Latvia Quotes

Latvija ir kā šampanieša pudele, kura ilgi – ko domājat? – septiņi simti gadu – gulējusi tumšā pagrabā un kuru piepeši attaisījis neuzmanīgais Laiks. Daudz ir izgājis griestos un daudz uz grīdas, bet traukā vēl pietiek, lai mēs noreibtu, jo vīns ir vecs un labs.Kārlis Skalbe

When you’re talking about the culture, maybe there is something that just permeates sort of thing, you know you pass it on or take it in, without ever being aware of it. - Ivan Pavelić, Croatia

The past has a way of walking around in the present, behaving as if it were alive.

Of course it’s taken many years to be able to express what’s been inside me. But nowadays I say to people I was born and brought up in a Latvian house in the country of Australia. So I consider that this house has always been a small part of Latvia, there’s always been Latvian traditions, Latvian foods, Latvian language and I’ve always considered that even though I lived in a large city, I lived in a Latvian ghetto. I mentioned the word ‘ghetto’ … which a lot of people consider negatively, but I consider it in a positive sense. I consider myself quite a competent schizophrenic—I am able to be very Latvian and very dinky-di strong. I don’t have any trouble switching hats. - Viktor Brenners, 2nd Generation DP

It is estimated that Josef Stalin killed more than twenty million people during his reign of terror. The Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia lost more than a third of their population during the Soviet genocide. The deportations reached as far as Finland. To this day, many Russians deny they ever deported a single person. But most Baltic people harbor no grudge, resentment, or ill will. They are grateful to the Soviets who showed compassion. Their freedom is precious, and they are learning to live within it. For some, the liberties we have as American citizens came at the expense of people who lie in unmarked graves in Siberia. Like Joana for Lina, our freedom cost them theirs. Some wars are about bombing. For the people of the Baltics, this war was about believing. In 1991, after 50 years of brutal occupation, the three Baltic countries regained their independence, peacefully and with dignity. They chose hope over hate and showed the world that even through the darkest night, there is light. Please research it. Tell someone. These three tiny nations have taught us that love is the most powerful army. Whether love of friend, love of country, love of God, or even love of enemy - love reveals to us the truly miraculous nature of the human spirit.

One thing that I find very weird here in Australia is Latvians in Australia celebrate Latvian traditions by a calendar, not by the seasons as they do in Latvia. It’s a bit strange for me, everyone said a few weeks ago, ‘Merry Christmas,’ in Latvian, or maybe Winterfest, and here I was sweating like a pig saying, ‘Merry Winterfest!’ – Viktor Brenners, 2nd Generation DP

They worked hard all their lives, what they basically did was, they built a little Ukraine, a little society for themselves here in Brisbane. They did this in all the cities … not a ghetto, it wasn’t inward looking to that extent, but it was inward looking in the sense that it was a place to go—somewhere where you could identify; where you could be understood; go about remembering and preserving your roots. - Walter Sucharsky, 2nd Generation Australian

Trīs māsas: Igaunija, Latvija un Lietuva ir darinājušas katra par sevi savas kultūras gredzenu. Ikkatrs no tiem laistās savā īpatā daiļumā. Kārlis Skalbe

The United States of America has had the world’s largest economy for most of our history, with enough money to feed and educate all our children, build world-leading infrastructure, and generally ensure a high standard of living for everyone. But we don’t. When it comes to per capita government spending, the United States is near the bottom of the list of industrialized countries, below Latvia and Estonia. Our roads, bridges, and water systems get a D+ from the American Society of Civil Engineers. With the exception of about forty years from the New Deal to the 1970s, the United States has had a weaker commitment to public goods, and to the public good, than every country that possesses anywhere near our wealth.

Vilis still doesn't pass to me but I don't care. Where he comes from (Latvia) they burn black people into tar and make roads out of them.

Political calculation and local suffering do not entirely explain the participation in these pogroms. Violence against Jews served to bring the Germans and elements of the local non-Jewish populations closer together. Anger was directed, as the Germans wished, toward the Jews, rather than against collaborators with the Soviet regime as such. People who reacted to the Germans' urging knew that they were pleasing their new masters, whether or not they believed that the Jews were responsible for their own woes. By their actions they were confirming the Nazi worldview. The act of killing Jews as revenge for NKVD executions confirmed the Nazi understanding of the Soviet Union as a Jewish state. Violence against Jews also allowed local Estonians, Latvian, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Poles who had themselves cooperated with the Soviet regime to escape any such taint. The idea that only Jews served communists was convenient not just for the occupiers but for some of the occupied as well. Yet this psychic nazification would have been much more difficult without the palpable evidence of Soviet atrocities. The pogroms took place where the Soviets had recently arrived and where Soviet power was recently installed, where for the previous months Soviet organs of coercion had organized arrests, executions, and deportations. They were a joint production, a Nazi edition of a Soviet text. P. 196

It is estimated that Josef Stalin killed more than twenty million people during his reign of terror. The Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia lost more than a third of their population during the Soviet annihilation. The deportations reached as far as Finland. To this day, many Russians deny they ever deported a single person. But most Baltic people harbor no grudge, resentment, or ill will. They are grateful to the Soviets who showed compassion. Their freedom is precious, and they are learning to live within it. For some, the liberties we have as American citizens came at the expense of people who lie in unmarked graves in Siberia.

Saliņu maizi Kalifornijā neizcepsi – izstiepies vai saraujies. Kādā valstī dzīvo, tādu maizi ēd… Ābeles šejienes karstumā neaug. Bērziņi nīkuļo. Nevar jau svešumā ietaisīt gabalu no Latvijas. To, mīļie, var uzcelt tikai iedomās. Bet, ja esi sirdī kārtīgs latvietis, tad sēdi mierīgs zem kaktusiem un palmām, tie nekaitēs tev nenieka.

Discord, in large part fueled by Moscow, was the order of the day in several other bordering nations; the invasion of Estonia was unsuccessful, but there remained the threat of invasion in Ukraine. In addition to this, a near–civil war in Georgia, bitterly disputed presidential campaigns in Latvia and Lithuania, riots and protests in other nearby countries.

Liberated in Germany by the Americans, seven-year-old Valya Brekeleva and her family of slave labourers went home to Novgorod as non-persons. “Most of the people from our village who went to Latvia survived. But most of those who were sent to Germany had died. For those of us who remained, the suspicion was always there.” Most of her family were killed by one side or the other in the course of the war. Her mother died in 1947, worn out by the struggle to keep her daughters alive. She was thirty-six. Her father completed his sentence for “political crimes” and came home from the Urals in 1951, an old man. Even after Valya had completed university and applied for work at a Kazan shipbuilders in the 1960s, when the manager saw that her papers showed her to be an ex-Nazi prisoner he said grimly: “Before we consider anything else, we have got to establish whether you have done damage to the state.

During the Second World War 70,000 Jews were murdered in Latvia, 30,000 of them by summer 1941. In Lithuania, almost all of the country’s 200,000 Jews were killed. (In Estonia there were only 5,000 Jews to start with, and most of them were able to escape to the Soviet Union.) In his official report, one German officer characterised the farmers’ hatred of the Jews as ‘monstrous’. They had, as he wrote on 16 August, 1941, ‘already done a great deal of the dirty work’ before the Germans could intervene.

The secret protocol of the Hitler-Stalin Pact partitioned Poland between the two signatories and gave the Soviets a free hand over Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, Bessarabia, and Northern Bukovina. Most of these new countries were Catholic, which in Stalin’s mind meant subordinated to a foreign power—the Vatican. That was unacceptable for the man who had become the Soviet Union’s only god—at whose order 168,300 Russian Orthodox clergy had been arrested during the purges of 1936–1938 alone, 100,000 of whom had been shot.4 The Russian Orthodox Church, which had had more than fifty-five thousand parishes in 1914, was now reduced to five hundred.5

Future Europe’s problems are many, but four stand out. The first is energy: The Europeans are more dependent upon energy imports than the Asians, and no two major European countries think that problem can be solved the same way. The Germans fear that not having a deal with the Russians means war. The Poles want a deal with anyone but Russia. The Spanish know the only solution is in the Western Hemisphere. The Italians fear they must occupy Libya. The French want to force a deal on Algeria. The Brits are eyeing West Africa. Everyone is right. Everyone is wrong. The second is demographic: The European countries long ago aged past the point of even theoretical repopulation, meaning that the European Union is now functionally an export union. Without the American-led Order, the Europeans lose any possibility of exporting goods, which eliminates the possibility of maintaining European society in its current form. The third is economic preference: Perhaps it is mostly subconscious these days, but the Europeans are aware of their bloody history. A large number of conscious decisions were made by European leaders to remodel their systems with a socialist bent so their populations would be vested within their collective systems. This worked. This worked well. But only in the context of the Order with the Americans paying for the bulk of defense costs and enabling growth that the Europeans could have never fostered themselves. Deglobalize and Europe’s demographics and lack of global reach suggest that permanent recession is among the better interpretations of the geopolitical tea leaves. I do not see a path forward in which the core of the European socialist-democratic model can survive. The fourth and final problem: Not all European states are created equal. For every British heavyweight, there is a Greek basket case. For every insulated France, there is a vulnerable Latvia. Some countries are secure or rich or have a tradition of power projection. Others are vulnerable or poor or are little more than historical doormats. Perhaps worst of all, the biggest economic player (Germany) is the one with no options but to be the center weight of everything, while the two countries with the greatest capacity to go solo (France and the United Kingdom) hedged their bets and never really integrated with the rest of Europe. There’s little reason to expect the French to use their reach to benefit Europe, and there’s no reason to expect assistance from the British, who formally seceded from the European Union in 2020. History,

Okupācija ir nenormāla situācija. Tās sekas vēl gadu desmitiem plosa atbrīvotās valsts cilvēkus, un "pareizie" vaino "nepareizos" piedzīvotajās nelaimēs un pastrādātajos noziegumos. [...] Latvija vienu pec otras pārdzīvoja trīs okupācijas, kuru kopējais ilgums - piecdesmit gadi - pārsniedz jebko, kas Eiropā 20. gadsimtā ir pieredzēts, tāpēc jautājums par katra individuālo atbildību un sadarbību ar dažādajiem okupācijas režīmiem ir īpaši sāpīgs. Tikai pēc neatkarības atjaunošanas mēs pilnībā esam ieguvuši brīvību spriest par savu vēsturi un to attīrīt no svešu režīmu iestrādātajiem meliem un propagandas. Noziegumus Latvijā pastrādāja abi režīmi, un vainīgajiem, neatkarīgi no tā, vai viņi darbojās nacistu vai komunistu doktrīnas vārdā, tāpat kā viņu kolaborantiem, kas ir noziegušies pret civiliedzīvotājiem, par savu rīcību ir jāatbild. Noziegumiem pret cilvēci nav noilguma.

Aiva Rozenberga was 13 years old when 2 million people stood hand in hand in 1989 across the three Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, forming a gigantic, peaceful human chain of defiance of Soviet occupation later called the Baltic Chain. Their voices raised in song, music carried the message: “We want freedom!” This past January, to kick off the tenure of Riga, Latvia, as a European Capital of Culture, 15,000 Latvians stood shoulder to shoulder again, this time passing books from one hand to the other to bring them from the current library to a new library across the Daugava River. Ms. Rozenberga was part of the chain, as program director for Riga 2014, the foundation that put together this year’s program of events. The chain of book lovers epitomizes the power of culture in a small, vulnerable country.

The Soviet Union had achieved an unusual boon through the pact. The Eastern part of Europe, from the Baltic to the Black Sea was declared as their sphere of influence. They spelled out by name the three Baltic republics: Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia - all three formerly, under the tsars, Russian territory. The two signatories included as part of the Soviet sphere of influence Bessarabia. Northern Bukovina had not been included in that sinister deal, yet Russia made its own decision to annex it, together with Bessarabia. They made it a kind of connecting bridge to Southern Poland.

on 3 March 1918 the new Soviet republic signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany, ending the war on the Eastern Front. It was a humiliation for Russia. The country lost one-quarter of the former Russian Empire’s population and industry, including 90 per cent of its coalmines. It renounced all territorial claims to Finland, Belarus and Ukraine, and the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Poland became an independent state. The driving force behind the signing of the treaty was Lenin. Despite the enormous losses, he believed that only an immediate peace would allow the young Bolshevik government to consolidate power in Russia, against all its enemies.

returned with my parents, who acted as my guides. In fact, my experience and Kotler’s are very different in that he was not only a boy in the former Soviet Union but grew to adulthood there, studied there, worked there, and ultimately was imprisoned there. So his frame of reference, not only for Crimea, but for the country as a whole, is substantially different from mine. My experience of returning to Latvia was one of actively trying to remember something, to tease out some memory of my life there. But what is common between my experience of Latvia and Kotler’s of Crimea is that both trips were taken in the summer and they were both to the seashore. When I returned, it was to the resort town of Jurmala on the Bay of Riga, where my family and I used to spend our summers. A few of those impressions filtered into the novel.

both cases, Deutsche steered very rich Russians into the Trump ventures, according to people who were involved in the deals—just a couple of years after American regulators had punished the bank for whisking Russian money into the U.S. financial system via Latvia.

Like Artukovic, many Nazi collaborators came from Eastern Europe. Hundreds of fugitives with Nazi ties came from Germany, but many more who wound up in America were collaborators from Nazi-controlled countries like Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and the Ukraine. American immigration policies made it easy for them to come. In the first few years after the war, fully 40 percent of all the visas granted by the United States were set aside for war refugees from the Baltics.

Like Artukovic, many Nazi collaborators came from Eastern Europe. Hundreds of fugitives with Nazi ties came from Germany, but many more who wound up in America were collaborators from Nazi-controlled countries like Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and the Ukraine.

Just months earlier, with the Nazi accusations bubbling up against him, the CIA had written to Laipenieks, a former Olympic star in Latvia, and assured him, with an apologetic air, that the INS was closing a war crimes investigation against him.

Brothers, don’t forget. Recount what you hear and see! Brothers, make a record of it all! Reported last words of the 81-year-old historian, Simon Dubnow, on 7 December 1941 in Riga, Latvia, when he was dragged out of his home to the execution site.

the framework of the conflict between former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Russian President Vladimir Putin, angered by U.S. intrusion in his wars in Georgia, Syria, Ukraine, the military seizure of Crimea, and pressures on NATO allies Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania, Putin may be unleashing Trump’s challenge as a way to exact revenge on the United States. Putin

So ask him. He could round up every goose in Manhattan before we could even figure out where Sam’s parents live now.” Wolf looked blank. “Uh…kosher poultry?” Sacha prompted. “Litvaks?” Now Wolf and Lily were both staring at him like he was speaking a foreign language. “Okay, all the big Jewish gangsters either come from Latvia or Galitzia. Ever since anyone can remember, the Galitzians ran the numbers rackets, and the Litvaks—that’s Minsky and Magic, Inc.—ran the kosher poultry business.” “I take it there’s big money in kosher poultry?” Wolf asked, with a bemused look on his face. “Well, I don’t know about that. But right around the time Minsky took over Magic, Inc., the Litvaks took over the numbers runners too.” “And what happened to the Galitzians?” Lily asked. Sacha grinned wickedly. “We don’t talk about that.

The South Koreans are better educated than the English. The Swedish are happier. The Germans are more compassionate. The Azerbaijanis are more literate. Brunei has cleaner air. Latvia has faster broadband. Everywhere has a better climate. And yet for some astonishing reason you still act as if you matter. Why is that, do you suppose? Ah, yes, empire. You lost yours over a century ago. The Americans are only just losing theirs and that’s not going down so well, either.

More than a fifth of our children live in poverty—the second worst of all the advanced economies, putting us behind countries like Bulgaria, Latvia, and Greece.

Then there are the pro-Western countries formerly in the Warsaw Pact but now all in NATO and/or the EU: Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia, Albania and Romania. By no coincidence, many are among the states which suffered most under Soviet tyranny.

This in turn reduces that country’s foreign policy options. Latvia, Slovakia, Finland and Estonia are 100 per cent reliant on Russian gas, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria and Lithuania are 80 per cent dependent, and Greece, Austria and Hungary 60 per cent. About half of Germany’s gas consumption comes from Russia, which, along with extensive trade deals, is partly why German politicians tend to be slower to criticise the Kremlin for aggressive behaviour than a country such as Britain, which not only has 13 per cent dependency, but also has its own gas-producing industry, including reserves of up to nine months’ supply.

Latvia

MBEKI Pierre, born in 1905, Scotland. MANDELA Giovanna Rosaria l, born in the 1800s, Italy. ZUMA Andreas, born in 1750, Pologne. TWALO July, born in 1850, USA. MALEMA Jannis, born in 1750, Latvia. These are Surnames of key people in Africa. But they are also a few examples of how people really received their Surnames in Africa ...through colonisation.

The three Baltic republics of the former Soviet Union, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, declined to join Russia in the successor Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and became EU members in 2004. Among the states that stayed with the CIS, six could claim to be European: Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine, and Russia itself. They could therefore, if they came to fulfil the conditions of stable democracy and competitive market economy, apply for membership of the EU.

Before delving into my family’s history, I’d never heard about the Rumbula forest massacre, where 26,000 Jews were killed over two nights, a tragedy in the manner and on the scale of Ukraine’s Babi Yar. I knew practically nothing about Latvia, its Soviet and Nazi occupations, and the fact that the execution of 90 percent of its Jews (including twenty-six of my relatives) was organized by a death squad also employed at Babi Yar, SS-Einsatzgruppen.

much of the peat sold in garden centres is now imported from other countries, notably from Ireland, Estonia, Latvia and Finland. Estonia is a wild and unspoiled country where bears and wolves still roam, and it is sad to reflect that great chunks of it are now being dug up so that we can grow begonias.

If Russia is to survive its demographic Twilight, it must do nothing less than absorb in whole or in part some 11 countries — Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia. This Twilight War will be a desperate, sprawling military conflict that will define European/Russian borderland for decades.

In 1939–40, under a secret codicil to the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the Soviets had regained control of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, which they had lost in the 1917 revolution.

What was to be done with those who had not volunteered for the Germans, such as the millions of Soviet civilians whom the Nazis had forced to labor at gunpoint in German factories? And what of prisoners from Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and parts of the western Ukraine? Since 1939, the USSR had claimed these territories as its own, but the Western Allies did not recognize them as such. Were prisoners from these regions to be considered Soviets?

Eurozone financial institutions have sought to impose Latvia’s “model” austerity on Ireland, Spain and Portugal – and most of all, on Greece, which is being made an object lesson of how creditor powers will treat countries that try to extricate themselves from debt, unemployment, privatization, emigration and demographic collapse.

The story of the great sacrifices of the Soviet people in the Second World War and the struggle against Nazism has been detached from the years 1939 to 1941, which saw the conquest and annexation of Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia and eastern Poland; from Romania, Bessarabia and northern Bukovina were annexed.

Although populated, cultivated, ruined and transformed, the basic scenery of Latvia is considerably more ancient than we are, whichever generation we belong to, and in all likelihood, it must have influenced us much more deeply than the other way round. In a sense, our landscape is akin to our language, for we were not the ones who created it, whatever assumptions we may have. Nor is it our possession. Resulting from chains of random coincidence, it has been allotted for our use for a brief stretch of time. And the only thing we can do and should do is to try not to mess it up too badly or lose it altogether.

She says she is Irish—Nell O’Connor, but she was born in Latvia and talks like a Greek.

Lithuanian citizens are the rudest and most animalistic I have ever seen in Europe. They have no moral, no values, and no manners. They are always starring at others, judging with their eyes of ignorance and their very small conscience, they are very rude, they are impolite wherever you go, and their customer service is horrible. They never say sorry for anything and even offend you when you complain about their mistakes and lack of proper attitude. Besides, eating in Lithuania is a huge disaster. Food is often rotten, and commonly comes with either hair, stones of even glass, as I have found many times. These people should be ashamed to be part of Europe and be removed from the European Union. They waste money as I have never seen anywhere else and are very abusive in prices. Their prices are high but their quality level is not even suitable for animals. They represent a waste on foreign investments. Their youngest generation is also a disaster: Extremely ignorant, without any respect or education, they deserve to be unemployed and starve to death. Nobody in his right mind should ever employ a Lithuanian, marry a Lithuanian or be friend with a Lithuanian. Lithuanias are always trying to use their friendships to take advantage of others, especially if such people are outsiders. Lithuanian women are gold diggers and extremely promiscuous, especially towards men of other cultures, as if their pride was built on the number of sex partners they can have from the widest variety of nations from around the globe, especially if such men are wealthy. Nevertheless, Lithuanians are also extremely racist and ignorant about the planet they live in. They are selfish, sadistic and parasitic. Probably the same could be said about all baltic countries, namely, Latvia, but for now, it is suffice to say this statement is an undoubted fact for the country in analysis. If Latvian and Lithuanian sovereignty ever end within this generation due to major unemployment, massacres and civil wars, and the vast majority of its people perish, I would say Divine justice has been made on both nations.