| Pastkarte no Latvijas |
[Sep. 24th, 2020|10:56 pm] |
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"And then it all came together for me – why Latvia hasn’t succumbed to the hysteria and inanities that Britain has. The ordinary Latvian has little time for state propaganda. They had enough of being told what to do in the Soviet era and they know that political masters are prone to filling them with nonsense. Yes, the regulations are there – the art gallery I visited was not short of OTT instructions on how many people should be in a room or which way you should walk along a corridor – but the visitors often ignored them and staff didn’t intervene. Between 1940 and 1990 the Latvian people were either under the heel of the Nazis or the Soviets. Like so much of Eastern Europe, Latvia has had a taste of totalitarianism in recent memory and the people don’t want to go back to it. They also have no time for identity politics or any other dumb trivialities – there are no debates about gender neutral loos here.
For now I’ve escaped the psycho-circus that is the UK. I’m dreading returning to our anxious, masked, misinformed, divided, cowed nation. How I wish we were more Latvian. It is a country which is so much more at ease with itself than we are, in so many ways."
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