NS Profile - George Soros
New Statesman - June 2, 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
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 $2m 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 $100m, 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 $3m 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 $100m 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 $50m 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 $5bn. 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'.