PROFILE: GEORGE SOROS
'Inside-Outside' Job
for the Oligarchy
by Scott Thompson
George Soros has gained notoriety among many Third World leaders as a Robin Hood who robs the poor to give to the rich. In fact, he has been doing an "inside-outside" job, in his game with both the international financial institutions and their supposed "arch-enemies" in the new terrorism.
Undoubtedly, as in the past, George Soros will be hosting lavish entertainment, if not actually speaking on the glories of globalization, inside the armed camp of the September 2001 International Monetary Fund-World Bank meeting in Washington, D.C. And, while he is on the inside, narco-terrorist forces that his network of "philanthropic" and "human rights" organizations acts to protect—including Mexico's Zapatistas (EZLN), Colombia's FARC, and Peru's Shining Path and MRTA—will be either demonstrating or a cause célèbre of the "anti-globalizing" new terrorists. Several Soros-created or -funded fronts have made opposition to Plan Colombia—which will be the opening salvo for the new terrorists in Washington, D.C.—one of their major activities.
Within the Soros financial and "philanthropic" empire, the following are some of the key institutions and personnel involved in this "inside-outside" operation:
The Open Society Institute (OSI)
400 West 59th Street
New York, N.Y. 10019
website: www.soros.org
George Soros, chairman
Aryeh Neier, president
The Open Society Institute was established in 1993, and is primus inter pares among OSIs in: Baltimore, Maryland; Brussels, Belgium; Budapest, Hungary; and, Paris, France. In coordination, these OSIs have primacy over more than 40 national Soros Foundations and institutions.
The Lindesmith Center
925 9th Avenue
New York, N.Y. 10019
website: www.drugpolicy.org
Ethan Nadelmann, executive director
The Lindesmith Center, whose major focus on legalizing all narcotics—from marijuana to crack cocaine to LSD—is part of the OSI in New York. It is named after a British detective, who, like British liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill, argued that use of narcotics was a "victimless crime."
Central European University-Budapest (CEU)
Nador u. 9
H-1051 Budapest
Hungary
website: www.ceu.hu/indexnsie.html
e-mail: external@ceu.hu
George Soros, chairman
Yehuda Elkana, president and rector
After Czech President Vaclav Havel rescinded the charter of the CEU in Prague, the CEU, whose main base had always been in Budapest, Hungary, opened a second branch campus in Warsaw, Poland. It has its own publishing affiliate in New York City.
Human Rights Watch (HRW)
350 Fifth Avenue, 34th Floor
New York, N.Y. 10118
website: www.hrw.org
e-mail address: hrwnyc@hrw.org
Ken Roth, executive director
Human Rights Watch/Americas
1630 Connecticut Avenue, N.W.
Suite 500
Washington, D.C. 20009
website: www.hrw.org
José Miquel Vivanco, executive director
Although Human Rights Watch is an independent organization, George Soros is one of its major funders. The proximity of the institutions is illustrated by the fact that Aryeh Neier had been executive director of HRW/Americas before becoming president of the OSI in New York City. And, George Soros himself has served on the board of HRW/Americas for several years.
How Soros Got Rich
Before illustrating Soros' "inside-outside" job on globalization, it is essential to note that he gained his billions of dollars to fund this operation through his hedge-fund activities, which have ravaged currencies, company stock values, and so forth throughout the Third World and formerly developed nations; and then turned around and bought up businesses and raw materials for a dime on their dollar value.
From headquarters in New York City, where he chairs Soros Fund Management, Soros directs the activities of a half-dozen hedge funds in the "offshore" tax haven of the Netherlands Antilles in the Caribbean. Soros' flagship hedge fund for wealthy family fondi is Quantum Fund, N.V., which reportedly manages $11-14 billion on behalf of investors, the wealthiest of whom is Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, head of the House of Windsor and Europe's wealthiest individual.
It will be seen to be highly ironic, that one of the principal people assisting Soros in establishing his business empire was George Karlweiss, an agent of Baron Edmond de Rothschild of the Swiss-based Banque Priveé, who also launched the looting career of Robert Vesco (the fugitive nicknamed, "The Detroit Kid"). And, on the board of the Quantum Fund, N.V., Baron Jacob Rothschild's St. James Place Capital is represented by Nils O. Taube, an old partner in Soros' shady dealings. Also on the board of Quantum Fund, N.V. is Richard Katz, who is on the board of the City of London-based N.M. Rothschild & Sons merchant bank, directed by Sir Evelyn Rothschild.
The reason there is so much irony in this City of London-centered Rothschild connection, is that upon at least two occasions, when Soros was asked what gave him the motivation for his speculative successes, he cited his work on behalf of the Nazis in looting wealthy Jewish estates in his native Hungary. Here is Soros' own carefully crafted admission on the Adam Smith Show, produced by WNET-TV on April 15, 1993, that he had been a small cog in Adolf Eichmann's killing machine, which was responsible for the Holocaust against 500,000 Hungarian Jews:
"It really started in 1944, when Hungary was occupied by the Germans, and me being Jewish, I was in danger of my life.... When the Germans came in, he [Soros' father, a prominent Budapest attorney] said, 'This is a lawless occupation. The normal rules don't apply. You have to forget how you behave in normal society. This is an abnormal situation.' And he arranged for all of us to have false papers, everybody had a different arrangement. I was adopted by an official of the Minister of Agriculture, whose job was to take over Jewish properties, so I actually went with him and we took possession of these large estates. That was my identity. So it's a strange, very strange life. I was 14 years old at the time."
So, Soros attributes his gift for speculative looting to the genocidal policies of the Nazis during World War II against Jews and others.
Soros' Brave New Open Society
In 1947, Soros attended the London School of Economics, where he fell under the sway of the late Sir Karl Popper, who as then-head of the British Aristotelian Society, developed his concept of the "Open Society" to counter the universal ideas embodied in Plato's Republic and Laws—which later helped foster the concept of the modern sovereign nation-state republic, notably including the United States.
Soros hates the sovereign nation-state, as witness his comparison of Malaysia's Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad to a Nazi, in recent speeches, because the Malaysian leader instituted exchange controls and capital controls after Soros had looted Southeast Asia, starting with his assault upon the Thai currency, the baht, in 1997. Not only had Prime Minister Mahathir committed the "crime" of naming George Soros as foremost among those responsible for destroying 30 years of growth overnight, but he took these concrete steps against further speculative looting by Soros' and other hedge funds. And, Soros, who backs drug-legalization, has branded former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori as a "dictator," like Prime Minister Mahathir, because when he was President, Fujimori led a relentless crackdown on narco-terrorists in Peru.
Instead of the sovereign nation-state republic, Soros said in a March 12, 1998 interview with the Italian Liberal magazine, that what is needed is a new Pax Britannica empire, because, he lies, nation-states cause war:
"Left alone, states do not maintain peace. We need an international organization aimed at keeping peace. It can be an empire, or a balance of powers. Or it can be some sort of international institution. Current international institutions ... cannot succeed because they are formed by states, and therefore they are instruments of state interests. During the Cold War, there was a balance of powers. Today, America is the only superpower left, but it does not have the capacity to be the world policeman. In the 19th Century, we had a global capitalist system as well, and it was Great Britain, representing the imperial power, that maintained stability.... Currently, we have no system of peace.... In some ways, the 19th-Century version of the global capitalist system was more stable than the current one.... There were imperial powers, Britain foremost among them, that derived enough benefits from being at the center of the global capitalist system to justify dispatching gunboats to faraway places to preserve the peace or collect debts."
It is also notable that on Oct. 17-19, 2001, Soros' Central European University in Budapest will host a conference entitled, "Globalization and Its Enemies." It is being co-organized by the British University of Warwick's Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation, while the bill is being paid for by the OSI in New York.
The choice of the CEU-Budapest is noteworthy, because it is one of the few universities that gives an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Nationalism Studies: a program initiated by George Soros, through the late Oxford University-trained Ernest Gellner. Given Soros' hatred of nation-states, it is no wonder that he and Gellner believed that nationalism led to what the Frankfurt School decried as the "Authoritarian Personality." Soros and Gellner, as Aristotelians, believe that no one can know or discover validatable universal principles or truth, and therefore strong leaders of nation-states are categorized as nadi, which is a term equatable with fascism. One four-credit course within the graduate program is on anti-Semitism and nationalism. Soros, together with CEU board member Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Calif.), almost toppled the Hungarian government, when they singled out an opponent of IMF-style "shock therapy," Istvan Csurka, by lying that he believed in a "Jewish/Plutocratic/Bolshevik" conspiracy.
How Soros Protects Narco-Terrorists
Through the Lindesmith Center and his funding for HRW, Soros champions "human rights" for the crack cocaine that floods America's streets and the narco-terrorists who are allied with the drug cartels, particularly in Ibero-America. The narco-terrorists protected by Soros and his associates are precisely the same ones that form a cornerstone of the new terrorism.
There are more than a half-dozen press releases from the Lindesmith Center, chiding Mexican President Vicente Fox for not having released members of the new terrorists' darlings, the Zapatistas, who are being held on federal drug-trafficking charges. Frequently, the Lindesmith Center has argued that such members of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) "were framed."
Shifting the argument, Al Giordano wrote a Feb. 12, 2001 press release for the Lindesmith Center, entitled "One Third of Indigenous Prisoners in Mexico Imprisoned on Drug Charges," which pleads from a report by Mexico's National Commission on Human Rights that the drug-related activity was merely due to poverty:
"The majority of these indigenous prisoners are used by organized crime to transport drugs.... Suffering from hunger, with poor-quality lands, without resources to plant and forgotten by development, the indigenous either accept or are obligated to transport drugs. They survive somehow."
Another Lindesmith press release decries the Clinton Administration's decision to send Gen. Barry McCaffrey (ret.), then-Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, to Colombia to discuss a $1.3 billion aid program for Plan Colombia: "Washington has sent Gen. Barry McCaffrey, the chief proponent for the militarization of the war on drugs in Latin America, to ostensibly address issues of social reform. In reality, the mission will lay the groundwork to expand and step up McCaffrey's futile war against drug production in Colombia. The $1.3 billion aid package targeted for the nation is sure to widen and deepen the decades old civil war in the north, recklessly plunging the U.S. into what could become one of its most disastrous Latin American foreign policy commitments in recent history. Rather than bring a peaceful resolution, Washington's massive contribution to the war on drugs will instead serve to fuel a thinly veiled anti-insurgency campaign that seeks to eliminate Colombia's two surviving guerrilla groups, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and the National Liberation Army (ELN). Since the FARC network is often intertwined with components and structures of civil society, if the Colombian military launches a strategic campaign against these leftist forces, the fragile semblance of normalcy among a populace already alienated by all sides to the conflict will be fundamentally undermined." In other words, Lindesmith argues that Colombia must do nothing amid a civil war that has virtually partitioned the nation and threatens to spill over the borders, and otherwise should let narco-terrorists such as the FARC traffic in narcotics, pillage, and kidnap whomever they choose.
'Narco-Terrorist Huggers'
Human Rights Watch, particularly through HRW/Americas, has written numerous documents in defense of the Zapatistas, as well as reports attacking Plan Colombia's potential for an assault upon the FARC and ELN, and former Peruvian President Fujimori's assault on narco-terrorists such as the Shining Path and MRTA. In particular, HRW/Americas has gone after the military, which has been the backbone for fighting the narco-terrorist takeover of these nation-states.
Thus, the February 2000 issue of Human Rights Watch journal is entitled, "The Ties That Bind: Colombia and the Military-Paramilitary Links." This report not only claims that the Colombian military is behind the equivalent of "paramilitary death squads," but it even applauds the 1998 dismantling of the Colombian military's 20th Brigade, which was composed of military intelligence officers who took too proactive an approach toward eradicating drug lords and their narco-terrorist allies. However, HRW claims that the intelligence personnel continue to function in disparate military units, "where human rights are violated" for narco-kingpins.
As was documented at length in the April 1997 EIR Special Report, "The True Story of Soros the Golem—A Profile of Megaspeculator George Soros," HRW/Americas has an extended network of "narco-terrorist huggers" that includes:
- The Andean Commission on Jurists. Having offices in six Andean countries, its headquarters is in Peru, where it operates as a de facto arm of HRW/Americas, publishing HRW reports in Spanish under its own logo. Its executive director, Diego García-Sayán, authored the foreword for Americas Watch's 1992 book defending the narco-terrorists, Peru under Fire. García-Sayán has also met on a regular basis with Ethan Nadelmann, who directs Soros' Lindesmith Center.
- The Andean Council of Coca Leaf Producers (CAPHC) has worked closely with the Andean Commission on Jurists, as in a March 13-14, 2001 conference featuring one of Nadelmann's British associates, where it was argued that coca had "traditional" uses, and any attempt to eradicate it was a "threat to the environment." CAPHC, whose head is Bolivian radical Evo Morales, has as its goal the organizing of coca growers in Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Colombia into a unified armed insurrectionary force. On April 18, 1995, the Bolivian government raided a meeting of CAPHC's directors and advisers, arresting 24 participants on charges of sedition, as the meeting had been called to spread CAPHC's violent campaign against coca eradication into Peru. In August 1996, Evo Morales, who may have a hand in organizing the People's Global Action third international conference in Cochabamba, Bolivia (see dossier on the PGA, in this Feature), travelled to Colombia, where he called upon the narco-terrorist FARC to maintain "strength, unity, and resistance to pressure from the police and the military."
Finally, it is noteworthy that Alejandro Toledo—elected President of Peru in June 2001, after an Anglo-American Establishment operation pulled off a cold coup d'état that drove President Fujimori to seek asylum in Japan—admitted, in the middle of his campaign, that he had received $1 million from George Soros. The purpose to be served by the funds was to attempt the overthrow of President Fujimori before his third Inaugural; Fujimori had won re-election by an overwhelming majority, in large part because he freed Peru of narco-terrorism. Toledo arranged the deal personally, in meetings with Soros at the June 2000 meeting of the World Democracy Forum.
