Posted on 01/30/2004 6:57:45 PM PST by Byron_the_Aussie
He is one of the world's wealthiest men. America made George Soros, but now he's digging deep to topple the 'truth machine', he tells Peter Fray.
George Soros is one of the world's wealthiest men, a self-created financial genius who has amassed a fortune by exploiting the foibles of the market and human nature. He is also a zealous philanthropist and supporter of both small and big "d" democrats. In short, he's a player.
But if you didn't know any of that or had somehow missed the entire Bush presidency, he might come across as more of a leftie sociology lecturer, the type who wears a leather-patched corduroy jacket and steadfastly clings to an equally faded world view. Come the revolution, brothers . . .
With Soros, it's not his dress sense, which is traditional business, but the patter. Within minutes of meeting the Herald at his plush west London abode, he complains about George Bush's "Orwellian truth machine" and its use of "doublespeak".
He believes that ending this presidency's "supremacist ideology" has become a "matter of life and death" for the planet's future. It's like meeting his compatriot Michael Moore in a posh suit and tie. "This Orwellian truth machine really does remind you of the conditions that Orwell was drawing from, mainly the Nazi and Soviet truth machines, with one tremendously significant difference - that in the Soviet and Nazi case, the state party apparatus absolutely controlled the media and all the sources of information totally. "In the United States today you do have a pluralistic, free media. Neverthe-less, the truth machine is capable of manufacturing truth, so that the majority of people in America continue to believe that Saddam was somehow connected to September 11, when all the evidence points to the opposite.
"It raises the question, how is this possible?"
Indeed. How is it possible that Mr Soros, at 73 and with a reported fortune of about $US7 billion ($9.1 billion), gives a hoot about Mr Bush; or why, when he himself has obviously lived the American dream to its fullest, has he devoted this year to unseating the man whom many Americans still believe is the living embodiment of that dream? Isn't this biting the system that feeds?
Soros, a Hungarian emigre to the US, concedes that he is open to such accusations. "I can be seen as a traitor to my class and my adopted country, but I am proud to take that role. I think there are values which transcend class and country. I think my country can be wrong and that's the value of an open society and that is the value which has made America great.
"I do think the open society and democracy is now in danger because the ultimate guarantor of an open society is a well-informed electorate that has a commitment to or values the truth.
"We now have a largely or partially misinformed electorate. But more to the point is that people are not concerned about the truth. In America, success counts more than the truth.
"You can see it in the [most recent] stockmarket bubble where entrepreneurs and various professionals used whatever means were needed to be successful. It got off the rails there, but that bubble did burst and you now have a lot of new regulations about corporate disclosure. But in the political area it reigns unconstrained and hasn't burst."
To assist in the bursting, Soros has written his eighth book, The Bubble of American Supremacy. It is a savage critique of Mr Bush's war on terrorism and the way in which it is being used to impose US views and interests "on the rest of the world by the use of military force".
He sees Mr Bush as a classic "victim-turned-perpetrator" and, as such, an ideal frontman for neo-conservative ideologues such as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, in his Administration.
"It suits his personality because he's a born-again. He is a former substance abuser [alcohol] who has personal acquaintance with the devil because he has experienced it inside himself and then he has been reinforced by a devil [al-Qaeda] which tried to destroy him by attacking him in the White House."
The book offers a post-Bush vision in which the US rejoins the international community to foster democracy with financial incentives ("carrots") in much the same way as Mr Soros's philanthropic organisations in more than 50 countries.
Unlike the US invasion of Iraq these incentives don't violate sovereignty. "If you had more carrots then you would have an additional stick, which is the withdrawal of carrots. So carrots and withdrawal of carrots would play a much bigger role because they don't violate sovereignty."
As an example, he cites the European Union's present carrot approach to assisting full democracy in Turkey.
Mr Soros knows a lot about carrots. He has given more than $US5 billion in the past 25 years to promote democracy in Asia, Africa and the former Soviet bloc. But now he wants to rekindle democracy in his adopted land.
So far, he has spent $US12.5 million supporting two Democrat-linked organisations - America Coming Together, which hopes to mobilise voters in 17 key states, and a web-based organisation, MoveOn.org.
Under strict campaign financing rules, he is restricted to directly giving individual candidates no more than $US2000. But he has organised fund-raisers for Howard Dean and Wesley Clark, and would gladly do one for John Kerry.
Mr Soros probably won't endorse any one candidate. It's a case of whoever has the best chance of unseating Mr Bush. But he knows General Clark well because of his own involvement in helping restore the Balkans, and Senator Kerry is a neighbour in Sun Valley, Idaho.
"I think Kerry has a vision of the world that I find very acceptable because his formative experience was in Vietnam. I think he is very sensitive to the falseness of the Bush approach. I am not endorsing Kerry but I am very much encouraged by a possible Kerry-[John] Edwards combination."
Mr Soros's high profile in the campaign has made him a target for the Bush "truth machine". The Republican national committee has claimed he had "purchased the Democratic Party", a charge he denies, and the Wall Street Journal recently recalled his support for cannabis reform as a way of questioning his motives. "Mr Soros has every right to play in this sandbox, but the rest of us also have a right to wonder how much his view will follow his cash in influencing Democratic policy."
But the hardest mud to remove has been the false claim that he called Mr Bush a Nazi. For Mr Soros, whose experience of growing up a Jew in wartime Hungary gave him first-hand experience of the Nazis, it was a galling slur.
"I've said that when Bush says those who are not with us are with the terrorists it reminds me of the Germans. This has been distorted to my calling Bush a Nazi, which I didn't and wouldn't exactly because I know that system and I know the difference.
"But if you took a public opinion sample in so far that people have heard of me, they've heard of me as the man who called Bush a Nazi, not as a man who has a foundation devoted to fostering open society." But the attack hasn't put Mr Soros off his quest to remove Mr Bush.
The outstanding question is how much is he prepared to spend to achieve it. He would like to stop contributing now, but if the funding gap between the Republicans and Democrats becomes "too great then I'll try to do something to keep it within manageable proportions. Because the Bush machine has three or four times as much money available, which is OK, but there has to be a critical mass on the other side".
"I do consider myself in a privileged position and that I why I stick my neck out and I can afford to do it . . ."
As has been noted before, George Soros is probably the only American citizen with his own foreign policy.
As the election moves into another gear, he will find out if that policy is worth anything to anybody else - or whether it's just about a wealthy old bloke exercising his democratic rights.
If only. But unfortunately he's just another zillionaire, ashamed at heart of how he made his money, a Hungarian Ted Turner. Now, of course, he wants a 'legacy.'. Remember how Clinton turned that into a dirty word?
Since when has the American dream been that every president's son has the chance to grow up to be president?
But the hardest mud to remove has been the false claim that he called Mr Bush a Nazi. For Mr Soros, whose experience of growing up a Jew in wartime Hungary gave him first-hand experience of the Nazis, it was a galling slur.
"I've said that when Bush says those who are not with us are with the terrorists it reminds me of the Germans. This has been distorted to my calling Bush a Nazi, which I didn't and wouldn't exactly because I know that system and I know the difference.
When Soros said "Germans," he was talking about the Nazis. Had he said that Bush reminded him of the postwar Germans, it would not have been a condemnation, and no one would have known what the hell his point was. Thus, Soros was not slurred; rather, he was properly condemned, and is now talking out of both sides of his mouth.
I'm not crazy about Bush or Soros. One is aggressively anti-intellectual, while the other has delusions of intellect. I used to assume they were political antipodes (a description they would agree with), but since Bush called on the world to come to America, they seem much less antithetical than used to be the case.
foreverfree
...Illuminating...<><
This man seems terrified of every good thing Bush stands for, and can't seem to handle the idea that a man of faith and conviction could ever be a world leader.
How sad.
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