Latvia’s Cannibals
There is an old Latvian joke.
Question: What is a Latvian’s favourite food?
Answer : Another Latvian.
Nowhere is this phenomenon made more vivid than in the recently published dissing of Latvia’s past President, Vaira Vike-Freiberga. This bizarre attack takes place in the flimsy pages of Lato Lapsa’s publication which he entitles, rather clumsily: ‘Va (i) ras virtuve.’
Lapsa clearly suffers from the ‘cannibal pot syndrome’.
The diagnosis of this syndrome has a poor prognosis:
The indications are that every time somebody tries to crawl out of the pot, the rest of the victims drag the escapee back into the boiling cauldron.
History plays a part in this syndrome.
Latvia has been a slave culture for 900 out of the last 1000 years.
Such long-term conditions have had a genetic and psychic impact on its people, including tendencies towards neurosis compounded with paranoid feelings of self-loathing and unwarranted inferiority complexes.
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This is quite frightening.
But then, when I think about it, it makes sense. I myself am a successful lawyer. Nice family etc… But somehow I’m still poor in the self-esteem department.
Could this finally be my diagnosis? Cannibal pot syndrome.
Well Andrej there is maybe a glimmer of hope if you are thinking about it. The first step to healing is actually recognizing that you have the illness. Most have absolutely no insight and without that there is not even a chance of improvement. In the end-stages it leads to self-destruction because you are unable to get out of the pot yourself.
I’m thinking that maybe this condition is not specific to Latvians only.
Surely other groups share this same malady. Writers, artists, bloggers…
I don’t know.
Still, I have found it to be the keenest in the Latvian population.
what about Genghis Khan’s conquest – if Latvian chieftains at the time would contact Mongol warriors who shared similar heathen beliefs (sky, wolf-mother etc) and asked them to demolish Teutonic knights’ little world of power / colony in the Baltics, then maybe Latvians would have different mentality? The Genghis’s army was only 150 miles away from Livonia
Thanks for the comment, Vilku Miks.