George Soros: Monster

From Roger Simon:

Were I a biographer Soros would be my first choice for a subject. He is a paradigmatic figure for our times, a kind of a monster created in the twentieth century, inexorably metastasizing into the twenty-first.


Now I realize monster is a big word to call someone and I don’t use it lightly. It’s just the one that comes to mind — there is something almost inhuman about Soros.

Most of us know him as the multi-billionaire financier of ultra-liberal causes (love them or leave them) whose fortune, ironically, comes from currency speculation — the “man who broke the Bank of England” during the 1992 British pound currency crisis. Never mind that thousands lost their pensions in the process. It’s the breaks of the game — capitalism as practiced by a quondam anti-captialist.

But that’s far from the most troubling thing about Soros. What disturbs most is something you will not read about in his Wikipedia entry, except in the most veiled manner. Soros — who appears in the right-hand column of that entry as a “Hungarian American” and an “atheist” — is a Hungarian Jew who, when 14 at the height of the Holocaust, was, well… no Anne Frank.

The Ottawa Sun’s Ezra Levant, quoted by Kimball, puts it succinctly:

To survive, George, then a teenager, collaborated with the Nazis.
First he worked for the Judenrat. That was the Jewish council set up by the Nazis to do their dirty work for them. Instead of the Nazis rounding up Jews every day for the trains, they delegated that murderous task to Jews who were willing to do it to survive another day at the expense of their neighbours.
Theodore [his father] hatched a better plan for his son. He bribed a non-Jewish official at the agriculture ministry to let George live with him. George helped the official confiscate property from Jews.

Well, okay, you’re thinking — he was fourteen. Give the guy a break. And I must admit that I — a secular Jew like Soros — have occasionally speculated about how I would have behaved in similar circumstances. And, although in my fantasy I might be a noble resistance fighter, laying my life on the line against fascism the way Primo Levi and others have described it, I certainly have no way of knowing. I might have been a sleazy collaborator myself. But I do know this: if I had done something like that just to survive, it would have haunted me the rest of my days.

And here’s the really creepy part: not so George Soros. In a sutprisingly overlooked interview with 60 Minutes‘ Steve Kroft, Soros denied guilt or second thoughts about his World War II activities.
From Levant again:

How does Soros feel about what he did as a teenager? Has it kept him up at night?
Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes asked him that. Was it difficult? “Not at all,” Soros answered.
“No feeling of guilt?” asked Kroft. “No,” said Soros. “There was no sense that I shouldn’t be there. If I wasn’t doing it, somebody else would be taking it away anyhow. Whether I was there or not. So I had no sense of guilt.”

Somebody else would have done it. Sound familiar? It’s just the kind of excuse you might use when devaluing the British pound. A psychoanalyst might call it “splitting,” taking a part of your personality and splitting it off, as if there were two disconnected parts of you — the monster and the good citizen. The good citizen provides a mask, a disguise for the monster to do his work.

Am I calling Soros a disturbed person? In probability, yes. A man with two sides who is all the more dangerous for having both.

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