The Passion II – The End of the Monroe Doctrine

The Con

Passion. Everyone in the world has passion, wants passion, admires someone else’s passion etc.

According to Dictionary.com, two of possible definitions of the word Passion are 6. a strong or extravagant fondness, enthusiasm, or desire for anything: a passion for music. Or 7. the object of such a fondness or desire: Accuracy became a passion with him.

My late father Aron Zola had a passion, one he indulged with extreme frequency: he hated the Russians. However, it wasn’t just passion, it was more than that: it was near obsession born from a young Jewish boy running from the Nazi’s right into the waiting arms of Josef Stalin and his slave labor camps in Tashkent. Jews weren’t immune from being killed, the Russians might be notorious ant-Semites but they saved their genocidal acts for the Ukrainians. No. The Russians just killed Jews like they killed Poles or Georgians: because it helped the Motherland.

My brothers and I were lectured daily about the dangers of fascism, communism, socialism and, most importantly, the Russians. The Old Man, being thirty years ahead of his time, condensed his wisdom down to a single, chilling “talking point” to help us with our short and long term memories:

The only difference between Nazi Germany and Russia is gulags and concentration camps.

By the time I was 13, I was sick of hearing the same saying over and over again. His analogy of Socialist houses of horror ranked right up there with his favorite admonition when my younger brothers and I misbehaved:

I survived Hitler so you could act like this?

Scot, Joel and I rolled our eyes and we endured his screeds several hundred/thousand times. Much like many a Catskill Comic, the Old Man needed some new material and I told him so one day when I was 19 during a phone call from my dorm room at NYU. He was so upset I would have been beaten to death had I been in Detroit. There was relative safety on the Lower East Side.

As I grew older, I realized my ‘normal’ passions for music; reading, film, wine etc. came directly from the Old Man and his hatred of the Russians. Hell, I even learned to respect the Old Man and his tightly wound, blood pressure raising, bright red HATE for the Muscovites. I loved to get the Mouse, my mentor WAZ and the Old Man into the same room and listen to their discussions of how we lost the Cold War, the Russians were still the greatest threat to the world etc. In a world where the average human doesn’t have the energy to grab the remote and change the channel, passion, whatever form it takes, is something that should be nurtured.

Or should it.

Again, according to Dictionary.com, Passion can also be defined as 8. an outburst of strong emotion or feeling: He suddenly broke into a passion of bitter words. Or 10.t he state of being acted upon or affected by something external, esp. something alien to one’s nature or one’s customary behavior (contrasted with action).

So while our President Obama has indulged his twin passions: ObamaCare and the end of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, something strange has been happening 45 miles off the coast of Florida. The Russians are drilling for oil. This area of the Caribbean was seeded to the Cubans thanks to an agreement with the Carter Administration and they have invited the Russians into a strategic energy partnership.

The Washington Times ran an editorial about this overlooked crisis. They brought up these points:

Russia more sensibly views energy primarily as a strategic resource. Energy is critical to Russia’s economy, as fuel and as a source of profit through export. Russia also has used energy as a coercive diplomatic tool, shutting off natural gas piped to Eastern Europe in the middle of winter to make a point about how dependent the countries are that do business with the Russians.

Now Russia is using oil exploration to establish a new presence in the Western Hemisphere. It recently concluded four contracts securing oil-exploration rights in Cuba’s economic zone in the Gulf of Mexico. A Russian-Cuban joint partnership will exploit oil found in the deep waters of the Gulf.

Where have our foreign policy watchdogs been while this egregious violation of the Monroe Doctrine is ongoing? Insulting our allies in Israel in order to get them to make peace with the Fatah movement headed by Mahmoud Abbas who was educated at Patrice Lumumba People’s Friendship University in Moscow. And Hillary went to give a report on her trip through the Middle East to Vladimir Putin.

The Monroe Doctrine has been eviscerated. Our Secretary of State is selling out an important ally to a Russian schooled and trained terrorist who participated in the Munich Massacre and then goes to visit a former KGB head to report on her actions.

We won the Cold War, right?