Professional Documents
Culture Documents
TIBOR KRAUSZ
Soros
ern Europe after the fall of communism, al institution, which is accredited in New
in which Hungary played a pivotal role in York but has a campus only in Budapest,
1989. Thanks to an endowment of nearly to stop enrolling new students from Jan-
$900 million from Soros, CEU has long uary 1, 2018, and to close down by 2021,
been the countrys best-financed academic unless Hungary and the US can agree on
institution and now operates independently new terms for the university. The law is set
of the Jewish billionaire. to be followed by similar legislative leg-
Over the years CEU has offered scholar- erdemain aimed at crippling civil society
ships to thousands of students from Hunga- groups funded by the Jewish billionaire or
ry and around the world, including Israel sweeping them out, in the words of one of
and the Palestinian territories. Among its Orbns deputies.
alumni are intellectuals, artists, government Speaking on public radio last March, Or-
bn sounded a nativist tone and accused the
Students bear a banner that says CEU Budapest-based university of cheating by
now, but whos next? during a protest offering degrees that are accepted both in
againstthe Hungarian governments plan Hungary and the US unlike degrees issued
to shut downa local university founded by other Hungarian universities that are
by George Soros only accepted locally. Its inexplicable,
he griped, why we should place our own in Hungary, where lurid phantasmagorias lion, and one of its most prominent philan-
universities at a disadvantage by allowing about the endless machinations of foreign thropists.
a foreign university to enjoy an unfair Jewish financiers are commonplace. Once His Open Society Foundations, which has
advantage. these alleged manipulators were claimed to a budget of $1 billion and has over the years
Yet, it clearly isnt that unfair advantage belong to the Rothschild banking dynasty, given away $12 billion to various causes in
that vexes Orbn. It makes no difference now they are seen to be embodied by Soros. more 100 countries, has benefitted millions
if someone is a billionaire in Hungary, he of people worldwide, including Hungarys
elucidated, in a jibe at the New York-based The greatest prime minister. In 1989, when he was still
Jewish financier. This university also has an up-and-coming young liberal politician
to respect the laws, Orbn said, referring to value of CEU is its with strong anti-Russian leanings, Orbn
received a scholarship from the Jewish bil-
laws that did not yet exist at the time be-
cause his partys proposed new legislation
independence. Its one lionaire to study at Englands Oxford Uni-
had yet to be passed in Parliament. of the last bastions of versity. Several members of his inner circle
In an interview with a right-wing online also enjoyed Soross munificence back in
publication last December, Orbn dispelled free thinking in Hungary their student days.
any doubt about his true motivation. The Today, the onetime beneficiary of Soross
coming year, he warned ominously, will largesse is hardly a poster boy for the values
be about the exclusion of Soros and the forc- that the billionaire seeks to foster through
es he represents [from Hungarian society]. [This law against CEU] is a covert form his foundations whose ideals were inspired
of antisemitism, Attila Mesterhzy, an op- by the Austrian thinker Karl Poppers
SHORTLY THEREAFTER, when the Eu- position lawmaker, stressed. When Orbn work of political philosophy, The Open
ropean Court of Human Rights ruled that and members of his Fidesz-Hungarian Civ- Society and its Enemies. Orbn is now a
the Hungarian government had illegally de- ic Alliance party keep harping on about self-avowed enemy of the very idea of a
tained two asylum seekers from Bangladesh George Soros, surely, [his Jewishness] is on Western European-style open society.
in 2015 at the height of the migrant crisis that their minds. The politician, whose right-wing coali-
was engulfing the country, Hungarys prime Its also on the minds of numerous other tion enjoys a seemingly unassailable par-
minister predictably lashed out at Soros. Hungarians. Thanks to his high-profile phil- liamentary majority that allows it to pass
Orbn has taken a hard-line stance against anthropic work with a decidedly left-wing laws at will, has pledged to create an il-
all migration into Europe, while several lo- political slant, Soros has become a handy liberal state modelled on his ally Vladi-
cally based nonprofits funded by Soross stand-in for the fictive Bond villain-like mir Putins stranglehold on Russia. He has
Open Society Foundations have been openly Jewish banker of fevered conspiracy myths. done much to undermine the rule of law in
campaigning on behalf of migrants from the His larger-than-life rags-to-riches life story Hungary and eliminate nascent democratic
Middle East, South Asia and Africa. has added to his aura of preternatural perfi- checks and balances, partly by rewriting the
It is a collusion of human traffickers, dy in the eyes of his countless detractors in constitution.
Brussels bureaucrats and the organizations Hungary and elsewhere. Nor does Orbn, one of whose advisers
that work in Hungary financed by foreign Born Gyrgy Schwartz in 1930 to a well- is the Jewish-American conservative polit-
money, insisted Orbn, echoing a com- to-do family of assimilated Jews, Soros ical consultant Arthur J. Finkelstein, hide
monly held view in Hungary that attributes survived the Holocaust in Budapest as a his nativist and autocratic tendencies. His
Europes migrant crisis to a shadowy glob- teenager with fake documents. By his own government has been relentlessly pushing
al conspiracy overseen by rich, scheming admission, as part of his wartime cover So- a revisionist view of history, which is now
Jewish bankers pulling the strings from be- ros, then 14, helped a local fascist catalogue taught in state-run schools. It portrays Hun-
hind the scenes. Lets call a spade a spade: confiscated Jewish property during Hungar- gary, a staunch wartime ally of Nazi Ger-
George Soros finances them. ian Jewrys mass deportation to Auschwitz many, as the hapless victim of first German
In case anyone missed his point then, the (a fact that has opened Soros up to charges aggression, then Soviet occupation there-
politician reiterated his claims in another di- that he was a Nazi collaborator, which he by absolving Hungarians of responsibility
atribe a few weeks later. Lets not underes- wasnt). He emigrated to London, where he for the fate of their country and the death of
timate George Soros, Orbn huffed. Hes studied philosophy, and after several false 600,000 Hungarian Jews in the Holocaust.
an all-powerful and unscrupulous billion- starts in banking he set up a hedge fund. Hungarians have still not come to terms
aire who knows neither God nor man when He turned to currency speculation, earning with their 20th-century history, says Mi-
it comes to his interests. $1 billion in a single day in 1992 in a high- chael L. Miller, a Jewish-American aca-
Such scapegoating and conspiracy mon- stakes gamble against the Bank of England. demic who specializes in Central European
gering, which ascribe an outsize ability to He then worked his way up in the world of Jewish history and teaches at CEUs Na-
Soros to influence global geopolitical de- high finance in New York to become one of tionalism Studies and Jewish Studies pro-
velopments, has found a receptive audience the worlds richest men, now worth $25 bil- grams. In the eyes of Hungarians, it was