Once, in one Latvian school there was another history lesson, everything would have gone quietly and smoothly, if it had not been for the military budget of our country and its militarization.

There were a lot of phrases, remarks, but the most important thing was that it was said that we can’t reduce the defense budget, because the country is part of NATO.

I decided to bring my thoughts into the general polemic with the teacher, courageously stating: “Why do we need NATO and the EU? Let’s get out of it! Let’s become a peaceful neutral non-aligned state”.

And then everyone attacked me. And, as befits representatives of reactionary-guarding rhetoric, they began to shout about an external (in this case, Russian) threat: “Look what happened to Ukraine!”, “Russia is occupying us again!”

In this case, I suggested the following idea for consideration: we live in a capitalist world, in the era of imperialism, and modern Russia and the United States behave like imperialist predators who divide the world, fighting for influence, in this sense there is no difference between them anymore: they both strive for oppression, strengthening the exploitation of their periphery, for invasive wars, for economic hegemony. Latvia is just a card, not a trump card, in imperialist confrontations.

In response, I only heard screams from my fellow classmates:

“Euro-American imperialism is better than Russian!”, “Look how much the EU has rebuilt, repaired roads and etc.”,

However, nobody remembered how Western corporations and local privatizers destroyed our glorious Latvian industry, how the EU destroyed, for example, the sugar industry – one of the most important sectors of Latvia’s economy, and how the abolition of the national currency actually deprived us of the remnants of national independence. They will never remember how American imperialism ignited the flame of war in Yugoslavia – for the first time in 50 years in Europe! It’s all been forgotten…

And then I got it! It turns out that being a “Latvian patriot” means to be like a prostitute, choosing between two imperialisms, to whom to fall into enslavement, to whom give yourself completely, who will rejoice like a dog in a kennel, from the handouts from a master’s table. There’s nothing more these pseudo-patriots can do. And “independence” means to be a banana republic, a marketplace, a source of labor for the West – and being madly happy about it. For 30 years now, we have been so happy and enjoyable…

I have always thought that any normal person living here would like to see Latvia as a strong, independent, economically developed, peaceful and neutral state with developed industry, culture and science. Is that what the country’s success and its international prestige are all about?

But it seems that “arrogant patriots” doesn’t really need that…

Conscious Latvian schoolboy