times and events can be read in Caterina Bruschi’s ground breaking book called “The Wandering Heretics of Languedoc.” Bruschi is a Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Birmingham.

I am not quite sure how my theory about the rise of the Roman Church sits with the academic community, but I suspect that it arose with the rise of the secular princely and landed class about a thousand years ago. Needing to repress the anarchic energies of a truly democratic forest people (in those days most of Europe was covered by forests), the landed classes coopted the proto-Christian church by persuading it to remove the Johns (Cathars, Bogomils, etc.) to a region in the skies, which these early oligarchs called their Haven, which we know today as Heaven. Along with this removal effort, the proto-Christian myths were rewritten. Thus, the Sun of the Winter Solstice, became one Jesus, while the Sun itself became the halo surrounding the baby’s head that we still see in so-called nativity scenes.

The battles between the Johns and the priests serving the oligarchs has not ended to this day. Anyone, who knows something of the history of the Christian religion, knows that the destruction of the Cathars did not end the civil war (if you will) between the various Christian sects and movements. The Herrnhuters were an outgrowth of these conflicts.

While a Reform movement, the Herrnhuters were not reformers without faults of their own. In the process of the many intra-Christian conflicts, they, too, had become infected with the oligarchal virus that came with the violent rise of the oligarchal classes. Indeed, the founder of the Herrnhuters was a German noble from around the region of Dresden, Germany. Though a prince and an oligarch, he was, at the same time, once of the rich kids with an anarchic streak in him. The German nobles kicked him out of their high society, and one of his first trips as an exile was to Valmiera, proto-Latvia. After this, he went to America, but did not have too much success as an evangelizer for his ideas.

One of Graf Zinzendorf’s revolutionary ideas was that evangelists should not be simply talking down to the  people, but should be living in their midst. After he was persuaded by the conditions about Valmiera, that his movement would be useful there, he issued a call for volunteers. The first arrived in Valmiera in 1739 http://www.diegeschichteberlins.de/geschichteberlins/persoenlichkeiten/persoenlichkeiteag/413-friedrich-wilhelm-i-graf-zinzendorf.html . My guestimate from looking at my family tree is that Andžs arrived in proto-Latvia about 1740. Wherefrom? I do not know. My dna tests show that my paternal ancestors, my closest dna relatives, are clustered about Croatia, northern Italy, and Romania.

AB’s father, Janis Benjamins, was working as a starasts (elder, community leader, for a German baron). I am not quite clear just where, but it is not beyond the possibility that it was about the region of Taurene, where a famous (and allegedly cruel) German noble had part of his estate. In the course of time, JB became the owner of an inn, a ‘krogs’, where on Sunday’s he held Herrnhuter meetings. In those days, it was not uncommon to have inns near churches. The proto-Latvian peasants often visited these inns before going to the church and, no doubt, after getting out. One did after all have to wash all the rhetoric and advertisement out of one’s mind.

The question that remains is—just how much was the Reformed Church, the Herrnhuters, the Lutherans, the spiritually revived proto-Latvian succeed in ‘reforming’ the collaboration between secular and religious forces? If we are to judge by results—the liberal neo-capitalist world order of today—the result of the ‘Reform’ of religion has been nil and on the minus side.