The power of one

Andrew Bolt

The Herald Sun

December 5th, 2003

IN many James Bond films, 007 must battle some megalomaniac tycoon who plots
to dominate the world by toppling governments and triggering wars.

It's always some nasty Right-winger, of course. In Tomorrow Never Dies, for
instance, the filmmakers thought it would be a hoot to cast my boss, Rupert
Murdoch, in the black hat.

How the Leftists who dominate Hollywood must have sniggered at the slur.

How odd, then, to find those same Hollywood liberals this week cosying up to
the very billionaire who most resembles that Bond villain - currency
speculator George Soros, fresh from toppling his latest president, this time
in Georgia.

And how predictable - to those with an eye for history - to find that Soros
is no Right-winger, but a preacher of the New Age Left.

You may remember Soros as the American financier who, in 1992, bet $20
billion that the British pound would fall, and made a $1.5 billion profit in
one day.

Or you may remember how he made another fortune when Asia's financial
markets crashed in 1997 - a disaster that Malaysia's then leader, Dr
Mahathir Mohamad, accused Soros of having caused for cash.

Some Australians have a sweeter reason to remember Soros. Top drug experts
such as Melbourne's Dr Nick Crofts and Sydney's Dr Alex Wodak have received
grants from his Lindesmith Foundation, which aggressively promotes their
brand of "harm minimisation".

Soros's Open Society Institute also organised a petition to the United
Nations demanding an end to the "war on drugs", and had it signed here by
Victorian Treasurer John Brumby, drug adviser Professor David Penington,
High Court judge Michael Kirby and a gabble of our politicians.

OF course, Australia is only one of 50 countries in which Soros works. And
his meddling here is nothing given what he's just done in Georgia.

Georgia has long been led by President Eduard Shevardnadze, the former
Soviet Union's foreign minister under Mikhail Gorbachev.

Soros, who spends $1 billion a year to promote his vision of the "Open
Society", was a Shevardnadze supporter, but fell out with him, calling him a
crook.

He then backed Georgia's former justice minister, Mikhail Saakashvili, and
spent some $4 million on a protest movement against the president. His
organisations brought in experts in "non-violent revolution" from Serbia,
gave $700,000 to an activist group that bussed in protesters, and financed
an anti-government TV station and newspaper.

It worked. Last month, protesters smashed into Georgia's parliament,
yelling - probably correctly - that Shevardnadze had stolen the elections a
month ago and must quit. Shevardnadze fled, and Saakashvili looks set for
leadership.

True, this may turn out to be a victory for democracy. But it also looks
like a victory for a foreign tycoon and his sponsored mates.

Indeed, the editor-in-chief of the Georgian Messenger newspaper this week
said: "It's generally accepted public opinion here that Mr Soros is the
person who planned the Shevardnadze overthrow." Shevardnadze says he's
certain of it.

NOR is this the first time Soros undermined a foreign government. From 1991,
he spent up to $100 million on activists campaigning against the president
of Serbian-dominated Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic.

He was also a huge donor to Human Rights Watch, and with six of his
associates sat on its advisory committee on Europe.

In the early 1990s, the Kosovo Liberation Army began killing officials in
the Yugoslav province of Kosovo. Its tactic was brutally simple: to provoke
Serbian troops into retaliating so violently that the horrified West would
intervene to give Kosovo independence.

It worked - not least because the HRW condemned Serbia's reprisals so
noisily that it boasted it had helped to inspire NATO's bombing of Serbia.

After NATO's "victory", Soros gave money to the United Nations' new
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and paid for
training for its judges and prosecutor. He also paid two American law
faculties to help the prosecutor find evidence against Serbia's suspected
war criminals - and Milosevic.

Yes, Milosevic is repulsive. But is it healthy for a billionaire like Soros
to be so involved in triggering a war, creating a court and then helping to
prosecute in it the leaders of the regime he's worked so hard to topple? Who
elected him? Who holds him accountable?

And now, of course, we've signed up to the International Criminal Court that
Soros spent millions lobbying for - a court which, under its rules, must
consult groups of the kind Soros himself funds.

So far, you may argue, Soros has acted against only thugs and tyrants. But
now he's moving against the leader of the world's greatest democracy, US
President George W. Bush.

Last month, Soros declared that "America, under Bush, is a danger to the
world", and defeating the president was now "the central focus of my life".

HE said he would give $13 million - the largest individual political
donation in US history - to America Coming Together, a far-Left group of
pro-Democrat activists, and up to $4 million for a Left-wing think tank.
Another $6 million would go to the radical MoveOn.org protest group.

"I've come to the conclusion that one can do a lot more about the issues I
care about by changing the Government than by pushing the issues," Soros
said.

Soros could say that without fussing many journalists because which of them
fears the Left? Imagine the uproar if Rupert Murdoch had said it instead.

Still, I can understand why Soros isn't content with simply "pushing the
issues", given what happened when one of his companies in 1986 bought
Spectrum 7, an oil outfit owned by George Bush, whose father was the then US
Vice-President.

"We were buying political influence," Soros said bluntly. Sadly, the Bushes
didn't play ball with that bit of issue pushing, and "it didn't come to
anything".

But this new tack already seems to be buying results.

JUST this week, the wife of Larry David, creator of Seinfeld, invited
Hollywood's elite to a "Hate Bush" event for the Soros-sponsored Americans
Coming Together (and never mind that mixed message).

And here we see the newest threats to democratic government in this
globalised world - of celebrity activists, unaccountable "rights" groups and
messianic tycoons from Soros to Ted Turner, all so terribly sure of their
virtue.

Mix them up and who knows what the explosion will do. It could destroy a
tyranny, or distort a democracy. There's no predicting which, because the
targets are as idiosyncratic as the whims of George Soros, a man with far
more dollars than sense, and fewer restraints than either.

Soros vs. Shevardnadze

Date: Sat, 6 Dec 2003 03:10:16 +1000 From: "makichris"
<chrispaul@netpci.com>

http://www3.sympatico.ca/sr.gowans/head.html

...Shevardnadze's alliances with corporate Russia were an invitation to
be overthrown. And sweeping the former golden boy aside wouldn't prove
to be too difficult. The infrastructure was already in place. US
billionaire George Soros was backing the anti-Shevardnadze opposition,
including a television station, Rustavi 2, the anti-Shevardnadze
newspaper, 24 Hours, and a student direct action group, Kmara!
(Enough!), modelled on Yugoslavia's Otpor (Resistance), also bankrolled
by Soros [7]. Plus, a successor had already been anointed: US-trained
lawyer, Mikhail Saakashvili, zealously pro-US, whose glitzy biography,
paid for by the US government, could be bought in Tbilisi bookstores,
bursting with photographs of the rising Georgian star with the US
political elite: George Soros, John McCain (who Saakashvili says he's
closest to politically), Edward Kennedy, Attorney-General John Ashcroft,
and FBI Director Louis Freeh [8]. What's more, the great man himself,
Soros, had personally conferred the Open Society award, named after his
Open Society Institute, on Saakashvili [9].

In fact, Soros did more than put up the cash to fund the infrastructure
that would chase Shevardnadze from power. He set the stage. Last year,
he told a Moscow news conference that Shevardnadze couldn't be trusted
to hold free and fair parliamentary elections in 2003, [10] which was
true enough. Georgia had never had elections that weren't flawed, so why
start now? The question was, why hadn't Soros said anything before?

Going further, Soros issued a warning. He said he'd "mobilize civil
society" to do "what we did...in Yugoslavia at the time of Milosevic."
[11] And true to his word, events pretty well followed the path they had
in October 2000, when Milosevic was forced to step down. And they'll
follow the same path they did after October, 2000, as well.

After Milosevic's ouster, it was generally agreed in the Panglossian
fashion that makes everyone feel better about an outrage committed by
our side, that in the end, Yugoslavs would probably be better off
without Milosevic. You could quibble about outside interference in
Yugolsav politics, but on balance, the scales had tipped in the right
direction. In this vein, Canada's establishment newspaper, The Globe and
Mail, grudgingly admitted that "it would be naive to assume that
geopolitics played no part at all" in Shevardnadze's fall from power,
but that "whatever the forces that led to his ouster, Georgians are
better off without him." [12]

Why should we suppose this? Milosevic's successors in Yugoslavia have
hardly been more democratic, and economically, their reform policies
have been a disaster, as they've been for ordinary people everywhere.
Life is only better for Serbs in a negative sense. Quislings aren't
bombed and slapped with sanctions, so now Serbs can get fuel oil to heat
their homes in the winter and go about their daily business, free from
worry they'll become one of the tens of thousands of cases of
"collateral damage" the US military has a habit of producing that US
politicians keep deeply regretting.

As for Shevardnadze, it's true enough that he offered nothing to
ordinary Georgians, but why should anyone think that Shevardnadze's
presumed successor, Saakashvili, will offer Georgians relief from
grinding poverty, freedom from being exploited by corporate interests,
or will wrest the political system from the hands of US-funded NGO's and
George Soros and put it into the hands of Georgians, where it belongs?
He's backed by the same forces that originally backed Shevardnadze, he's
committed to the same policies of "economic reform" that plunged Georgia
into the depths of poverty, and he's only different in pledging his
heart exclusively to corporate America, and to his patron George Soros.
A velvet revolution? There has been no revolution. All that's happened
is that head office has fired the old branch manager and replaced him
with a new one who's just as keen to see to it that the employees get
screwed...