4Liberty: LGBTQ Community Became Viktor Orban’s Latest Scapegoat

In the second half of 2019, racism was the next topic to be tested, and the Hungarian Roma community became the focus point of Orbán’s hateful rhetoric. Orbán started with a harsh anti-Roma narrative, then denied financial compensation for Roma children who were forced to learn in segregated schools for years. Orbán portrayed the victims of segregated education as people who are “looking for free money”.[...]

In May 2020 Fidesz made a radical move: they completely banned legal gender recognition for Hungarian transgender and intersex people. This is an unprecedented phenomenon in Europe: legislators usually work towards a more equal society, not the other way around. This law ended a 20 year practise with which transgender people could (although, though a very long and malfunctioning, but still existing process) get the personal documents that provide their basic safety within the society. [...]

These cases show how Fidesz shifted from the “behind closed doors” narrative to the “pathologizing” narrative. And when Fidesz started talking about changing what LGBTQ people are doing in the privacy of their own home by sending them to conversion therapies or depriving them of their right to adopt, fundamental radical groups started to disrupt LGBTQ cultural indoor events.

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Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty: Moldova's Orthodox Church Lashes Out At 'Anti-Christ Plot' To Develop Virus Vaccine

 The Moscow-affiliated Moldovan Orthodox Church has called on the country's leadership to ensure that a potential future anti-coronavirus vaccine will not be made compulsory, claiming conspiracy by a "world anti-Christ system" that will allegedly insert microchips into humans to control them via 5G technology. [...]

Such accusations are also present in the Moldovan church's statement, which says that "Bill Gates is considered the man responsible for the creation of a technology allowing people to be microchipped through a vaccine that would insert in their bodies nanoparticles that interact with 5G waves and allow people to be remotely controlled." [...]

The Moldovan Orthodox Church is autonomous but operates under the jurisdiction of the Russian Orthodox Church. The Romanian Orthodox Church's Metropolis of Bessarabia is the country's other major church.

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Jacobin Magazine: After We Sacked the Ministers

Yet there was also a big difference with the movement of three decades hence: the social forces involved. If by the early 1990s the Communist regime was economically and politically on its knees, practically awaiting the final push that would send it tumbling, the current political establishment is strongly supported by economic magnates who would not wish to see them replaced. In the 2019 movement protesters kept politicians of all sides at bay, blocking their usual attempts to blend with the crowd so as to gain political capital. This was crucial in confronting the prime minister with the creative discontent of the country’s educated youth. [...]

Indeed, it’s no surprise that the judicial system is at the center of the current conflict. The three major political parties, PS (Socialist Party, now in government), PD (Democratic Party), and LSI (Socialist Movement for Integration) have all been involved in major corruption scandals and abuses of power in recent years. These parties do refer to different electorates — PS is rooted in the old Hoxhaist party and its intelligentsia, whereas PD is built on the families persecuted by that regime as well as among the largely poor working class from northern Albania; meanwhile, LSI maintains its electorate primarily through rewarding its activists with public sector jobs. But what unites all three is their common entrenchment in right-wing, pro-privatization policies.

Beyond the theatrics of the mutual allegations these parties exchange, they have together contrived to maintain a dysfunctional judicial system that holds no one accountable for even flagrant wrongdoing. In Albania, the legal process is a mere auction for the highest bidder. The power of money in influencing justice is apparent in the spread of property speculation, as public assets are passed into the hands of private “developers.” The status of properties supposedly protected by the state — such as natural reserves, cultural heritage sites, or public buildings like the National Theatre — is illegally changed in order to allow for the construction of private resorts or urban skyscrapers. Moreover, the ambiguous legal status of property owners since the change of regime — for decades, intentionally left unclear and open to speculation — has allowed the current government to undertake megaprojects, for instance the construction of a ring-road in Tirana which would destroy the homes of dozens of families. [...]

The Albanian president — former LSI leader Ilir Meta — joined this strategy by decreeing a new date for the local elections, October 13. Meta labeled the justice reform an initiative by shadowy forces sponsored by Hungarian-Jewish billionaire George Soros, while comparing his own opposition to the stances adopted by various national heroes. The president’s decree, however, was ignored both by PS and Western functionaries, who have shown unprecedented support for Edi Rama’s government in their pursuit of the rapid implementation of the reform.

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The Guardian: Think Republicans are disconnected from reality? It's even worse among liberals

The survey, published by the thinktank More in Common as part of its Hidden Tribes of America project, was based on a sample of more than 2,000 people. One of the study’s findings: the wilder a person’s guess as to what the other party is thinking, the more likely they are to also personally disparage members of the opposite party as mean, selfish or bad. Not only do the two parties diverge on a great many issues, they also disagree on what they disagree on.

This much we might guess. But what’s startling is the further finding that higher education does not improve a person’s perceptions – and sometimes even hurts it. In their survey answers, highly educated Republicans were no more accurate in their ideas about Democratic opinion than poorly educated Republicans. For Democrats, the education effect was even worse: the more educated a Democrat is, according to the study, the less he or she understands the Republican worldview. [...]

What could be going on? Bubble-ism, the report suggests. Even more than their Republican counterparts, highly educated Democrats tend to live in exclusively Democratic enclaves. The more they report “almost all my friends hold the same political views”, the worse their guesses on what Republicans think. [...]

There are other promising signs of middle ground. In response to the violence and death in Charlottesville, Virginia, big donors to the feuding parties, George Soros and David Koch, jointly funded the After Charlottesville Project to curb online calls to violence. The New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Texas senator Ted Cruz have co-sponsored a congressional bill preventing lawmakers from entering lucrative second careers as corporate lobbyists. Conservatives and liberals united to push for ex-felons in Florida to win the right to vote in 2018, and, this year to push modest but significant reform of our draconian criminal justice laws through Congress.

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Politico: Orbán defiant as conservative critique grows

EPP leaders were outraged this week when the Hungarian government unveiled a taxpayer-financed campaign attacking Juncker, along with the Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros, and accusing Brussels of plotting to impose migration policies that go against Hungary's interests.

So far, party chieftains, including the EPP president, Joseph Daul, have protected Orbán, mindful that the 12 seats Fidesz holds in the European Parliament are important for the EPP's majority and its future election prospects. According to EPP rules, the suspension or exclusion of a member party can be triggered by “seven ordinary or associated member parties from five different countries.”

Earlier Friday, Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said he found the wording of Orbán’s campaign “unacceptable,” according to local media reports.

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The New York Review of Books: The Fake Threat of Jewish Communism

Trying to discredit powerful political myths with mere facts, as we know all too well today, is a frustrating endeavor. Thus Hanebrink seeks instead to understand the historical background and the “cultural logic” of the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism—how it functioned and morphed through different phases. Ultimately Judeo-Bolshevism embodied, in the form of “Asiatic barbarism,” an imagined threat to national sovereignty, ethnic homogeneity, and Western civilization conceived as traditional European Christian hegemony. It fused, in short, political, racial, and cultural threats into a single “specter haunting Europe.”

Hanebrink notes that amid the exhaustion, defeat, and political dissolution of many European countries at the end of World War I, the threat of the spread of Bolshevik revolution from Russia into Europe caused not only widespread fear and loathing but fear and loathing that identified Jews as the real cause of Bolshevism. He is correct, I think, to point out that this pervasive identification required more than the prominence of Jewish revolutionary leaders, and that Judeo-Bolshevism was constructed from the “raw materials” of earlier anti-Semitism. For Hanebrink the “three venerable pillars” of anti-Jewish thought were the attributions to the Jews of social disharmony, conspiracy, and fanaticism, which made Judeo-Bolshevism both a coherent idea and a ubiquitous, self-evident assumption. [...]

Atrocities against Jews led to Jewish appeals to the Allies and the subsequent imposition of minority rights treaties on Eastern European nations. In a vicious circle, these regimes in turn resented Jews as the cause of this infringement on their sovereignty, which they saw as further evidence of Jewish disloyalty. They insisted even more vehemently on the Judeo-Bolshevik connection to justify their past mistreatment of Jews and successfully exploited the Allies’ desire for a cordon sanitaire in Eastern Europe to prevent the further spread of Bolshevism. For instance, the Polish army received crucial military aid to help it resist the Soviet invasion of 1920 even as it interned many of its own Jewish soldiers. All of this, it must be emphasized, took place before history’s most notorious purveyor and champion of the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism had emerged from obscurity on the streets of Munich. [...]

The Allied occupation, the war crimes trials and denazification, but above all the division of Germany and the onset of the cold war led to the emergence in Western Europe of an anti-communism that was pro-democratic, pro-American, and not anti-Semitic. Underlying this transformation were two concepts. The first was that of totalitarianism, by which discredited and defeated fascism was equated with communism. The German churches in particular—previously highly nationalistic, authoritarian, and anti-Semitic, and thus all too often fellow travelers of the Nazi regime’s campaigns against liberalism, Marxism, and Jews—now portrayed themselves as resisters to and victims of that regime, which like the Soviet Union had manifested the evils of the secular, materialistic, ungodly state run amok. West Germany’s new self-image of Christian Democracy pitted against totalitarianism dovetailed with the second concept—the American notion of Judeo-Christian values as the basis of both democracy and Western civilization in its cold war opposition to godless communism. By embracing the cold war, assimilationist American Jews finally severed the old identification between Jews and Bolsheviks, but at the cost of giving priority to anti-communism over Holocaust memory. It was not until the late 1970s that the Holocaust began to obtain the position it currently holds in American consciousness.

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The New Yorker: Viktor Orbán’s Far-Right Vision for Europe

Observers disagree about whether Orbán’s shift to the right was purely strategic. “He planned for years how to get where he is,” Scheppele, the Princeton legal scholar, told me. She believes that if the left had been weaker in the nineties, Orbán would have moved in that direction. In 1995, Scheppele accompanied Orbán on a visit to an ethnic-Hungarian enclave in Ukraine, to observe as he tested out a new nationalist message. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Scheppele said. “Orbán’s mind is like a tractor beam that can melt even the strongest resistance.” She continued, “He feels any constraint, no matter how small, as if he is in a prison, and he is always trying to bust out.”[...]

“They do everything by law—there will never be an illegal action,” Scheppele told me. “Any one law didn’t look that bad, but if you stack them together it creates this web. That’s why the E.U. is unable to cope. They look at one thing at a time, but Orbán is a systemic thinker.” Orbán created a counterterrorism force, which initially had apparent constitutional constraints on its surveillance powers. Subsequently, in several paragraphs inserted into a law on reservoirs and waterworks, he invalidated the restraints. [...]

Opposition politicians and investigative journalists maintain that Orbán has become fantastically rich through companies that are registered in the names of family members. His extended family has shown a special affection for buying the old villas of the Jewish bourgeoisie. A stone quarry near Felcsút has earned Orbán’s father millions of euros; his son-in-law receives E.U. money in the form of contracts for installing street lights and making tourism-related renovations. Lőrinc Mészáros, a former pipe fitter from Felcsút who connected with Orbán on the soccer field, in 1999, won a slew of state construction contracts. (He helped build the town’s stadium.) In 2010, when Orbán returned to power, Mészáros owned one company; now he owns two hundred and three, and is, by most accounts, one of the richest men in Hungary. His gated estate spreads into the hills at the edge of Felcsút, where he served as mayor from 2010 to 2018, joining the eighty-five per cent of mayoralties and local councils controlled by Fidesz. The Princeton political scientist Jan-Werner Müller has written, “Certainly, elections will continue to be held in Hungary, Orbán’s opponents will be allowed to demonstrate in Budapest, critical voices will find a niche somewhere in the media. Power really changing hands, however, is increasingly unlikely.” [...]

Four years later, Orbán had refined his idea. “There is an alternative to liberal democracy: it is called Christian democracy,” he said at this summer’s gathering. “And we must show that the liberal élite can be replaced with a Christian-democratic élite.” Orbán offered some clarification. “Liberal democracy is in favor of multiculturalism, while Christian democracy gives priority to Christian culture,” he said. “Liberal democracy is pro-immigration, while Christian democracy is anti-immigration.”

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AJ+: The Origins Of Anti-Semitism In America

Anti-Semitism, or hatred of Jews, has a long and often violent history in the U.S. It’s also frequently used by white nationalists and others on the right wing to rally against social change.

Social Europe: CEU And Hungary’s War Against The Enlightenment

Hungary’s current political leaders, most of whom were socialized in the ‘70s and ‘80s during the Communist era, seem fully at ease with the notion that a government can dictate what is taught in schools and universities, as illustrated by the recent removal of gender studies from a list of approved postgraduate programs in accordance with a decree signed by Hungary’s Prime Minister. Similarly, the ruling Fidesz Party appears to have no qualms about the influence it wields over the choice of news items carried by most of Hungary’s print and electronic media. Marius Dragomir, Director of the Central European University’s (CEU) Center for Media, Data and Society, has estimated that “some 90 percent of all media in Hungary is now directly or indirectly controlled by Fidesz”.[...]

As under Communism, ideological conformity – or at least a willingness not to question the core values and assumptions of the ruling regime or the private and public behaviour of key figures in the administration – is both expected and enforced. Sanctions may include withdrawal of state funding, punitive taxation, the imposition of complex and restrictive regulations, loss of employment or public shaming. To date, there has been no need for Fidesz to resort to the cruder, less sophisticated methods favoured by Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, and Turkey’s ruler, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, in dealing with their opponents.[...]

CEU’s ‘sins’, in the government’s eyes, are many and grievous. As indicated above, it is largely immune to the forms of pressure and manipulation that have allowed the government to exercise ever greater control over other Hungarian universities. Equally disturbingly, at least for Prime Minister Orbán, CEU is a self-avowedly liberal institution. As noted by the Canadian scholar and former politician, Michael Ignatieff, now CEU’s Rector and President, its mission is “to teach the values of open society: free minds, free politics and free institutions”. This open, pluralist political and intellectual vision is starkly at odds with Orbán’s declared intention of turning Hungary into an “illiberal democracy”. [...]

Perhaps one of CEU’s most important contributions to intellectual life in Hungary has been to host regular public lectures by prominent intellectuals from around the world. In the past year or so, visiting speakers have included the French economic historian Thomas Piketty, the Princeton-based political scientist Jan-Werner Müller, the Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan and the Oxford historian, Timothy Garton Ash. Without the stimulus provided by such widely acclaimed scholars, the quality and vitality of Hungary’s intellectual life, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, will inevitably decline.

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New Statesman: British politics is being destroyed by a total lack of shame

The Conservative Party has said, rightly, that the ongoing problems with anti-Semitism in the Labour ranks are a scandal. But its correct criticisms of the Labour Party, ought to, if she had any sense of shame, mean that Kemi Badenoch wouldn’t have felt able to say that when the Muslim Council of Britain says there are institutional problems with Islamophobia in the Tory Party, it does so for a “political motive”. [...]

Scruton’s thesis is that the problem with the European project is that it has become an empire, that while there are good and bad empires, good empires seek to “protect local loyalties and customs under a canopy of civilisation and law”, but bad empires have no respect for the need for nations and their traditions. The European project sees national pride only through the prism of the destructive conflicts in the first half of the 20th century. Although he is more rhetorically sympathetic to Hungarian Jews’ inability to distinguish between positive and negative forms of nationalism, it is impossible to rescue this section from the charge of repeating a series of anti-Semitic tropes: that Jewish intellectuals and George Soros in particular form part of a supra-national project, and the classic “divided loyalties” trope that Jews are uneasy with their own nations. The rhetorical acknowledgement of existing problems of anti-Semitism in Hungarian society should be taken no more seriously than the same in the god knows how many rhetorical flourishes made by Labour politicians on the issue. [...]

This lack of shame allows MPs to, with a straight face, retain ministerial office in the face of scandal, defend the indefensible and powers the breakdown of our political norms. As so often when politics breaks down, the first victims are those least able to defend themselves: in this case, the poor and people with Jewish and Muslim cultural heritage. While we ought to care about this in its own right, history should teach us that what starts with bad treatment of minorities very rarely ends without bad treatment of everyone else.

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The Huffington Post: Hungary’s Anti-George Soros Campaign Is A Cautionary Tale For The U.S.

CEU’s billionaire founder, George Soros, believed that the region, with the university as its engine, could become a powerhouse for democracy and truly vibrant societies. In the subsequent years, CEU became a global hub, attracting about 1,400 students from more than 100 countries. When I worked there, from 2010 until 2012, it was a place of incredible promise. Students held human rights workshops, faculty led classes on extremism and nationalism, speakers from around the world came to the ’90s-era auditorium to lecture on bioethics and Ottoman history. Roma students were given opportunities to access higher education they have long been denied.[...]

It’s Hungarians and Hungary who stand to lose the most from CEU’s departure. As one of Hungary’s highest-ranked educational institutions, in 2015 alone CEU drew 9 billion forints (over $30 million) in research funds into the country and calculated in-country expenditures of over $35 million. The university just completed a multimillion-euro renovation project in the heart of Budapest’s historic downtown. While the university says it will continue some operations in Hungary, it’s clear the local economy will take a massive hit when it decamps to Vienna. [...]

It’s part of a pattern that seems to be consuming Eastern and Central Europe: In 2017, the democracy-monitoring NGO Freedom House gave Hungary the lowest ranking of the nations it monitors in Central Europe, and lowered its overall democracy scores for 18 of the 29 countries in Eastern Europe and central Asia. And it’s all a little too familiar for anyone watching from the United States, where attacks on the press, electoral suppression and xenophobia have led us into a very dark moment.

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CityLab: On Weaponizing Migration

The menace that has triggered this show of force is an unarmed group of migrants—at least half of whom are women and children—several hundred miles away. Most are attempting to flee violence and escape poverty in Central America; a smaller subset are people who have been previously deported from the U.S., and want to return to their families in America. Such migrant caravans aren’t new: In the past, activists from Pueblo Sin Fronteras, a group that has been providing humanitarian aide and legal help to migrants for 15 years, have assembled these groups in order to ensure safer passage to the U.S. and draw attention to the conditions they face in their home countries.[...]

Historians trace the origins of today’s refugee crisis from Central America to the Cold War policies of President Ronald Reagan. The rhetoric has parallels too. In 1983, Reagan warned Americans that if they rejected his plan to send military and economic aid to Central America, “a tidal wave of refugees” would come crashing onto the borders. “This time they’ll be ‘feet people’ and not ‘boat people’ —swarming into our country,” he said at the time. More recently, Barack Obama and David Cameron have also used words like “waves” and “swarms” to suggest vast numbers of outsiders coming ashore, overwhelming American towns and cities. [...]

In an interview with Public Radio International, Professor Gregory Lee at the University of Lyon called this narrative of a nation being consumed by refugees the “inundation” metaphor. His own research explores its usage in the context of immigration restrictions on Asians in the late 19th and early 20th century. The passage of these laws required the portrayal of Asians as the unassimilable other—a group that would drain American society and pose existential threats to its culture. Hence, the racist, dehumanizing terms “yellow peril” and “Asiatic horde.” Fast forward to post-9/11 America, and the same tropes persist for Muslim and Arabs living in the U.S.[...]

When it comes to migration, Americans across the political isle share misconceptions. Simply correcting them will not be enough. “What those who seek to oppose Trump’s migration policies need is a compelling narrative of their own,” Greenhill writes in Foreign Affairs, “one that takes voter concerns seriously, defining problems responsibly and offering comprehensible and attainable solutions.“

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Reuters: Three liberal prophets of doom

In the past several months, three leading liberal figures, each with international reputations, have given speeches in defense of liberal values and practice. Two of these – the billionaire financier and philanthropist George Soros and the French President Emmanuel Macron – have addressed the EU’s present travails and likely future. The third, former U.S. President Barack Obama, as befitted a former leader of the still-hegemonic world power, addressed more global issues. [...]

Europe’s existential danger is “no longer a figure of speech… it is the harsh reality,” said Soros. A passion for austerity had turned the rich countries (especially Germany) into creditors, and the struggling (notably Greece and Italy) into debtors – creating “a relationship that is neither voluntary nor equal.” The Hungarian-born Soros, reviled in his birth country by the government led by rightwing nationalist Viktor Orban (who, in his student days, benefited from Soros’ largesse) is rendered especially pessimistic by the drift towards authoritarian rule of the Central European states, particularly Hungary and Poland. It’s a drift which runs directly counter to Soros’ earlier optimism that, with some assistance, the peoples of the former communist states of Central Europe could become citizens with the same civic and democratic rights as in the Western European countries. [...]

The urgency of Macron’s conviction that the Union must integrate or disintegrate has found few enthusiastic takers in the EU. Netherlands Prime Minister Mark Rutte has said d that the EU could fulfil its basic promise only if individual member states are strong and able to maintain their own identity. In Germany, where voters are concerned about issues like the cost of Macron’s euro zone reform plans, Chancellor Angela Merkel – much damaged by her party’s loss of support in this year’s elections and a quarrel with her main coalition partner, the Christian Social Union – has to be even more cautious than usual. [...]

Poverty, discrimination, violence all remain, sometimes growing – as does inequality. Elites are more closed off from the mass of the people; solidarity in nations wilts; the reckless behavior which precipitated the 2008 banking crisis prompted spikes of mistrust in every kind of leadership – political, financial, corporate. Then there’s politics. “Unfortunately, too much of politics today seems to reject the very concept of objective truth,” said Obama. “People just make stuff up.” The former president did not mention the name of America’s current president, but few doubt that he was referring to Donald Trump when he mentioned “the utter loss of shame among political leaders, where they’re caught in a lie and they just double down and they lie some more.”

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Haaretz: Splitting the EU: Israel’s Tightening Alliance With Central Europe’s Nationalist Leaders

hese two countries, led by ultra-nationalist right-wing leaders, have been challenging the EU in recent years, using the massive wave of migration in 2015 and the rise in global terror to cast doubt on the common liberal values on which the EU was founded. Hungary, led by Orban, is the extreme symbol of the opposition. During his three terms in office Orban has led a campaign to restrict democracy in his country through a legislative assault. This included limits on civil society and on media freedom of expression, as well restrictions imposed on the courts. Part of this campaign over the last two years has included attacks against the Hungarian-born Jewish-American billionaire George Soros, who donates money to human rights groups in Hungary. Netanyahu also attacks Soros as part of his campaign against left-wing NGOs. The Hungarian government’s inflammatory campaign is perceived by many Hungarian Jews as replete with anti-Semitic elements. [...]

Israel has been exploiting this internal, complex and delicate European dissent in recent years in order to change the way decisions about its policies are made in the EU. Observers in Brussels point to a chilling effect created by the alliance between Israel and the V-4 on the ability to issue joint statements in the name of all 28 EU members. “Netanyahu succeeded in using this group in order to undermine European unity,” they say. This effect is not limited to just these four countries. There are similar ties with Austria, Romania, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Cyprus and even Greece. “When the Union wants to issue something in the name of all its members, as happens in foreign affairs, there are specific cases in which Hungary objects or demands a softening of the criticism of Israel, to the extent that other countries cannot agree, so that the declaration is void,” say these observers. [...]

Dr Nimrod Goren, the head of the think tank, Mitvim, the Israel Institute for Regional Foreign Policies, believes that fostering relations with these countries at the expense of larger liberal European countries is a mistake which harms important friendships. “Israel has traditionally preferred strengthening ties with specific countries, but in the past it recognized the importance of its ties with the EU, in terms of common interests and values. This was never politically controversial. In recent years there has been a change and the ties with the Visegrad group reflect this well. The choice of these countries attests to Israel’s moving away from the values of a liberal democracy. The Economist’s democracy index ranks all these countries lower than Israel. These should not be Israel’s allies in a continent which prides itself on democratic ideals and human rights. Germany, Britain and France are much more important for ensuring Israel’s security and for fulfilling its national interests. Choosing the V-4 distances Israel even more from the EU, which is investing a lot in contending with challenges posed by these countries. It also contradicts Israel’s efforts to fight extreme right-wing elements in other European countries, as well as Israel’s ties with Cyprus and Greece, which consider democracy a strong binding factor to Israel. Israel should diversify its foreign policy but without losing its moral compass.”

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The Guardian: The George Soros philosophy – and its fatal flaw

Unlike Gates, whose philanthropy focuses mostly on ameliorative projects such as eradicating malaria, Soros truly wants to transform national and international politics and society. Whether or not his vision can survive the wave of antisemitic, Islamophobic and xenophobic rightwing nationalism ascendant in the US and Europe remains to be seen. What is certain is that Soros will spend the remainder of his life attempting to make sure it does. [...]

But it was more than a lack of political will that constrained the west during this moment. In the era of “shock therapy”, western capital did flock to eastern Europe – but this capital was invested mostly in private industry, as opposed to democratic institutions or grassroots community-building, which helped the kleptocrats and anti-democrats seize and maintain power. Soros had identified a key problem but was unable to appreciate how the very logic of capitalism, which stressed profit above all, would necessarily undermine his democratic project. He remained too wedded to the system he had conquered. [...]

Soros argued that the history of the post-cold war world, as well as his personal experiences as one of international finance’s most successful traders, demonstrated that unregulated global capitalism undermined open society in three distinct ways. First, because capital could move anywhere to avoid taxation, western nations were deprived of the finances they needed to provide citizens with public goods. Second, because international lenders were not subject to much regulation, they often engaged in “unsound lending practices” that threatened financial stability. Finally, because these realities increased domestic and international inequality, Soros feared they would encourage people to commit unspecified “acts of desperation” that could damage the global system’s viability. [...]

The George W Bush administration’s militarist response to the attacks of September 11 compelled Soros to shift his attention from economics to politics. Everything about the Bush administration’s ideology was anathema to Soros. As Soros declared in his 2004 The Bubble of American Supremacy, Bush and his coterie embraced “a crude form of social Darwinism” that assumed that “life is a struggle for survival, and we must rely mainly on the use of force to survive”. Whereas before September 11, “the excesses of [this] false ideology were kept within bounds by the normal functioning of our democracy”, after it Bush “deliberately fostered the fear that has gripped the country” to silence opposition and win support for a counterproductive policy of militaristic unilateralism. To Soros, assertions such as “either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists” eerily echoed the rhetoric of the Nazis and Soviets, which he hoped to have left behind in Europe. Soros worried, wisely, that Bush would lead the nation into “a permanent state of war” characterised by foreign intervention and domestic oppression. The president was thus not only a threat to world peace, but also to the very idea of open society. [...]

Bush’s victory convinced Soros that the US would survive as an open society only if Americans began to acknowledge “that the truth matters”; otherwise, they would continue to support the war on terror and its concomitant horrors. How Soros could change American minds, though, remained unclear.

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Haaretz: Israel's Long History of Cooperation With Ruthless, anti-Semitic Dictators

In mid-July, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will host the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban for a state visit. The leader of the left-wing Meretz party, Tamar Zandberg, has been among those calling on Netanyahu to cancel the visit because of Orban’s anti-Semitic attacks on the Jewish philanthropist George Soros during his recent election campaign. [...]

Begin cooperated closely with the murderous Galtieri regime in Argentina during the early 1980s. During this period, Israel sold Argentina over 20 Nesher fighter jets as well as numerous Skyhawks and Mirage jets and other military hardware. This was controversial for several reasons. [...]

"This worsening anti-Semitism is the latest expression of hatred against the Jews in Argentina. Leading anti-Semites who themselves identify with Hitler and Mussolini serve in high educational and cultural posts in the government. There have been hundreds of anti-Semitic acts against Jews. Yet in its seven years in power the Argentine government has arrested not one of the perpetrators of these acts."

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Vox: Hungary just passed a “Stop Soros” law that makes it illegal to help undocumented migrants

This week, Hungary passed what the government dubbed the “Stop Soros” law, named after Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros. The new law, drafted by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, creates a new category of crime, called “promoting and supporting illegal migration” — essentially, banning individuals and organizations from providing any kind of assistance to undocumented immigrants. This is so broadly worded that, in theory, the government could arrest someone who provides food to an undocumented migrant on the street or attends a political rally in favor of their rights. [...]

“We are fighting an enemy that is different from us. Not open, but hiding; not straightforward but crafty; not honest but base; not national but international; does not believe in working but speculates with money; does not have its own homeland but feels it owns the whole world,” Orban said in a characteristic anti-Soros tirade in March.  [...]

There’s still a lot of opposition to Orbán’s policies in Hungary, particularly in the capital city of Budapest. But Orbán is popular with a pretty significant chunk of Hungarian society. In the April 2018 parliamentary elections, the Fidesz party won a little under 50 percent of the vote. The next-closest party, the even-more right-wing Jobbik, won 19 percent. [...]

Soros’s aim, according to Orbán, is to undermine the soul of European Christian society — to hollow out the West from the inside out. Soros’s humanitarian activity is supposedly secretly indoctrinating Hungarians in a bid to let them acquiesce to mass migration. Once Soros and his allies succeed in opening the borders, Orbán warns, Muslim refugees will flood into Hungary and the rest of Europe — and soon the continent will become unrecognizable.

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The Guardian: Hungary is making a mockery of ‘EU values’. It’s time to kick it out

Consider the latest act in Hungary’s slide towards what its prime minister Viktor Orbán boasts is an “illiberal democracy”. The country’s parliament has not just passed a law making claims for asylum almost impossible: the very act of helping migrants and refugees has been criminalised. Furthermore, a 25% tax has been slapped on funding for NGOs that “support immigration”: in practice, that means having anything positive to say about immigration.

In the same week, the musical Billy Elliot was cancelled in Budapest after a vicious homophobic campaign by the pro-government press, including the claim in one government-linked newspaper that it could “transform Hungarian boys into homosexuals”. [...]

But Hungary, along with increasingly authoritarian Poland, is making an utter mockery of the EU’s stated commitment to democracy and human rights. In 2016 Luxembourg’s foreign minister called for Hungary to be expelled from the EU because of its treatment of refugees. He was right. Yes, the EU is buffeted by multiple crises, from Brexit to the assumption of power of a Eurosceptic Italian government. But its acceptance of its own member states succumbing to authoritarianism may prove its greatest existential threat of all.

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Haaretz: The One Place Europe's anti-Semitic Far Right Is Confident of Winning the Jewish Vote

Last week, the German, Austrian and Italian ministers of the interior initiated an "axis" of states aiming at stopping immigration to Europe, confirming their commitment to an already thriving reactionary nationalistic trend in both eastern as well as western Europe. [...]

It was the Austrian Chancellor, Sebastian Kurz, who after his short visit to Israel last week (re)coined the term "Axis" for the Berlin-Vienna-Rome anti-immigrant alliance, a term which even people with relatively crude historical antennae will recognize for its historical resonances.

That was straight after getting an enthusiastic "kosher certification" from Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, thanks to Kurz's speech in Jerusalem, in which he admitted that Austrians were not only victims but also perpetrators during WWII. Seemingly, having paid his dues to the past, he felt free to move on with an ethnocentric policy without risk of an unfavorable reaction from Israel. [...]

We should not forget: Not long-ago Netanyahu supported Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s anti-Semitic anti-Soros campaign (because of Soros’ support for the Israeli "enemies" of Netanyahu) thus overruling the deep, explicit opposition of Hungary’s Jewish community to this campaign. [...]

Far right populist parties in Europe use their support for the current Israeli government policies to gain legitimacy, as they simultaneously restate their commitment to a racist and anti-democratic agenda that is in marked contrast to the founding values of the European Union.

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Al Jazeera: The Soros obsession: Why far-right conspiracy theories prevail

Alexander Reid Ross, author of Against the Fascist Creep, explained that "Soros conspiracies have always been a marker for the radical right as opposition to mainstream conservatism".

Explaining that such theories found currency among some leftists in the past, Ross noted that Soros has been blamed for economic crises, the tanking of currencies worldwide and backing an uprising against Serbia's former ultra-nationalist ruler Slobodan Milosevic, who was toppled in 2001. [...]

"In a way, he fits the perfect sort of historic epistemological category in the national socialist tradition," Reid Ross told Al Jazeera. [...]

According to Reid Ross, this rhetoric became prevalent among the far right during the era of the Tea Party, the ultra-conservative movement that sprung up in the wake of Barack Obama's 2008 election.

In 2010, the once popular right-wing Fox News commentator Glenn Beck aired a now infamous series deeming Soros as "the puppet master" pulling the strings behind global political developments.  

Pushing the conspiracy that Soros was complicit in the Holocaust, Beck said he had bankrolled civil society and liberal organisations as part of a plot to "form a shadow government, using humanitarian aid as a cover".

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