Researcher’s note: Are the medical stations that you see in this video for the caravan Doctors Without Borders? Funded by Soros? Looks like the U.N. might be helping out as well!

Researcher’s note: Are the medical stations that you see in this video for the caravan Doctors Without Borders? Funded by Soros? Looks like the U.N. might be helping out as well!

Ami Horowitz: The Truth Behind the Caravan

Mária Schmidt on George Soros, the grave digger of the left, part 1

Hungarian Spectrum

April 16, 2017

Tag Archives: Doctors Without Borders

http://hungarianspectrum.org/tag/doctors-without-borders/

The Orbán regime must consider Mária Schmidt’s essay “The Grave Digger of the Left,” which appeared on her government-sponsored blog Látószög (viewing angle), a critically important piece of writing. It was promoted on MTV1, the state propaganda television network, even before it was published.

The essay is, as you might have guessed from its title, about George Soros. Schmidt contends that Soros is singlehandedly orchestrating world events to bring about a world he has been cunningly building for decades. He is a puppeteer, a “wizard/double agent,” as a Russian source called him.

Schmidt’s piece is the result of shockingly bad research. Admittedly, a blog post is not an academic treatise, but one would expect a historian to check her facts. At the very least, one would hope that a historian doesn’t blindly take the conclusions of highly questionable sources at face value. Schmidt’s one-sided interpretation of events with which George Soros has been connected over the years leads me to believe that she first has a theory and then looks for anything that could possibly pass as evidence. It doesn’t seem to bother her that her stories make no sense or that they sound more like fantasy than fact.

Here is one example. At the very beginning of the article Schmidt mentions two organizations in connection with the closing of the Trepca (Kosovo) lead mines: the International Crisis Group (ICG) and Doctors Without Borders. She claims that both are “generously” supported by George Soros. Schmidt is correct in pointing out that both George Soros and his son Alexander are on the board of ICG. What she neglects to say is that the board has 43 members from 33 countries and that ICG’s budget comes largely from governments and corporations and to a smaller extent from foundations and individuals. Her other claim is that Doctors Without Borders, which is also “financed” (Soros pénzel) by Soros, was responsible for closing the Trepca mines, which did unspeakable harm to the people of the area. A quick look at the list of organizations funded by George Soros and his Open Society Foundations would have revealed that Doctors Without Borders is not a recipient of Soros money. And this is a serious problem because, as a result, the whole conspiracy story of Soros’s involvement with the mines collapses.

 

As Mária Schmidt sees Soros and the world

If there is a problem with the Trepca story, there is also something very wrong with the conclusion of the blog post. Because that story from 2000 is supposed to be the prototype of George Soros’s predatory remaking of the world bit by bit. First, this shrewd and unscrupulous financier finds a project that makes good business sense. Then, he sends his civilians there to destabilize a region. Subsequently, he pays off the media, creates chaos and once the whole area is physically destroyed he offers assistance for the reconstruction. Meanwhile he cherry-picks the best business opportunities. Soon after that comes breaking down borders, abolishing national sovereignty, paying off the experts with scholarships, prizes, fame, calling them independent and democrats. This is what happened in Kosovo, where the “Soros-financed Doctors Without Borders” were called in to do the dirty work for him. They convinced the UN forces that the mines were having a deadly effect on the people working and living there. If, of course, Doctors Without Borders were not the henchmen of Soros, Schmidt’s prototypical example collapses.

This is a pretty embarrassing beginning, and I’m afraid the rest is no better. For instance, Mária Schmidt claims that George Soros was solely responsible for the 1998 Russian financial crisis. It is worth quoting her summary of what happened. “George Soros talked the ruble down, something which also caused significant hardship for Hungary, when he published an op-ed piece in The Financial Times in which he called for the devaluation of the ruble by 15-20%. As a result of this [article] the ruble collapsed and lost 60% of its value. The salaries, pensions, and of course savings of people were gone, just as five years later were those of the Brits.”

I don’t think one has to know much about economics to be suspicious of Schmidt’s interpretation of the 1998 Russian financial crisis. An op-ed piece in The Financial Times cannot be responsible for such a financial calamity. So, let’s see what an associate of the CFA Institute had to say about it. “The Russian crisis of 1998 was really an extension of the Asian Currency Crisis of 1997 (the ‘Asian flu’). The combination of declining economic output, falling oil prices, enormous budget deficits, and a currency pegged to the rising US dollar overwhelmed the fledgling Russian government. To maintain its peg to the dollar, Russia used its foreign exchange reserves to buy rubles. But as the country gradually depleted its foreign exchange reserves, it became clear that Russia would soon run out of reserves. At that point, the Russian government would no longer be able to maintain the ruble’s peg to the US dollar. Upon exhausting its reserves, Russia defaulted on its debt and revalued the ruble on foreign exchange markets.” Not a word about George Soros.

These two examples will suffice to demonstrate that Schmidt is offering up “alternative historical facts.” We can therefore move on to her other charge: Soros’s “capture of the left not just in the United States but also in Europe, including Hungary.” In her reading, by now Soros and the left are one and the same. People who are inclined to support social democratic, green, or liberal parties in reality “unscrupulously serve the interests of large global corporations and global financial actors.” How does Schmidt know this? Simple. She noticed that heading leftist parties are “businessmen, bankers, corporate managers, or politicians who will become sooner or later lobbyists for big business.” For example, Clinton, Schröder, Blair, Kern, Macron, Schulz, Gyurcsány, and Bajnai.

For Soros to buy the left and liberalism, he first had to buy the Democratic Party. Her evidence: Saturday Night Live. No, this is not a joke. But what follows is outright breathtaking. Somehow Soros managed to get the McCain-Feingold Reform Act of 2002 enacted, which, according to Schmidt’s interpretation, financially ruined the Democratic Party. The party subsequently became entirely dependent on Soros’s financial support. After that, everything went smoothly, Schmidt concludes.

Schmidt next turns to a dissection of Soros’s influence on current Hungarian society, especially on the youth. But this deserves another post tomorrow.