-Caveat Lector- ==================BEGIN FORWARDED MESSAGE================== >To: "[spynews]" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >Date: Wed, 24 Nov 1999 02:24:38 +0100 >Mailing-List: contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] >X-Mailing-List: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >X-URL: http://www.egroups.com/list/spynews/ >List-Subscribe: <http://www.egroups.com/subscribe?listname=spynews>, > <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >Subject: [spynews] Re: Soros: "It Isn't Enough to Shed Communism" '__ ___ _ ___ __ ___ _ _ _ __ /'_|'o'\'V'/'\|'|'__|'|'|'/'_| \_'\''_/\'/|'\\'|'_||'V'V'\_'\ |__/_|''//'|_|\_|___|\_n_/|__/ http://mprofaca.cro.net/mainmenu.html -------------------------------------- Tuesday November 23, 1999 -------------------------------------- > It Isn't Enough to Shed Communism > By George Soros > Tuesday, November 23, 1999; > The Washington Post > Page A27 > The writer is an international financier > and philanthropist. Beware of billionaires bearing gifts -------------------------------------- http://www.forbes.com/forbes/97/0407/5907082a.htm A near decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, much of Central and Eastern Europe is still ruled by the old gang. Guess who's helping keep them in power? By Richard C. Morais Forbes Magazine April 7, 1997 IF YOU'VE DIMLY wondered what is happening in Albania, we can, in a brief sentence, explain: George Soros' friends are coming out on top. Late in February, armed gangs led by gangsters and ex-Communists, many of them veterans of the old secret police state, all but toppled an elected liberal government, and forced the president to appoint a neo-Communist as prime minister. While this was happening, George Soros sat in his London town house and calmly told Forbes that his Albanian Foundation is "an excellent group very much on top of the situation." On top is right: Soros has kept afloat a newspaper, Koha Jone, that egged on the coupists with inflammatory antigovernment propaganda. A pyramid scheme had collapsed, costing many people their savings, and the Soros-supported paper effectively made a call to arms. A top official of the Soros foundation in Tirana boasted to stunned observers: "[President] Berisha's going. We got him." In an age-old tradition of European political patronage, this multibillionaire speculator routinely taps his billions to fund journals, politicians and educators in Europe and elsewhere. More often than not, these have an exclusively left-wing bias. Soros, 67, is Hungarian-born but a U.S. citizen. He recently caused a flutter in the February issue of the Atlantic Monthly by penning a windy attack on free market capitalism. Why is George Soros so cozy with people and causes that might be expected to view his kind as parasites? To understand his charitable works Forbes visited the Soros Foundation- Hungary's cream-colored villa in the hills of Budapest. Hungary is not only Soros' native land but where his charities have the longest history. There we met Miklos Vasarhelyi, the 80-year-old president of the Soros-funded foundation. This man, who dispenses millions of dollars a year in a rather poor country, has an interesting past. Vasarhelyi was press officer to Imre Nagy, the Communist Prime Minister executed in 1958 for being too independent. Vasarhelyi stood trial along with Nagy after Soviet tanks crushed the 1956 Hungarian uprising. Nagy and most others were hanged or sentenced to life. Vasarhelyi got just five years, the lightest punishment of the pack. Thanks to George Soros, this former Communist has risen again. A political party he helped found is a partner in the present government. That government is a coalition of ex-Communists (now the Hungarian Socialist Party) and a left-liberal group, the Alliance of Free Democrats, a coalition that came to power in 1994 after defeating a rather ineffectual moderate government. Soros blessed the election results. "These are strong, serious-minded people," he publicly said of the victorious ex-Communists. "I have great expectations in general." Not everyone agreed. One prominent foreign businessman who first considered, then rejected, doing business in Hungary, described the current government as a "bunch of clowns who haven't a clue as to how to run an economy." Soros has since banged heads with Socialist Prime Minister Gyula Horn, but remains close to his coalition partner, the Alliance of Free Democrats. He provides many AFD leaders with income. Besides Vasarhelyi, for example, Soros' Hungarian lawyer, Alajos Dornbach, is a top-ranked AFD official and a legal adviser to the foundation. Soros is the great philanthropist of our age or so his press constantly remind us. Every year, according to his flacks, he gives away more than $300 million through a network of 1,000 employees in 30 countries. When Russian scientists were starving he gave each a year's salary; he brought fresh water to besieged Bosnians; he's providing kindergartens for Gypsies. Good deeds, all. But there is another side to the giving, a rather nutty political side. The 50 offices maintained by Soros money are spread from Haiti to Mongolia, and all claim that their works are based on philosopher Sir Karl Popper's views of tolerant, open societies. Thus a common name: Open Society Institute. Behind the nuttiness, there is a consistency. "The people Soros hires," says Mark Almond, a respected Oxford University lecturer, "are noted for their anti-Thatcherite views. You'll be hard-pressed to find a religious dissident or staunch anti-Communist in his foundations." Johnathan Sunley, the Budapest-based director of The Windsor Group, puts it even more strongly: "Soros is engaged in a one-dimensional ideological laundering of the old Communist/nomenklatura at the expense of those who didn't get trips abroad." Sunley means, of course, that real anti-Communists couldn't travel abroad in Communist days; only those in official favor could. Soros has adopted many of these formerly pampered, generally moderate Marxists. "Soros," says Peter Bod, a former cabinet minister and central bank governor in Hungary, "is the most influential nonelected politician east of the Alps." His power stems not from the ballot box but from his bank account. He wants to see that the old left-wing dictatorships are replaced not with free market democracies, but with left-wing democracies. "Yes," the prickly billionaire conceded in an interview with Forbes, "clearly there is a political bias in the [Soros] foundation." Look at the trustees of his U.S. foundation and you will see where the bias lies. One of them is the notorious Lani Guinier, the law professor Bill Clinton tried to nominate as head of the civil rights division of the Justice Department. Once her intemperate brand of politics was examined such as minority veto power over legislation even Clinton backed away from her and withdrew his support. "Yes," says the prickly billionaire. "Clearly there is a political bias in the [Soros] foundation." President of the Open Society Institute in the U.S. is Aryeh Neier, a human rights advocate who often embraces extreme liberal positions. So be careful when you apply the term "philanthropy" to Soros' spending. Not all his causes are political, but he's clearly a would-be social engineer. You wouldn't get far in a U.S. election running on a Soros-style platform, but you might feel quite at home in a lot of U.S. universities. But back to Hungary. Soros has been working in his native Hungary for the past 13 years. In the early 1980s he was quietly supporting dissidents in Central and Eastern Europe. It was then that the mercurial Vasarhelyi showed up at Columbia University in New York, where he met Soros. The ex-Communist hack seems to have had a considerable influence on the billionaire. With Vasarhelyi's help Soros made a deal in 1984 with the then-government. The first Soros Hungarian foundation had a budget of $3 million and was jointly run by Soros and the Communists. "One of Soros' conditions was that I should be his personal representative," says Vasarhelyi. "He had excellent judgment," says Soros, "and a good understanding of what was possible and what wasn't." Interesting guy. Vasarhelyi's understanding of what is possible has undergone a number of changes. In 1936 and 1937 he studied political science in Rome because he thought "Italian Fascism showed the way out of an unjust society." He secretly joined the Hungarian Communist Party in 1939 and officially became a member of the Social Democratic Party. "[The Communist Party] instructed [me] to join the Social Democratic Party," he wrote in his 1989 autobiography, "to try and get ahold of key positions, but to continue following the leadership of the Communist Party." By the late 1940s the Communists ruled Hungary and Vasarhelyi became a top-ranked "journalist" spouting pure Communist propaganda. Then he turned his coat again. By the mid-1950s, he had joined the ranks of "goulash" Communists disenchanted by Stalinism, but still in love with Karl Marx. After serving his relatively mild prison term, Vasarhelyi eventually got a job at a literature academy, was given a passport and allowed to travel. The dissidents we talked to said dissidents normally didn't get such perks. Says OSI's Neier: "We always regarded him as strongly committed to the Open Society principles, and he is held in high regard." Everyone likes Vasarhelyi. References to him are to be found in recently released internal records of Communist Party meetings about a 1989 political demonstration. Vasarhelyi and others negotiated with the government on behalf of the dissidents. According to the records: "it is worth talking to...Vasarhelyi on whom we have influence" and "if the [speeches] get into Vasarhelyi's hands we would be able to get ahold of them." Vasarhelyi strenuously denies collaborating with the Communists. Maybe that was wishful thinking, but it's a revealing comment nonetheless. Vasarhelyi of course no longer calls himself a Communist but neither is he a big believer in free markets. "I was and always am very critical of capitalism," Vasarhelyi tells Forbes. Give Soros credit. His money does do considerable good. Between 1984 and 1989 he and Vasarhelyi helped undermine the Communist Party's control of information by trading photocopying machines to cultural and educational institutes for Hungarian currency; the currency was then used to give grants to dissidents and to writers of all political stripes. But along the way Soros seems to have developed delusions of grandeur. He wasn't satisfied with helping end Communist totalitarianism. He wanted to decide what kind of government would replace it. In 1990 a new center-right coalition government was voted into power in Hungary which killed the Soros-government agreement. That's when the foundation began its partisan support. Vasarhelyi denies that there is any political bias in his foundation. The Soros Foundation, for example, gives to the youth clubs and pays for Gypsy dance troupes (the Gypsies are a repressed minority in Europe). Gabor Ivanyi is a former AFD member of parliament, and a Methodist minister who runs homeless shelters in Budapest. Last year Soros Foundation Hungary gave Ivanyi $38,000 for mattresses, an ambulance to pick up homeless who were freezing on the streets and for TB treatments. Ivanyi is a genuine man of goodwill. But study the foundation's 1980s modus operandi and you'll see it always mixed applauded works with politically motivated projects. With Vasarhelyi's AFD pals in power again, we found the relationship with certain sectors of government very cozy. The AFD-controlled culture ministry and the Soros foundation, for example, both subsidize periodicals. We matched the most recently published lists of subsidies and found 77% of the periodicals that got major government handouts also received subsidies from the Soros foundation. It seems to us a foundation dedicated to an Open Society would go out of its way to assist periodicals not supported by the government of the day. How reformed are Soros' ex-Communists? Not very. A few years back, Gyorgy Litvan, a Soros friend of longstanding, a former adviser to the foundation's board and director of an institute given Soros' grants, attacked historian Maria Schmidt. She had uncovered secret police files indirectly confirming that Alger Hiss had been a Soviet spy. Her work was widely published in the U.S. and led to a <I>Reader's Digest</I> article in Hungary. Then she bumped into Litvan. Schmidt says Litvan lambasted her for her "mentality," and said he would do everything he could to stop her working as an academic in Hungary. Litvan tells Forbes he never said such a thing, but admits he used his power to block her from making a documentary on the secret police. "I dislike her," he says. "She is on the far right." This Soros friend has an interesting idea of what constitutes "far right." It seems to be anyone to the right of Alger Hiss. Interviewing him in London, Forbes asked Soros why he supports turncoats like Litvan and Vasarhelyi. His reply was shall we say a bit confusing. "They [as ex-Communists] know better what democracy is than perhaps those who were always opposed to [the regime]." What an insult to those true democrats who paid, sometimes with their lives, for their beliefs. That's outrageous, typical Soros gobbledygook. Exactly what does he believe in? A utopian vision of a sort of borderless, multicultural world, where people respect one another and the well-to-do take care of the less-well-off. But Soros' friend Byron Wien, managing director of Morgan Stanley International, comes closer to the truth when he says: "Soros is terrified of right-wing nationalism." A press officer told us over a five-star buffet we should see what Soros "means to the little people." Understandable perhaps in a man who spent his boyhood watching Nazis and their Hungarian supporters at work. In testimony to the U.S. Congress in 1994, Soros insisted that Eastern Europe's ex-Communists "want to get away from Communism as far as possible. Their reemergence constitutes a welcome extension of the democratic spectrum." Soros went on: "The real danger is the emergence of would-be nationalist dictatorships. They are playing in a field definitely tilted in their favor." Thus, for Soros, a rosy glow seems to surround the left, while conservatism seems, to him, a stand-in for Nazism. That may seem relatively benign when expounded in American universities. It is pure poison in Eastern and Central Europe, which badly need to develop their free markets. Soros annually pumps some $60 million into outfits in Hungary, among them his Central European University, whose goal is to educate an "administrative elite." Here students can not only bone up on macroeconomics but also on such American imports as feminist literary theory and how the media "constructs gender and sexuality, whether heterosexual or homosexual." We found Soros' "cultural elite" unbelievably arrogant. A chirpy Open Society Institute press officer told us over a five-star Kempinski Hotel breakfast that she wanted Forbes to see what Soros "means to the little people." Vaclav Klaus, the Czech Republic's prime minister and a tireless advocate of free markets, has a good notion of what Soros' ideas mean to "the little people." Klaus, in effect, kicked Central European University out of Prague. The no-nonsense Klaus wasn't afraid of Soros' ideas. He just didn't want Soros money buying up Czech intellectuals. Soros returned the insult: "Klaus embodies the worst of the Western democracies." Maybe, but the Czech Republic is easily the most prosperous, modern economy in Central or Eastern Europe. Say this for Soros: He knows his way around the law. His country foundations are usually local legal entities but often receive funds, says his New York press officer, from the New York-domiciled foundations. That's very interesting. According to the IRS tax code, to enjoy tax-exempt status a private foundation cannot "intervene, directly or indirectly, in any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office...." You can dismiss George Soros as a kooky rich man who uses his money to collect politicians and intellectuals the way some rich people collect castles and old masters. And in a way he is ridiculous, flying about the world, holding press conferences and writing books and articles that nobody can understand. On the other hand, money can do a lot of harm in politics, especially in poor, small countries. Instability IN BUDAPEST in 1944 George Soros lived a double life. His father, a lawyer and editor of a journal in Esperanto (a now almost forgotten effort to develop a common language for the world), forged official papers to disguise the family's Jewish heritage. The papers saved the family, and during the Nazi occupation, when German and Hungarian fascist allies rounded up 300,000 Jews, young Soros posed as the Christian godson of a Hungarian government official. The 14-year-old George Soros sometimes found himself accompanying his supposed godfather as he seized the property of Jewish families bound for slaughter. Heroic? No, but how many heroes are there when survival is the issue and resistance futile? It's typical of Soros that he purports to remember that time not as a terrifying ordeal but as an adventure. "The happiest year of my life," he calls it. Read George Soros' frank personal statements and meet the billionaire in his elegant but slightly tatty London home light switches falling out of the wall, piles of laundry on the bathroom floor and you can't help but rather like the man. Yet sometimes the openness seems a bit phony. Example: After George Soros challenged Europe's Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992, becoming the "man who broke the Bank of England" and probably the first person to make $1 billion in a month, he lectured: "It behooves the authorities to design a system that does not reward speculators." Yeah, I did it, but you shouldn't have let me. It's the system. So he's a capitalist but hedges his bets by supporting socialist causes. The key to understanding George Soros is that he skirts, by his own admission, a kind of lunacy. It's both his strong point and his weak point. "Next to my fantasies about being God," Soros told British television, "I also have very strong fantasies of being mad. In fact, my grandfather was actually paranoid. I have a lot of madness in my family. So far I have escaped it." Just. One bout of instability came in the early 1980s. His fund was doing extremely well when he walked away from his partner, first wife and family. It was a "very intense emotional process to correct errors [in the financial markets]," he explains. "The psychic cost of running the fund was very high. The more successful I was, the more I was punished by having more money to run." During this turmoil Soros walked through the City of London and was convinced wrongly that he was having a heart attack. "It made me realize that maybe it wasn't worth it. To have a heart attack and be knocked out is really losing the game." He spent a few years devoting himself to his intellectual and charitable interests, remarried and eventually pulled off his greatest financial coup by betting against the British pound. Unable to resist pondering his navel, eager to dazzle with his erudition, Soros has produced several books, all impenetrable to the point where some people think he is pulling their leg. His recently published Atlantic Monthly article, "The Capitalist Threat," is a collection of pretentious and incomprehensible musings about capitalism, the implication being that, though he didn't mention them by name, Reagan and Thatcher were bad guys. "The article was misunderstood," he says. "I was not attacking the capitalist system. I was attacking the excesses of the capitalist system." Oh. When he went through his personal crisis in the early 1980s, he says he felt he was acting out the conflict between his parents. We couldn't resist asking: Are you projecting onto capitalism and the financial markets your own personal anxieties? "Maybe so," he answered. "The insecurity I feel actually corresponds to the conditions in the market better than the equilibrium that the professors of economics deal with." Looking into himself, Soros sees the world. Looking at the world, he sees George Soros. Madness is close to genius. R.C.M. --------------------------------------------- *** NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to SPYNEWS eGroup members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes only. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml *** Mario Profaca, moderator mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ FREE Post-it® Notes! Get 10 4"x3" note pads (with your own personal message and graphics) FREE at iPrint.com. 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