The soul being that of George Soros.

Back during the Cold War he was a minor celebrity on the Right because of his opposition to the USSR and its European Communist satellites, especially his native Hungary (The Atlantic, 1993). In the mid-1980s, he started distributing scholarships (and photocopiers) to dissidents in those nations, which certainly helped the collapse of Euro-communism. Even today there are connections with the Right: the current US Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent, joined Soros Fund Management in 1991 and he was a partner there throughout the 1990s. But in recent years the Right, especially the Nationalist side, have bitterly turned against him as he has used similar tactics against them.

On the Left the mirror image has happened. When Soros famously shorted the British Pound in 1992 – earning his Quantum Fund group a tidy $US1.8 billion and him the title of “the Man Who Broke the Bank of England” – the Left despised him for that. But so-far-so-standard for a money man; the same attacks were made by the Left against John Key because of his trading days in the mid-1980’s here in NZ – and that Atlantic article above argues that Soros sees geo-politics as simply a variation on finance, it’s how he’s figured out many of his plays after all.

But Soros has always had something far emptier about him than what is implied by his relentless pursuit of money, and this lengthy X commentary about him nails it, especially in the connection between how he survived in WWII and how that feeds his efforts in the world today – from support of virulently anti-Israeli groups, the anti-Musk protests, other groups pushing pro-Democrat Party stuff like Turning Texas Blue, other such groups (since its inception his Open Society Foundation has given Democrat NGOs and candidates $32 billion), to getting local District Attorney’s elected in the US to push his theories of decarceration of criminals.

I’ll copy the whole thing below the first fold in case the X thread vanishes, as they do – and place a YouTube of the now-infamous 60 Minutes interview in 1998, plus the key part of the transcript, below the second fold.

But here are the key points of the commentary that stand out for me.

  • Asked if he felt guilt [about helping catalog and confiscate the estates of Jews deported to Auschwitz, though a Jew himself who hid as a Christian], he answered, “No,” elaborating that someone else would have taken the property anyway, so his presence was morally neutral. To most people, the logic of “if I hadn’t done it, someone else would have” is the language of moral abdication. To Soros, it was the foundation of character.
  • He was 14. Too young, perhaps, for mature guilt, but not too young to learn that moral responsibility can be evaded with sufficient intellectual distance. And it is precisely that psychological habit—the capacity to view human suffering through a lens of abstract causality—that has marked his life’s work.
  • Soros himself has said that 1944 made his character. It is not irrelevant that the character it produced regards guilt as an illusion, morality as conditional, and power as fungible.
  • Soros did not merely survive evil, he appears to have absorbed its techniques and repurposed them under a new ideological guise. He became not a defender of the liberal democratic West but its most insidious critic—a financier of erosion, a bureaucrat of destabilization.
  • In this light, Soros’s antipathy to the West makes sense. Liberal democracy, especially in its American form, is premised on the idea that individuals are morally accountable, that rights come with duties, and that truth is not merely strategic. These are precisely the beliefs Soros abandoned in 1944. And they are the beliefs his foundations now erode.

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There are men whose lives are defined by tragedy. Then there are those who define tragedy, wielding their scars not as reminders of what should be avoided, but as tools to reconstruct the world in their own anguished image. George Soros, born György Schwartz in 1930 Budapest, is often regarded as a philanthropist, a financier, a globalist idealist. But the truth is far more unsettling. His formative years, lived as a Jewish teenager under Nazi occupation, did not merely teach him survival. They taught him something far darker: that moral boundaries are elastic, and that power accrues to those who understand this first.

In 1944, Nazi Germany tightened its grip on Hungary. Over half a million Hungarian Jews were deported to extermination camps. Tivadar Schwartz, Soros’s father, saw the storm coming and acted. He secured false papers for his family, including young George, and sent him to live under a Christian alias, Sándor Kiss, with one Baumbach, a Hungarian official in the Ministry of Agriculture.

Baumbach, it turns out, was no neutral bureaucrat. He was a cog in the vast machinery of state-sponsored theft and ethnic cleansing. His task: to catalog and confiscate the estates of Jews deported to Auschwitz. His accomplice, or perhaps merely his shadow, was George Soros. The boy accompanied Baumbach on inventory missions, including one to the opulent estate of Baron Moric Kornfeld, a Jewish industrialist who had recently been arrested. Soros has since insisted that he was merely present, a bystander watching history’s machinery grind forward. But he also, by his own admission, helped.

In a chilling 1998 interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes, Soros, then 68, was asked if the experience left him traumatized. He answered: “Not at all. Not at all.” He described the events with clinical detachment, likening himself to an impartial observer of an unstoppable tide. Asked if he felt guilt, he answered, “No,” elaborating that someone else would have taken the property anyway, so his presence was morally neutral. To most people, the logic of “if I hadn’t done it, someone else would have” is the language of moral abdication. To Soros, it was the foundation of character.

He was 14. Too young, perhaps, for mature guilt, but not too young to learn that moral responsibility can be evaded with sufficient intellectual distance. And it is precisely that psychological habit—the capacity to view human suffering through a lens of abstract causality—that has marked his life’s work.

Contrast this with Prohászka, Baumbach’s subordinate. When Soros’s identity was threatened with exposure, it was Prohászka who hid him behind a false wall, who refused to touch the assets of deported Jews, who took moral stands in a time when doing so could mean death. Soros has never credited this man publicly, though he paid his medical bills until his death in 1999. One protected him morally, the other tactically. It is Baumbach—the tactician—who Soros chose to remember.

Soros has often remarked that this year of Nazi occupation was the most formative of his life. It taught him, as he put it, to anticipate dangers, to act with cunning, and to survive evil by accommodating it. But here lies the twist: Soros did not merely survive evil, he appears to have absorbed its techniques and repurposed them under a new ideological guise. He became not a defender of the liberal democratic West but its most insidious critic—a financier of erosion, a bureaucrat of destabilization.

This brings us to the Open Society Foundations (OSF), Soros’s crowning project. With over $32 billion donated, it is the second-largest NGO in the world. At first glance, its mission appears noble: to promote transparency, civil rights, and democratic values. But the details betray a more radical agenda. OSF has funded thousands of NGOs designed not to support liberal democracy, but to exploit its procedural weaknesses, enabling movements that reject national borders, criminal punishment, and electoral integrity.

In 2023 alone, OSF awarded over 2,350 grants across more than 100 countries. These grants often seed activist litigation in the United States, giving nascent NGOs the capital they need to qualify for far larger federal grants from agencies like USAID. It is an ingenious model of political leverage: invest in ideologically aligned non-profits, then let taxpayers finance their expansion.

But what are these groups fighting for? Open borders. The abolition of voter ID laws. The elimination of cash bail. The downgrading of crimes committed by preferred demographic groups. Soros has spent tens of millions funding the campaigns of local district attorneys who seek not to prosecute crime, but to redefine it, often into oblivion. In Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, and dozens of other cities, the Soros model has taken root: elect a DA who views criminal justice as a relic of systemic oppression, and who will substitute restorative justice for prosecution.

None of this is accidental. Soros is a master of asymmetric warfare. Just as the Nazis relied on Hungarian collaborators to carry out the logistics of deportation, Soros relies on a phalanx of ideological collaborators embedded in Western institutions. From universities to NGOs to media outlets, Soros bankrolls the infrastructure of ideological subversion. His method is legal, bureaucratic, and procedural—but its outcomes are revolutionary.

Critics will call this a conspiracy theory. They will claim that any discussion of Soros’s youth is an ad hominem attack. But this misunderstands the nature of biography. Soros himself has said that 1944 made his character. It is not irrelevant that the character it produced regards guilt as an illusion, morality as conditional, and power as fungible.

What Soros absorbed in wartime Budapest was not just survival instinct. He learned that truth could be manipulated, that institutions could be hollowed out from within, and that good intentions are no defense against effective malice. His philanthropy mimics the structure of the regime that tried to kill him: vast, impersonal, and ideologically rigid. It uses law to undermine order, rights to dismantle responsibilities, and charity to abolish justice.

In this light, Soros’s antipathy to the West makes sense. Liberal democracy, especially in its American form, is premised on the idea that individuals are morally accountable, that rights come with duties, and that truth is not merely strategic. These are precisely the beliefs Soros abandoned in 1944. And they are the beliefs his foundations now erode.

George Soros is not a Bond villain. He is something more dangerous: a true believer forged in the crucible of collaboration, who has mistaken the trauma of survival for a license to reconstruct civilization in his own disenchanted image. His war on the West is not waged with tanks or bombs, but with forms, grants, and court filings. It is the bureaucratic perfection of moral detachment.

Perhaps that is the final tragedy. That a boy who once hid behind a cupboard to survive now funds the dismantling of the very cupboard—Western civilization—that gave refuge to millions after the war. And that in seeking to defeat fascism forever, he has adopted its methods, if not its name.

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The full video and the key part of the transcript of George Soros’ 1998 interview with 60 Minutes’ Steve Kroft.

Steve Kroft: In the last two years, you’ve been blamed for financial collapse in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan, and Russia—all of the above?

George Soros: All of the above, yeah.

Steve Kroft: Are you that powerful?

George Soros: No, I think there’s a great misunderstanding. I am basically there to make money. I cannot and do not look at the social consequences of what I do. As a competitor, I’ve got to compete to win. As a human being, I am concerned about the society in which I live.

Steve Kroft: Which George Soros am I talking to now? The amoral George Soros or the moral George Soros?

George Soros: It’s one person. It’s one person who at one time engages in amoral activities and the rest of the time tries to be moral.

Steve Kroft: You’re a Hungarian Jew who escaped the Holocaust by posing as a Christian, right? And you watched lots of people get shipped off to the death camps?

George Soros: I was 14 years old, and I would say that’s when my character was made.

Steve Kroft: In what way?

George Soros: That one should think ahead, understand, and anticipate events. When one is threatened, it was a tremendous threat of evil. I mean, it was a very personal experience of evil.

Steve Kroft: My understanding is that you went out with this protector of yours, who swore you were his adopted godson, and helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews. Is that right?

George Soros: Yes.

Steve Kroft: That sounds like an experience that would send lots of people to the psychiatric couch for many, many years. Was it difficult?

George Soros: Not at all, not at all. Maybe as a child, you don’t see the connection. But it created no problem at all.

Steve Kroft: No feeling of guilt? For example, that I’m Jewish and here I am watching these people go? I could just as easily be there, I should be there—none of that?

George Soros: Of course, I could be on the other side, or I could be the one from whom the thing is being taken away. But there was no sense that I shouldn’t be there, because—well, actually, in a funny way, it’s just like in markets. If I weren’t there—of course, I wasn’t doing it—but somebody else would be taking it away anyhow. Whether I was there or not, I was only a spectator. The property was being taken away. So I had no role in taking away that property, so I had no sense of guilt.