A wealth of criticism

GEORGE SOROS, the Hungarian Holocaust survivor whose fortune is matched only by his philanthropy, pioneered a kind of self-styled approach to global reform that made him, in the words of the Carnegie Endowment’s Morton Abramowitz, “the only private citizen who had his own foreign policy.”

With no sluggish bureaucracy to answer to, he rose to prominence with stunningly practical bequests delivered in a timely manner. There was his $50-million donation to the besieged citizens of Sarajevo in 1993 that financed a water plant so that women did not need to rely on the public wells where Serbian snipers picked them off with ease. There was his pro-democracy support in the Soviet Bloc, for Poland’s Solidarity movement and for Czech dissident Vaclav Havel, who would become that country’s post-Communist president.

Soros has given away about $5 billion since he embarked on this citizen-policymaker approach in the 1970s, a sum that approaches the $7.2-billion estimate of his net wealth by Forbes in 2004. That put him in the league of a Rockefeller or a Carnegie and has made him a perennial Nobel nominee.

Today, Soros, 75, has company. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has put that couple at the forefront of global health issues -- they just contributed $287 million for the development of an AIDS vaccine with the help of a recent $31-billion bequest from Warren Buffett. And in 1997, Ted Turner made a $1-billion pledge to the United Nations to help bail it out.

But Soros still distinguishes himself with the staggering multiplicity of his projects: He spent $125 million on after-school programs in New York City. He has helped distribute Xerox machines to facilitate the exchange of information in former Soviet satellites and supported efforts to curb violence against women.

Now, Soros has raised eyebrows with his most recent sally into American political culture by drawing comparisons in his new book between the Bush administration and communist and Nazi governments.

In “The Age of Fallibility: Consequences of the War on Terror,” Soros recalls that when he “heard President Bush say, ‘Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists,’ ” in the wake of 9/11, “I was reminded of Nazi propaganda.

“Indeed, the Bush Administration has been able to improve on the techniques used by the Nazi and the Communist propaganda machines by drawing on the innovations of the advertising and marketing industries.”

On a recent day, Soros was not quite backing down.

“You don’t have a Karl Marx, you only have a Karl Rove who has been successful in creating a coalition of fundamentalists,” he began, sitting in a conference room high above Manhattan, framed by a view of New York’s Central Park, in a striped blue cotton shirt and khakis, his manner affable and relaxed.

However, he added, “we are an established democracy.... The policies and tactics employed by the Bush administration do not pose a threat to open society.” Heavy-handed government in America today, he said, manifests itself in the undue extension of executive powers and the dismissal of critics as unpatriotic. That, in his view, “is the most significant similarity with the Nazi and communist regimes.”

But he acknowledged that -- even at a time when the government has engaged in secret wiretapping, hustled prisoners off to secret jails around the world and is holding terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay indefinitely without trial -- more than a few people might consider such comparisons a stretch.

“It’s very dicey, because people consider it somewhat shocking,” Soros said. “It’s really questionable whether I’m doing the right thing in being outspoken.... It may be that I pushed it too far.”

It’s not that Soros can’t take the heat. Chris Blackhurst wrote in the Evening Standard of London this year that Soros is “reviled by the right as a ‘left-wing radical’ (it really is a term of abuse over there).” Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.) called Soros “pro-marijuana” because of Soros’ advocacy of decriminalizing the drug (Soros also favors clean needle programs). A Republican spokesman, Jim Dyke, called him the “Daddy Warbucks” of the Democratic Party when he spent $27.5 million to try to beat Bush in 2004. House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert once falsely speculated to Fox TV that Soros might get his money from “drug groups.” Fox’s Bill O’Reilly reportedly ranted, nonsensically, that Soros “wants abortion even out of the womb.” Vicious anti-Semitic smears blink out from the Internet.

At the moment, Soros said, “I’m not all that comfortable” serving as a lightning rod. “I accept it. I’m in a position where I can take it. But I don’t enjoy it. I have too many enemies. And that becomes counterproductive.... Taking on too many causes, I create a kind of echo chamber, and it works against me.”

Soros views the attacks on him partly as an inevitable consequence of the issues he has tackled -- a dizzying array that makes a perusal of his website, www.soros.org, seem like a trip around the world.

He thinks some of his projects have been misunderstood. His drug policy initiatives, he said, began as an attempt to eliminate the kind of racial disparities in drug sentencing that put more black Americans in jail for crack cocaine than white Americans who use the powdered form. But those efforts -- which included $1 million for the 1996 ballot initiatives in Arizona and California that won voter approval for medical marijuana use -- “made me seem like some kind of extremist,” he said. “And that’s the opposite of who I am.”

His new book is likely to egg on his critics, as America heads toward the fall midterm elections that the Democrats hope will provide something of a referendum on Bush’s second term.

The Nazi-Bush comparison is not new.

In 2004, MoveOn.org, a group Soros supported, ran a video that began with a Hitler speech that segued into a picture of Bush. Another video used imagery of Bush and the Nazis, with the message: “What were war crimes in 1945 is foreign policy in 2003.”

In a National Review Online column in March 2005, Victor Davis Hanson wrote that a Google search of Hitler + Bush yielded 1,350,000 matches. (Bush + Nazi now yields 17.1 million hits.)

Hanson wrote that Soros and other proponents of “this crazy analogy” share “the same thing that unites Fidel Castro, the European street, the Iranians, and North Koreans: an evocation of some aspects of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany to deprecate President Bush in connection with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Soros himself drew the comparison back in 2003, in an interview in the Washington Post. In a 2004 New Yorker piece by Jane Mayer, he is quoted as saying that some of the statements of then U.S. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft “reminded me of Germany, under the Nazis. It was the kind of talk that Goebbels used to use to line the Germans up.... It was the same kind of propaganda about how ‘We are endangered’ and ‘We have to be united.’ ”

Soros said his concern over Bush’s executive-heavy government stems from firsthand experience under Nazism and communism in Hungary. Born Gyorgy Schwartz in Budapest in 1930, he was the son of an Esperanto enthusiast who changed the family name as anti-Semitism spread, according to his biography, “Soros: The Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire,” by Michael T. Kaufman. When Nazi Germany took over Hungary in 1944, Soros was 13. He survived by posing as a non-Jewish Hungarian, avoiding the fate of 440,000 other Hungarian Jews murdered in the Holocaust. He escaped the Soviet occupation in 1946 by attending an Esperanto youth conference and immigrating to Britain. After graduating from the London School of Economics, he worked as a waiter, porter and salesman for years before getting a job as a London investment banker.

That led to the financial world in the United States and eventually his establishment in the late 1960s of what became the Quantum Endowment Fund, one of the first private hedge funds that made money by betting on the rise and fall of currency values. Under his stewardship, the fund has earned billions of dollars.

Today he chairs Soros Fund Management and the Open Society Institute, which has spent more than $400 million annually in recent years on such things as support for pro-democratic groups during the 2003 “Rose Revolution” in Georgia that peacefully ended the presidency of Eduard Shevardnadze.

On the personal front, he recently divorced for the second time, from decorative arts expert Susan Weber, with whom he had two of his five children.

Not all of Soros’ critics come from the right.

Soros was once tagged the man who “broke the Bank of England” when he bet against the pound in 1992, and he has been accused of undermining other economies with his trades -- though he says he has simply ridden the rise and fall of currency valuations. He has been criticized for lavish recent political contributions after spending $18 million on campaign finance reform in the 1990s.

A few weeks ago, in a British review of Soros’ book, the Independent’s Boyd Tonkin took a swipe at what he views as a sense of entitlement among the rising uber-philanthropists -- and not just Soros.

“Now, the super-class of the seriously loaded expect more than just the lion’s share of assets and honour. They insist on monopolising virtue and wisdom as well,” he wrote. “Bill Gates offloads the multi-billions earned from Microsoft to Third World causes, while wizard investor Warren Buffett swiftly plays catch-up with his giant giveaways. Along with the cash comes the credibility, as ruthless players in software or stock markets make themselves over into experts on human welfare.”

Soros notes that he has also been the target of criticism from the Jewish community, which he attributes partly to his support for projects that benefit Palestinians.

“One of the negative consequences of taking on too many causes is I’ve taken on too many enemies,” he said. “They kind of feed off each other. Perhaps I should have been more judicious in the causes I take on. But I keep taking on new causes. So I can’t say I would do it differently.”

“Emotionally, it kind of eggs me on,” he said. “And that’s why I keep doing it.”