Boots smashing in human faces forever, thanks to Georgie Porgie

George Soros voids forth a disgusting stream of offal in the guise of "political commentary."

President George W. Bush's second inaugural address set forth an ambitious vision of the role of the United States in advancing the cause of freedom worldwide, fueling worldwide speculation over the course of American foreign policy during the next four years. The ideas expressed in Bush's speech thus deserve serious consideration.

It is too bad we won't find it here.

"It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture," Bush declared, "with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world."

It would be nice to think so, but Bush and his fellow politicians are addicted to the power vibe, baybee.

There was a bow to diplomacy in the assurance that fulfilling this mission "is not primarily the task of arms, though we will defend our friends and ourselves by force of arms when necessary." Similarly, Bush recognized that outsiders couldn't force liberty on people. Instead, "Freedom by its nature must be chosen and defended by citizens and sustained by the rule of law and the protection of minorities."

Nothing but classical liberalism here, not that Soros would know anything about that.

Finally, there was acceptance of diversity, for "when the soul of a nation finally speaks, the institutions that arise may reflect customs and traditions very different from our own. America will not impose our own style of government on the unwilling. Our goal instead is to help others find their own voice, attain their own freedom and make their own way."

I agree with this goal, and have devoted the last 15 years of my life and several billion dollars of my fortune to attaining it. Yet I find myself in sharp disagreement with the Bush administration. It is not only that there is a large gap between official words and deeds; I find that the words sometimes directly contradict the deeds in a kind of Orwellian doublespeak.

We're about to get an earful from a master at the game. Stay awake, boys and girls.

When Bush declared war on terror, he used that war to invade Iraq. When no connection with Al-Qaeda could be established and no weapons of mass destruction could be found, he declared that we invaded Iraq to introduce democracy. In Iraq and beyond, when Bush says that "freedom will prevail," many interpret him to mean that America will prevail. This impugned America's motives and deprived the U.S. of whatever moral authority the country once had to intervene in other countries' domestic affairs. If, for example, America offers support to Iranian students who are genuinely striving for greater freedom, they are now more likely to be endangered by American support, as the regime's hard-liners are strengthened.

Oh, boo hoo. Transnational socialists like Soros have been whining about American power long before 9/11 or even 1/20/01. The only thing that Soros is really afraid of is that America WILL help the Iranian youth overthrow their mullahs, thereby discrediting his filthy little fascistic organizations like the U.N., which rejoices in genocide and oppression.

To explain what is wrong with the new Bush doctrine, I have to invoke the concept of open society. That is the concept that guides me in my efforts to foster freedom around the world. The work has been carried out through foundations operating on the ground and led by citizens who understand the limits of the possible in their countries. Occasionally, when a repressive regime expels our foundation, the Open Society Institute, as happened in Belarus and Uzbekistan, we operate from the outside.

Soros is parasitizing the concept from Karl Popper, whose forays into political philosophy were nothing but disastrous. Popper's OPEN SOCIETY AND ITS ENEMIES is infamously unfair to those philosophers, like Plato and Hegel, that Sir Karl attacks. This makes his entire defense of liberalism based on "falsification" that Soros appeals to a self-refuting sludge.

Paradoxically, the most successful open society in the world, the U.S., does not properly understand the first principles of an open society; indeed, its current leadership actively disavows them. The concept of open society is based on recognition that nobody possesses the ultimate truth, that one may be wrong. Yet being wrong is precisely the possibility that Bush refuses to acknowledge, and his denial appeals to a significant segment of the American public. An equally significant segment is appalled. This has left the U.S. not only deeply divided, but also at loggerheads with much of the rest of the world, which considers its policies high-handed and arbitrary.

There is nothing "paradoxical" about the fact that "the most open society in the world" affirms objective morality. The very fact that we have confidence in the truth and our ability to find it enables us to "tolerate" the search for truth wherever it is found without fear that the process will "contaminate" us. The one who really refuses to re-examine his positions here is Soros, of course. As evidenced by his constant reiteration of "failure" in Iraq and his refusal to acknowledge the known existence of uranium stockpiles there, he is completely impervious to counter-evidence against his little transnationalist fascist fantasy-world, where a velvet-soled shoe stamps into non-European faces forever. Elsewhere, I have written about the disastrous results that Soros's attitude towards truth had for Weimar Germany. Jacques Maritain's comments are appropriate here as well:

The problem of truth and human fellowship is important for democratic societies; it seems to me to be particularly important for this country (the USA-E.B.), where men and women coming from a great diversity of national stocks and religious or philosophical creeds have to live together. If each one of them endeavored to impose his own convictions and the truth in which he believes on all his co-citizens, would not living together become impossible? That is obviously right. Well, it is easy, too easy, to go a step further, and to ask: if each one sticks to his own convictions, will not each one endeavor to impose his own convictions on all others? So that, as a result, living together will become impossible if any citizen whatever sticks to his own convictions and believes in a given truth?

Thus it is not unusual to meet people who think that NOT TO BELIEVE IN ANY TRUTH, or NOT TO ADHERE FIRMLY TO ANY ASSERTION AS UNSHAKABLY TRUE IN ITSELF (Maritain's emphasis), is a primary condition required of democratic citizens in order to be tolerant of one another and to live in peace with one another. May I say that these people are in fact the most intolerant people, for if perchance they were to believe in something as unshakably true, they would feel compelled, by the same stroke, to impose by force and coercion their own belief on their co-citizens. The only remedy they have found to get rid of their abiding tendency to fanaticism is to cut themselves off from truth. That is a suicidal method. It is a suicidal conception of democracy: not only would a democratic society which lived on universal skepticism condemn itself to death by starvation; but it would also enter a process of self-annihilation, from the very fact that no democratic society can live without a common practical belief in those truths which are freedom, justice, law, and the other tenets of democracy; and that any belief in these things as objectively and unshakably true, as well as in any other kind of truth, would be brought to naught by the presumed law of universal skepticism... Be it a question of science, metaphysics, or religion, the man who says: "What is truth?" as Pilate did, is not a tolerant man, but a betrayer of the human race. There is real and genuine tolerance only when a man is firmly and absolutely convinced of a truth, or of what he holds to be a truth, and when he at the same time recognizes the right of those who deny this truth to exist, and to contradict him, and to speak their own mind, not because they are free from truth but because they seek truth in their own way, and because he respects in them human nature and human dignity and those very resources and living springs of the intellect and of conscience which make them potentially capable of attaining the truth he loves, if someday they happen to see it. (Jacques Maritain, . "Truth and Human Fellowship." in ON THE USE OF PHILOSOPHY: THREE ESSAYS. (New York: Atheneum) 1965 p. 17-18, 24)

Bush regards his reelection as an endorsement of his policies, and feels reinforced in his distorted view of the world. The "accountability moment" has passed, he claims, and he is ready to confront tyranny throughout the world according to his own lights. But the critical process that is at the core of an open society - which the U.S. abandoned for 18 months after Sept. 11, 2001 - cannot be forsaken. That absence of self-criticism is what led America into the Iraq quagmire.

Notice that self-criticism is not something that Soros engages in himself. He is that worst of mentally self-castrated pseudo-intellectuals, a "shielding skeptic." That is to say, skepticism is only to be employed against the premises of one's opponents, not one's own. This results in genuine unfalsifiability of one's premises, the very thing that he complains against.

A better understanding of the concept of open society requires that promoting freedom and democracy and promoting American values and interests be distinguished. If it is freedom and democracy that are wanted, they can be fostered only by strengthening international law and international institutions.

"International institutions" like the U.N. where Libya chaired the human rights committee, and Iraq the disarmanment committee? These organizations are fundamentally impotent without great power backing, and their fascistic bureaucratic nature is antithetical to genuine liberty. There is no excuse for Soros's advocacy of these criminal bodies, and it is especially obscene that he does so in the name of liberal democracy, a concept that the U.N. mocks openly, when it isn't denying Darfurian genocide or looking the other way in Rwanda.

“The human person possesses rights because of the very fact that it is a person, a whole, master of itself and of its acts, and which consequently is not merely a means to an end, but an end, an end which must be treated as such. The dignity of the human person? This expression means nothing if it does not signify that by virtue of natural law, the human person has the right to be respected, is the subject of rights, possesses rights. There are things which are owed to man because of the very fact that he is man.” (Jacques Maritain, THE RIGHTS OF MAN AND NATURAL LAW, p. 65, cited in Charles A. Fecher’s THE PHILOSOPHY OF JACQUES MARITAIN, New York: Greenwood Press, Publishers. 1953, 207-7)

No political body GIVES humans any rights.

Bush is right to assert that repressive regimes can no longer hide behind a cloak of sovereignty: what goes on inside tyrannies and failed states is of vital interest to the rest of the world. But intervention in other states' internal affairs must be legitimate, which requires clearly established rules.

Rules that his beloved "international organizations" have no intention of providing, since they are composed of said regimes and their enablers like France and Germany.

As the dominant power in the world, the U.S. has a unique responsibility to provide leadership in international cooperation. It cannot do whatever it wants, as the Iraqi debacle has demonstrated; but, at the same time, nothing much can be achieved in the way of international cooperation without U.S. leadership, or at least active participation. Only by taking these lessons to heart can progress be made toward the lofty goals that Bush announced.

On the contrary, the U.S. IS powerful enough to form its own coalitions and accomplish its own ends, that's why Soros hates it so much, to the point of trying to foist off a traitorous and politically/morally impotent swine like Kerry on America.

The real sickness in Soros's soul can be seen below:

It’s not often that George Soros, the billionaire financier and philanthropist, makes an appearance before a Jewish audience.

It’s even rarer for him to use such an occasion to talk about Israel, Jews and his own role in effecting political change.

So when Soros stepped to the podium Wednesday to address those issues at a conference of the Jewish Funders Network, audience members were listening carefully.

Many were surprised by what they heard.

When asked about anti-Semitism in Europe, Soros, who is Jewish, said European anti-Semitism is the result of the policies of Israel and the United States.

“There is a resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe. The policies of the Bush administration and the Sharon administration contribute to that,” Soros said. “It’s not specifically anti-Semitism, but it does manifest itself in anti-Semitism as well. I’m critical of those policies.”

“If we change that direction, then anti-Semitism also will diminish,” he said. “I can’t see how one could confront it directly.”

That is a point made by Israel’s most vociferous critics, whom some Jewish activists charge with using anti-Zionism as a guise for anti-Semitism.

The billionaire financier said he, too, bears some responsibility for the new anti-Semitism, citing last month’s speech by Malaysia’s outgoing prime minister, Mahathir Mohammad, who said, “Jews rule the world by proxy.”

“I’m also very concerned about my own role because the new anti-Semitism holds that the Jews rule the world,” said Soros, whose projects and funding have influenced governments and promoted various political causes around the world.

“As an unintended consequence of my actions,” he said, “I also contribute to that image.”

(snip highly justified outraged reactions by Jewish leaders-E.B.)

Associates said Soros’ appearance Wednesday was the first they could ever recall in which the billionaire, a Hungarian-born U.S. Jew who escaped the Holocaust by fleeing to London as a child, had spoken in front of a Jewish group or attended a Jewish function.

The one-day meeting on funding in Israel, which took place at the Harvard Club in New York, was limited mostly to representatives of Jewish philanthropic foundations.

After Soros’ speech, Michael Steinhardt, the real-estate magnate and Jewish philanthropist who arranged for Soros to address the group, said in an interview that Soros’ views do not reflect those of most Jewish millionaires or philanthropists.

He also pointed out that this was Soros’ first speech to a Jewish audience.

Steinhardt approached the lectern and interrupted Soros immediately after his remarks on anti-Semitism.

“George Soros does not think Jews should be hated any more than they deserve to be,” Steinhardt said by way of clarification, eliciting chuckles from the audience.

Steinhardt then gave the lectern back to Soros, who said he had something to add to his remarks on the issue of anti-Semitism. Soros then paused to ask if there were any journalists in the room.

When he learned that there were, Soros withheld further comment.

...thus proving that, while they share the same hatred of America's genuine freedom principles, Soros has more common sense than Ward Churchill.

That's what we cowboys call "damning with faint praise."