- He is one of the world's wealthiest men. America made
George Soros, but now he's digging deep to topple the 'truth machine'.
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- George Soros is one of the world's wealthiest men, a
self-created financial genius who has amassed a fortune by exploiting the
foibles of the market and human nature. He is also a zealous philanthropist
and supporter of both small and big "d" democrats. In short,
he's a player.
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- But if you didn't know any of that or had somehow missed
the entire Bush presidency, he might come across as more of a leftie sociology
lecturer, the type who wears a leather-patched corduroy jacket and steadfastly
clings to an equally faded world view. Come the revolution, brothers .
. .
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- With Soros, it's not his dress sense, which is traditional
business, but the patter. Within minutes of meeting the Herald at his plush
west London abode, he complains about George Bush's "Orwellian truth
machine" and its use of "doublespeak".
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- He believes that ending this presidency's "supremacist
ideology" has become a "matter of life and death" for the
planet's future. It's like meeting his compatriot Michael Moore in a posh
suit and tie. "This Orwellian truth machine really does remind you
of the conditions that Orwell was drawing from, mainly the Nazi and Soviet
truth machines, with one tremendously significant difference - that in
the Soviet and Nazi case, the state party apparatus absolutely controlled
the media and all the sources of information totally. "In the United
States today you do have a pluralistic, free media. Neverthe-less, the
truth machine is capable of manufacturing truth, so that the majority of
people in America continue to believe that Saddam was somehow connected
to September 11, when all the evidence points to the opposite.
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- "It raises the question, how is this possible?"
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- Indeed. How is it possible that Mr Soros, at 73 and with
a reported fortune of about $US7 billion ($9.1 billion), gives a hoot about
Mr Bush; or why, when he himself has obviously lived the American dream
to its fullest, has he devoted this year to unseating the man whom many
Americans still believe is the living embodiment of that dream? Isn't this
biting the system that feeds?
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- Soros, a Hungarian emigre to the US, concedes that he
is open to such accusations. "I can be seen as a traitor to my class
and my adopted country, but I am proud to take that role. I think there
are values which transcend class and country. I think my country can be
wrong and that's the value of an open society and that is the value which
has made America great.
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- "I do think the open society and democracy is now
in danger because the ultimate guarantor of an open society is a well-informed
electorate that has a commitment to or values the truth.
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- "We now have a largely or partially misinformed
electorate. But more to the point is that people are not concerned about
the truth. In America, success counts more than the truth.
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- "You can see it in the [most recent] stockmarket
bubble where entrepreneurs and various professionals used whatever means
were needed to be successful. It got off the rails there, but that bubble
did burst and you now have a lot of new regulations about corporate disclosure.
But in the political area it reigns unconstrained and hasn't burst."
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- To assist in the bursting, Soros has written his eighth
book, The Bubble of American Supremacy. It is a savage critique of Mr Bush's
war on terrorism and the way in which it is being used to impose US views
and interests "on the rest of the world by the use of military force".
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- He sees Mr Bush as a classic "victim-turned-perpetrator"
and, as such, an ideal frontman for neo-conservative ideologues such as
Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, in his Administration.
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- "It suits his personality because he's a born-again.
He is a former substance abuser [alcohol] who has personal acquaintance
with the devil because he has experienced it inside himself and then he
has been reinforced by a devil [al-Qaeda] which tried to destroy him by
attacking him in the White House."
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- The book offers a post-Bush vision in which the US rejoins
the international community to foster democracy with financial incentives
("carrots") in much the same way as Mr Soros's philanthropic
organisations in more than 50 countries.
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- Unlike the US invasion of Iraq these incentives don't
violate sovereignty. "If you had more carrots then you would have
an additional stick, which is the withdrawal of carrots. So carrots and
withdrawal of carrots would play a much bigger role because they don't
violate sovereignty."
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- As an example, he cites the European Union's present
carrot approach to assisting full democracy in Turkey.
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- Mr Soros knows a lot about carrots. He has given more
than $US5 billion in the past 25 years to promote democracy in Asia, Africa
and the former Soviet bloc. But now he wants to rekindle democracy in his
adopted land.
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- So far, he has spent $US12.5 million supporting two Democrat-linked
organisations - America Coming Together, which hopes to mobilise voters
in 17 key states, and a web-based organisation, MoveOn.org.
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- Under strict campaign financing rules, he is restricted
to directly giving individual candidates no more than $US2000. But he has
organised fund-raisers for Howard Dean and Wesley Clark, and would gladly
do one for John Kerry.
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- Mr Soros probably won't endorse any one candidate. It's
a case of whoever has the best chance of unseating Mr Bush. But he knows
General Clark well because of his own involvement in helping restore the
Balkans, and Senator Kerry is a neighbour in Sun Valley, Idaho.
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- "I think Kerry has a vision of the world that I
find very acceptable because his formative experience was in Vietnam. I
think he is very sensitive to the falseness of the Bush approach. I am
not endorsing Kerry but I am very much encouraged by a possible Kerry-[John]
Edwards combination."
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- Mr Soros's high profile in the campaign has made him
a target for the Bush "truth machine". The Republican national
committee has claimed he had "purchased the Democratic Party",
a charge he denies, and the Wall Street Journal recently recalled his support
for cannabis reform as a way of questioning his motives. "Mr Soros
has every right to play in this sandbox, but the rest of us also have a
right to wonder how much his view will follow his cash in influencing Democratic
policy."
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- But the hardest mud to remove has been the false claim
that he called Mr Bush a Nazi. For Mr Soros, whose experience of growing
up a Jew in wartime Hungary gave him first-hand experience of the Nazis,
it was a galling slur.
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- "I've said that when Bush says those who are not
with us are with the terrorists it reminds me of the Germans. This has
been distorted to my calling Bush a Nazi, which I didn't and wouldn't exactly
because I know that system and I know the difference.
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- "But if you took a public opinion sample in so far
that people have heard of me, they've heard of me as the man who called
Bush a Nazi, not as a man who has a foundation devoted to fostering open
society." But the attack hasn't put Mr Soros off his quest to remove
Mr Bush.
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- The outstanding question is how much is he prepared to
spend to achieve it. He would like to stop contributing now, but if the
funding gap between the Republicans and Democrats becomes "too great
then I'll try to do something to keep it within manageable proportions.
Because the Bush machine has three or four times as much money available,
which is OK, but there has to be a critical mass on the other side".
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- "I do consider myself in a privileged position and
that I why I stick my neck out and I can afford to do it..."
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- As has been noted before, George Soros is probably the
only American citizen with his own foreign policy.
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- As the election moves into another gear, he will find
out if that policy is worth anything to anybody else - or whether it's
just about a wealthy old bloke exercising his democratic rights.
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- Copyright © 2004 The Sydney Morning Herald.
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- http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/01/30/1075340842951.html
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