The announcement seemed to sum up 2018: an elite, metropolitan and global publication honoring a man loathed by populist, nationalist and indeed anti-Semitic adversaries.
Since 1979, the Hungarian-born billionaire has poured $32 billion of the money he made as a hedge-fund manager into liberal, democratic causes through his Open Society Foundations. Even before the fall of the Berlin Wall, he was sending copy-machines to Hungary to help the sprouting reform movement.
In the past decade Soros has earned the animosity of the emergent “illiberal elite” — Presidents Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Russia and Turkey, and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, to name but three. And he’s become the bogeyman of the far right in the United States.
Targeted by the right
Both in the US and abroad, Soros’s immense wealth (not least through currency trading), his Jewish heritage and patronage of liberal causes have fed conspiracy theories. He is often called a “globalist” by his enemies, one of a cabal involved in a plot to destroy US sovereignty.
President Donald Trump himself has embraced some of the conspiracy theories about Soros. In his closing campaign ad in 2016, Trump featured video of Soros over the words “…for those who control the levers of power in Washington and the global special interests.”
“George Soros?” a reporter asked.
“I don’t know who, but I wouldn’t be surprised. A lot of people say yes,” Trump said.
Soros told the Financial Times: “The fact that extremists are motivated by false conspiracy theories about me to kill hurts me tremendously.”
Anti-Semitic slurs
In Hungary’s election this year, Orbán accused his erstwhile benefactor of encouraging the flow of Muslim migrants into Europe. Orbán’s election campaign included billboards picturing a laughing Soros with the slogan: “Don’t let Soros have the last laugh.”
Bulcsú Hunyadi, senior analyst at the think tank Political Capital in Budapest, said Orbán had portrayed Soros as the “main machinator” of migrants who would “destroy the Christian, traditional identity and ethnic homogeneity of the continent.”
Orbán also used traditionally anti-Semitic innuendo in his attacks on Soros. Berating “Uncle George” at a rally in March, he said Hungary’s enemies were “not open but hiding; not straightforward but crafty; not honest but base; not national but international; does not believe in working but speculates with money.”
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has also played the anti-Semitic card in his attacks on Soros. Just last month, he told a meeting that “the famous Hungarian Jew” had been behind protests in 2013. He claimed Soros was trying to divide and destroy nations — prompting the Open Society Foundations to cease operations in Turkey, citing “an increasingly hostile political environment.”
Soros’ organization was expelled from Russia in 2015, and this summer Putin went so far as to compare him with the Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prighozin, who’s alleged to have organized the Russian troll factories and is under US sanctions. Soros “meddles in all sorts of situations around the world,” Putin said.
Despite the onslaught, Soros seems undaunted — even energized. In July he tweeted: “I must be doing something right to look at who my enemies are.”
“Polarization, tribalization, partisanship, and a general breakdown in civic discourse are all serious problems in America right now,” Kirchik said. And Soros himself — by supporting groups such as MoveOn — “must answer for some of the damage.”
Forces against him
Recognizing the forces ranged against him, he has doubled down — transferring to his foundations a further $18 billion of his wealth. Among current projects: advocating for a 2020 census in the US that would better represent minorities, and the “Best for Britain” campaign, which seeks a second referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union.
Soros speaks about two formative experiences that still guide his work. In Nazi-occupied Hungary, his father provided other Jews with false identity papers to help them survive. “Not only did we survive, but we managed to help others. This left a lasting mark on me,” Soros has written.
And as a student in London he was taught by the Austrian philosopher Karl Popper, author of “The Open Society And Its Enemies.”
Soros’ foundations were named after the book, in which Popper writes: “If we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”
It’s a declaration that has driven George Soros for much of his life.
from Nettech News http://bit.ly/2EFAsnN
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