Somewhat the same from Roger L. Simon. (See 1a below.)
The limp and confused White House Response. (See 1b below.)
As I am writing this a news report suggests ISIS' recruiting is exploding (bad choice of words.) and our air attacks are failing as well as what is happening on the ground. Obama's claim about the Taliban being defeated proved wrong, his claim that Yemen was a success proved wrong, his comment about ISIS being the equivalent of a JV team proved wrong, his release of terrorists from Guantanamo not returning to battle because they were under surveillance proved wrong.
Domestically speaking all accusations of wrongdoing and scandals has been denied by Obama and yet he stonewalls further investigations by withholding information and preventing testimony..
Perhaps Obama is wrong. DUH!
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This from an old and dear fiend and fellow memo reader in response to my last memo : "Nice ---- Can’t believe the man every time he opens his mouth …… makes Jimmy Carter look like Thomas Jefferson x 5!! Stay well. J--"
Not all those I send my memos to are conservative. I have many many memo readers /receivers who are very liberal. They too have become greatly disappointed by Obama but most remain defensive because they have trouble acknowledging the obvious. I understand one's need to be defensive because no one likes to have their warts exposed, me included, but there does come a time when defending a mistake simply means you are involved in creating a bigger mistake and that is foolhardy.
Even if one assumes, which I do not, Obama has good intentions the man is, at the very least, an embarrassment, is over his head, has made matters worse and has divided our nation on many levels.
I have a good friend who seeks his emotional shelter by responding both sides of the aisle are guilty. Yes, there is truth in that comment but that is also ducking the issue because when/if the focus is on Obama it is disingenuous to cast a wider net in Obama's defense. What someone else may have done clouds the discussion. At least that is my response.
I have another dear friend who apparently embraces the fact that great sins were committed in prior history similar to those attributed and committed by ISIS today. That suggests the world has made no progress and we are still only a step away from being animals. I cannot buy that logic because I do believe we have made extraordinary progress in human relationships. I remember asking Sam Nunn, to cite something that, in his view, Jimmy Carter would be remembered for and he said his introduction of human rights as a component of our diplomatic and foreign policy dealings.
Are we where we need to be in order to take comfort in the belief a long period of peace lies ahead? Not only are we not, but because of Obama's incompetency and feckless belief feeding bullies works, I believe we are closer to war and a very unstable world. Time will tell. You decide!
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Is The E.U. ready to impose sanctions on Israel after the election ? (See 2 below.)
Is Jordan being judged and held to the same standards for their air attacks on ISIS as was Israel when it attacked Hamas in Gaza, or is that old double standard, conveniently used by the press and media, being applied? (See 2a below.)
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This from a long time friend, fellow memo reader and owner of many fast food locations who has worked in the industry in various positions for many years. Yes, he may have a vested interested in the press for increasing the minimum wage but he makes valid points that frightened politicians ignore because they are more interested in buying votes than being rational. (See 3 below.)
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A psych looks at Muslim sicko's !(See 4 below.)
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Sent me by an old and dear family friend and fellow memo reader. (See 5 below.)
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Sen. Moynihan's research was rejected by liberals because he was intellectually superior and his work revealed the flaw in their progressive attitudes and policies which helped destroy the Black Family. The 50th anniversary of his report on the Black Family is approaching. It is as true and meaningful in its insight today as it was when he published it. Sad the problem of the black family has worsened. It will continue to do so as long as they are offered mush for an education, kept beholden to welfare, not held to high standards and affirmatively promoted without being exposed to required experience and training.
Liberals, white and black, for all their professed caring, have been engaged in disgraceful sinister and hypocritical behaviour and have done so for political gain.
Limbaugh calls it soft racism.(See 6 below.)
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Dick
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1) Anti-Semitic horrors don't exist to Bam's clan
By John Podhoretz
At TUESDAY’S press briefing, White House mouthpiece Josh Earnest said something disgusting — I don’t know how else to describe it — about the massacre at the Hyper Casher kosher supermarket in Paris one month ago.
“The individuals who were killed in that terrible, tragic incident,” Earnest droned, “were killed not because of who they were but because of where they randomly happened to be.”
Take it from someone who keeps kosher: Nobody “randomly” happens to be in a kosher supermarket, not even in Manhattan.
But you didn’t need to take it from someone who keeps kosher, did you? You already know that the clientele of a kosher supermarket is almost entirely made up of Jews. You know this because you’re not an idiot.
Yes, if you want to find Jews, a kosher supermarket is the place to be on a Friday morning, as people are preparing for the Sabbath.
Since Earnest is the press secretary of the most important person in the world, I assume he isn’t an illiterate dope. Which means he knows this too.
So what he did was speak a vile lie, and a deeply dishonorable one.
It’s dishonorable because his remarks suggest these murders were meaningless acts of nihilism, when they in fact were terrifyingly meaningful acts of anti-Semitic murder on European soil 70 years after the Holocaust — acts that are causing many if not most of the 600,000 Jews in France to think seriously about emigrating.
Alas, it appears that Earnest’s vile lie can’t be excused away as an expression of his own moral cretinousness.
For only a few minutes later, about half a mile away from him in Washington, Earnest’s fellow administration mouthpiece Jen Psaki took to the podium at the State Department’s press briefing and with similar moral cretinousness dismissed the purpose and goal of the Jew-killers at Hyper Casher.
“I believe if I remember the victims specifically,” said Jen Psaki, “they were not all victims of one background or one nationality.”
Asked point-blank by AP’s Matt Lee whether the Obama administration believes “this was an anti-Jewish or an attack on a Jewish community in Paris,” Psaki responded, “I don’t think we’re going to speak on behalf of French authorities.”
After a firestorm of criticism on Twitter, Earnest and Psaki both tried to pretend they hadn’t said what they said. “Terror attack at Paris Kosher market was motivated by anti-Semitism,” tweeted Earnest.
For her part, Psaki said, “We have always been clear that the attack on the kosher grocery store was an anti-Semitic attack that took the lives of innocent people.”
Well, no, you weren’t always clear, now, were you?
What madness was this? What madness is this?
The most comforting explanation is that the administration chose to circle the wagons around President Obama after his flabbergasting remarks on Monday — when he spoke of “violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris.”
As we’ve established, it wasn’t “a bunch of folks” but four Jews who were shot — and not, by the way, eating corned beef on rye at Katz’s while Sally faked an orgasm but as they shopped for ingredients for their Sabbath meals.
Which means it wasn’t done “randomly” but purposefully and in a directed fashion. It didn’t matter who they were individually, true. What mattered was this: JEW. JEW. JEW. JEW.
That isn’t random, bub.
So this is the exculpatory argument:
Obama stepped in it on Monday. He said something stupid and ill-advised. (After all, he had previously said the attack was an act of anti-Semitism.) And rather than walk it back, the administration’s blatherskites on Tuesday foolishly chose to step in it even more deeply by twisting themselves into pretzels on the “randomness” issue.
This is what Earnest and the White House want us to believe. In a late-afternoon tweet, Earnest said, “Our view has not changed. . . POTUS didn’t intend to suggest otherwise.”
But what if this is disingenuous and false?
What if the administration is now so committed to its bizarre assertion that the acts of terror in Paris and the horrifying butcheries of ISIS have not been perpetrated in the name of Islam that it chose to dance around the anti-Semitic agency of Islamist Jew-killers — until it was caught out, that is?
If this is so, the moral cretin is the man now resident in the Oval Office.
By Roger L. Simon
Thought experiment: What if a white racist with a submachine gun broke into a convenience store in South Central Los Angeles, grabbed seven or eight African Americans who were shopping (maybe there was one Korean) as hostages for the release of some other white racists and then, when attacked, started spewing the N-word while shooting up the place, killing three or four of the African Americans and wounding three or four others, one or two critically.
How would President Obama react?
Do you think he would say there was something racial about the obscene incident? Damn right he would — and he should. In fact, he would do it forcefully and immediately. After all, when Trayvon Martin died in far more ambiguous circumstances, he was quick to jump in, identifying with the 17 year old who would resemble, Obama said, his own son if he had one.
Now consider what our president said about the events at the Hyper Cacher market in Paris on January 9 in a new interview withVox.com: “It is entirely legitimate for the American people to be deeply concerned when you’ve got a bunch of violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris.”
“[V]icious zealots… randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli”? That’s the way the president of the United States describes a dedicated jihadist murdering four Jews in a kosher market in one of the oldest and largest Jewish neighborhoods in Paris, the day after other jihadists shot up the Charlie Hebdooffices, killing even more people? No Jews, no jihadist, just more “random” violence, as if Ahmedy Coulibaly, the man who murdered the four Jews and had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, just stumbled into a kosher deli by accident with a submachine gun while on the way to Cafe de Flore for a cognac.
Now hold on, Simon. You’re not about to call the president of the United States an anti-semite, are you? (Not yet. Give me a moment.) Inevitably some in the media found these remarks by the president a bit disturbing and queried Jen Psaki at State and White House press secretary Josh Earnest.
Question: Does the administration really believe that the victims of this attack were not singled out because they were of a particular faith?
Psaki: Well, as you know, I believe if I remember the victims specifically there were not all victims of one background or one nationality so I think what they mean by that is, I don’t know that they spoke to the targeting of the grocery store or that specifically but the individuals who were impacted.
Question: They weren’t killed because they were in a Jewish deli though, they were in a kosher deli?
Earnest: John, these individuals were not targeted by name. This is the point.
Question: Not by name, but by religion, were they not?
Earnest: Well, John, there were people other than just Jews who were in that deli.
Yes, one of about twenty, but only the Jews were killed and the killer was there with the sole objective of killing Jews. He even said so himself before he shot them. Why do Psaki and Earnest make such outrageous and morally despicable statements? Who tells them to do it? To call Psaki and Earnest whores is an insult to prostitutes. Ms. Psaki is doing an excellent job of upholding the State Department’s long-time reputation for antisemitism. As for Mr. Earnest, that he could say what he did with a straight face makes him about as reprehensible a human being as you could find. I say “about” because nothing could top his boss.
If you’re asking me whether I think the president’s an anti-semite, why don’t I put it this way. Barack Obama — despite a claque of Jewish advisers (Axelrod, Lew, Emanuel, etc. I wonder how they felt when they heard this latest round) — appears to have a very complicated, almost bizarre reaction to Jews. Maybe it’s a weird competition between oppressed groups — blacks and Jews — or more of his not-so-masked appreciation of (and defensiveness about) all things Islamic.
And, yes, he clearly can’t deal with Benjamin Netanyahu, whose natural existential concern for his country regarding Iranian nuclear weapons is disruptive of the president’s desire to be seen as a peacemaker with that pathologically un-peaceful country that is the world’s greatest state sponsor of terrorism. How could anyone trust Obama to protect Israel’s interest against Iran’s religious fanatics when he can’t even acknowledge jihadists are deliberately killing Jews in Paris when it was on everyone’s television sets for days?
You will have to excuse me for getting a little personal but I am more than a little outraged. Back when I was in grammar school, my best buddy was a kid named Andy Goodman. He was Jewish (I bet you guessed!) and the name may be familiar to you. He went down South in 1964 to do his bit for the civil rights movement. You may have seen the movie about what happened to him — Mississippi Burning. Nowhere near as courageous as Andy and more than a bit frightened after what happened to him, two years later I decided to go down South myself. I felt I had to do something, too.
Now I live in an era when Barack Obama and so many others are trying to remind me and everyone post-Ferguson that #blacklivesmatter. Well, they do and they always did, for me and a lot of other people. But somehow our president, regarding Iran, Israel and the events in Paris, seems to have forgotten its obvious corollary: #Jewishlivesmatter. Until he gets that straight, I’ll be on the side of black people, but not for a second on his.
1b) White House spokesman struggles to defend Obama's comments on Paris Deli attack
The White House and State Department struggled Tuesday to clarify President Barack Obama's suggestion that last month's deadly shooting at a kosher deli in Paris was random, despite the administration's earlier assertions that the attack was anti-Semitic.
Obama, in describing terror threats during a lengthy interview with the online news site Vox, said the American people were right to be concerned "when you've got a bunch of violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris."
Administration officials at first defended Obama's comments, with White House spokesman Josh Earnest saying that while the administration was aware of the "motivation" of the gunman, the president was making the point that those killed in the deli "were not targeted by name."
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2)
EU states said to be planning fresh sanctions against Israel
Officials say new measures will go into effect if peace talks don’t resume after elections
European Union member states are planning new sanctions against Israel that will be implemented if peace negotiations with Palestinians do not resume following the March elections, it was reported Tuesday
The proposed plan would include “sanctions against companies that conduct business over the Green Line, support in the legal proceedings of Palestinians in the issue of settlements and also renewing the proposal to create a Palestinian state through the Security Council,” according to an Israeli official who met recently with European leaders in Brussels, the Hebrew-language Walla website reported.
Israeli officials in several European capitals said the proposals have buy-in from all countries in the EU, according to the report.
The EU has threatened sanctions against Israel for several years in an effort to prod forward the peace process with the Palestinians and discourage settlement expansion.
According to one of the Israeli officials briefed by European leaders, the process of imposing sanctions was delayed by elections, but will likely be picked up should peace efforts not restart after Israelis go to the polls on March 17.
“For some of the countries there is the hope that after the elections there is a chance to renew the negotiations with the Palestinians. But now it does not seem like that will happen, and therefore they are planning to shift into a higher gear,” the official said.
Economy Minister Naftali Bennett told representatives of the European Union that Israel would not endanger itself to avoid sanctions, in a closed door meeting Monday.
“To single out Israel, to twist our arms economically, in the hopes that we’ll commit suicide because financially we’ll get hit if we don’t — it’s immoral from my perspective,” Bennett told the diplomats, according to a tape of the meeting leaked to Army Radio and published Tuesday. “Instead of understanding… we’re the big dam in this big river of terror.”
Bennett’s office declined to comment on his message to the representatives, which included envoys from 26 out of the 28 EU countries, and noted only that “things that were said behind closed doors should remain there.”
2a) Casualties of War
By Yarden Frankl
"Israeli officials confirmed that the structure was bombed in airstrikes last week.
The authorities insisted that the building, a weapons storage facility, was a legitimate target and explained that they had conducted detailed surveillance to make sure that no hostages were seen going in or out. But a senior Israeli official who requested anonymity to discuss classified information acknowledged that they had not been able to surveythe building around the clock."
When incidents such as the one above are reported, they lead to international condemnations of Israel, accusations of war crimes, and global calls for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions. It does not seem to matter that Israel takes great pains to minimize the chances of civilian casualties, often exposing its soldiers to greater risk and reducing the chances of an effective surprise attack. Nor do Israeli claims that certain targets are legitimate matter in the court of global opinion. But we have gotten used to a knee-jerk reaction to condemn Israel no matter what thecircumstances.
What is astounding though, is the difference in the reaction when someone else's finger is on the trigger.
The above excerpt appeared in a New York Times article.
I made one change, however.
The original article was about an airstrike by the anti-ISIS coalition. I just took the word "American" out and substituted "Israeli."
The United States justified an airstrike which may have been responsible for the death of an American hostage. They claimed that she was being held in a "legitimate" ISIS target, and there was no way -- even with massive surveillance -- to guarantee that innocents were not in the area when it was attacked.
So where is the outcry? Where are the protests?
When is the United Nations investigation starting?
There are none of course. Nor should there be. If the hostage died during the attack, her death is indeed a tragedy. But in war, innocent civilians and hostages die. Everyone knows this, and so no one is outraged when there are civilian casualties during a military campaign. There is no other way to defend against an enemy which hides among civilians and uses the lives of hostages for public relations.
Yet when the airstrike is an Israeli one, people tend to forget all this. With the media trumpeting the accusations, is it any wonder that global opinion is so set against us?
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3)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Hamburgers or minimum wage.I remember as a kid (no, Lincoln was not president at the time) all the employees at McDonalds were teenagers, only adults were the managers. How the following rings true for these old eyes.
Hamburgers or minimum wage.
For those fast food employees striking for $15 an hour, let's do some math.At $15 an hour Johnny Fry-Boy working 40 hours per week would make $30,000 annually.An E1 (Private) in the military makes $18,378 annually.An E5 (Sergeant) with 8 years of service only makes $35,067 annually.So you're telling me that you deserve as much as those kids getting shot at, deploying for months in hostile environments, and putting their collective asses on the line every day protecting your unskilled butt!?Here's the deal. You are working in a job designed for a kid in high school who is actually supposed to be learning how to work and earning enough for gas, movies, and condoms, and hanging out with their equally goofyhigh school pals. If you have chosen this as your life long profession, you have failed.If you don't want minimum wage, don't have minimum skills.If you can read this, thank a teacher.If it's in English, thank a Veteran.Thank You!
4)- Sadomasochism and the Jihadi Death Cult
A psychoanalytic look at why people throw themselves into campaigns of murder and suicide
Paul Berman’s recent essay in Tablet magazine “Why Is the Islamist Death Cult So Appealing?” is a wonderful piece on the history of Islamist ideas, but Berman does not really answer the question that he poses in his first line: “Why do people who are not clinically crazy throw themselves into campaigns of murder and suicide?” Berman’s conclusion is that “apocalyptic dreams, the cult of hatred and murder and yearning for death” born of unhappiness is what motivates Islamist terrorists, and further that “eschatological rebellion against everyday morality satisfies them.” But is that why they do it? Is that what motivates men in hoods to publicly decapitate an individual with a knife, or pose smiling with the severed head of a woman, or put bullets into the heads of hundreds of captives and toss them into the river, or most recently throw a prisoner into a cage and light him on fire? Berman addresses the ideological part of the problem, but buried deeper is the psychological pull of sadomasochism—the thrill of violence, power, and control that comes from inflicting pain on others. This is the unspoken driver of the appeal of the Islamic State and similar groups.
Although we cannot know what goes on inside anyone’s head, the tools of psychoanalysis offer some tantalizing, and I believe promising, angles of interpretation. To be fair, military strategists, national security specialists, criminal-justice professionals and journalists are not trained to observe these men as if they were patients. They may have read the works of Islamists like Sayyid Qutb and Hassan al Banna, but they lack the diagnostic skills needed to access the deeper unconscious levels of psychology that are necessary for understanding the attraction of sadomasochism.
Indeed the denial of sadism by the specialists who usually comment on terrorism has ironically played into the hands of jihadis by permitting an identification with the aggressor. There are many people out there who, alas, like to watch torture videos of immolations and beheadings. We are even more reluctant to acknowledge that broad portions of the world’s population are drawn into this sadism because they cannot recognize their own impulses.
The Islamic State communicates to us on the deepest level of perversity possible, tapping into our own terrors through projective identification. The most recent atrocity committed by ISIS in the case of the Jordanian pilot Lt. Mu’adh Al-Kasasbeh is instructive. Why fire? Why the cage? Clearly they wanted to create a modern-day video of a medieval spectacle to terrify us in order to further a strategic goal: to issue a summons to obey them or otherwise become the object of their rage. But to leave it at that will not help us to deconstruct what is happening symbolically. The terrorists themselves do not realize how revealingly transparent their aberrant behavior is; they have no capacity to look at their own behavior or to understand it psychologically.
Unconsciously and concretely, they have recreated their own group self-perception of being “caged in” emotionally and mentally because of the debilitation of growing up in a shame-honor culture: They realize that, in the eyes of the world, Islam has been shamed. Fire, too, in the context of psychoanalysis, has many aspects worth considering. It might express projected rage. It might also purify an obsession with feeling dirty, deeply linked to this shame, which is supported by a religious conviction that normal human needs are unclean. They must therefore find a scapegoat and then kill off the contaminated one, inviting us to watch voyeuristically.
But what of the Western converts who join the jihadi cults? What is the draw for them? It is nearly the same. From examining their childhoods, the majority are born into what I call shame-honor Western families—highly rigid and authoritarian or lacking any parental structure at all. And then there are the numerous jailhouse converts. Many criminals have a cognitive deficit, and some show signs of clinical sadomasochism. A sadist seeks power through control, manipulation, and forcing the other to submit. Intimacy comes only with violence. They feel, they bond, through violence: Burning the Jordanian pilot expressed the Islamic State’s perverse sense of intimacy with its victim.
These jihadis then use fire to work through that which they don’t understand. Since some jihadis have difficulty feeling emotion, they are obsessed with torturing the other in order to see feelings expressed on the agonized face of the other. Fire can also represent their rage and denial of mortality, though they claim to love death. While they may think martyrdom can lead to a certain kind of immortality, that is a delusion: The Islamist ideologies are merely a conduit through which to project their own rage and terror. This all involves sadism of the highest order.
It is important to underline the fact that many viewers enjoy this kind of perversion. Like Jean Baudrillard, the French intellectual who wrote that everyone had to rejoice at the sight of the twin towers collapsing, an unknown percentage of people see these horrendous videos and rejoice—which is why they are viewed so widely and make such effective propaganda for the jihadi cause. We underestimate their appeal. We do not want to think about it.
While it is obviously true that we cannot place every terrorist under intensive psychological investigation, we can nonetheless speculate on their behavior and the sources of this trauma. In my own research and descriptive analysis, corroborated by neuroscience findings, my theory is that terrorists may not fully develop empathy, an emotion acquired in the earliest years of life. Professor Aner Govrin at Bar Ilan University has written a fascinating essay in which he places moral development at the age of 1 and focuses on the importance of maternal attachment: The mother is most influential in shaping the baby’s brain, which quadruples in size between the ages of 0 and 3, and is the repository of morality and knowledge. She is also the earliest cultural interpreter of shame and honor for her child.
It is profoundly mistaken, however, to believe that undervalued women who have been constant shock absorbers for male rage and abuse are able to attach in optimal ways when they have their own children. I refer to this elsewhere as “the maternal drama,” which, along with sadomasochism and shame-honor, lies at the heart of Islamist terrorism. Why now does it produce such a harvest of violence? Mass communication and the Internet have exacerbated a deeper cultural problem.
The Iraqi child-psychiatrist Dr. Sami Timimi has written that in Arab Muslim culture the bond between mother and child is unseverable. One is never permitted to separate from the mother. This is a perversion, a misuse of the baby as an object. In an honor-shame culture one does not go through an individuation separation process known in psychological development as neotenization. This impedes maturity. The group identity is more important than the individual identity. Shame and revenge predominate.
It must be remembered that the father is also a symptom of the underlying problem in shame-honor environments as he, too, was once a baby boy experienced as an object of honor, not as an individual in his own right. Many experts on Arab Muslim culture get this point and emphasize the need for an authoritarian father-figure to keep the shame-honor tribes in line, but that just repeats the awful cycle of treating people like objects: ISIS immolated the Jordanian pilot, an object of their hatred, whereupon the King of Jordan retaliated by killing two terrorists and launching dozens of airstrikes to avenge the death, to great popular acclaim.
Yet I would argue that King Abdullah needs to use both the carrot and the stick. The stick is his revenge attacks on the Islamic State in order to reestablish honor in his kingdom. But at the same time he needs to begin to teach his people that the cycle of blood-letting has to stop in order to pull his people out of the morass of shame and its destructive culture through education and early-childhood development.
Arab culture needs to get over willfully spilling blood in order to cleanse honor. It is delusional, and it has profound consequences for us all. If we fail to consider the sadism of the jihadis and their early-childhood development, we will wind up in the cage that they have built for us. We do not need to share in their perversion. We know in the West that shame destroys a child, but we have failed to understand the ramifications of shame linked to sadism, which is shame’s key instrument.
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5)
I spent my youth in Murmansk, a city in the northwest part of Russia, located right above the Arctic Circle. Murmansk owes its existence to the port that, due to the warm Gulf Stream, doesn’t freeze during the long winters, providing unique access to Russia from the north. During the Cold War, Murmansk’s coordinates must have been on the speed dial of the U.S. military, as it is the headquarters of the Russian Northern Navy Fleet. Fans of Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October may remember Murmansk as the home base for the submarine Red October
The city revolves around its port, and its academic institutions are geared toward producing a workforce for the fishing and merchant marine industries. It was always assumed that I’d attend either the Marine College or the Marine Academy. Both were semi-military schools where the students (cadets) had to reside in dormitories, wear navy uniforms, follow strict military-like rules, and take orders from navy officers (and ask no questions).
Russia has a draft army. It is not concerned about recruiting and thus treats its soldiers very poorly (an understatement). The pay is only high enough for soldiers to afford the postage to write home asking for money. Russian youth look at serving in the Russian army as akin to a two-year prison sentence (at least when I was there). The army avoidance in the late 1980s was not about fear of death, as the war in Afghanistan was over, but came from the dread of losing years of one’s youth and the dismay of humiliation, as the older soldiers commonly abused the younger ones. My very sane friend entered a psychiatric institution and faked mental disease just to avoid serving in the army.
My father and both of my older brothers graduated from the Murmansk Marine Academy. My father, a PhD, also taught electrical engineering at the academy for 27 years. Neither my brothers nor I had any dreams about being seamen. Quite to the contrary, my oldest brother could have been a philosopher (now he is a technology engineer); my other brother wanted to be anything but an electrical engineer (he is now a successful real estate broker in Denver). Our choices were limited: either attend one of these two semi-military schools or join the Red Army.
By the time I was finishing eighth grade, the law had changed: Cadets from the Marine Academy lost their draft exemption, but college cadets were spared. I enrolled in the Marine College and dreaded every moment I spent there, but the alternative was even worse.
Aunt in Siberia
My father has two younger sisters; one lived all her life in Moscow, while the other moved with her family from Moscow to Siberia in 1979. For a long time I wondered why my aunt and my cousins in Siberia never visited or called us. It seemed so uncharacteristic of our family, who were always very close. In the summer of 1988 my father finally told me that my aunt did not really move to Siberia — she immigrated to the United States of America. My immediate reaction was resentment toward her. The first words out of my mouth were “traitor” and “spy.”
It sounds a bit silly now, but you have to understand I was a child of the Cold War. A couple of times a month my class walked to the movie theater (this was before VCRs) and watched propaganda documentaries about decaying capitalistic America, infested with the homeless, where black people are lynched, the poor are exploited by the rich, and people are poisoned by hamburgers (later, of course, I learned that the part about hamburgers was not a complete lie).
Russian movies showed Americans as evildoers, usually spies whose single goal in life was to destroy Mother Russia — the whole country was brainwashed. When I was nine years old, I attended a pioneer camp and went on a field trip. A foreign tourist, mesmerized by my smile and internal beauty (okay, that is just a wild guess), gave me bubble gum. My camp teacher, in horror, took it away, yelling that I was lucky to be alive as it was probably poisoned.
My father was not at all surprised to hear the words “traitor” and “spy” come out of my mouth. He calmly explained that despite being well educated, his sister’s family had lived in poverty because they had faced the invisible anti-Semitic wall that is so often encountered by Jewish people in Russia.
He also explained that he hid the truth about my aunt’s whereabouts from us because the consequences of the truth leaking out to local authorities would have been dire. My mother and he could have lost their jobs, and my brothers and I would never be permitted to leave the borders of the country, which for (future) seamen would have been devastating. In fact, his sister who stayed behind was demoted due to my aunt’s departure for the United States; she was deemed guilty of betrayal by association.
Shame of Being Jewish
Though my parents always tried to shield us from anti-Semitism, I was often made aware that there was something wrong about me being Jewish. Even as a little child I often encountered a second-class-citizen attitude toward me.
Nationality was a mandatory line in Soviet passports and was a required disclosure on every application. When I was seven, my parents, hoping that I had a hidden music talent (I didn’t), signed me up for singing lessons. While filling out a standard application, the teacher asked me the usual questions: parents’ names, address, phone — and then nationality. I vividly remember being filled with shame, while staring at the ground, when I said, “Jewish.”
Russia was not South Africa under apartheid regime; there was no formal discrimination and segregation towards Jews. Though Stalin was going to send all Jews to the Far East, fortunately his timely death interrupted that endeavor. I’d be lying if said that we constantly felt anti-Semitism in Russia; we did not. It had sporadically touched parts of lives; some people were impacted more than others.
We were impacted even less by discrimination than most. Murmansk was a city of immigrants, a melting pot that came to life for the most part in the 1960s and 1970s. My father moved to Murmansk in 1952 from Moscow. Despite tutoring other kids in math, he failed the math admission exam in Moscow University. Of course, the real reason for failure was his “wrong” nationality; he actually aced the exam. Murmansk Marine Academy at the time could not afford to be choosy — Murmansk was in the middle of nowhere and accepted anybody who showed up.
I always thought of being Jewish as a nationality. Until my late teens I never related being Jewish as a religious identity. My parents and grandparents were not religious. The premise behind all organized religions was “debunked” by teachers at school in Soviet Russia from first grade forward. I don’t think “the God doesn’t exist, it is all a mass delusion” lecture was on the curriculum, but it sounded consistently the same from all teachers. My father says my teachers were just a product of their environment; he is probably right.
Come to think of it, I did not know a single religious person of any religion. My parents had a lot of Jewish friends which for the most part were either teachers, scientists or doctors, and none of them were religious. In reality, the Soviets just substituted one religion for another. They wanted to have a monopoly on the real estate in one’s brain that controlled one’s life goals and ambitions, and they did not want to share it with other religions.
Coming to America
After the glasnost reform (transparency, openness) of 1985, the decades of brainwashing were slowly supplanted by the truth. In the late 1980s few people could afford VCRs, but little VCR movie theaters were popping up in basements of an apartment buildings everywhere, comprised of several TV sets hooked up to a VCR. Unlike state-owned theaters, they were not censored and had the freedom to choose their repertoire. Picture and sound quality were terrible, as VHS tapes were copied dozens of times before they made it into a VCR. Movies were dubbed by one monotone voice that translated all characters. But none of that mattered; we were hungry for variety, and American cinema was it. After watching hundreds of these flicks, it became painfully obvious that America and capitalism were not so rotten after all, and despite what my camp teacher told me, Americans did not really have any intention of poisoning little kids.
Just a few years earlier it would have sounded absurd, but after my “Siberian” aunt’s invitation in 1990, we decided to immigrate to the United States. My father saw no future for us in Russia. On December 4, 1991, we landed in New York City. Our new and in many ways harder (at least at first) life started, and we never regretted leaving Russia.
Our coming-to-America experience lacks the color and drama one would expect. Pan Am oversold its coach class, we got a free upgrade, and we flew first class from Moscow to New York. In 1991 the road to new immigrants was already paved by the hundreds of thousands that came before us a few years earlier. So with the help of my aunt and Jewish Family Service (a terrific organization that helped tens of thousands of Jewish families successfully integrate), we were able to get on our feet relatively quickly.
I discovered that my English was worthless. It was good enough to buy a pack of cigarettes but beyond that, I could barely understand anything. Americans spoke in full sentences, not in separate words. But lack of language did not stop me from visiting every neighborhood fast food establishment in search for a job. I never got the fast food job, but I did get a job at a health club folding towels and cleaning locker rooms.
TV was a great educational tool. In fact, the show Married with Children is responsible for a good portion of my day-to-day vocabulary and Al Bundy for awhile was my role model (not too long though).
When we first arrived, we were not residents of Colorado and could not afford paying out of state college tuition rates. So I found myself going to high school to learn English. This was quite a shock considering I left Russia three months before my college graduation.
The rest of my American life was fairly straightforward. I was very fortunate to discover what I wanted to do (more accurately what I love to do) — investing. While enjoying the benefits of being single and living with my parents, I worked full time and put undergraduate and graduate degrees in finance under my belt. I got married. My wife and I have, thank God, wonderful kids. I figured the best way to learn is to teach, so I started teaching an investment class at the University of Colorado and write regularly for financial newspapers and websites.
We had a lot of great experiences in Russia – mainly from family and friends. But at the same time it was also full of injustice, powerlessness, discrimination, lack of choice, and Russian-like poverty. In America, our past was a great motivator and none of the problems we encountered felt insurmountable. We feel very blessed to be here.
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Vitaliy N. Katsenelson, CFA, is CIO at Investment Management Associates in Denver, Colo. He is the author of The Little Book of Sideways Markets (Wiley, December 2010). To receive Vitaliy’s future articles by email click here.
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