I've already mentioned New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz's lunatic screed against George Soros wherein the philanthropist and Holocaust survivor is made to answer to charges of being a Nazi collaborator. To me, it seemed the less said about this the better. But Steve Clemons wanted to say more, so I say give him a read. Soros, of course, earned his money, whereas Peretz obtained it through marriage. And Soros has spent his money on various charitable endeavors around the world. Peretz has used his cash to secure publication for his otherwise unpublishable work and, as Clemens says, is so deeply opposed to the notion of political accountability for the architechts of the present disaster because such accountability would necessarily bite him.
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Clemens on Peretz and Soros
04 Feb 2007 10:25 am
Comments (17)
Most of you can't read the New Republic article "Tyran-a-Soros" by Peretz. I've found it for you here. If that goes away, just google for Tyran-a-Soros.
If you read the Peretz article, you'll find that it is not Peretz who is the lunatic, but Soros. Why? Soros basically says the US is now a Nazi state. At least that is what I think he means when he says the US needs De-Nazification.
Peretz goes on to ask rhetorical questions: 1) Does that then make Soros a "Good Nazi" as he's a US citizen? 2) How will Soros "De-Nazify" the US if his favorites get elected to US President? 3) When Soros was a Jew persecuted by the holocaust did he take Nazis seriously? and 4) Does he have any guilt over having taken the property of Jews deported by the Nazis? (while Soros posed as a Christian).
Even if you don't like the questions Peretz asks, he's not a lunatic. Soros is. I think Matthew Yglesias never read the Peretz piece, or was hoping we wouldn't. Does he also think the US is a Nazi state?
Clemens re-interprets Soros into what he "Must have meant" and defends the new meaning he invented. That is, all Soros meant was "The US should improve itself". If I could be sure Clemens was right, I'd sleep easier. As it is, Soros is a one-man walking argument against great wealth in the hands of individuals.
I'd like to believe that maybe Soros was a little drunk, or something, and the words just didn't come out right. If only I could be sure.
I'm really getting tired of people who don't have the imagination to criticize political opponents without calling them Nazis.
As for George Bush, I wouldn't have said that I 'hated' him until he publicly defended torture (while also fatuously insisting that torture isn't torture if he says it isn't). On that day I officially declared myself a Bush hater.
Bush isn't Hitler, but not for lack of trying. Torture, arbitrary detentions, wars of aggression, , claims of unlimited executive power - Bush's America is as Nazi-esque as he can make it.
Bush and his immediate enablers may deserve being likened to Nazis. But saying so doesn't sound like a thoughtful critique. It just sounds like name-calling - lazy name-calling that reaches for the most demonic political image available. It's preaching to the choir. It's worse than unpersuasive. It tends to kill dialogue, as those who don't already agree will dismiss it as lazy, hateful name-calling and quite justifiably stop listening.
I don't think Clemons knows much about what de-Nazification actually involved. I can't say I do either, but my recollection is that some people attainted had their property - their life savings - confiscated.
Peretz's crack about Ramsey Clark representing the neo-cons in the war crimes dock is priceless.
Warren, thanks for the link to the Peretz article.
Peretz:
He believes that the United States is now a Nazi country. Why else would we have to go through a "certain de-Nazification process"? I defy anybody to interpret the remark differently. The analogy between Bush's America and Hitler's Germany is not fleshed out, and one is left wondering how far he would take it.
Peretz defies anybody to intepret as an analogy what he himself calls an analogy in the very next sentence.
After reading all the related articles, I have to agree with Clemons and that Soros doesn't believe US is a Nazi state.
And the problem with Peretz's article is that if you don't buy his interpretation of Soros' remark, it sounds pretty silly.
I don't think Clemons knows much about what de-Nazification actually involved. I can't say I do either, but my recollection is that some people attainted had their property - their life savings - confiscated.
I don't think you are recollecting correctly.
Mostly it was taking the pictures of Hitler off the wall at the local party headquarters and relabeling everything "Christian Democrat".
Unless you are thinking about the Soviet version, which went way past emptying Nazi savings accounts...
Clemons:
The necons too have wanted to change the world -- albeit with guns, while Soros did it through education and political and civil institution buildng.
Didn't Soros also support Clinton's military interventions in the Balkans?
There's a difference between using violence to change the world - being a utopian revolutionary - and trying to stop ongoing genocides. Similarly, I would hardly call our involvement in WWII and the first Iraq War revolutionary-utopian. We didn't get into those wars to transform the Middle East, Europe and Japan. We got into those wars to preserve the norm that militaries cannot willy-nilly cross intot others' sovereign territory and because war was declared on us. Our fight in the Phillipines and the Spanish-American War are closer to neocons' wet dreams than the Balkans.
Soros also gave quite a bit of support to Central and Eastern European dissidents before the collapse of communism. In fact, he probably did more than any other Western private citizen to help bring about the peaceful collapse of communism. Afterward, he founded a university in Central Europe (and unlike, say, the Vanderbilts, Carnegies, Mellons or Stanfords of a previous era did not name it after himself), has continued to support a string of Open Society Foundations in the post-communist world and has generally been doing some of the most honorable things with his billions so as to be a good role model for any billionaire not named Nobel.
Denazification did not, as a general rule, involve confiscation of property. It did, at times, involve banning some people from practicing some professions. Universities were purged, school authorities, the legal profession, the judiciary, many government and civil service positions. It was a mixed bag for many different reasons. On balance, it worked, though the consensus is that it worked because German people themselves were largely (not, of course, every single one of them) revolted by what the NSDAP had done in their name. Interestingly, in the immediate postwar period, as much emphasis was put on demilitarization as was on denazification. Demilitarization worked so well that you almost never hear it mentioned now. (Eradicating Prussia was one of the measures that made a revival of Prussian militarism unlikely.)
Soros lived under the Nazis, and if he starts making that comparison it seems that people might listen. For whatever reason, he's less scrupulous about Godwin's law than others are.
Michael Savage, Ann Coulter, and a few others seem close enough to Nazis, granted that they're out of power. I suspect that they and their kind are what got Soros thinking that way. The Nazis had been around for 15 years or more before they built a death camp. Up to a certain point (1932) all they really had was rhetoric.
Apparently almost no one knows about Soros' role supporting Solidarity in Poland any more. It would seem if that a guy who played as big a role as he did in bringing down the iron curtain starts talking trash about George Bush, people might listen.
Re: de-Nazifications.
Suppose that you have a house with few mice. While not exactly overrun with rodents, some judicious extermination is in order.
"Soros basically says the US is now a Nazi state."
For Soros, English is a second langage, but for you, it is apparently not a language you understand at all.
Comparing the Bush adminstration to Nazis is not the same as saying that the two are identicaql in every respect. They're not similar in every respect, of course--just in their use of "pre-emptive" war and state-sponsored torture.
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Comments closed February 18, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
I've said this a bunch of times here and there, but Soros stacks up wonderfully against the Republican sugar daddies. Scaife is borderline mentally ill, Moon thinks he's the next Jesus (really), Murdoch is a tabloid slimeball, and the Koch brothers are just greedy.
But he's a big Jewy foreign Jew with a thick accent, and Democrats don't seem to want to put him front and center. (Or maybe it's him).
It's fun to see Republicans, including Peretz, try to slime Soros without actually Jew-baiting him, because that would be such an obvious place to start. They don't always succeed in avoiding that -- one of the Als on Drum called him a blood-sucking currency trader, IIRC.
(The diamond merchant of our time is Pat Robertson, BTW. Not Jewish.)
Posted by John Emerson | February 4, 2007 4:10 PM