[PEN-L:32648] RE: George Soros, Imperial Wizard

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

Title: RE: [PEN-L:32637] George Soros, Imperial Wizard

while this is a good debunking of Soro's "humanitarian" pretensions, it leans heavily toward conspiracy-theory thinking.

I am sure the guy worked -- and works -- with the CIA, but a materialist analysis would look for the internal contradictions of the old Soviet-type mode of production that allowed Soros and the CIA to be so effective in dismantling bureaucratic socialism. After all, the Soviets had their own secret interventions into the so-called "West" that didn't have cause capitalism to fall apart. How is it that the Soros-style seduction of the "Eastern" elites was so successful?

While it's likely that the CIA sent a lot of funds to Poland's Solidarity movement, it would be a mistake to see its origins as simply a CIA or CIA/Soros plot, as is suggested by the phrase "CIA-funded Solidarity operation" below. I would look instead to the failures of the planned economy (the equivalent of capitalism's crises) and to the class antagonisms in Poland, along with the traditional antagonism of the Poles toward the Russians.

>In 1980, Soros began to use his millions to attack socialism in Eastern Europe. He financed individuals who would cooperate with him. His first success was in Hungary. He took over the Hungarian educational and cultural establishment, incapacitating socialist institutions throughout

the country. He made his way right inside the Hungarian government. Soros next moved on to Poland, aiding the CIA-funded Solidarity operation and in that same year, he became active in China. The USSR came next. It is not coincidental that the Central Intelligence Agency had operations in all of those countries. The goal of the Agency was exactly the same as that of the Open Society Fund: to dismantle socialism. In South Africa, the CIA sought out dissidents who were anticommunist. In Hungary, Poland and the USSR, the CIA, with overt intervention from the National Endowment for Democracy, the AFL-CIO, USAID and other institutions, supported and organized anticommunists, the very type of individuals recruited by Soros' Open Society Fund. The CIA would have called them "assets." As Soros said, "In each country I identified a group of people - some leading personalities, others less well known - who share my belief..."16 Soros' Open Society organized conferences with anticommunist Czechs, Serbs, Romanians, Hungarians, Croatians, Bosnians, Kosovars. 17 His ever-expanding influence gave rise to suspicions that he was operating as part of the U.S. intelligence complex. In 1989, the Washington Post reported charges first made in 1987 by the Chinese government officials that Soros' Fund for the Reform and Opening of China had CIA connections. 18 <

BTW, the phrase "Imperial Wizard" is cute, but is there any evidence that Soros likes the KKK?

Jim