PrintOctober 10, 2007
The Religious Quest of George Soros
Tivadar Schwartz, George Soros' father, rejected his own Judaism in youth, but found another "religion" at some point in the First World War. During his years as a Russian POW, Tivadar became enthralled with the obscure, synthetic language, Esperanto. He acquired a rudimentary knowledge of it from his fellow POWs.
Esperanto was devised by a Jewish physician in Warsaw during the 1880's. But it wasn't (and still isn't) just a made-up language; it served as the embodiment of a cult formed around the ideas of "internationalism, anti-sectarianism and cosmopolitanism," in the words of Soros biographer Michael Kaufman. (p.12)
Esperantists believe that a new world order of harmony and cooperation will be ushered in through the adoption of their made-up, one-world language. They see language as the vehicle that will enable them to re-create the world according to their own specifications.
Tivadar Schwartz seized upon the cult of Esperanto to fill his own God-shaped void, a vacuum created by his repudiation of Judaism.
If Tivadar and his fellow Esperantists had been as well-versed in their own Judaism as they were enthralled by their own intelligence and ingenuity, they would have clearly remembered that a strikingly similar idea had already been conceived and quite neatly recorded by their own ancestors.
It wasn't called Esperanto; it was called Babel.
Both the rise and precipitous fall of Babel are described in the Genesis allegorical section: Genesis 11:1-9. Moses and his assistants wrote down this brilliant-beyond-brilliant idea, an idea that did indeed encompass the seemingly noble qualities of "internationalism, anti-sectarianism and cosmopolitanism" close to 4000 years before Esperanto hit the world scene.
Genesis 11:1-4 (New American Bible)
The whole world spoke the same language, using the same words. While men were migrating in the east, they came upon a valley in the land of Shinar and settled there. They said to one another, "Come let us mold bricks and harden them with fire." They used bricks for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city and tower with its top in the sky, and so make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered all over the earth." (Emphases mine)
Then, we are told, God had to come down to have a look at the amazing thing the one-world language folks had built. Evidently it was so puny that God was unable to see it except by coming down, way down. But God was not at all pleased with this one-world people, consumed by their own "greatness."
"If now, while they are one people, all speaking the same language, they have started to do this, nothing will later stop them from doing whatever they presume to do. Let us go down and there confuse their language, so that one will not understand what another says." Thus the Lord scattered them from there all over the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the speech of all the world. It was from that place that he scattered them all over the earth.
Genesis 11:6-9 (New American Bible)
The cause of Esperanto consumed Tivadar's life between the two World Wars, allowed him to place man at the center of the universe, and to throw off the encumbrance of morality contained in the 10 Commandments. This abandonment of his Jewish morality is probably what enabled Tivadar to so readily survive Nazism when the Germans took over Hungary in March of 1944.
As David Horowitz and Richard Poe point out in The Shadow Party, escaping the Holocaust by assimilating with the Nazis was "an option unacceptable to most and, in practice, open to only a few." (p. 83) Most Jews caught in Nazi peril preferred to save their souls at the expense of their earthly lives; Tivadar and George Soros evidently accepted an alternative Faustian bargain.
Most would expect George Soros to have been traumatized by the horrors to which he was exposed during the War. Astonishingly, he would later recount to his biographer that the years 1944-1946 were "the most exciting time of my life." (Kaufman; p. 48) How could this possibly be? A seventy-year old Soros explains:
"For an adolescent to be in real danger, having a feeling he is inviolate, having a father whom he adored acting as a hero and having an evil confronting you and getting the better of it, I mean, being in command of the situation, even though you're in danger, but basically maneuvering successfully, what more can you ask for?"
The lessons George Soros learned in WWII were simple and crude. He saw his father's (and his own) law-of-the-jungle morality conquer both the Nazis and death, all the while observing that obeying God's laws caused his fellow Jews to perish -- ignominiously, he must have felt. An aging George Soros, to this very day, feels no guilt (interview with Steve Kroft; Sixty Minutes; December, 1998) regarding his own complicity in the Nazis' crimes against humanity, however small it may have been and young though he was. He finds no place among those Holocaust survivors blaming themselves for the deaths of others.
This lack of guilt simply confirms to me that he is a man without any conscience or the necessary morals upon which to build one. He made his Faustian bargain early in life, and shows no signs of regret.
Extraordinary luck seems to have played a part not only in George Soros' escape from the Nazis, but again as he managed to slip, just in the nick of time, beneath the descending Iron Curtain. Tivadar had managed to acquire a visa and travel permit to attend an Esperanto conference in Bern, Switzerland in 1946. George managed to acquire a visa too, but not the necessary travel permits. His father went on ahead to Bern. George decided to take a chance, boarded a later train, and by his account, was never asked for his travel papers. He made his way to Bern, and the next year to England, where distant relatives provided food and shelter. (Kaufman; pp. 52-53)
When Soros arrived in war-ravaged London in 1947, he didn't get quite the fawning welcome that he seems to have expected. The tale he spun for his biographer Kaufman is filled with minute details about one perceived slight after another, whether from relatives or acquaintances or school personnel or aid societies or just passers-by.
He took advantage of the generosity of relatives who took him in, but instead of being thankful he despises them for not being more generous. He easily acquired part-time jobs and gained admission to a university. Again, no gratitude. Only bitterness that the jobs were less than he felt he deserved and the school was not his first choice.
He relates periods of depression over his "ill-fortunes" that he took to relieving by speaking at the Esperanto stand in Hyde Park. He got his first feelings of inclusiveness in England when he attended the Esperanto youth conference of 1948 in Ipswich. Still, he was alone in a foreign country and anxious to make his mark on the world.
He got his first chance when he was finally admitted to the Fabian Socialist London School of Economics in 1949. He had been a little down, but he wasn't out. Still empowered by his narrow escapes from the Nazis and the Soviets, he was perfectly poised at the threshold of revelation, and he indeed got one. Not from God, but from another atheist, Karl Popper. Writing for the Atlantic Monthly in "The Capitalist Threat," Soros says that Popper's analysis of the "Open Society" "struck me with the force of revelation."
Writing for the Atlantic Monthly in 1997, Soros explained his "visionary" Open Society and its values:
Moreover, the open society as a universal concept transcends all boundaries. Societies derive their cohesion from shared values. These values are rooted in culture, religion, history and tradition. When a society does not have boundaries, where are the shared values to be found? I believe there is only one possible source: the concept of the open society itself. (Emphasis mine)
And there you have it. Since there will be no external immutable source such as God from which to derive morality and values, those one-world, anything-goes people are going to need something to hold them together, something upon which to focus. But they have nothing but circular logic. Which means there are no limits at all.
There are some compelling similarities between Tivadar's pseudo-religion, Esperanto, and George's new religion, the Open Society.
Both are ideologies that espouse man as supreme, especially over God. Both depend upon internationalism over the nation-state concept. Both require the destruction of individual cultures and traditions. Both demand a tyrannical tolerance for every idea being treated in absolute equal fashion.
In other words, George Soros did not really find a new religion; he just found essentially the same one as his father, minus the vehicle of language. A sort of Kingdom of Babel with qualities of Sodom and Gomorrah thrown into the mix. No wonder he has found such a warm home with the aging hippie class; they all adhere to the same creed. If it feels good do it.
My suspicion is that George Soros was more affected by the atrocities of the Nazis than he is able to admit, even to himself. He was trying in his own way to search for God, but then the Nazis swooped in with their heinous hatred of the Jews, and their unreasonable evil wrath scared the wits out of George. His arrogance, I believe, is just a cover for his underlying fear.
He lacked the necessary rudder of moral faith, because his parents had shamefully neglected to teach him any. He assimilated; he collaborated. He lived. And the one thing that seared into him like a hot branding iron was the fact that he was Jewish. And that it wasn't just a religion; it was in his genes. (God set that one up.) And the Nazis who turned the world upside down thought it mighty important.
He then made a very common error. Instead of blaming the actual perpetrators of the evil, he blamed the "system" that he believed had spawned the evil: the religions of the God of Israel, Judaism and her spiritual cousin, Christianity. He began to envision a world so overwhelmed by "alternatives" that both Judaism and Christianity would simply cease to have the slightest significance. That's the world he has been trying to build ever since.
