From his hollowed-out base inside Asteroid M, surrounded by the grim Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, Max Eisenhardt plotted his revenge on the human race. Escaping from the horrors of Kristallnacht and the Warsaw Ghetto, and losing his family in a Nazi mass execution, Max learned to fear power. To ensure the survival of his fellow mutants against bigotry and hatred, he sets out to carve out a homeland. That leads him to war, fighting the dangerous forces that inhabit the Marvel Universe.
Earlier this year, Elon Musk put a human face to the supervillain Magneto: George Soros, the hedge-fund legend who has funnelled a staggering $32 billion into his network of Open Society Foundations, which promote liberal and progressive causes.
For years now, the far-Right has characterised Soros as the hidden hand behind a cosmopolitan conspiracy to destroy the agency and autonomy of tradition, religion and nation. Few figures in the West have been subjected to quite so much outright hatred. Fox News had the grace to drop an anti-Semitic slur directed at Soros, but others are unrepentant.
These ideas have now embedded themselves in Indian Right-wing discourse—often without understanding of their anti-Semitic context—as Soros has become increasingly vocal in his criticism of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Soros has been alleged to be plotting the nation’s downfall by engineering attacks on corporate jewels like the Adani group.
Even as the ideological war explodes across the cosmos it is important to understand the real story is less than super-powered. Economists Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, Lucas Núñez and Hayden Ludwig, in one of few thoroughgoing assessments of Soros’s work, show that his massive philanthropic contributions have had marginal impacts on political rights, civil liberties or gender parity. There has been no measurable impact on the influx of migrants in recipient countries, nor an increase in protests.
Eastern Europe, where Soros focussed his energies and his fortune, hasn’t turned out as planned. Among the first recipients of a scholarship from Soros, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has become the loudest spokesperson for anti-liberal chauvinism. Georgia, home of the Soros-backed Rose Revolution, has slid back into authoritarianism. Soros predicts a civilisational conflict with China and Russia—but his fortune seems powerless to prevent it.
Instead, the story holds out tragic, even radically pessimistic, lessons. No amount of cash can buy a liberal culture where individuals respect each others. To imagine that billionaires can shape the course of history is pure hubris.
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Surviving to be Soros
The great Budapest of the nineteenth century, where Hungarian élites embraced Jews as their own, and the community was among the most assimilated in Europe, was not the one George Soros would inherit. The devastation left behind by the wars needed a scapegoat, and the Jews were ready to hand. Admiral Miklós Horthy’s Right wing government passed the first anti-Jewish laws in 1920. Austria, next door, embraced union with Nazi Germany.
Large-scale antisemitic violence had periodically flared in rural Hungary, historian Robert Nemes reminds us, and many Jews may have believed that this phase would pass. It wouldn’t.
Fears among the Nazi high command that Miklós Horthy, the Hungarian head of state, might stall the full implementation of the Final Solution, as their collaborators in Romania had done, proved unfounded. The Hungarian Jewish community was identified, marked and forced into ghettos. From March to May 1944, they were sent to Auschwitz in numbers so large that ditches had to be dug to burn the corpses since the crematoria at the death camp could not cope.
Tivador Soros had planned for this moment: Through networks of friends and associates, he provided fake documents for family, friends, and later friends of friends. “There is nobody we can turn to,” he would observe. “And since we can’t stand up to Hitler’s fury, we must hide from it.” “I learned the art of survival from a grandmaster,” Soros would say.
Following the liberation of Hungary by the Soviet Union in 1945, Soros found himself living in an authoritarian shadow. He escaped to Switzerland, then London. The indigent immigrant, biographer Michael Kaufman writes, was turned down for a stipend by the Jewish Board of Immigrants—but gained his revenge by claiming benefits for a broken leg, long after it had healed.
The decision to leave Hungary proved a smart one. “Kafka was a realist after all,” lamented the theorist and education minister during the 1956 revolution, Georgy Luckas, as he was held in prison after a failed attempt to break Soviet shackles.
Later, Soros gained entry into the London School of Economics—encountering the work of the philosopher Karl Popper, whose ideas would shape his life.
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The Paradox of the Open Society
Like Soros, Popper—also assimilated Jewish by descent—had fled the rise of Fascism in Europe, leaving Austria on the cusp of unification with Nazi Germany for New Zealand. Following the Second World War, he obtained a position at the LSE. Though much of his most important work revolved around the philosophy of science, Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies argued for a politics that rejected both communism and fascism. Instead, Popper argued for a robust liberalism, founded on individual freedoms.
The attractiveness of this ideal to Soros is self-evident—and, in 1979, he turned to the name of his final-year tutor’s book when he founded the Open Society Foundations. Among his earliest work was providing scholarships to Black students in Apartheid South Africa. Though some individual students benefitted, its systemic impact was limited. Later, the OSF would move into the decaying socialist states of Eastern Europe.
For many modern philosophers, Popper provided an anodyne manifesto for change. The intellectual historian Mark Lilla has described the idea of an open society as an oxymoron, arguing that all societies are characterised by boundaries. For his part, Mark Royer notes that Popper does not address the question of how the open society ought to be governed.
The philosopher Rajeev Bhargava argued that Popper had no theory of why “violence continues to be deployed in the defence of the most despicable and exploitative social orders as well as for their overthrow.” Popper’s commitment to individualism, Bhargava went on, blinded him to the historical reality that “beliefs, desires, intentions and actions are inescapably social.”
Even more important, Popper had no clear answer to the questions of how open societies were to use their power, or closed societies were to be defeated. Soros welcomed the collapse of the Soviet Union—and pushed the West, ineffectually, to economically aid its reconstruction, But it is not clear what his views were on the United States’ own efforts to undermine democracy, from Vietnam to the Middle East and Latin America.
The brilliant Christopher Hitchens once pointed to the ideological paradoxes of geopolitics. Anthony Eden, the British prime minister who crafted the invasion of the Suez canal in 1952, made little effort to hide his hatred of Jews. British radio, on the eve of the invasion, described Egypt’s nationalist leader, Abdel Gamal Nasser, as a “secret Zionist and also a secret Freemason.” Yet, he succeeded in drawing Israel into an alliance against Nasser.
In an unpublished 1960 essay, the sociologist Norman Birnbaum gently mocked Popper, suggesting it derived from British politics “prescriptions applicable to all of mankind’s ideological ills.” “The writings of Professor Isaiah Berlin, Michael Polanyi and Karl Popper are adduced wherever British self-congratulation seeks intellectually reputable credentials.”
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The billionaire who failed?
For years now, Soros has thrown his weight behind globalised regulation of the financial and geopolitical system—pointing to his own fortune as evidence of the perils that confront capitalism. In 1992, he mounted a infamous speculative attack on the Bank of England, forcing the United Kingdom to devalue the pound and leave the European Currency Mechanism. Economic revival followed, but Soros also lit the fires of Euroscepticism, undermining his own political commitment to the European Union as an agent of change.
The similar attack mounted by Soros on Thai currency in 1997 sparked off a financial crisis across Asia, inflicting enormous hardship on the poor. The economist Paul Krugman wrote that Soros and his like “actually do their best to trigger that crisis for fun and profit.”
For Soros, though, his life as an investor and his philanthropic commitment exist on two separate planes.
Ever since 2004, Soros increasingly turned his attention from the world to the United States—the triumph of President George W. Bush shaking his certainty that history was headed in a benign direction. Ever since the defeat of Bush’s rival Presidential candidate John Kerry, Soros has funnelled millions of dollars into Democratic party campaigns. In spite of his reputation for radicalism, though, his choice of candidates have been firmly establishmentarian: among them, Hilary Clinton and now-President Joe Biden.
Soros might be, as his critics contend, a billionaire with a messiah complex. There’s little doubt, though, that his money has brought some change to some lives, even if his grand objectives have dissolved in the face of reality. There is little doubt his life has been better spent than one devoted to buying big cars, jewellery or art.
The author is National Security Editor, ThePrint. He tweets @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Anurag Chaubey)