16 / 06 / 2009
by Heather Cottin, December 9, 2003: The tactic of creating political hysteria was necessary for the United States to carry out its Balkan policy. It was repeated in 1999 when HRW functioned as the shock troops of indoctrination for the NATO attack on Yugoslavia. The institutions of George Soros stood behind it.
Soros: Philanthropist? Spook? or Philanthropist spook?
NURTURING LEFT ANTI-SOCIALISM
Soros’ Open Society Institute has a finger in every pot. Its board of directors reads like a “Who’s Who” of Cold War and New World Order pundits. Paul Goble is Communications Director; ‘he was the major political commentator at Radio Free Europe. Herbert Okun served in the Nixon State Department as an intelligence adviser to Henry Kissinger. Kati Marton is the wife of former Clinton administration UN ambassador and envoy to Yugoslavia, Richard Holbrooke. Marton lobbied for the Soros-funded radio station B-92, also a project of’ the National Endowment for Democracy (another overt arm of the CIA), which was instrumental in bringing down the Yugoslav government.
When Soros founded the Open Society Fund he picked liberal pundit Aryeh Neier to lead it. Neier was the head of Helsinki Watch, a putative human rights organization with an anticommunist bent. In 1993, the Open Society Fund became the Open Society Institute.
Helsinki Watch became Human Rights Watch in 1975. Soros is currently on its Advisory Board, both for the Americas and the Eastern Europe-Central Asia Committees, and his Open Society Fund/Soros/OSI is listed as a funder. 29 Soros is intimately connected to HRW, and Neier wrote columns for The Nation magazine without mentioning that he was on Soros’ payroll. 30
Soros is intimately involved in HRW, although he does his best to hide it. 31 He says he just funds and sets up these programs and lets them run. But they do not stray from the philosophy of the funder. HRW and OSI are close. Their views do not diverge. Of course, other foundations fund these institutions as well, but Soros’ influence dominates their ideology.
George Soros’ activities fall into the construct developed in 1983 and enunciated by Allen Weinstein, founder of the National Endowment for Democracy. Weinstein said, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”32 Soros is operating exactly within the confines of the intelligence complex. He is little different from CIA drug runners in Laos in the 1960s, or the mujahedin who profited from the opium trade while carrying out CIA operations against socialist Afghanistan in the 1980s. He simply funnels (and takes home) a whole lot more money than those pawns, and he does much of his business in the light of day. His candor insofar as he expresses it is a sort of spook damage control that serves to legitimize the strategies of U.S. foreign policy.
The majority of people in the U.S. today who consider themselves politically left-of-center are undoubtedly pessimistic about the chances for a socialist transformation of society. Thus the Soros ‘Decentralization” model, or the “piecemeal” approach to “negative utilitarianism, the attempt to minimize the amount of misery,” which was Popper’s philosophy, appeals to them. 33 Soros funded an HRW study that was used to back California and Arizona legislation relaxing drug laws. 34 Soros favors the legalization of drugs – one way of temporarily reducing awareness of one’s misery. Soros is an equal-opportunity bribester. At a loftier rung of the socioeconomic ladder, one finds Social Democrats who accept Soros funding and believe in civil liberties within the context of capitalism. 35 For these folks, the evil consequences of Soros’ business activities (impoverishing people all over the world) are mitigated by his philanthropic activities. Similarly, liberal/left intellectuals, both in the U.S. and abroad, have been drawn in by the “Open Society” philosophy, not to mention the occasional funding plum.
The New Left in the United States was a social democratic movement. It was resolutely anti-Soviet, and when Eastern Europe and the USSR fell, few in the New Left opposed the destruction of the socialist systems. The New Left did not mourn or protest when the hundreds of millions in Eastern Europe and Central Asia lost their right to jobs, housing at reasonable and legally protected rents, free education through graduate school, health care and cultural enhancement. Most belittled any suggestion that the CIA and certain NGOs such as the National Endowment for Democracy or the Open Society Fund had actively participated in the annihilation of socialism. These people felt that the Western determination to destroy the USSR since 1917 was barely connected to the fall of the USSR. For them, socialism failed of its own accord, because it was flawed.
As revolutions, such as the ones in Mozambique, Angola, Nicaragua or El Salvador were destroyed by proxy forces or were stalled by demonstration “elections,” New Left pragmatists shrugged their shoulders and turned away. The New Left sometimes seemed to deliberately ignore the post-Soviet machinations of U.S. foreign policy.
Bogdan Denitch, who had political aspirations in Croatia, was active within the Open Society Institute, and received OSI funding. 36 Denitch favored the ethnic cleansing of Serbs from Croatia, NATO bombing of Bosnia and then Yugoslavia, and even a ground invasion of Yugoslavia. 37 Denitch was a founder and chair for many years of the Democratic Socialists of America, a leading liberal-left group in the U.S. He has also long chaired the prestigious Socialist Scholars Conference, through which he was key to manipulating the sympathies of many toward support for NATO expansion. 38 Other Soros targets for support include Refuse and Resist the ACLU, and a host of other liberal causes. 39 Soros added another unlikely trophy when he became involved in the New School for Social Research in New York, long an academy of choice for left intellectuals. He now funds the East and Central Europe Program there. 40
Many leftists who were inspired by the revolution in Nicaragua sadly accepted the election of Violetta Chamorro and the defeat of the Sandinistas in 1990. Most of the Nicaragua support network faded thereafter. Perhaps the New Left could have learned from the rising star of Michael Kozak. He was a veteran of Washington’s campaigns to install sympathetic leaders in Nicaragua, Panama and Haiti, and to undermine Cuba – he headed the U.S. Interests Section in Havana.
After organizing the Chamorro victory in Nicaragua, Kozak moved on to become U.S. Ambassador to Belarus. Kozak worked with the Soros-sponsored “Internet Access and Training Program” (IATP), which was busy “creating future leaders” in Belarus. 41 This program was simultaneously imposed upon Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. IATP operates openly with the support of the U.S. Department of State. To its credit, Belarus expelled Kozak and the Soros-Open Society/U.S. State Department crowd. The government of Aleksandr Lukashenko found that for four years before moving to Minsk, Kozak was instrumental in engineering the flow of tens of millions of dollars to the Belarus opposition. Kozak was creating a united opposition coalition, funding web-sites, newspapers and opinion polls, and tutoring a student resistance movement similar to Yugoslavia’s Otpor. Kozak brought in Otpor leaders to instruct dissidents in Belarus. 42 Just before September 11, 2001, the U.S. was revving up a demonization campaign against President Aleksandr Lukashenko. Demonizing Lukashenko has temporarily taken a back burner to the “war on terrorism.”
Through OSI and HRW, Soros was a major supporter of the B-92 radio station in Belgrade. Soros funded Otpor, the organization that received those “suitcases of money” in support of the October 5, 2000 coup that toppled the Yugoslav government. 43 Human Rights Watch helped legitimize the subsequent kidnapping and show trial of Slobodan Milosevic in The Hague by saying nothing about his rights.” 44 Louise Arbour, who served as judge at that illegal tribunal, is presently on the Board of Soros’ International Crisis Group. 45 The Open Society/Human Rights Watch gang has been working on Macedonia, calling it part of their “civilizing mission.” 46 Expect that republic to be “saved” to finish the total disintegration of the former Yugoslavia.
DEPUTIES OF POWER
Soros has actually stated that he considers his philanthropy moral and his money management business amoral. 47 Yet those in charge of Soros-funded NGOs have a clear and consistent agenda. One of Soros’ most influential institutions is the International Crisis Group, founded in 1986. ICG is headed by individuals from the very center of political and corporate power. Its board includes Zbigniew Brzezinski, Morton Abramowitz, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State; Wesley Clark, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander for Europe; and Richard Allen, former U.S. National Security Adviser, Allen is noteworthy for quitting Nixon’s National Security Council out of disgust with the liberal tendencies of Henry Kissinger; recruiting Oliver North to Reagan’s National Security Council, and negotiating missiles for hostages in the Iran-Contra scandal. For these individuals, “containing conflict” boils down to U.S. control over the people and resources of the world.
In the 1980s and 1990s, under the aegis of the Reagan Doctrine, U.S. covert and overt operations in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia were in the works. Soros was openly active in most of these places, working to buy off would-be revolutionaries, or subsidize politicians, intellectuals and anyone else who might come to power when the revolutionary moment had passed. According to James Petras:
“By the early 1980s the more perceptive sectors of the neoliberal ruling classes realized that their policies were polarizing the society and provoking large-scale social discontent. Neoliberal politicians began to finance and promote a parallel strategy ‘from below,’ the promotion of ‘grassroots’ organizations with an ‘anti-statist’ ideology to intervene among potentially conflictory classes, to create a “social cushion.” These organizations were financially dependent on neoliberal sources and were directly involved in competing with sociopolitical movements for the allegiance of local leaders and activist communities. By the 1 990s these organizations, described as “nongovernmental,” numbered in the thousands and were receiving close to four billion dollars world-wide.” 48
In Underwriting Democracy, Soros boasts about the “Americanization of Eastern Europe.” According to his account, through his education programs he began to establish a young cadre of Sorosian leaders. These Soros Foundation-educated young men and women are prepared to fulfill the functions of so-called “influence agents.” Thanks to their fluent knowledge of languages and their insertion into the emerging bureaucracies in target countries, these recruits would philosophically smooth the inroads for Western multinational corporations.
Career diplomat Herbert Okun, on the Europe Committee of Human Rights Watch, along with George Soros, is connected to a host of State Department-linked institutions, from USAID to the Rockefeller-funded Trilateral Commission. From 1990 to 1997, Okun was executive director of something called the Financial Services Volunteer Corps, part of USAID, “to help establish free market financial systems in former communist countries.” 49 George Soros is in complete accord with the capitalists who are in the process of taking control of the global economy.
NON-PROFIT PROFITEERING
Soros claims not to do philanthropy in the countries in which he is involved as a currency trader. 50 But Soros has often taken advantage of his connections to make key investments. Armed with a study by ICC, and with the support of Bernard Kouchner, chief of the UN Interim Administration in Kosovo (UNMIK), Soros attempted to acquire the most profitable mining complex in the Balkans.
In September 2000, in a hurry to take the Trepca mines before the Yugoslavian election, Kouchner stated that pollution from the mining complex was raising lead levels in the environment. 51 This is incredible considering that he cheered when the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia rained depleted uranium on the country and released more than 100,000 tons of carcinogens into the air, water and soil. 52 But Kouchner had his way, and the mines were closed for “health reasons.” Soros invested $150 million in an effort to gain control of Trepca’s gold, silver, lead, zinc and cadmium, which make the property worth $5 billion. 53
As Bulgaria was imploding into “free-market” chaos, Soros was busy scavenging through the wreckage, as Reuters reported in early 2001:
“The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) invested $3.0 million in [Bulgarian high-tech company] Rila, the first firm to benefit from a new $30 million facility set up by the EBRD to support IT firms in central and eastern Europe…. Another $3. 0 million came from U.S private investment fund Argus Capital Partners, sponsored by Prudential Insurance Company of America and opera ting in central and eastern Europe… Soros, who had invested around $3.0 million in Rila and in 2001 invested another $1.0 million…remained its majority owner. ” 54
HellenesOnline | 16 / 06 / 2009 | PROFILES | Tags: Europe, New World Order, Open Society Institute, SOROS, UNITED NATIONS, Yugoslavia | Comments (2)
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2 Responses to “Soros: Philanthropist? Spook? or Philanthropist spook?”
My name is spelled: Heather Cottin. I am sorry you left out the opening line where George Soros says, “I do have a foreign policy.” also that you left out the footnotes. And I am presently a teacher of US History at La Guardia Community College in New York City.
Thank you, it was not intentional and it has been corrected. Please accept our apologies. Your articles are well appreciated. Thank you again
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