Marty & George
[Peretz is insane, but Soros’ story about posing as a Christian and
participating in the confiscation of Jewish property and feeling no
guilt is amazing. “It’s kind of like the markets,” says George.]
The New Republic - February 12, 2007
Tyran-a-Soros by Martin Peretz
George Soros lunched with some reporters on Saturday at Davos. He
talked about spending $600 million on civil society projects during
the 1990s, then trying to cut back to $300 million, and how this year
it will be between $450 and $500 million. His new projects aim, in
Floyd Norris’s words, to promote a “common European foreign
policy” (read: an anti-American foreign policy) and also to study the
integration (or so he thinks) of Muslims in eleven European cities.
He included among his dicta a little slight at Bill and Melinda
Gates, who “have chosen public health, which is like apple pie.” And
then, after saying the United States was now recognizing the errors
it made in Iraq, he added this comment, as reported by Norris in The
New York Times’ online “Davos Diary”: “To what extent it recognizes
the mistake will determine its future.” Soros said Turkey and Japan
were still hurt by a reluctance to admit to dark parts of their
history and contrasted that reluctance to Germany’s rejection of its
Nazi-era past. “America needs to follow the policies it has
introduced in Germany. We have to go through a certain deNazification
process.”
No, you are not seeing things. He said de-Nazification. He is not
saying, in the traditional manner of liberal alarmists, that the
United States is now where Weimar Germany was. He is saying that the
United States is now where Germany after Weimar was. Even for Davos,
this was stupid. Actually, worse than stupid. There is a historical
analysis, a moral claim, in Soros’s word. He believes that the United
States is now a Nazi country. Why else would we have to go through a
“certain de-Nazification process”? I defy anybody to interpret the
remark differently. The analogy between Bush’s America and Hitler’s
Germany is not fleshed out, and one is left wondering how far he
would take it. Is Bush like Hitler? If it is “de-Nazification” that
we need, then in some sense Bush must be like Hitler. Was the
invasion of Iraq like the invasion of Poland? Perhaps. The more one
lingers over Soros’s word, the more one’s eyes pop from one’s head.
In the old days, the Amerika view of America was propagated by angry
kids on their painful way to adulthood; now, it is propagated by the
Maecenas of the Democratic Party.
But nobody seems to have noticed. I did not see Soros’s canard
reported in other places, and on the Times’ website on the day I saw
it there were only four comments. Imagine the outcry if a Republican
moneybags–say, Richard Mellon Scaife–had declared that Hillary
Clinton is a communist or that Bill Clinton’s America had been in
need of a certain de-Stalinization process. But I hear no outcry from
Soros’s congregation. People who were repelled by Bush’s rather
plausible notion of the “axis of evil” seem untroubled by Soros’s
imputation of even worse evil to Bush. Because Bush really is a
fascist, isn’t he? And Cheney, too; and Donald Rumsfeld, and Antonin
Scalia, and even Joe Lieberman, right? Or so I fear too many liberals
now believe. There seems to be a renaissance among liberals of the
view that there are no enemies to the left. I hear no Democrats
expressing embarrassment, or revulsion, at Soros’s comment. Whether
this silence is owed to their agreement or to their greed, it is
outrageous.
But if Soros lives in a Nazi state, what does that make him? I still
recall Karl Jaspers’s devastating point, in The Question of German
Guilt in 1947, that every German shares in the guilt of Hitlerism.
Such guilt was not, in Jaspers’s mind, an abstraction or a purely
political matter. But Soros does not appear to accept any
responsibility for the Nazi-like crimes he ascribes to the United
States. Perhaps he thinks that, having contributed $18 million to
elect John Kerry in 2004, he was an American hero, a dissident, a
resistance fighter, the Grill Room’s representative of the White
Rose. And if, in 2008, Soros’s gang comes to power, how will de-
Nazification work? Whom shall we send to prison? Perhaps we should
prevent everybody who voted or argued for the war from running for
office. At the very least, the neocons must be brought to justice.
(Maybe Ramsey Clark can represent them.)
What makes Soros’s remark even more twisted is that he himself
experienced something of Nazism. He was 14 when the Nazis entered
Budapest. On December 20, 1998, there appeared this exchange between
Soros and Steve Kroft on “60 Minutes”:
Kroft: “You’re a Hungarian Jew …” Soros: “Mm-hmm.”
Kroft: “… who escaped the Holocaust …”
Soros: “Mm-hmm.”
Kroft: “… by posing as a Christian.”
Soros: “Right.”
Kroft: “And you watched lots of people get shipped off to the death
camps.”
Soros: “Right. I was 14 years old. And I would say that that’s when
my character was made.”
Kroft: “In what way?”
Soros: “That one should think ahead. One should understand that–and
anticipate events and when, when one is threatened. It was a
tremendous threat of evil. I mean, it was a– a very personal threat
of evil.”
Kroft: “My understanding is that you went … went out, in fact, and
helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews.”
Soros: “Yes, that’s right. Yes.”
Kroft: “I mean, that’s–that sounds like an experience that would
send lots of people to the psychiatric couch for many, many years.
Was it difficult?”
Soros: “Not, not at all. Not at all. Maybe as a child you don’t …
you don’t see the connection. But it was–it created no–no problem
at all.”
Kroft: “No feeling of guilt?”
Soros: “No.”
Kroft: “For example, that, ‘I’m Jewish, and here I am, watching these
people go. I could just as easily be these, I should be there.’ None
of that?”
Soros: “Well, of course, … I could be on the other side or I could
be the one from whom the thing is being taken away. But there was no
sense that I shouldn’t be there, because that was–well, actually, in
a funny way, it’s just like in the markets–that is I weren’t there–
of course, I wasn’t doing it, but somebody else would–would–would
be taking it away anyhow. And it was the–whether I was there or not,
I was only a spectator, the property was being taken away. So the–I
had no role in taking away that property. So I had no sense of guilt.”
So this is the psychodrama that has been visited on American
liberalism. We learn Soros never has nightmares. Had he been tried in
a de-Nazification process for having been a young cog in the
Hitlerite wheel, he would have felt that, since other people would
have confiscated the same Jewish property and delivered the same
deportation notices to the same doomed Jews, it was as if he hadn’t
done it himself. He sleeps well, while we sleep in Nazi America.
Soros is ostentatiously indifferent to his own Jewishness. He is not
a believer. He has no Jewish communal ties. He certainly isn’t a
Zionist. He told Connie Bruck in The New Yorker–testily, she
recounted–that “I don’t deny the Jews their right to a national
existence–but I don’t want to be part of it.” But he has involved
himself in the founding of an anti-aipac, more dovish Israel lobby.
Suddenly, he wants to influence the character of a Jewish state about
which he loudly cares nothing. Once again, he bears no
responsibility. Perhaps his sense of his own purity also underwrites
his heartlessness in business. As a big currency player in the world
markets, Soros was at least partially responsible for the decline in
the British pound.
Forget my differences with Soros’s Jewishness. Call it shul politics.
But the characterization of the United States under Bush as Nazi is
much bigger, and more grave, than shul politics. It casts a shadow
over U.S. politics. In the same conversation at Davos, Soros
announced that he is supporting Senator Barack Obama, though he would
also support Senator Hillary Clinton. So my question to both of those
progressives is this: How, without any explanation or apology from
him, will you take this man’s money?