A Stateless Statesman

George Soros

Background:

George Soros was born György Schwartz in 1930 in Hungary to a non-practicing Jewish family. Soon thereafter, his father changed the family name to Soros to obscure their heritage. When the Nazis arrived in Hungary in 1944, he bribed an official, who had been charged with confiscating property from the Jews, to take George in as his Christian godson. George became his assistant.

Three years later, as the Iron Curtain descended, George left for England, where he studied and worked in the financial industry until 1956, when he came to New York to trade in international arbitrage—buying securities in one country and selling them in another.

He was very good at it. He made his first big mark on the world in 1992, when he perceived the vulnerability of the British pound, acted on his hunch, and made $1 billion overnight (at the expense of British taxpayers), to become known as "the man who broke the Bank of England."

Reason for Surveillance:

But sometime before that, in the 1970s, when he was already a multi-millionaire, Soros began to lay plans for making his real mark on the world: "I came to the conclusion that what really mattered to me was the concept of an open society." Having seen the horrors of a totalitarian state, Soros knew the dangers of political absolutism. "Ideologies like Fascism or Communism give rise to a closed society in which the individual is subjugated to the collective, society is dominated by the state . . . in such a society, there is no freedom." He was right about that.

It is therefore utterly astounding that, having recognized and fled that tyranny, Soros would continue to espouse the very principles on which it was based. "Karl Marx's proposition, 'from everybody according to their ability' and 'to everybody according to their needs' was a very attractive idea," he said in 2009. "But the Communist rulers put their own interests ahead of the interests of the people." He was correct about that, too. Apparently, he believes that he can overcome this basic human tendency and that he will succeed where they failed.

In 1993, Soros, who refers to himself as "a stateless statesman," founded the Open Society Institute to carry out his admittedly "messianic fantasies" about making "the world a better place." "My goal is to become the conscience of the world," he told biographer Michael Kaufman.

To achieve his utopian goal, however, he must dismantle American independence. "The main obstacle to a stable and just world is the United States," he once stated, bluntly identifying the enemy. His weapon of choice is money. In The Shadow Party, authors David Horowitz and Richard Poe compare Soros to Vladimir Lenin, as one who wages war "through manipulation of economic and political forces at the highest levels." The December 2010 issue of Whistleblower magazine lists more than 150 of Soros's organizations that are aimed at influencing public policy and the public perception of reality. For example, the Institute for New Economic Thinking funds symposia on the need for central government control of the economy. Soros also funds a web of media organizations, one of which, under the Orwellian name Free Press, urges the founding of a massive government-run media system.

Most troubling: This man who would be the conscience of the world still confesses no problems of conscience over his collaboration with the Nazis in the guise of a Christian youth. "1944 was the happiest year of my life," he wrote in 1995. "It was the most exciting adventure that anyone could ask for."

Soros's Open Society is an adventure we can do without. •

From Salvo 16 (Spring 2011)
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