Morons as punishers, morons as the punished?

Latvia is never lacking for examples of petty fuckwit authoritarian behavior by ape-brained primates who have found their way into public administration. The latest example, according to media reports, comes from Liepāja, where a pensioner was administratively fined LVL 25 (around 50 USD) for calling the light-haired wife of a municipal official "little blondie" (blondīnīte in Latvian).
The alleged name-calling occurred after Linards Ozols tried to deliver some heating briquettes to a friend but found the driveway to the courtyard  of the friend's apartment house blocked by a car belonging to a blond-haired woman, who refused to move it, but finally moved the vehicle (apparently a jeep-like SUV) after Ozols addressed her as "little blondie", which she considered an insult.
To be fair, calling a woman "blond" in certain contexts in Latvia  is a mildly sexist insult based on the assumption that women, generally, are not as "smart" as Latvian men (depressive, chain-smoking drunks in the grave by age 65 by another stereotype) and that blondes are the least smart of them all. But where there is boorish behavior, an exchange of insults follows, as Latvians would say, like amen! in church (kā āmen baznīcā). You cannot force people to be civil, least of all in a society where, with a number of factors working simultaneously, white trash behaviors are more and more commonplace. To punish minor incivility is a ridiculous violation of a person's right to speak freely.
What elevates this incident from the perniciously silly to the bizarre is the fact, according to media accounts, that Ozols, having delivered his briquettes, was unsuccessfully pursued by a Liepāja municipal police car, which only failed to overtake him because of oncoming traffic. However, Ozols was later identified and handed an adminstrative fine for calling the blond wife of municipal police official blond.
Police officials call the pensioner's story of an alleged pursuit a fantasy, but Ozols was eventually fined for insulting the wife of Gints Krēsla, the head of the Administrative section of the Liepāja municipal police.


Nazi crank back in the news
The other free speech issue recently raised in the Latvian media is a report that the American organization the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has taken notice of an anti-Semitic rant on a Latvian television channel by a crackpot extremist, Uldis Freimanis and asked, in a public statement, that he be "brought to justice." The ADL statement correctly notes that incitement to ethnic hatred is punishable under Latvian law, so  the organization's demand is logically correct and consistent with its mission to expose and combat anti-Semitism and other kinds of bigotry.  Fair enough.
However, as an American organization, the ADL should be aware that in the US, Freimanis' ravings would be protected speech under the First Amendment and were he punished on US territory, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) might well take up his case. The ACLU, which has a number of Jewish lawyers working for it, was behind legal actions in the 1970s to allow a march by neo-Nazis in Skokie, Illinois. a town populated at the time by a number of Holocaust suvivors. The Nazis won their case, helped by some Jewish lawyers who put free speech and free assembly (the right to non-violently express any message) above the deeply offensive content of the Nazis' message.
I fully agree with the ADL that Freimanis expressed offensive, depraved views about Jews, that he even urged their murder, but absent a very limited context of direct incitement (leading a mob with torches to a synagogue) I oppose the punishment of any speech, writing or other expression not involving the direct use of force.  The organization Article 19,  I believe, has  a number of articles on its website opposing the  application of so-called hate speech laws. There should be no hate speech laws in Latvia, hate, bigotry and ignorance cannot be legislated out of existence. Free speech, open debate and free expression are part of a process that may, over time, reduce the level of ignorance and xenophobia in this country,

March 16 - police, peaceful marchers and free expression

The annual March 16 event to commemorate the Latvian Legion, forcibly conscripted by the German occupation authorities in 1943, passed peacefully after its almost ritual banning by the Riga City authorities and the lifting of the ban by a Latvian court. It almost looked like an effort by outgoing Minister of Interior Linda Mūrniece (caught briefly in the video) to show that there were still many police under her command. Toward the end of the video, when I say this may be one of the last few years when the event takes place, I mean that there will be very few actual veterans of the Legion left alive and fit to march. It will either fade or become a purely politicized event expressing differing interpretations of historical events that few people have living memory of.

Latvian court backs free speech and assembly, yet again

An "antifascist" organization a few days ago and the Latvian veterans' organization "Daugavas vanagi" on March 15 won the right to assembly near the Freedom Monument on March 16 in appeals to a Latvian court.  The court ruled, yet again, for the right to free assembly. Lame-duck Minister of Interior Linda Murniece (who has resigned, but will not go away until June) initially opposed the ban on public gatherings imposed by the fuckwit Riga City Council (the fuckwit part doesn't fade with a change in political compositon). Now she is promising a massive show of police force to make sure the rallies stay peaceful. Massive, at least, as far as the large majority of police who will not be out in the countryside staging armed robberies and gun battles, or driving around Riga shitfaced banging up cars, as another member of the elite Alfa unit did.
What happens now is that a small number of 80 and 90-somethings, former Latvian Legion members, accompanied, perhaps, by their middle aged children, will march to the Freedom Monument after a religious service. They will be met by a cordon of Latvian flags held by youth supporters of the Visu Latvijai  (All for Latvia) a fervent, but moderate nationalist party. Various ultranationalist and neo-Nazi crackpots will also show up. Opposing them will be a mixture of geezers and younger folk denouncing the Legion veterans as fascists. There will, yet again, be almost universal distortion or ignorance of both history and "alternate history".
What I mean by that is that in 1943,  when the Latvian legion was drafted in violation of international law by the Nazi occupation authorities, nobody was seen off with an honor guard of dozens of flags of the Latvian republic. Maybe I am wrong, but the red-white-red shoulder flashes that these conscript Waffen SS troops got was as far as officially allowed displays of nationalism went back then.
It is also undeniable that like the little spoon dipped in tar that gets used in a big honey pot, there were people in the Latvian Legion who had been with the Latvian Police Battalions formed prior to 1943. I don't think even any of these guys participated in the Holocaust, which was largely over in the Baltics by 1942, but some of them may have done some nasty things in Belarus.
That will not prevent some of the anti-fascists from acting as if everyone in the Latvian Legion personally took part in the shooting of Jews and then celebrated by having Hitler's face tattooed life-sized on their back with a hairpin taken from one of their victims. Nonsense, to be sure.
As for the "ignorance" of alternate history, consider this -- what if the side the Latvian Legion was fighting on had actually "won" in a limited sense. Say, Stalin dropped dead in late 1944 and the Red Army suffered some major calamity and whoever took charge of the Kremlin called an uneasy armistice. Then what?
I am pretty sure the Germans would have shifted much of their "best" troops to the West, to give the Allies a bloody nose, maybe doing a better in the Battle of the Bulge, or maybe a bit worse, because some Latvians decided to desert or surrender to the 101st Airborne? Then what? I could see reprisals in Latvia, mutiny, more Legionnaires and civilians killed by "loyal" German troops and maybe the Red Army moving in anyway to "restore order" (a mutiny or disorder on the Eastern Front could be a breach of the armistice, who knows).
The least likely scenario, whatever the 18 to 20-something patriotic draftee legionnaires were thinking at the time, was that Hitler would say -- thanks, kids, here is Latvia back! Not likely. At best, there would be even fewer surviving Legionnaires and brighter and stranger shades of grey about what they were up to in an alternate history end of World War II. The guys who happily surrendered after mauling an American tank company? Sorry about that.  The guys who survived a battle with the regular SS and staggered out of a concentration camp dressed in the tatters of another kind of SS uniform? WTF or whatever they said in 1945? Guys who surrendered to Swedish police after landing on Gotland in the 1938 uniforms of the Latvian army, but armed with Schmeissers and captured Russian submachineguns?  No, it would not have ended well, only differently.  What happened in reality to the Legionnaires was one of many potential bloodsoaked clusterfucks waiting to happen under the political and military circumstances of World War II.
My late father was drafted and fought in the Legion, he was badly wounded. At the end of it, he took off his Latvian flag shoulder flash and said something like -- we did our best, but it got fucked up, and what happened did not really do honor to that flag. Kind of sums it up pretty well. 

F**kwit Riga city administration just doesn't learn, suspends free speech again

The fuckwit (yes, the term is appropriate, once is a mistake, more than twice, well...) acting Riga City manager Māris Kalve has yet again forbidden any and all requested public meetings relating to March 16, a day on which various groups have commemorated the World War II Latvian Legion and others have protested this commemoration. Needless to say, the Latvian Legion, formed during the German occupation of Latvia, was controversial. Most of the Legion was drafted, yet the soldiers predominantly fought in the belief that they were defending Latvia against the return of Soviet terror experienced in 1940-41. Some members of the Legion may have come  from police battalions formed earlier and involved in surpression of anti-German partisans.
Prior to the formation of the Legion in 1943, the Holocaust took place in Latvia, and there are some members of contemporary Latvian society who believe (inaccurately, but they are nonetheless  entitled to believe so) that the Latvian Legion can be equated with Nazism. These so-called anti-Fascist groups have also announced they would hold demonstrations on March 16. All of these intended manifestations of viewpoints, some of them extreme (young nationalists and ultranationalists are also "commemorating" the Legion), are part of the contentious, noisy public dialog of a free and democratic society. Kalve, using his office in a fuckwit manner, has attempted to stop this dialog. This is a direct threat to free speech, freedom of assembly and democracy in Latvia. Last year, a court annulled a similar ban. The Riga City administration has learned nothing. Last summer it allowed, then violated the free speech rights of people organizing by dispersing, a crackpot (in my opinion) commemoration of the "liberation" of Riga by German forces on July 1, 1941.
It is the duty of a democratic municipal government to respect the right of all citizens, regardless of their political views, to free speech and peaceful free assembly. This includes assembling sufficient police forces to keep opposing, hostile groups apart, something which the city has managed to do in the past (even when contending groups simply violated bans on marching and gathering). It should do the same on March 16 and rescind the ban on public meetings before the courts do so.
The ban, of course, has caused an understandable outcry among commentators on Latvian internet news portals, but it has also brought other democrats out of the woodwork. These people are calling on the authorities to ban celebrations on May 9, when mainly Russian war veterans, their families and supporters gather to mark the end of World War II as understood in Soviet times (the rest of the world commemorates May 8). I would agree the many of the old geezers, wittingly or unwittingly, are celebrating what, to most Latvians, was the beginning of another, longer and more devastating occupation than any that took place during the war. The commentators accused Riga mayor Nils Ušakovs, an ethnic Russian, of favoring the May 9 celebrants. While this may be true ro some extent, it is no reason to ban May 9 or any other peaceful public celebration. If mayor Ušakovs' attendance at May 9 events offends voters, they can try to throw him out of office at the next municipal election. That is also a democratic right.

For the record:  From The Urban Dictionary 
fuckwit:
Someone who despite constant failure, is unable to learn from these transgressions. Continues to do foolish and irritating things, which aggravate many people. They are not only a halfwit, but also significantly fucked in the head. Hence the term fuckwit. 

Latvia proposes an internet kill-switch -- Mubarak on the Baltic?

Latvia's new draft law on a “ A State of Emergency”, which was presented to the meeting of state secretaries (part of the process of introducing it to the parliament or Saeima) last September, was way ahead of Egypt's authoritarian ruler Hosni Mubarak by granting the government the right to throw a kill switch on the internet and all other electronic media. They can also censor the press and all correspondence, too.

The draft law also contains provisions for regulation the movement of citizens during an emergency, for overruling the decisions of local authorities, for searches and seizures in private homes and a number of other totalitarian measures. It also provides for emergency allocation of resources, goods and services and other steps that are at least superficially reasonable in case of a natural disaster, war or insurrection.

What is worrisome is that a state of emergency can be declared for political reasons, such as “a threat of civil disorder”, and that the provisions for regulating media and electronic communications, especially the internet, are dangerous and disproportionate. It is hard to see what benefit the population could gain from being shut off from domestic and outside media during a major global or regional disaster. As far as preventing people in Latvia from disseminating information over the internet and social media, it looks like the main purpose of such measures would be to keep the outside world from learning of repression or other violent and irrational actions by Latvia's own government and authorities.

Let us assume that a megastorm, a Cyclone Yasi or Hurricane Katrina type of storm was raging over Northern Europe and about to hit Latvia, where a state of emergency had been declared. Why should people be cut off from looking at the Weather Channel, the BBC, CNN or other news sources on the internet or on their mobile phones for a “second opinion” in addition to what the government was saying in official announcements?

I don't think the government would cut off the internet simply because a storm was coming, but such measures could be used if there were mass demonstrations that presented a “danger of civil disorder” to police and government bureaucrats advising those able to declare a state of emergency. In such a case, the reason for cutting off electronic communications, including the internet and the social media that live on it, would be to prevent information about state repression from getting out and to interfere with efforts by dissident groups and civil society to self-organize using the internet.

In short, this is a dangerous piece of draft legislation that leaves way too much leeway for the state to censor, repress, and prevent the dissemination of information about its own repression. This law must be stopped and/or drastically modified so that it is not a compilation of “rubber clauses” that can be stretched to attack inalienable human rights in times of social and political tension. There shall be no Latvian Mubarak, no internet kill switch.

A dialog of fools thrown to the thought police and more on the fashionista scandal

www.pietiek.com, an interesting hybrid of a Latvian wiki-leaks and some borderline hatchet-job investigative journalism reports that the scandalous electronic  correspondence of Latvia's new foreign minister Ģirts Valdis Kristovskis and Latvian-American physician Aivars Slucis is being turned over to Latvia's post-independence zombie of the KGB thought police, the Latvian Security Police (Drošības Policija).
Kristovskis, corresponding about a year ago with Slucis, a financial supporter of radical nationalist causes in Latvia, wrote that he broadly and in principle agreed with a screed in which the US-based Mayo Clinic doctor said he would be hard pressed to treat Latvians and Russians equally were he practicing medicine in Latvia. The e-mail also referred to the possibility of starting a medical facility in Latvia that would only treat ethnic Latvians.
There was, of course, a major uproar when this correspondence was disclosed even before the ink was dry on whatever document was signed nominating Kristovskis as foreign minister. A vote of no-confidence against him requested in the new Saeima (where the newly-elected legislators had barely learned how to operate the electronic voting system) failed,  but the whole scandal set the tone for the generally shambolic way the new Dombrovskis government was put together.  But that is another story.
The free speech issue at stake is that neither Dr. Slucis anti-Russian remarks, nor the reply by Kristovskis should be the subject of a police investigation. What both sides wrote, however deranged or offensive it may look, is and should be protected free expression. Period.
I will repeat again -- free expression is not something that protects only nice expression, rational expression, polite expression etc. Free expression protects all forms of thought and opinion, starting with the most extreme views. Once we let police power start examining "extreme" expression -- where will they go next?
The almost black humor crackpot part of Slucis'  views is that as a physician, he would be bound to treat enemy combatants in a war. I don't know (I doubt it) if any injured Taliban have been flow to the US and "outsourced"  for treatment to the Mayo Clinic, but I think that Slucis would have to take them as patients. Certainly that would be his duty were he a military doctor,  or in the unlikely situation that foreign terrorists were wounded by police during an incident in Rochester, Minnesota and rushed to the Mayo Clinic as the nearest hospital.
However you analyze the complex tensions that sometimes exist between Latvians and Russians in Latvia, both ethnic groups are not engaged in armed conflict. Yet Slucis makes statements that would not apply even in an armed conflict (in World War II, American doctors treated Germans whose language they didn't understand and who had been killing  Americans minutes earlier. They may not have liked it, but they treated them).  Arguments, not police, should be used against crackpot opinions.

MORE ON THE FASHIONISTA SCANDAL
While on the subject of the bizarre, it is worth noting that my post on the expulsion of fashion blogger and magazine editor-in-chief Agnese Kleina from the Riga Fashion Week drew more than 2 000 hits in a single day to my blog. This was amazing, because to me this was a marginal matter, hardly a case of the government banning a public protest or arresting a journalist. It was actually my gut reaction to what seemed to me to be irrational mistreatment of a fellow journalist.  But nothing I have ever written on this blog has ever gotten the same level of attention, especially considering that most Latvians may find my slang-ridden American English prose a bit difficult to understand. I had no idea that the fashion industry (of which I know nothing) had so many followers
Anyway,  I got a couple of e-mails from  Jeļena Stahova, the president of the Baltic Fashion Federation, who explained her reasons for banning Kleina.
She sent  a longer e-mail in Latvian, but the salient points (here in an edited  Google translation) were as follows:

The decision on refusal of accreditation  for A. Kleina, by the Baltic fashion Federation and in particular by the Riga Fashion Week Autumn session was made  this year In the spring, when I got to publications of Latvian Style and Fashion Awards ceremony. The reason for this was Kleina in her unethical comments  in a  blog, where she mocked thje event for members, leaders and everything that happened on the runway, in a way that is inconsistent with the word"Journalist" and which  was inconsistent with any professional journalism general ethical standards.Her remarks on the RFW poster  had nothing to do with this case. 


My original post was a borderline rant, so I am glad that Jeļena didn't take offense, especially as I know about as much about the fashion business as a dog knows of the Catholic mass (translating, loosely, the Latvian expression  ko suns zin no dievkalpojuma) .  I don't know what Agnese Kleina wrote earlier to anger the Fashion Federation and Jeļena, but as far as ethics go, there is a difference between blogging and "straight" (no reference to sexual orientation)  journalism. Blogs are there to express opinion, and the ethical standards are much looser. In writing news, it is unethical to distort facts, etc.  so to say that 50 people watched XY's collection demonstration when there were clearly 200 people there, or to confuse colors, etc. would be bad journalism. But to express a strong opinion in a blog is another story. Perhaps it is foolish to offend members of a close-knit and sensitive community (the Latvian fashion scene) knowing that they may react strongly to being offended. But that is more a question of tact than journalistic ethics. 
So I hope I have made an effort to be fair to the other side :).  Do I get another 2000 page hits for this?

Boozehound (?) gets six month jail sentence for desecrating Latvian flag

A 28-year old man has been sentenced to six months in jail for desecrating the Latvian flag by hanging from the flagpole of the Smiltene town hall while boozed up. The flagpole snapped and the flag was torn. This according to media reports.
Normally, this would be a case of public drunkeness and property damage or vandalism. What is disturbing is the harsh application of a law that, essentially, "sanctifies" symbols of the state and nation, giving them protection above and beyond other items of public or private property. The reason for this in Latvia as in other states is to create a disincentive for using national symbols (the flag, coat of arms, whatever) in certain forms of protest -- burning, defacement and the like.
While I doubt that our Smiltene boozehound was making any kind of political statement by doing pull-ups (maybe just one :) ) on the town hall flagpole, it is nonetheless both ominous and bizarre that he was sentences under a political law. It would be worse, still, had his actions actually been politically motivated. Is this a hidden warning not to deface the Latvian flag as a protest against, say, budget cuts or some other matter. If so, our Smiltene boozehound is actually a mineshaft canary warning of a latent but very real threat to the full freedom of expression in Latvia.
I don't favor burning flags as a form of protest either here or in the United States, where I grew up. But I do support the First Amendment cases that defend the right to burn one's own property as a form of protest even if that property happens to be a national flag.
As a final note, it may be that the dude in Smiltene got the harsh sentence because he had a previous shortened or suspended sentence for another crime. Even that does not justify harsher sentencing under a law designed to repress free expression. Had the charge been simple drunkeness and vandalism, fine. Repressive laws --no.