Two portraits of G. Soros

[Andrej Tisma]

How do leaders of Nettime and Spectra fit into this story?
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New Statesman Profile - George Soros

Neil Clark
Monday 2nd June 2003


The billionaire trader has become eastern Europe's uncrowned king and
the prophet of ''the open society''. But open to what?

George Soros profiled by Neil Clark

George Soros is angry. In common with 90 per cent of the world's
population, the Man Who Broke the Bank of England has had enough of
President Bush and his foreign policy. In a recent article in the
Financial Times, Soros condemned the Bush administration's policies on
Iraq as "fundamentally wrong" - based as they were on a "false
ideology that US might gave it the right to impose its will on the
world".

Wow! Has one of the world's richest men - the archetypal amoral
capitalist who made billions out of the Far Eastern currency crash of
1997 and who last year was fined  for insider trading by a court in
France - seen the light in his old age? (He is 72.) Should we pop the
champagne corks and toast his conversion?

Not before asking what really motivates him. Soros likes to portray
himself as an outsider, an independent-minded Hungarian emigre and
philosopher-pundit who stands detached from the US military-industrial
complex. But take a look at the board members of the NGOs he organises
and finances. At Human Rights Watch, for example, there is Morton
Abramowitz, US assistant secretary of state for intelligence and
research from 1985-89, and now a fellow at the interventionist Council
on Foreign Relations; ex-ambassador Warren Zimmerman (whose spell in
Yugoslavia coincided with the break-up of that country); and Paul
Goble, director of communications at the CIA-created Radio Free
Europe/Radio Liberty (which Soros also funds). Soros's International
Crisis Group boasts such "independent" luminaries as the former
national security advisers Zbigniew Brzezinski and Richard Allen, as
well as General Wesley Clark, once Nato supreme allied commander for
Europe. The group's vice-chairman is the former congressman Stephen
Solarz, once described as "the Israel lobby's chief legislative
tactician on Capitol Hill" and a signatory, along with the likes of
Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, to a notorious letter to President
Clinton in 1998 calling for a "comprehensive political and military
strategy for bringing down Saddam and his regime".

Take a look also at Soros's business partners. At the Carlyle Group,
where he has invested more than , they include the former secretary of
state James Baker and the erstwhile defence secretary Frank Carlucci,
George Bush Sr and, until recently, the estranged relatives of Osama
Bin Laden. Carlyle, one of the world's largest private equity funds,
makes most of its money from its work as a defence contractor.

Soros may not, as some have suggested, be a fully paid-up CIA agent.
But that his companies and NGOs are closely wrapped up in US
expansionism cannot seriously be doubted.

So why is he so upset with Bush? The answer is simple. Soros is angry
not with Bush's aims - of extending Pax Americana and making the world
safe for global capitalists like himself - but with the crass and
blundering way Bush is going about it. By making US ambitions so
clear, the Bush gang has committed the cardinal sin of giving the game
away. For years, Soros and his NGOs have gone about their work
extending the boundaries of the "free world" so skilfully that hardly
anyone noticed. Now a Texan redneck and a gang of overzealous neo-cons
have blown it.

As a cultivated and educated man (a degree in philosophy from the
London School of Economics, honorary degrees from the Universities of
Oxford, Yale, Bologna and Budapest), Soros knows too well that empires
perish when they overstep the mark and provoke the formation of
counter-alliances. He understands that the Clintonian approach of
multilateralism - whereby the US cajoles or bribes but never does
anything so crude as to threaten - is the only one that will allow the
empire to endure. Bush's policies have led to a divided Europe, Nato
in disarray, the genesis of a new Franco-German-Russian alliance and
the first meaningful steps towards Arab unity since Nasser.

Soros knows a better way - armed with a few billion dollars, a handful
of NGOs and a nod and a wink from the US State Department, it is
perfectly possible to topple foreign governments that are bad for
business, seize a country's assets, and even to get thanked for your
benevolence afterwards. Soros has done it.

The conventional view, shared by many on the left, is that socialism
collapsed in eastern Europe because of its systemic weaknesses and the
political elite's failure to build popular support. That may be partly
true, but Soros's role was crucial. From 1979, he distributed  a year
to dissidents including Poland's Solidarity movement, Charter 77 in
Czechoslovakia and Andrei Sakharov in the Soviet Union. In 1984, he
founded his first Open Society Institute in Hungary and pumped
millions of dollars into opposition movements and independent media.
Ostensibly aimed at building up a "civil society", these initiatives
were designed to weaken the existing political structures and pave
the way for eastern Europe's eventual colonisation by global capital.
Soros now claims, with characteristic immodesty, that he was
responsible for the "Americanisation" of eastern Europe.

The Yugoslavs remained stubbornly resistant and repeatedly returned
Slobodan Milosevic's unreformed Socialist Party to government. Soros
was equal to the challenge. From 1991, his Open Society Institute
channelled more than  to the coffers of the anti-Milosevic opposition,
funding political parties, publishing houses and "independent" media
such as Radio B92, the plucky little student radio station of western
mythology which was in reality bankrolled by one of the world's
richest men on behalf of the world's most powerful nation. With Slobo
finally toppled in 2000 in a coup d'etat financed, planned and
executed in Washington, all that was left was to cart the ex-Yugoslav
leader to the Hague tribunal, co-financed by Soros along with those
other custodians of human rights Time Warner Corporation and Disney.
He faced charges of crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide,
based in the main on the largely anecdotal evidence of (you've guessed
it) Human Rights Watch.

Soros stresses his belief in the "open society" propounded by the
philosopher Karl Popper, who taught him at the LSE in the early 1950s.
Soros's definition of an "open society" - "an imperfect society that
holds itself open to improvement" - sounds reasonable enough; few
lovers of genuine liberty would take issue with its central tenet that
"the open society is a more sophisticated form of social organisation
than a totalitarian one". But Soros's "open societies" don't tend to
be all that open in practice.

Since the fall of Milosevic, Serbia, under the auspices of
Soros-backed "reformers", has become less, not more, free. The
recently lifted state of emergency saw more than 4,000 people
arrested, many of them without charge, political parties threatened
with bans, and critical newspapers closed down. It was condemned by
the UN Commission on Human Rights and the British Helsinki Group. But
there was not a murmur from the Open Society Institute or from Soros
himself. In fairness, Soros has been far more critical of his former
protege Leonid Kuchma, president of the Ukraine, a country described
by the former intelligence officer Mykola Melnychenko as "one big
protection racket", and now possibly the most repressive police state
in Europe.

But generally the sad conclusion is that for all his liberal quoting
of Popper, Soros deems a society "open" not if it respects human
rights and basic freedoms, but if it is "open" for him and his
associates to make money. And, indeed, Soros has made money in every
country he has helped to prise "open".
In Kosovo, for example, he has invested  in an attempt to gain control
of the Trepca mine complex, where there are vast reserves of gold,
silver, lead and other minerals estimated to be worth in the region of
. He thus copied a pattern he has deployed to great effect over the
whole of eastern Europe: of advocating "shock therapy" and "economic
reform", then swooping in with his associates to buy valuable state
assets at knock-down prices.

More than a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Soros is the
uncrowned king of eastern Europe. His Central European University,
with campuses in Budapest, Warsaw and Prague and exchange programmes
in the US, unashamedly propagates the ethos of neoliberal capitalism
and clones the next pro-American generation of political leaders in
the region. With his financial stranglehold over political parties,
business, educational institutions and the arts, criticism of Soros in
mainstream eastern European media is hard to find.
Hagiography is not. The Budapest Sun reported in February how he had
been made an honorary citizen of Budapest by the mayor, Gabor Demszky.
"Few people have done to Budapest what George Soros has," gushed
Demszky, saying that the billionaire had contributed to "structural
and mental changes in the capital city and Hungary itself". The mayor
failed to add that Soros is also a benefactor of Demszky's own party,
the Free Democrats, which, governing with "reform" communists, has
pursued the classic Soros agenda of privatisation and economic
liberalisation - leading to a widening gap between rich and poor.

The Soros strategy for extending Pax Americana differs from the Bush
model, particularly in its subtlety. But it is just as ambitious and
just as deadly. Left-liberals, admiring his support for some of their
favourite issues such as gay rights and the legalisation of soft
drugs, let him off lightly.

Asked about the havoc his currency speculation caused to Far Eastern
economies in the crash of 1997, Soros replied: "As a market
participant, I don't need to be concerned with the consequences of my
actions." Strange words from a man who likes to be regarded as the
saviour of civil society and who rails in print against "market
fundamentalism".



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GEORGE SOROS' INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL OF YOUTH CORRUPTION

(The slightly enlarged version of speech delivered by Marek Glogoczowski
during the EU(RO)-skeptic Youth Camp held at Ljublana, Slovenia, Sept.
26-27, 2001.)

George Soros is a businessman-philanthropist, whose activities are known to
professionals worldwide. In USA he operates the Institute of Open Society,
in countries belonging to the former Soviet Block he operates a number of
similar foundations, which in case of Poland holds the "royal" name of
Bathory Foundation. These "philanthropist" institutions have - or had - a
substantial influence on composition of consecutive post-communist
governments in Eastern Europe, especially governments of big countries - in
Poland, with George Soros Fund are linked three first "independent" Prime
Ministers (Mazowiecki, Bielecki, Suchocka); in Russia to Soros' "boys"
belong such ardent reformers as PM Gajdar, Kirylenko and Niemcov. In his
book "Underwriting Democracy" of 1993, George Soros claims to be - together
with his associate, professor Jeffrey Sachs - a true Funding Father (or
rather a Godfather) of all these "Protocols of Zion" styled reforms, which
we had to suffer in Eastern Europe.
Today, with Soros Fund is linked in Poland the most influential journal
"Gazeta Wyborcza" -  which journal already in 1989 paved the way for the
"Solidarity" electoral victory over PZPR, the declining at that time Polish
Communist Party. In Slovakia with Soros' Invisible Empire is linked the TV
station "Markiza", which helped to remove, during 1998 elections, the
supposedly undemocratic Meciar's government. Inside Serbia the Soros Fund
operated in Kosovo, until 1999 NATO bombings, a Civil Center in Pristina,
which fought for the national independence of the local Albanian majority,
and in Belgrade it still operates the famous "Radio B-92", which played a
substantial role in anti-Milosevic's student riots in 1996/7. (And than, in
October 2000, it helped the "civilized" - i.e. bulldozer and Parliament
fire assisted - destruction of the last socialist regime in Europe.) At
present many of Soros Fund linked intellectuals are in key positions of
institutions controlling economies and cultures of former East Block
countries, and in Budapest this Foundation operates a whole International
University of Central Europe. George Soros plays also an important role in
USA foreign politics, already in 1980 he organized, together with his close
associates, Secretaries of State Zbig Brzezinsky and Mad Albraight, a
National Endowment for Democracy (NED) fund, which is a kind of joint
venture of CIA and private business, greed oriented, activities.

The best summary of George Soros humanitarian activities in South-East
Europe gave Gilles d'Aymery in an article "Mapping the Human Rights Crowd
in the Balkans" published on July 23, 2001 in the Jugoinfo vitrine:
"Behind the veil of legitimacy and humanitarian concerns can be found the
same powerful people and organizations such as the Open Society Institute
of the billionaire and - as always characterized - philanthropist, George
Soros, the Ford Foundation, the United States Institute of Peace, the
National Endowment for Democracy and many more, financing and using a maze
of well known NGO's such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the
International Crisis Group, etc., as well as more obscure entities ... But,
among all of them, shining as the Southern star, is George Soros who, like
an immense Jules Verne octopus, extends his tentacles all over Eastern
Europe, South-Eastern Europe, the Caucasus as well as the republics of the
former Soviet Union. With the help of these various groups (it is possible)
not only to shape but to create the news, the agenda and public opinion to
further aims which are, in short, the control of the world, its natural
resources and the furtherance of the uniform ideal of a perfect world
polity made in America."

Despite such richness of this philanthropist activities, the general public
hardly knows his name. During our meeting at Ljublana, young, 20 - 25 years
old, EU sceptics from several countries virtually ignored the name of
Soros, my equal age, 59 years old Swiss German friend from Zurich wrote me
that in his well informed country perhaps 2 percent of people knows about
this billionaire. And in Poland surely no more than 10 percent of adult
population knows who was the true author of widely despised "Balcerowicz's
reforms". Despite this "educated" public ignorance, Soros' "missionary"
role is perceptible at the planetary scale: according to Schiller's
Institute data, the "man of Soros" in the European Commission is professor
Romano Prodi, in Malaysia our philanthropist is officially searched for
enormous financial frauds, and in Italy he is officially considered persona
non grata for similar reasons. We can take for granted that these last
facts are only summits of a whole "iceberg" of fraudulent affairs in which
our billionaire-philanthropist-politician is - or was - engaged in.

 The mystery of his success in world-wide speculation George Soros
explained in a surprisingly honest statement, during an interview he gave
to the Swiss weekly "L"hebdo" of May 1993. He said "I SPECULATE ON
DISCREPANCY BETWEEN THE REALITY AND THE PUBLIC IMAGE OF THIS REALITY, UNTIL
A CORRECTIONAL MECHANISM OCCURS, WHICH APPROACHES THESE TWO." It is evident
that a skillful speculator is not used to wait passively until such
discrepancy occurs. To the contrary, with his "creativity of an investor"
he purposefully enlarges the gap between the "real reality" and its public
image. (To put this statement into a plain language, a good speculator,
knowing principles of the stock exchange, is feeding the public with the
fake information - or, in more polite words, with DISINFORMATION - in order
to gather personal profits.)
The "liberal" idea of a purposeful construction of a fake image of the
world - in order to get the political power - is also expressed in Soros'
book "Underwriting democracy" (in French version "Sauver la démocratie a
l'Est") published in 1993. He writes there for example: "In a normal state
of affairs it is necessary that a movement (a political one, but also
commercial, scientific and religious ones - M.G.) is pushed sufficiently
far, before forces occur, which are able to correct the deformation (of
image of reality) which was at its base." Putting this statement once again
into a plain language, it means that the more aggressively a person - or a
group, a coterie or a Mafia - is able to lie-up the image of reality, the
longer this group is expected to remain in power. (The same maintained
Goebbels 70 years ago: the bigger the lie is, the better it holds.)

 George Soros even explains in detail how the elaborated by him, program of
"Americanization" of Eastern Europe works. He informs in "Underwriting
Democracy" that behind his philanthropic idea of creation of Open Society
Foundations was "the creation of an international web (...) at the heart of
which will be the computerized base of (personal) data, which enable the
Western Multinational Societies to find candidates, which they are
searching for". In short, all these Soros-Fundation educated (and kept in
computer memories) young men and women are prepared to fulfill functions of
so-called "influence agents", which behave in a way similar to that of
Japanese geishas. These Young Urban Professionals, thanks to their fluent
knowledge of languages, and having multiple, delicate social contacts with
bureaucracy in target countries, facilitate the implementation in their
homelands not only of Western Multinationals, but also of Western
sub-cultures and Western habits of consumption of appropriate, personality
enriching, commercial goods.

For the first time I heard that Soros Fundation corrupts young people, from
the mouth of Piotr Ikonowicz, who is a leader of the Polish Socialist
Party, roughly twenty years younger than me. How does this corruption is
organized in detail? In general it takes the form of an ordinary training
very similar to the one practiced while teaching young dogs to bark at a
"stranger". In case of 'education' of "Soros youth" (SorosJugend) the
"food" necessary for such simple training consists of all these computers,
lavish scholarships, luxury cars and invitations for dinners and seminars
in four stars hotels. In general this was/is sufficient to bribe not only
the young but also adult "intellectuals" in a target country. An example of
this gave few years ago the former finance minister of Poland, Grzegorz
Kolodko, in a Warsaw satirical "Nie" weekly. He reported there the story
how a "well known investor" (his name he dared not to disclose) was able to
buy, only at the cost of few dozens of millions of dollars spent for
Warsaw's "elite", the Polish Bank Handlowy having the value of 1,5 billion
of dollars.

The specific task of all these Bathory Foundation trained 'watchdogs' of
Open Society consist of "barking" (in tune with Their Master's Voice),
against all individuals which may endanger the Private Property of
'feeding' them Lord. Observing the behavior of journalists linked with this
'watchdog' formation, one finds easily that all their vigor and sense of
humor is exploited for the task of continuous, monotonous defamation of
national leaders, which have an authentic, popular support. (This was the
case, for example, of Soros/NED sponsored Students in Market Theology
"Otpor" movement in Serbia; the similar baiting of Lukashenko we witness
today in Belorussia.)
Once competent people are removed from key posts of a target country, its
pillage, by the gang of "Global Investors", can proceed at full speed,
thanks to utter cretins (like President Walesa or PM Buzek in Poland), or
opportunists (like Djindzic in Serbia), which get installed at commands of
the state. It is evident that in order to obtain the public (i.e. media)
consent for such 'reforms', all more observant and honest people have to
disappear from the public life. Usually it is sufficient to associate them
with despised (by "Soros' Family", of course) "communists, fascists,
reactionaries and populists", but in particular cases it becomes necessary
to kidnap them to the Hague's ICTY. (Or simply, to murder them by the
"invisible death squads" - inside Serbia, after Milosevic was ousted from
power, about 20 personalities were liquidated in this "open society" way.)
The best, and at the same the shortest description of the general direction
of all "reforms", we have in Eastern Europe, was given to me, in May 1999,
by an old professor of Slavic literature, Vladimir Bozkov from Skopie,
Macedonia. At that time he witnessed at Skopie nearly every day how B-52
bombers fly towards his former homeland. Impressed by this techno-spectacle
he told me, during our meeting at Moscow, "Oni chotiat' ubit' vsiech umnych
ljudi": (THEY WANT TO KILL ALL THINKING PEOPLE). I think that this is the
essential goal, which our beloved "Global Investors" are aiming at.
The very ethics of "misinformation as a tool of survival and conquest"
belongs to the "aristocratic" pattern of behavior, which spontaneously
developed among Stock Exchange players. It is already in 1813 brothers
Johannes and Nathan Rotschild, by a skillful, gossiped at London's & Paris'
Stock Exchanges, lie about the outcome of the Waterloo battle, were able to
earn in one "scoop" 40 million francs, making out of their family the
richest Banking Group in Europe. (By the way, according to Schiller's
Institute, George Soros is associated with this famous Rotschild Banking
Group.)
Here I come to the point, which I want to stress in the conclusion. Already
in the Antiquity the Greek philosopher Socrates argued that (in
contradiction with the Biblical (mis)information about the 'original sin')
people are not evil by their nature, but they are becoming evildoers out of
their ignorance. The Global Stock Exchange is by its very nature the place
where the MISINFORMATION (or the production of ignorances) has become the
principal source of personal enrichment of 'Investors'. By an imitation of
Stock Exchange 'Super Stars' like George Soros, every day more and more
numerous 'young wolves of interest' are polluting the Planet with lies
supposed to bring them their selfish, pecuniary happiness. It is precisely
from Stock Exchanges radiates in all directions the Lie - and thus
automatically also the Evil and Ugliness - which has become the ever more
visible symbol of Our Civilization. (By the way, these B-52 bombers, which
2,5 years ago impressed so much professor Bozkov from Skopie, I can see at
present over Tatra Mountains, during their return to Germany from
antiterrorist missions in Afghanistan.)
Stock Exchanges and bourgeois Banks were permitted to operate only in 16
century Europe by our religious reformers, dreaming about 'New Jerusalem'.
We can trace thus the origin of these modern 'Temples of Lie', back to the
Old Jerusalem's Temple of Merchants two thousand years ago. At that time
Jewish dissidents considered their Temple of Hypocrites as "brigands'
cavern". Considering this last expression as an 'approaching the reality'
description, we can take for sure that nothing will turn for a better in
our Brave (observe the military stout of Americans!) World until we kick
Global Investors out of our homelands.

Marek Glogoczowski,     November 2001