Posted on 06/11/2004 8:17:33 AM PDT by Congressman Billybob
I was going to write this column about George Soros, but sometimes events overtake intentions. Beyond the three men, the subject is understanding America. Reagan understood his nation. Soros does not understand his adopted nation. But deHollan, another Hungarian who came to America nearly a half century ago, does understand this land.
America has a talent, rare among the nations of the world, for finding greatness in her leaders at the most urgent of times. More than that, she has the talent of finding greatness in the hearts of ordinary men. Thomas Jefferson was a man of greatness all his life, for his intellect. Likewise Benjamin Franklin, for his knowledge of the practical world. Likewise George Washington, for his capacity to lead.
There have been other times and other leaders, when greatness was not found but was grown from common soil. Abraham Lincoln was such a man. So was Teddy Roosevelt. So was Harry Truman. So was Ronald Reagan.
President Reagan had a clear vision of the best that America could be. With that came an understanding of the leadership role in the world which was ours by default, whether we accepted it and sought to use it well, or to avoid it and neglect its demands -- as so many other American leaders and would-be leaders did. Only clear understandings can lead to clear statements of intent. Just six words, spoken at the right time and place, defined the greatest achievement of the Presidency of Ronald Reagan. Spoken in front of the Berlin Wall, those words were, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall."
The geopolitical momentums that Reagan put in place, many over the violent opposition of lesser leaders of lesser vision, ultimately brought down the Soviet Union. His efforts also gut-shot the entire theory of communism worldwide, except in selected pockets in Asia, the Caribbean, and the faculties of assorted American universities.
Among America's intelligensia, and among foreign leaders, there were many who doubted both Reagan's vision and his capacities while he was in office and after he left office. Today, a generation later, only the most adamant anti-Reagan ideologues cling to the idea that Reagan did not "win the Cold War," that it was coincidence, not intention and plan, which brought about the collapse of the USSR. (For a clear example of this rear-guard anti-Reaganism, contrast the coverage of the death of Ronald Reagan by the New York Times with the coverage by any other major US newspaper, including such former Reagan adversaries such as the Washington Post.)
We turn now to George Soros. Those who come to America as adults are not disqualified from understanding their adopted land. One of the most perceptive descriptions of the nature of this nation was written by a foreigner, Alexis de Tocqueville. He traveled in America for only a few years before writing his classic Democracy in America. De Tocqueville understood America. His work bears up well, 165 years after its publication. The heart of de Tocqueville's analysis is that morality is the key to this nation. As he wrote:
"America is not good because she is great; She is great because she is good."
We turn now to George Soros' claimed understanding of America and her place in the world.
From Soros' biography on the website of his Open Society Institute, he was born in Budapest in 1930. It notes that he "survived the Nazi occupation" and left there in 1947. Curiously, it neglects the fact that he also survived the Communist takeover of Hungary. He graduated from the London School of Economics. In 1956, he moved to the United States and began his very successful career as an investor and market manager.
Because Soros made a comparison, not an exact equation, I quote his precise words used to connect the recent abuse of a dozen Iraqi prisoners to the murder of 2,900 Americans on 9/11. He said, "The picture of torture in the Abu Ghraib, in Saddam's prison, was the moment of truth for us, because this is not what this nation stands for. I think that those pictures hit us the same way as the -- as the terrorist attack itself. Not quite with the same force because the terrorist attack, we were the victims. In the pictures, we were the perpetrators, others were the victim."
This incredible statement is a small example of Soros' overall philosophy. He laid out his views in the February, 1997, issue of The Atlantic Monthly in an article entitled, "The Capitalist Threat." There, he attacks "laissez-faire capitalism" and "social Darwinism" and makes the charge that, "The main enemy of the open society, I believe, is no longer the communist but the capitalist threat."
Of course, any competent historian should know that laissez-faire capitalism died as a viable concept in the United States seventy years ago. The beginnings of the death of social Darwinism in both the US and England were more than a generation prior to that, when the first laws were passed concerning child labor, public health, and restraint of monopolies of various types.
In this long article, Soros claims that there is no such thing as "ultimate truth" in the organization of societies and governments. In short, contrary to all that’s been learned since the fall of the USSR, he advances (without using these words) the "moral equivalency" between western ideals and those of other, mostly totalitarian, governments in the world. In short, Soros is a geopolitical moron.
Mind you, no one who has managed to accumulate about seven billion dollars in a single lifetime can possibly be an objective moron. It takes serious intellectual firepower to accomplish that task. But when it comes to the differences between nations, and the uniquely successful history of the United States, Soros is a moron. Like most of his ilk, he has a blind and unjustified faith that the United Nations – a collection of representatives of mostly dictatorships – is better able to lead world affairs than the handful of fully civilized governments, beginning with the United States.
Why has Soros reached this false conclusion? Perhaps he’s cut too many corners and stepped on too many people in his own path to the top, and now seeks to atone for his own misdeeds though his current philanthropy. More than a few American robber barons turned to philanthropy at the end of their careers. More than a few great institutions owe their funding to such late-life spasms of conscience.
Perhaps Soros is one of those: a self-loathing millionaire. In any event, Soros has chosen to put $16 million of his own money into the 2004 election, in part by the new (and legal for the moment because the Federal Election Commission has declined to act) route of the "527 organization." He's chosen four organizations, the best known being Move-On.org; an examination of its primary leaders will turn up more than a few devotees of Fidel Castro, Yassir Arafat, and assorted other modern, government-based murderers.
The simpler explanation is that Soros, like many people of substantial self-made wealth, has fallen in love with his own intellect. He assumes that because he has the wisdom to make great money selling widgets, that he must be wise in all matters including history, society and politics. America has always had an overabundance of people who succeeded in one area, and therefore thought their ideas in other areas were of equal moment and accuracy. Every reader of this column can make his own not-so-short list of wealthy people who are dumb as a hoe handle outside their area of expertise. (Hollywood alone can produce a substantial list of such people.)
Be that as it may, Soros is neither the first nor the last man of great wealth to put his money and the power it represents behind ideas that are patently absurd and socially dangerous. While in his article he decries communist dictatorships, he seems not to have learned the lessons that were written in blood in the streets of his own hometown, in the very year that he moved to America -- the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. That brings us to the third American described in this column.
I know another Hungarian who came to America in the same era. His is not a well-known name like George Soros. He’s known mostly to his family, friends and colleagues -- though he’s a successful man by any measure of that term. Aurel Nicholas deHollan came into my high school in Baltimore in the fall of 1957.
He was shy, perhaps because of his limited English, more likely because of what he had just experienced. In time, I learned the story of Aurel deHollan.
He was a high school student in Budapest in the autumn of 1956, when the Hungarian Revolution broke out. He took to the streets, armed with a rifle and the knowledge of how to make a Molotov cocktail. In the course of three weeks, he and his confederates drove the Soviet troops, and most importantly the Soviet tanks, out of their city.
The General of the Hungarian “troops,” Paul Maleter, then met with the Russian Generals under a flag of truce, to negotiate the terms of permanent Russian withdrawal from Hungary. Instead, the Russians captured General Maleter and launched their counterattack to crush the rebels. (Maleter was not executed immediately. He was held by the Russians and later by the Hungarian Secret Police, subjected to two secret trials, and finally hanged on 16 June, 1958, and his body dumped in an unmarked grave. A different, questionable source suggests that Maleter was executed by Rumanians as a favor to the Russians.)
My classmate, Aurel deHollan, escaped his native city with a rifle on his shoulder, just ahead of the counter-attacking Russians.
His family brought him to America. They came to Baltimore, and he entered my class in high school. He came here at almost the same time as George Soros. But Aurel came with a better and stronger understanding of the differences between governments than Soros did.
Aurel is a very intelligent man. He got his doctorate, and now is a successful professor and landscape architect. But he never forgot the lessons he learned in the streets of Budapest about the differences between governments that are honest and competent, and those that are dishonest and vicious. I suggest simply that between these two Americans of Hungarian birth, Aurel understands the nature of America and its place in the world, and George does not.
Even further, Aurel may understand the unique promise of this nation almost as well as the man who was laid to rest this week, Ronald Reagan, 40th President of the United States. And last, I suggest that those Americans who have chosen to come here, having felt the deadly threats of other nations, sometimes have a better understanding of what it means to be an American. There is a tendency of Americans whose families have been here for at least three generations – so that no members with direct experience elsewhere remain alive – to forget what America means.
By no means do I suggest that America is a perfect nation. It is neither perfect nor perfectible. That is a goal, not a destination. But the fullness of time and the results shown in history demonstrate that the poetic promise on the base of the Statue of Liberty is true. “I lift my lamp beside the golden door.” That this nation is a place of promise to all the world. That Ronald Reagan was a good American. That Aurel deHollan is a good American. And that George Soros is a danger to America, because of his gross misunderstanding of both this nation and its place in the world.
- 30 -
About the Author: John Armor is a First Amendment lawyer and author who lives in the Blue Ridge. CongressmanBillybob@earthlink.net. - 30 -
John
bump
$ORO$ may be a US citizen, but be is NOT AN AMERICAN.........
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110004764
The egotism is revealing. Mr. Soros has admitted to having "carried some rather potent messianic fantasies with me from childhood, which I felt I had to control, otherwise they might get me in trouble." Having made his mark, he now seems to give them free rein. He told one interviewer that he had "godlike, messianic ideas," and another that he sometimes thought of himself as "superhuman." To still a third he explained that his "goal is to become the conscience of the world." This self-imagined messiah has now come to save the world from the America of George W. Bush and its war against terrorism. He is convinced that this is an unjustified war, contrived in response to events (the attacks of 9/11) that "should have been treated as crimes against humanity . . . requir[ing] police work, not military action." To say the least, it is a strange idea, and an even stranger role, for one who owes not only his immense fortune but also his freedom and even his life to America, and in particular to its willingness to confront those who have committed crimes against humanity with enough military force to defeat and stop them. http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110004764 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
John / Billybob
The forerunner to the Antichrist.
With hindsight always being 20/20, I would have thrown Soros to the damned Stalinists, for a glorious dream vacation tour of the Soviet Gulag system.
If Soros ever survives a serious head injury, look out!
Is Soros really an American citizen?
John / Billybob
$ORO$ may be a US citizen, but be is NOT AN AMERICAN.
Very well put!
Once again this week - thanks to President Reagan - we get the picture of the heart of a "real" American and the "real" America,... not the charlatans from their phony fiefdoms we have become accustomed to being fed with by TV!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.