NRC's Caroline de Gruyter en Andere Clowns 3

Op grond van beweringen uit de leugenachtige politiek en de schimmige wereld van de inlichtingendiensten, en dus niet naar aanleiding van juridisch bewezen vaststaande feiten, schreef NRC-correspondente Caroline de Gruyter, met grote stelligheid dat Rusland de NAVO tart. In haar krant van 7 mei 2021 schreef zij dat een Tsjechische hoogleraar had betoogd dat Rusland: 

‘de grens [oprekt] tussen oorlog en vrede om te kijken hoe westerse landen reageren: hebben die dezelfde perceptie van een gebeurtenis? Nee. Dus kan Rusland doorgaan met deze operaties.’ Zo vervaagt Rusland het bestaande internationale regelsysteem — zoals ‘gij zult geen andere landen annexeren’ — steeds verder. Zodat het zijn gang kan gaan, 

om aansluitend de vraag op te werpen:

Waar ligt de grens? Betekent artikel 5 nog iets? Wat als we geen diplomaten meer kunnen uitzetten? We zullen dit gesprek een keer moeten voeren. Voor er echte ongelukken gebeuren.

https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2021/05/07/de-grens-tussen-oorlog-en-vrede-in-europa-is-dunner-dan-we-denken-a4042807 

De Gruyter probeert haar publiek te overtuigen dat Rusland een groot gevaar betekent voor het voortbestaan van de ‘westerse democratieën,’ terwijl de situatie in feite precies omgekeerd is, tenminste als men uitgaat van de werkelijkheid. Al in februari 2007 wees de Russische minister van Buitenlandse Zaken, Sergei Lavrov, op het feit dat ‘We are seriously concerned about plans to deploy elements of a U.S. missile-defense system in Europe and the critical situation that threatens the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty,’ waarbij Tsjechië onderdeel werd van een Amerikaans anti-raketschild, waardoor de VS een first-strike mogelijkheid kreeg, omdat het niet meer een gelijkwaardige Russische nucleaire tegenaanval hoefde te vrezen. Bovendien, zo verklaarde Lavrov, ‘NATO's enlargement, which is undertaken despite the assurances we were given previously, does not help strengthen trust either. We are also concerned about the advance of the alliance's infrastructure toward the Russian border.’ De cijfers geven de verhoudingen duidelijk weer. April 2020 berichtte het SIPRI, het Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, onder de kop ‘Strong increase in US military spending continues in 2020,’ dat:

In 2020 US military expenditure reached an estimated $778 billion, representing an increase of 4.4 per cent over 2019. As the world’s largest military spender, the USA accounted for 39 per cent of total military expenditure in 2020. This was the third consecutive year of growth in US military spending, following seven years of continuous reductions.

‘The recent increases in US military spending can be primarily attributed to heavy investment in research and development, and several long-term projects such as modernizing the US nuclear arsenal and large-scale arms procurement,’ said Alexandra Marksteiner, a researcher with SIPRI’s Arms and Military Expenditure Programme. ‘This reflects growing concerns over perceived threats from strategic competitors such as China and Russia,’

aldus het gezaghebbende SIPRI. 

https://www.sipri.org/media/press-release/2021/world-military-spending-rises-almost-2-trillion-2020 

Volgens de officiële cijfers spenderen de NAVO-landen in 2021 tezamen bijna 20 keer meer aan militaire uitgaven dan Rusland. En toch proberen de opiniemakers van de polderpers hun publiek wijs te maken dat Rusland het Westen bedreigd. Daarbij verzwijgen propagandisten als Caroline de Gruyter tevens dat de NAVO-bases sinds de val van de Sovjet Unie steeds dichter naar de Russische grens zijn verplaatst, en de Russische Federatie nu geheel omsingeld is. Bovendien is het aantal NAVO-lidstaten, sinds de val van de Sovjet-Unie en het ontbinden van het Warschau Pact, van 16 naar 30 uitgebreid. In diezelfde periode is de militaire agressie van de VS en de NAVO drastisch toegenomen zoals de desastreuze westerse interventies in Afghanistan, Irak, Libië, Syrië, en zelfs Oekraïne aantonen.  

https://www.statista.com/chart/14636/defense-expenditures-of-nato-countries/ 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures 

De ‘rechtvaardiging’ van al deze oorlogsvoorbereidingen is dat na de eerste Koude Oorlog het doel van de NAVO is veranderd:

from defending common territory to defending the common interests of Alliance members. As an alliance of interests, NATO would be the vehicle of choice to address threats to these shared interests,

waarbij de ‘gedeelde belangen’ in de eerste plaats de bescherming en verovering zijn van grondstoffen en markten om het neoliberale globalisme van de westerse elite in stand te kunnen houden. Zodra ‘these shared interests’ worden bedreigd heeft de rijke wereld de NAVO tot zijn beschikking. Dat is één van de twee belangrijkste redenen waarom ‘the Atlantic Alliance survived and, at times, thrived in the decade since the disappearance of the Soviet threat robbed NATO of its main raison d’être,’ aldus de conservatieve Amerikaanse denktank The Brookings Institution. In feite is de dreiging van de Sovjet Unie nooit ‘de belangrijkste raison d’être’ geweest, zeker niet in 1949 toen de NAVO werd opgericht, dus in de periode dat het Europese deel van de Sovjet Unie grotendeels verwoest was, en het Sovjet-rijk meer dan 25 miljoen doden telde als gevolg van de heroïsche strijd tegen de nazi’s. Onder gezaghebbende historici bestaat daarom de consensus dat de geallieerde overwinning op de nazi’s allereerst te danken is aan de Sovjet-opofferingen. The Washington Post berichtte dan ook op 8 mei 2015 onder de kop ‘Don’t forget how the Soviet Union saved the world from Hitler’ dat:

In the Western popular imagination — particularly the American one  — World War II is a conflict we won. It was fought on the beaches of Normandy and Iwo Jima, through the rubble of recaptured French towns and capped by sepia-toned scenes of joy and young love in New York. It was a victory shaped by the steeliness of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the moral fiber of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and the awesome power of an atomic bomb.

But that narrative shifts dramatically when you go to Russia, where World War II is called the Great Patriotic War and is remembered in a vastly different light.

On May 9, Russian President Vladimir Putin will play host to one of Moscow's largest ever military parades to mark the 70th anniversary of the Soviet Union's victory over Nazi Germany. More than 16,000 troops will participate, as well 140 aircraft and 190 armored vehicles, including the debut of Russia's brand new next-generation tank.

It's a grand moment, but few of the world's major leaders will be in attendance. The heads of state of India and China will look on, but not many among their Western counterparts. That is a reflection of the tense geopolitical present… the current tensions obscure the scale of what's being commemorated: Starting in 1941, the Soviet Union bore the brunt of the Nazi war machine and played perhaps the most important role in the Allies' defeat of Hitler. By one calculation, for every single American soldier killed fighting the Germans, 80 Soviet soldiers died doing the same…

The Red Army was ‘the main engine of Nazism’s destruction,’ writes British historian and journalist Max Hastings in ‘Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945.’ The Soviet Union paid the harshest price: though the numbers are not exact, an estimated 26 million Soviet citizens died during World War II, including as many as 11 million soldiers. At the same time, the Germans suffered three-quarters of their wartime losses fighting the Red Army.

‘It was the Western Allies’ extreme good fortune that the Russians, and not themselves, paid almost the entire “butcher’s bill” for [defeating Nazi Germany], accepting 95 per cent of the military casualties of the three major powers of the Grand Alliance,’ writes Hastings.

The epic battles that eventually rolled back the Nazi advance — the brutal winter siege of Stalingrad, the clash of thousands of armored vehicles at Kursk (the biggest tank battle in history) — had no parallel on the Western Front, where the Nazis committed fewer military assets. The savagery on display was also of a different degree than that experienced farther west.

Hitler viewed much of what's now Eastern Europe as a site for ‘Lebensraum’ — living space for an expanding German empire and race. What that entailed was the horrifying, systematic attempt to depopulate whole swaths of the continent. This included the wholesale massacre of millions of European Jews, the majority of whom lived outside Germany's pre-war borders to the east. But millions of others were also killed, abused, dispossessed of their lands and left to starve.

‘The Holocaust overshadows German plans that envisioned even more killing. Hitler wanted not only to eradicate the Jews; he wanted also to destroy Poland and the Soviet Union as states, exterminate their ruling classes, and kill tens of millions of Slavs,’ writes historian Timothy Snyder in ‘Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin.’

By 1943, the Soviet Union had already lost some 5 million soldiers and two-thirds of its industrial capacity to the Nazi advance. That it was yet able to turn back the German invasion is testament to the courage of the Soviet war effort. But it came at a shocking price.

In his memoirs, Eisenhower was appalled by the extent of the carnage:

When we flew into Russia, in 1945, I did not see a house standing between the western borders of the country and the area around Moscow. Through this overrun region, Marshal Zhukov told me, so many numbers of women, children and old men had been killed that the Russian Government would never be able to estimate the total,

hetgeen de auteur van het artikel in The Washington Post tot de conclusie voert dat ‘we shouldn't forget how the Soviets won World War II in Europe.’

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/05/08/dont-forget-how-the-soviet-union-saved-the-world-from-hitler/ 

Volgens het Brookings Instituut is één van de voornaamste redenen dat de NAVO na de val van de Sovjet Unie niet werd ontbonden het feit dat toen deze militaire organisatie werd opgericht:

the basis was laid for a large bureaucracy, staffed by many thousands of people dedicated to the organization and its mission. While old soldiers may fade away, large organizations rarely do. After initially resisting the need to change, the NATO bureaucracy responded, like all such bureaucracies, by seeking to adapt its mission and structure in a manner relevant to its new environment. On the military side, internal adaptation has taken the form of a streamlined and more flexible command structure capable of deploying military forces rapidly and over greater distances than was the case during the cold war. Politically, the Alliance has sought new missions to retain its relevance — from peacekeeping to countering the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). In the process, NATO has not only survived but been transformed into a politico-military entity that differs in many significant ways from the organization that stood ready to meet a Warsaw Pact tank assault…

https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/reportch1.pdf 

Met andere woorden: net als bij elke organisatie is de belangrijkste drijfveer van de NAVO uiteindelijk haar eigen voortbestaan. Dat geldt zeker voor het gigantisch, westers militair-industrieel complex dat ontelbare miljarden verslindt, en ten koste gaat van onderwijs, gezondheidszorg, volkshuisvesting, uitkeringen, cultuur, het milieu, onderhoud aan de infrastructuur, de toekomst van de komende generaties, etcetera. Wanneer bij gebrek aan een vijand er geen rechtvaardiging meer bestaat voor deze verspilling, wordt een vijand gecreëerd en, in dit geval, een nieuwe Koude Oorlog, met steun van de mainstream-media en intellectueel gecorrumpeerde opiniemakers als Geert Mak, Hubert Smeets, Bas Heijne, Ian Buruma, Caroline de Gruyter, zoals ik op deze weblog met talloze voorbeelden heb proberen duidelijk te maken. Veelzeggend is tevens dat:  

Both NATO and the EU share common strategic interests as well as a broad approach to stability and security encompassing political, economic, social and environmental aspects, along with the defence dimension.

https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_24733.htm 

De ‘gemeenschappelijke strategische belangen’ van de NAVO en de EU zijn het beschermen van de grondstoffen en markten, die de neoliberale elite dermate rijk hebben gemaakt dat nu 26 individuen evenveel bezitten als de helft van de mensheid tezamen. De bekende Amerikaanse politiek theoreticus Sheldon Wolin, beschreef in het laatste boek vóór zijn dood Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (2008) hoe op die manier de zo geprezen ‘democratie’ is uitgelopen op een systeem van ‘corporate totalitarianism.’ Hij wees erop dat men vandaag de dag :

cannot point to any national institution that can accurately be described as democratic, surely not in the highly managed, money-saturated elections, the lobby-infested Congress, the imperial presidency, the class-biased judicial and penal system, or, least of all, the media.

In een interview met oud New York Times-correspondent Chris Hedges wees professor Wolin er tevens op dat: 

The ruling groups can now operate on the assumption that they don’t need the traditional notion of something called a public in the broad sense of a coherent whole. They now have the tools to deal with the very disparities (ongelijkheden. svh) and differences they themselves helped to create. It’s a game in which you manage to undermine the cohesiveness that the public requires if they [the public] are to be politically effective.

And at the same time, you create these different, distinct groups that inevitably find themselves in tension or at odds or in competition with other groups, so that it becomes more of a melee than it does become a way of fashioning majorities.

Hedges zette uiteen dat Wolin’s:

[i]nverted totalitarianism is different from classical forms of totalitarianism. It does not find its expression in a demagogue or charismatic leader but in the faceless anonymity of the corporate state. Inverted totalitarianism pays outward fealty (trouw. svh) to the facade of electoral politics, the Constitution, civil liberties, freedom of the press, the independence of the judiciary, and the iconography, traditions and language of American patriotism, but it has effectively seized all of the mechanisms of power to render the citizen impotent. 

Wolin voerde nog een ander aspect op:

Employment in a high-tech, volatile, and globalized economy is normally as precarious as during an old-fashioned depression. The result is that citizenship, or what remains of it, is practiced amidst a continuing state of worry. Hobbes had it right: when citizens are insecure and at the same time driven by competitive aspiration, they yearn for political stability rather than civic engagement, protection rather than political involvement.  

Er bestaat een fundamenteel en buitengewoon gevaarlijk verschil tussen enerzijds een geleerde als Sheldon Wolin, die wetenschappelijk heeft aangetoond dat de democratie is uitgehold, en anderzijds een mainstream-opiniemaker als Caroline de Gruyter, die vanuit narcistische motieven zoveel mogelijk in de belangstelling wil staan. Wolin’s academische werk demonstreert hoe maatschappelijke- en politieke processen in de VS een imperialistisch systeem hebben gecreëerd, waardoor een functionerende parlementaire democratie onmogelijk werd. Terecht merkt Chris Hedges op dat:

Great writers and intellectuals give us a vocabulary that allows us to make sense of reality. They excavate depths that we, without their help, are unable to fathom. We are captive to systems of power until we can name the dominant myths and the intricate systems of coercion and control that extinguish our freedom.

We are a society awash in skillfully manufactured lies. Reality is whatever hallucination flickers on a screen. Solitude that makes thought possible — a removal from the electronic cacophony that besieges us — is harder and harder to find. We have severed ourselves from a print-based culture. We are unable to grapple with the nuances and complexity of ideas. We have traded ideas for fabricated clichés. We speak in the hollow language we are given by our corporate masters. Reality, presented to us as image, is unexamined and therefore false. We are culturally illiterate. And because of our illiteracy we are easily manipulated and controlled.

Juist omdat ‘grote schrijvers en intellectuelen ons een vocabulaire geven die ons in staat stelt de realiteit te begrijpen’ en zij bovendien ‘diepten onthullen die wij, zonder hun hulp, niet in staat zijn te doorgronden,’ wordt duidelijk hoe ééndimensionaal en propagandistisch de columns van onder andere Caroline de Gruyter zijn, die weliswaar slechts twee minuten leestijd vergen, maar waarin zij wel impliciet aandringt op een militaire confrontatie met de Russische Federatie. Deze opiniemaakster negeert het proces dat zich de afgelopen vier decennia voor onze ogen heeft voltrokken, namelijk dat het neoliberale:

Capitalism is destructive because it has to eliminate the kind of custom, political values, even institutions that present any kind of credible threat to the autonomy of the economy. And it’s that — that’s where the battle lies. Capitalism wants an autonomous economy. They want a political order subservient to the needs of the economy. 

Het neoliberalisme is in feite net zo ‘elitist as any aristocratic system ever was.’ Wolin toont met concrete feiten aan dat al in ‘the system that was consciously and deliberately constructed by the (Amerikaanse. svh) founders who framed the Constitution’ de: 

democracy was the enemy. And that was rooted in historical realities. Many of the colonial governments had a very strong popular element that became increasingly prominent as the colonies moved towards rebellion. And rebellion meant not only resisting British rule, but also involved the growth of popular institutions and their hegemony in the colonies, as well as in the nation as a whole, so that the original impulses to the Constitution came in large measure from this democratizing movement. But the framers of the Constitution understood very well that this would… jeopardize the ruling groups that they thought were absolutely necessary to any kind of a civilized order. And by ‘ruling groups,’ they meant not only those who were better educated, but those who were propertied, because they regarded property as a sign of talent and of ability, so that it wasn’t just wealth as such, but rather a constellation of virtues as well as wealth that entitled capitalists to rule. And they felt that this was in the best interests of the country.

Zolang in dit systeem ‘dissent remains ineffectual,’ aldus Wolin, ‘the government does not need to stamp out dissent. The uniformity of imposed public opinion through the corporate media does a very effective job.’ Vandaar het belang van ‘especially the intellectual class,’ die afgekocht wordt door:

a combination of governmental contracts, corporate and foundation funds, joint projects involving university and corporate researchers, and wealthy individual donors, universities (especially so-called research universities), intellectuals, scholars, and researchers have been seamlessly integrated into the system,

aldus Sheldon Wolin. De Gruyter is hiervan een sprekend voorbeeld. Als ‘medewerker’ van Carnegie Europe is zij onderdeel van ‘The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,’ waarvan de voormalige Amerikaanse minister van handel, de multi-miljardair Penny Pritzker in 2018 de voorzitter werd van de Raad van Bestuur. Daarnaast is ‘Pritzker chairman of the investment firm PSP Partners and previously served as the secretary of commerce from 2013 to 2017. Pritzker was a core member of then president Barack Obama’s economic team and served as the country’s chief commercial advocate, leading the administration’s trade and investment promotion efforts. During her tenure, she launched SelectUSA, the first federal program to attract foreign direct investment to the United States, which facilitated $23 billion in investment.’ 

https://carnegieendowment.org/2018/02/22/penny-pritzker-elected-chairman-of-board-for-carnegie-endowment-for-international-peace-pub-75622 

Caroline de Gruyter is bovendien ‘columnist at Foreign Policy,’ opgericht in 2007 met financiële steun van ondermeer de in Frankrijk veroordeelde speculant en belastingontwijker George Soros, die zijn miljarden spendeert aan initiatieven die zijn eigen ideologische opvattingen verspreiden. Hoe ver zijn interventies in andere landen gaan, blijkt uit de bevindingen van de Griekse econoom en politicus Yanis Varoufakis, die van 27 januari 2015 tot 6 juli 2015 minister van Financiën was in het kabinet-Tsipras. Vlak voor zijn aftreden had de geldhandelaar Soros in het geheim contact opgenomen met de Griekse premier Tsipras om hem op te dragen:

Fire Varoufakis! Europe cannot afford to have two open wounds at once — Greece and the Ukraine [where fierce fighting was taking place]. Athens must capitulate to Germany now so that Europe can dedicate itself to resolving Ukraine. For this Varoufakis must be removed.

Months later a further, bitter vindication arrived when the EU and the IMF announced that the same debt swaps and nominal income indexed bonds that I had been proposing for Greece would be used to restructure Ukraine’s public debt,

zo schreef Varoufakis naderhand in zijn boek Adults in the Room: My Battle with the European and American Deep Establishment (2017). Oekraïne, is een tot op het bot corrupt land, waar Soros grote financiële belangen heeft. Vanzelfsprekend wordt dit allemaal verzwegen door zijn syccofanten, die elke kritiek op Soros afdoen als ‘anti-semitisme.’ Ondanks dit chantagemiddel schreef de Amerikaanse hoogleraar Daniel Bessner, die Westerse Civilisatie doceert aan de Universiteit van Washington in The Guardian van vrijdag 6 juli 2018 onder de kop ‘The George Soros philosophy – and its fatal flaw’ dat Soros weliswaar behoort tot ‘the best the meritocracy has produced,’ maar dat juist daarom:

Soros’s failures are so telling; they are the failures not merely of one man, but of an entire class — and an entire way of understanding the world. From his earliest days as a banker in postwar London, Soros believed in a necessary connection between capitalism and cosmopolitanism. For him, as for most of the members of his cohort and the majority of the Democratic party’s leadership, a free society depends on free (albeit regulated) markets. But this assumed connection has proven to be a false one. The decades since the end of the cold war have demonstrated that, without a perceived existential enemy, capitalism tends to undermine the very culture of trust, compassion and empathy upon which Soros’s ‘open society’ depends, by concentrating wealth in the hands of the very few.

Instead of the global capitalist utopia predicted in the halcyon 1990s by those who proclaimed an end to history, the US is presently ruled by an oafish heir who enriches his family as he dismantles the ‘liberal international order’ that was supposed to govern a peaceful, prosperous and united world. While Soros recognized earlier than most the limits of hyper-capitalism, his class position made him unable to advocate the root-and-branch reforms necessary to bring about the world he desires. The system that allows George Soros to accrue the wealth that he has done has proven to be one in which cosmopolitanism will never find a stable home…

For Soros, the goal of contemporary human existence is to establish a world defined not by sovereign states, but by a global community whose constituents understand that everyone shares an interest in freedom, equality and prosperity. In his opinion, the creation of such a global open society is the only way to ensure that humanity overcomes the existential challenges of climate change and nuclear proliferation.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jul/06/the-george-soros-philosophy-and-its-fatal-flaw#_=_ 

Het zal niemand kunnen verbazen dat ook Caroline de Gruyter een bewonderaar is van de speculant Soros, en nauwlettend in de gaten houdt wat deze handelaar in niet bestaand geld allemaal verkondigt. Op 29 mei 2018 twitterde zij dan ook instemmend dat ‘George Soros at #ECFR18 in Paris’ had verklaard dat ‘Everything that could go wrong in Europe has gone wrong,’ daarbij verwijzend naar een bijeenkomst van de ‘European Council on Foreign Relations: the only pan-European think-tank,’ die zich toen boog over de vraag: ‘How to Save the European Union.’ Wij hebben hier te maken met een zogeheten liberale politieke en journalistieke kongsi die gefinancierd en aangestuurd wordt door miljardairs, die altijd wel een gat in de wet weten te vinden om zich nog meer te verrijken. Ondanks het feit dat Soros achter de rug van betrokkenen om in de binnenlandse aangelegenheden van democratieën als Griekenland intervenieerde, prijst De Gruyter de mutimiljardair Soros als een ‘sociaal-liberaal weldoener.’  De hoerigheid van de ‘corporate press’ is onbegrensd. Ondertussen blijft het parasitaire neoliberale kapitalisme — waaraan Soros vele miljarden verdient — een steeds onrechtvaardigere wereld creëren, waardoor tegenwoordig ‘The world’s 2,153 billionaires have more wealth than the 4.6 billion people who make up 60 percent of the planet’s population,’ en ‘Our broken economies are lining the pockets of billionaires and big business at the expense of ordinary men and women. No wonder people are starting to question whether billionaires should even exist,’ aldus  de ‘Oxfam India CEO Amitabh Behar.’ 

https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/worlds-billionaires-have-more-wealth-46-billion-people

Bovendien waren er voordat de Covid-pandemie uitbrak nog steeds bijna ‘700 Million People Are Hungry,’ terwijl ‘acute malnutrition in children, responsible for nearly half of all child deaths, now threatens to claim the lives of 10,000 more children each monthdue to the secondary impacts of COVID-19.’ Dit is de onzichtbare — om in het jargon van de mainstream-pers te blijven — 'collateral damage’ van de neoliberale shock-doctrine. 

https://reliefweb.int/report/world/world-food-day-nearly-700-million-people-are-hungry 

Een ander feit dat een pluimstrijker als Caroline de Gruyter verzwijgt wanneer zij Soros ophemelt kwam ter sprake tijdens het bekende CBS-programma 60 Minutes van 20 december 1998. De Amerikaanse onderzoeksjournalist Steve Kroft verklaarde voorafgaand dat:

When the Nazis occupied Budapest in 1944, George Soros’ father was a successful lawyer. He lived on an island in the Danube and liked to commute to work in a rowboat. But knowing there were problems ahead for the Jews, he decided to split his family up. He bought them forged papers and he bribed a government official to take 14-year-old George Soros in and swear that he was his Christian godson. But survival carried a heavy price tag. While hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were being shipped off to the death camps, George Soros accompanied his phony godfather on his appointed rounds, confiscating property from the Jews.

KROFT: You’re a Hungarian Jew… who escaped the Holocaust… by posing as a Christian.

Mr. SOROS: Right.

KROFT: And you watched lots of people get shipped off to the death camps.

Mr. SOROS: Right. I was 14 years old. And I would say that that’s when my character was made.

KROFT: In what way?

Mr. SOROS: That one should think ahead. One should understand and anticipate events and when one is threatened. It was a tremendous threat of evil. I mean, it was a very personal experience of evil.

KROFT: My understanding is that you went out with this protector of yours who swore that you were his adopted godson.

Mr. SOROS: Yes. Yes.

KROFT: Went out, in fact, and helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews.

Mr. SOROS: Yes. That’s right. Yes.

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

Mr. SOROS: Not — not at all. Not at all. Maybe as a child you don’t see the connection. But it was — it created no — no problem at all.

KROFT: No feeling of guilt?

Mr. SOROS: No… Well, 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 that was — well, actually, in a funny way, it’s just like in markets —  that if I weren’t there — of course, I wasn’t doing it, but somebody else would be taking it away anyhow. And – 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.

Hoewel dit interview keer op keer van YouTube wordt verwijderd, duikt het telkens weer op. De lezer moet dus zelf dit interview zoeken op https://www.youtube.com Typerend voor Soros’ mentaliteit, en die van zijn dwepers, is dat George tegenover Kroft verklaarde: ‘I am basically there to make money. I can not and do not look at the social consequences of what I do.’ En met het geld dat Soros opstrijkt, schakelt hij democratische instituten uit door het politieke leiderschap van westerse landen direct en meestal in het geheim onder druk te zetten. Maar dat interesseert mevrouw De Gruyter niet; democratie is voor haar de stem van de rijke elite, en de proleten die om de schatrijke geprivilegieerden heen cirkelen.