As we all know, thousands of Latvians left Latvia during the war, and thousands more left Latvia after accession to the EU.  Many are leaving as a result of the economic problems.  So what if every ethnic Latvian left?  If it’s OK for some Latvians not to live here, then surely it’s OK for every Latvian not to live here, isn’t it?

What if every ethnic latvian repatriated? 

Latvians born & raised in Australia, Canada, England, Germany, the USA and more have moved to Latvija and are working hard to make it all work.

What if the moon was made of green cheese…................................

Imagine there’s no heaven. It’s easy if you try.

Ilze wrote:-

What if every ethnic latvian repatriated? 

Latvians born & raised in Australia, Canada, England, Germany, the USA and more have moved to Latvija and are working hard to make it all work.

I know, Ilze, but very few - a few hundred at most.  At the same time tens of thousands have left to work and live in Britain, Ireland and elsewhere.

Džons

To answer Dzon Brauns question, “If it’s OK for some Latvians not to live here, then surely it’s OK for every Latvian not to live here, isn’t it?”

Sure its OK. Its OK for Latvians to do as they please. They appear to have free will. But they should realize that choices have consequences. If every Latvian chose not to live in Latvia, then every Latvian would be accepting the consequence that someone else will move here in their place. Nature abhors a vacuum. If your team leaves the playing field in a huff, another team will take your place. The Mongol Hordes were good at persuading people to leave their homes, and Europeans only partially succeeded in getting all native American Indians to leave their lands. Some people are forced to leave their lands because of drought, pestilence or bad kharma. I, for one, plan to stick around for a while. Hope others do too. The game is far from over.

Krišjānis Valdemārs, invoked by Ivars Graudiņš in the other thread on this subject, “was confident that the multicultural future he envisioned would not endanger the survival of the Latvian nation, as long as even cosmopolitan, multilingual Latvians continued to read Latvian literature and as long as most Latvians continued to live in the countryside, ‘in Latvian surroundings, where foreign languages are not needed, and where even if once learned, they would soon be forgotten.’” (Katrina Z. S. Schwartz, Nature and National Identity After Communism: Globalizing the Ethnoscape. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006. Italics mine.)

Džons has already brought up numerous reasons why residency matters; revenue, for example. A friend at Facebook recently offered an ugly summary of the unsustainable reality—we have about 1,3 million people of working age; around 300 000 have left, 200 000 are unemployed, 55 000 are functionaries, and 200 000 work in the public sector, leaving 500 000 people with a tax burden of 75%.

A look at Israel would not only show that Jews continue to make aliyah (e.g., 3324 from North America alone last year; there are approximately 110 000 North American immigrants in Israel [1]); it would show numerous other relevant things, like the fact that about three times as many books are published in Israel than in Latvia. Israel has some of the top-ranked universities in the world and ranks fourth after the US, Sweden and Switzerland in the number of science and engineering articles published per year per million inhabitants. [2] How does Latvia compare? See “The sorry state of higher education (and research)” at Vjačeslavs Dombrovskis’ blog.

I don’t see why it’s not “practical and feasible to sit on a farm and engage in animal husbandry or simply grow crops”; I know people who do just that and they’re quite practical folk who are part of the real economy, not that there aren’t some virtual jocks around here who are terribly turned off by the real. As to a knowledge-based economy—most of what Latvia’s officials and p.r. men spout is unadulterated claptrap, just Euro-newspeak about life-long learning and retraining and how very educated we supposedly are.

Israel is the Jewish state, and Latvians have no religious reasons to repatriate. Nonetheless, as long as we’ve started making comparisons—how many Latvians from North America do you think repatriated last year? Answer: seven. The UK isn’t even on the list, unless there’s one under “from other countries.” The most came from Russia: 44. Here’s a graph of the total numbers of those repatriating, year by year.

I definitely agree that the trimda did a lot for Latvia, though I think Latvians in Latvia did a lot more to revive Latvia than those abroad. As Aleksejs already pointed out, the trimda came to an end two decades ago. I don’t doubt that one can still do a lot for Latvia abroad. I’ve no desire to guilt-trip anybody into repatriating. The fact of the matter is, though, that the strength of the trimda was about keeping the Latvian flame alive until the fatherland was free again. I don’t know about your family, but ours planned to return once Latvia regained its independence. It was very much a “next year in Jerusalem” kinda thing.

Latvian publishing in the West has slowed to a trickle. Most of the press is either fossilized or defunct. The wonderful books Saulaine offers are available mostly because people get rid of their books—there’s almost nobody left to read them. Enrollment in diaspora Saturday schools has steadily declined. LSC ceased to exist. MLĢ is gone. There are now six Latvian weekend schools in Ireland, but the character of the current waves of emigration is quite different, and most Latvians leaving will probably assimilate even more quickly than the offspring of the trimda.

I once brought up an old JG article suggesting that the superletiņi, most of them opposed to contact with the real Latvia, purchase Arctic territory in Canada the size and shape of Latvia and hold contests for baking the world’s largest pīrāgs. I think Ivars’ vision of a post-modern, global Latvia is as pathetically funny as that. Being Latvian outside Latvia for most people is little more than being Irish by drinking green beer (or, as I hinted earlier, dropping nickels in the IRA collection box).

Like OK, I plan to stick around for a while; unlike OK, I’m not sure whether the game isn’t at a stage where most chess players would tip over their king. Latvia must change, yes. It is, unfortunately, quite ill-equipped to adapt, though, rutting in its historical divisions and myths. It’s still a beautiful country with amazing people, and the main reason to live here is because you love it—the landscape, the language(s), its soul. 

Rather than contrast Latvia with Israel, contrast it with Latvia 1918/20, when many returned from exile to build this country. They faced far more difficulties than Ambersun does, Latvia having been devastated by war.

Vysu lobu,
/P