(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . The origins of the dangerous George Soros myth revisited; The Village, 4/12/23 [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-04-12 George Soros, 2019 This diary is a re-run of one from June, 2020. Sadly, Soros is again being smeared and used as a convenient bogeyman by republicans, so I thought I’d share it again to refresh ourselves of the ridiculous myth surrounding this incredibly generous and inspiring man. ****** We’ve probably all had a good chuckle or two about being paid by Soros to attend protest marches, or vote for certain candidates. I think we all also recognize the anti-semitic overtones to the attacks on him and the bizarre mythology of him as someone who controls our party, and events happening in our country and around the world. Here’s a very short biography of the man. George Soros experienced ethnic and political intolerance firsthand. Born in Hungary in 1930, he lived through the Nazi occupation of 1944–1945, which resulted in the murder of over 500,000 Hungarian Jews. His own Jewish family survived by securing false identity papers, concealing their backgrounds, and helping others do the same. Soros later recalled that “not only did we survive, but we managed to help others.” As the Communists consolidated power in Hungary after the war, Soros left Budapest in 1947 for London, working part-time as a railway porter and as a night-club waiter to support his studies at the London School of Economics. In 1956, he emigrated to the United States, entering the world of finance and investments, where he made his fortune. In 1973, he launched his own hedge fund and went on to become one of the most successful investors in the history of the United States. www.opensocietyfoundations.org/... This information is from the website for his philanthropic organization — Open Society Foundations. He created the foundations with the wealth he made in investments. He’s used his money all over the world to foster, and support open societies. George Soros began his philanthropy in 1979, giving scholarships to black South Africans under apartheid. In the 1980s, he helped promote the open exchange of ideas in Communist Hungary by funding academic visits to the West and supporting fledgling independent cultural groups, as well as other initiatives. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, he created Central European University as a space to foster critical thinking—which at that time was an alien concept for most universities in the former Communist bloc. With the Cold War over, he gradually expanded his philanthropy to Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the United States, supporting a vast array of new efforts to create more accountable, transparent, and democratic societies. He was one of the early prominent voices to criticize the war on drugs as “arguably more harmful than the drug problem itself,” and helped kick-start America’s medical marijuana movement. In the early 2000s, he became a vocal backer of same-sex marriage efforts. Though his causes have evolved over time, they continue to hew closely to his ideals of an open society. www.opensocietyfoundations.org/... Seems like a solid guy, using his fortune to help others, right? How did he become a despised villain of the right wing here and abroad? According to this 2019 Buzzfeed article, The Unbelievable Story Of The Plot Against George Soros, he gets mentioned tens of thousands of times each week on the internet. The demonization of Soros is one of the defining features of contemporary global politics, and it is, with a couple of exceptions, a pack of lies. Soros is indeed Jewish. He was an aggressive currency trader. He has backed Democrats in the US and Karl Popper’s notion of an “open society” in the former communist bloc. But the many wild and proliferating theories, which include the suggestion that he helped bring down the Soviet Union in order to clear a path to Europe for Africans and Arabs, are so crazy as to be laughable — if they weren’t so virulent. My apologies if you already know this story, but I just ran across it last week and was flabbergasted to learn the origins of the cruel and fantastical myths about George Soros. The first surprise is that the two people that created the myth are both Jewish — George Birnbaum, and Arthur Finkelstein. Both were raised Jewish. Birnbaum attended Jewish schools as a child, and believed that only a Jewish nation, Israel, could prevent a second holocaust. He was clearly raised with the understanding of the risks Jewish people have faced for centuries. All of which makes it bizarre that Birnbaum and Finkelstein’s ideas spawned a new wave of anti-Semitism, and that they did so in the service of an authoritarian leader, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, reviled around the world for his far-right views. The two men took all the arguments against Soros, from East and West, from left and right, and fused them together. Two American Jews, one a towering figure in US politics, helped create a monster. Their method was to find an enemy for their candidate to rail against. Does this feel familiar? Finkelstein’s goal was to polarize the electorate as much as possible, to pitch each side against the other. The fuel: fear. “The danger has to be presented as coming from the Left,” a 25-year-old Finkelstein advised Nixon. Whoever doesn’t attack first will be beaten, he argued. And Finkelstein made things personal. Every campaign needs an enemy to defeat. He developed negative campaigning into a technique he called “rejectionist voting” — to demonize the enemy so much that even the laziest of voters would want to get out and vote, just to reject them. We absolutely know this happened four years ago, and that’s because Steve Bannon knew it too. He ran the same framework for the traitor in the WH. Although, I might add that the demonization of Sec. Clinton also suppressed turnout for her, in addition to bringing out the extreme right wing base. Ok, back to Hungary and Orbán. President Orbán came to power in 2010, just a few years after the global recession. It was easy for him to blame the country’s problems on foreign bureaucrats or the country’s creditors. When it came time for reelection he needed a new enemy; something to keep the base energized. Against this backdrop, Finkelstein had an epiphany. What if the veil of the conspiracy were to be lifted and a shadowy figure appear, controlling everything? The puppet master. Someone who not only controlled the “big capital” but embodied it. A real person. A Hungarian. Strange, yet familiar. That person was Soros, Finkelstein told Birnbaum. Birnbaum was mesmerized: Soros was the perfect enemy. Somehow a man who didn’t live in Hungary, but spent millions of his own money to fight communists there before the fall of Soviet dominated eastern Europe, built a university in Budapest, and helped with cleanup funds of a toxic spill in Hungary in 2010 became the ‘enemy’ that the Orbán campaign needed. It’s absurd on it’s face, but propaganda is a powerful tool that’s been successfully used for hundreds of years. The public campaign against Soros began in earnest on Aug. 14, 2013, around nine months ahead of the next election. It started relatively quietly, with an article in the government-aligned newspaper Heti Válasz attacking NGOs that were said to be controlled by Soros. That article was soon followed by a raid of some of his NGO’s offices. Of course nothing came of the investigation, but the foundation for the narrative of Soros as an enemy was set. After Soros advocated in 2015 for the European Union to take a common approach to the Syrian refugee crisis, Orbán characterized those remarks as what you’d expect from an authoritarian wanting to continue to use Soros as his foil. It’s what we’ve seen here from the republicans and the right wing when discussing our immigration policies. He said Soros was advocating for a flood of refugees that would weaken the country. All too familiar to us here in the US. Birnbaum and Finkelstein were successful. The tactics like those below led Orbán to victory in 2014 and 2018. A crescendo was reached in July 2017, when the whole country was plastered with ads showing Soros’s face and the slogan “Don’t let George Soros have the last laugh!” The slogan “Stop Soros” was repeated endlessly, everywhere. Manipulated photos showed him walking hand in hand with allies through a fence: Orbán’s fence, constructed to stop refugees crossing into Hungary. Orbán claimed Soros maintained a mafia network. In the fall of 2017 the administration conducted a “national consultation.” Millions of citizens received questionnaires, in which they could choose whether or not they supported the “Soros plan” to allow a million people from Africa and the Middle East to enter Europe per year. From there, the demonization of George Soros spread across Europe, and jumped the Atlantic Ocean landing on our shores. His support of liberal ideas and candidates made it easy for the republicans to get on board the George Soros as boogeyman train, and that’s what they did of course. Campaigns here and around the world can find and use a huge variety of “open source” material, according to the article. Birnbaum claims they were unaware that Soros was Jewish when they first decided to use him for their campaign’s enemy. I for one find that very, very hard to believe. I’m surprised that Birnbaum agreed to be interviewed because I don’t think the article did him any favors. It also closes with this chef’s kiss of a rationalization, and a claim of no regrets. “Anti-Semitism is something eternal, indelible,” said Birnbaum. “Our campaign did not make anyone anti-Semitic who wasn’t before. Maybe we were just drawing a new target, not more. I would do it again.” [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/4/12/2163005/-The-origins-of-the-dangerous-George-Soros-myth-revisited-The-Village-4-12-23 Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/