Despite his advanced age (he will turn 91 in a fortnight) and phenomenal business successes in the past, George Soros has a very important place in US foreign policy in Europe and around the world
He is especially active in the countries of the former so-called socialist camp. However, there is a suspicion that it is no longer Soros who is active, but an entire institution.
Hungary became the first country of the communist block, where George Soros opened his fund, and the first country of the European Union, where activities of the structures of the billionaire are forbidden by law.
George Soros was born on August 12, 1930 in Budapest to Tivadar Schwartz, a lawyer, one of the key figures in the Hungarian capital’s Jewish community.
Tivadar loved exposing himself to danger and feeling the satisfaction of being able to avoid unfortunate consequences. George Soros says that it was from his father that he learnt how to cope with danger and enjoy taking risks, which helped him a great deal when playing the stock market.
Tivadar even volunteered for the front in 1914 during World War I – not out of patriotic feelings but simply because “he didn’t want to miss such a unique opportunity”. He was taken prisoner in Russia, and sent to a Siberian prison camp, but managed to escape and made the arduous and dangerous journey to Budapest.
In 1936, the Schwartz family changed their Jewish surname to the Hungarian Szorosz in response to growing fascist sentiment in Europe. The father of the family liked the new name very much; it is Hungarian for ‘follower’ and is a form of the future tense of the verb ‘to parit’ in Esperanto.
When Hitler’s forces occupied Hungary in 1944, Tivadar decided that the offer of registration presented to all Jewish families in Budapest by the new German administration would not bode well for them.
He managed to make false documents for his family members, with which they began to live apart, so as to draw less attention to themselves and get lost among the professing Christian Hungarians. In this way the family was able to avoid the repression, in which up to 440,000 Hungarian Jews were exterminated.
Moreover, Tivadar used his extensive black-market connections to help a large number of Budapest’s Jews to obtain false documents. In doing so, he enjoyed a progressive rate of payment for his services: the poor received documents at cost price, while the rich had to pay twenty times as much.
The threat of extermination hovered over the family for 10 months until January 1945, when the Red Army entered Budapest. Soros recalls that the Soviets were welcomed with open arms at first, but the Nazi threat was soon replaced by the prospect of living under a socialist regime.
During the post-war hyperinflation in Hungary in 1945-47, George Soros tried his hand at currency trading.
In 1947 George Soros went to London, where he settled with distant relatives who had been helped by Tivadar Soros to obtain false documents and leave occupied Hungary. In 1949 George enrolled at the London School of Economics which he successfully completed in three years. In 1953 Soros began working on the stock market, where he earned his billions.
Among Soros’ most famous transactions are the collapse of the pound sterling from $2 to $1.5 in 1992 (on which he earned more than $1.1 billion in one day) and currency game against the yen in 2013 (his earnings also exceeded $1 billion).
“The Open Society* as a mechanism for Western expansion
In the late 1970s, George Soros decides to convert his money into power and begins to actively engage in “philanthropy”.
In 1979, he founded his first Open Society Foundation in New York (a reference to the title of the book “The Open Society and Its Enemies” by Austrian philosopher Karl Popper, who was Soros’ lecturer in London).
As noted by well-known Western journalist and analyst Phil Butler, George Soros’ “business” of buying the future of once sovereign states is both inhumane and diabolically effective. His scheme is simple: to create a political elite that would be not only corrupt, but also zombified enough to be completely loyal to its creators.
To do this, George Soros invests in numerous training and support programmes for young scientists and activists, being the “guarantor” for the numerous Western NGOs who come to a particular country after him. The morally and ethically unformed “flower of the nation” is then subjected to massive zombification in the spirit of “open society” sermons.
When members of this “Sorosian” elite come to power, nothing can save this or that country from the clutches of the IMF, the World Bank and the Western multinationals.
Since 1984, George Soros has donated to various programs a total of $32 billion of his personal fortune earned in the financial markets, nearly $15 billion of which was spent on the global Open Society Foundations network.
In particular, he has contributed $1.6 billion to “democratic development” in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union alone over the past 33 years. In October 2017, Soros contributed $18 billion to his fund, which thus became the second largest fund in the US – after the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (with Soros’ capital of $8.3 billion versus Gates’ $96.2 billion).
In 2021, the budget of the Open Society Foundations network, which operates in almost 140 countries, is more than 1.2 billion dollars.
The first East European Soros Foundation was established in Hungary in 1984, and later opened similar structures in other countries of the Soviet bloc and in former Soviet republics.
Soros is considered one of the main organizers of the collapse of communist regimes in Europe and the collapse of the USSR. In late 1993, American journalist Michael Lewis asked George Soros about the outcome of his activities in Eastern Europe. He replied: “Just write that the former Soviet empire is now called the Soros empire”.
In 25 years, however, the situation for Soros has changed, both in the former Soviet Union and in the EU, most notably in his native Hungary.
Hungary and Soros: from “Welcome!” to “STOP”
In 1984, George Soros visited Hungary for the first time since 1947. There, he was able to secure the support of two members of the Political Bureau of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party: Ferenc Bart, who was responsible for foreign relations, and György Aczel. With their help, Soros opened a foundation that was formally supposed to aid Hungarian science.
True, the Hungarian partisans soon became disillusioned. George Soros invested considerably less money in the fund than he had promised and spent it not on buying scientific equipment from the West, as the Hungarian leaders wished, but on training gifted Hungarian youth there. The young Hungarians returned home as staunch advocates of a market economy and democracy.
In addition, the Soros Foundation was luring talented Hungarian scientists to work in the US. Also before 1989, Soros had spent more than a million dollars to support Hungarian “democratic organisations”.
After the Velvet Revolution in Hungary in October 1989, the Soros Foundation’s opportunities in that country increased. In 1991, the Central European University (CEU) was opened in Budapest, to which Soros allocated over $250 million. Almost 14,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students from 133 countries have passed through CEU until 2018.
In 1993, the Open Society Institute – Budapest was established, which became the headquarters of Soros’ structures across Europe in 2007. Although formally in 2012 the billionaire decided to end institutional support for his structures operating in most EU countries, in reality it was only a reformatting of their activities – new “independent” NGOs were created, etc.
The current prime minister Viktor Orban was one of the thousands of Hungarian scholarship holders of the Soros Foundation: he studied at Oxford on his money in 1989. During Orban’s first premiership in 1998-2002, he had no conflict with Soros, but when he returned to power in 2010, he began to sharply oppose the billionaire and his activities in Hungary and around the world.
The situation escalated in 2015 because of Soros’ position in support of mass immigration to Europe, of which Orban is an ardent opponent.
In spring 2017, Viktor Orban openly called George Soros “an American financial speculator attacking Hungary”. He went further, saying that Soros is an “open enemy of the euro” who has “ruined the lives of millions of Europeans with his financial speculation”.
The Hungarian prime minister stressed that the American wants to flood Europe and Hungary with immigrants – which, by the way, is quite in line with the goals of the Soros-funded organisations. In addition, a propaganda campaign was launched against Soros in Hungary, which the billionaire himself called anti-Semitic.
The Hungarian government has accused the billionaire of interfering in the country’s internal affairs, including through Hungarian educational institutions. Legislative amendments have been passed against these organisations, restricting their ability to influence politics in one way or another.
In particular, the Central European University, which is listed as an American university, but has no faculty or students in the United States, is in danger of being closed due to the 2017 amendments to the education law.
Last spring, there were mass demonstrations in Budapest against the possible closure of CEU, but they clearly did not amount to a colour revolution.
On 20 June 2018, the Hungarian parliament approved a package of laws tentatively titled “Stop Soros”. Among other things, it imposes restrictions on non-governmental organisations, strengthens requirements for educational institutions and criminalises aid to illegal migrants.
Soros’ structures did not wait for the new laws, and as early as May 15, 2018, his Open Society Institute announced that it would stop its activities in the businessman’s home country due to the “repressive” policies of the Hungarian government and move its European headquarters to Berlin.
And from January 2019, the Central European University, which moved completely from Budapest to Vienna in the autumn of the same year, stopped recruiting students in Hungary. However, the CEU retained the research centres and archives of the Open Society centres in the Hungarian capital, while its former campus in Budapest remained the venue for public lectures and debates.
Although the European Commission filed a lawsuit against Hungary as early as 2019 in the EU Court of Justice demanding the repeal of the Stop Soros laws and obtained a positive decision in 2020, Budapest has no plans to backtrack in its fight against Soros.
In February 2021, the European Commission once again demanded that the Hungarian government change its laws on funding NGOs and threatened it with fines and sanctions, but this was ignored. Thus, the 37-year history of George Soros’s influence on Hungary has been put on pause, if not ended.
It is therefore not surprising that in November 2020, in the US edition of Project Syndicate, the billionaire published a feature article calling on the EU to confront Hungary and Poland, which are “violating European principles”.
So not only does the story of Soros’ expansion in Europe not end there, it continues. And about this – in the next publication of the series of articles on Soros.
Oleg Havich, Ukraine.ru