The Uncrowned King of East Europe

By Neil Clar, NorthStar Compass, July 2005

George Soros, the multi billionaire is angry. In common with 90 per cent of world's population, the Man Who Broke the Bank of England has had enough of George Bush and his foreign policy. In a recent article in “The Financial Times”, Soros condemned George W. Bush administration's policies on Iraq as “fundamentally wrong” based as they were on a “false ideology that USA 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 hi old age (he is 72). Should we all pop the champagne corks and toast his conversion?

Not before asking as to what motivates him. Soros likes to portray himself as an absolute outsider, an independent-minded Hungarian émigré and philosopher-pundit who stands detached from the US military-industrial complex. But, take a look at the board members of the NGOs he organizes 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 (who's duty spell in Yugoslavia coincided with the break-up of that country); and Paul Goble, Director of communications at the CIA-created and funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty ( which Soros also funds). Soros's International Crisis Group boasts such US “independent” luminaries as the former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and Richard Allen, as well as General Wesley Clark, once NATO supreme commander for Europe. This group's vice chairman is the former US congressman Stephen Solarz, once described as the “Israel's lobby's chief legislative tactician on Washington's Capital Hill” and a signatory, along with the likes of Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, to a notorious letter to President Clinton in 1998, calling fur a “comprehensive political and military strategy for bringing down Saddam and his regime.”

Let us just take a look at Soros's business partners. At the Carlyle Group, where he has invested many, many millions, this includes the former secretary of state James Baker and the erstwhile defense secretary Frank Carlucci, George Bush Sr. and, until recently, the estranged relatives of Osama bin Laden, CARLYLE GROUP is one of the world's largest private equity funds, makes most of its money from its work as a US defense contractor.

Soros's companies, NGO's and other worldwide funds are closely wrapped up in the present US-CIA expansionism, and this cannot be doubted.

But why is he so upset with Bush? The answer is very simple. Soros is not angry 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 around the world too 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 skillfully that hardly anyone noticed. Now this Texan redneck and his gang of over-zealous neo-cons have blown it.

As a cultivated and educated man (a degree of philosophy from the London School of Economics, honorary degree from the Universities of Oxford, Yale, Bologna and Budapest), Soros knows only too well that empires perish when they overstep their 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 US Empire to endure. Bush's policies have led to a divided Europe, NATO is in disarray, the genesis of the new Franco-German-Russian alliance and the first meaningful steps towards Arab unity, since Nasser.

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

The conventional view, shared by many on the left, that Socialism collapsed in Eastern Europe and USSR because of its systematic weaknesses and the political elite's failure to build popular support. That maybe only partially true, but Soros's role was very crucial. From 1979, he distributed millions for a whole year to dissidents, including Poland's Solidarity movement, Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia and to Andrei Sakharov and other dissidents in the Soviet Union. In 1984, he funded his first Open Society Institute in Hungary and pumped millions of dollars into all opposition movements and independent media. Ostensibly these were aimed at building a “civil society”. These initiatives were designed to weaken the existing political structures and pave the way for Eastern Europe's eventual colonization by global capital. Soros now claims, with characteristic immodesty, that he was responsible for the “Americanization” of Eastern Europe.

Yugoslavia remained stubbornly resistant and repeatedly returned Slobodan Milosevic's unreformed Socialist Party to government. But Soros was equal to this challenge. From 1991, his Open Society Institute channeled more millions to the coffers of the anti-Milosevic opposition, funding different political parties, publishing houses and of course the so-called “independent” media such as Radio B92, the student radio station of Western mythology which in reality was fabulously bankrolled by one of the world's richest men on behalf of the world's most powerful nations, the USA.

With Milosevic finally toppled in 2000 in a coup d'etat that was financed, planned and executed in Washington, all that was left was to kidnap and cart the ex-Yugoslav leader to the Hague Tribunal, co-financed by Soros and all those other custodians of humans rights, like Time Warner Corporation and Disney. He is charged with all sorts of crimes, on the basis of the so-called “evidence” supplied by the Human Rights Watch—which is the favorite baby of Soros!

This is just one example of the way Soros makes billions at the expense of the state's natural resources when they are privatized. In Kosovo, Yugoslavia, Soros bought the Trepca mine complex, where are found vast reserves of gold, nickel tin, lead and other minerals. The estimates are that this mine is worth many billions of dollars. This pattern was used all over Eastern Europe and Russia by his promoting and the traitors accepting his “shock therapy” and “economic reform”. Soros and his associates than swoop down and buy these state assets at knock down prices.

The Soros strategy 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 favorite issues such as gay rights and the legislation of soft drugs, let him off very lightly.

Asked about the financial havoc his currency speculation caused to the 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 savior of every civil society from communism and who rails in print against “market fundamentalism”.