166 - Bearing False Witness: Odious Ogres, Scapegoating, Outright Lies, anti-Semitism, and the Coarsening of Discourse
Condemning the Nattering Nabobs of Negativism
Blaming scapegoats is an enduring human enterprise. Throughout history out-groups across the globe have served as easy to blame convenient “causes” of societal ills. Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Roma, Muslims in Buddhist Myanmar and Hindu India, and Christians in Mao Zedong’s China have all been tarred with responsibility for harms and calamities. So have named individuals in those countries and dozens more. Recall unfounded witchcraft accusations in seventeenth-century Salem and alleged heresy in sixteenth century Spain (the Inquisition), or blasphemy in today’s Bangladesh. Even in the contemporary world, shamans or the priests of vodun can finger culprits falsely.
Putin does much the same when he falsely uses the supposed presence of Nazis in Ukraine to justify his invasion and then lies about atrocities committed there daily. Across time and geographical space, tyrants like Putin have excused their aggressions by blaming non-existent provocations and provocateurs. Scapegoating and bearing false witness go together.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a classic puffed up potentate who cleverly and mendaciously runs an electoral autocracy in the heart of eastern Europe, has long used the threat of supposed refugee hordes flooding into his country en route to more liberal parts of Europe to mobilize resentment and gain votes for his ruling Fidesz party. He has also whipped up animosity against outsiders in general in order to preserve his tight hold on Fidesz and to bar essential human rights and civil freedoms within Hungary. Those venomous finger pointings helped under his leadership since 2010 to transition Hungary and himself from defenders of democracy and freedom against Soviet oppressive control during the 1956 revolution into what is now a tightly, slavishly pro-Russian, outpost of Soviet style oppression within modern Europe and NATO.
Orban’s Hungary still purchases Russian gas and oil, refuses to support its neighbor Ukraine against Russia, and gives whatever comfort it can to Russia despite its invasion of Ukraine and subsequent atrocities. Orban has just refused to allow grain from Ukraine to enter or transit. To justify his antagonism to the West and his tilt toward Putin, Orban invents contrived hobgoblins against which he battles. Scapegoats are essential to his personal and party hegemony.
Like Kim Jong-un in North Korea, Orban pillories and lambastes those supposed enemies who, he claims, are attempting to undermine Hungary. One is a former native, a Jew, and a long-ago émigré. For Orban, George Soros, who survived the Holocaust in Hungary with his family thanks to forged identity documents, later emigrating to escape Soviet Communism, is the invented ogre. He has been called all manner of names and accused of all manner of attempts to interfere with Orban’s plans for a modern dictatorship in his native land. Whenever an electoral contest emerges, Orban rants against Soros.
But Soros has not lived in Hungary since 1947, has no family or investments there, and merely wants to help make Hungary a better place. Three years ago, Orban even forced the Central European University, to which Soros had donated large sums, to exit Hungary for Austria despite the fact, or perhaps because, it was the best place to obtain an advanced education in Hungary. But cutting off one’s proverbial nose to save Orban’s face and rouse his supporters was more salient despite the clear fact that the Central European University largely kept to itself, educated within a bubble, and knew better than to try to play a role in local politics.
Soros’ name and his very being has become an anti-Semitic trope, a meme really, that many others now also employ (aping Orban) to rouse their own right-leaning supporters. Some of this anti-Soros trashing may have emerged from deep wells of ignorance, even deeper canyons of conspiracy. Few even know who Soros is, or how he spends his considerable fortune for good causes in higher education, supporting freedom in totalitarian states like Myanmar, or across the globe backing freedom of expression endeavors and such outlying efforts such as prison reform.
True, Soros has contributed personally in the United States to Political Action Committees (PACs) that have helped to support Democratic Party candidates, but his Open Society Foundation is a separately administered sponsor of democratic initiatives outside the U. S. The Foundation believes that “societies can only flourish when they allow for democratic governance, freedom of expression, and respect for individual rights.”
Soros began his philanthropy decades again when he provided scholarships to Black South Africans fleeing apartheid. Then he helped to promote the open exchange of ideas in Communist Hungary, funding academic visits to the West. He supported fledgling independent cultural groups and other initiatives. After the Berlin Wall fell, he created the Central European University in Budapest as a gift back to his native country and as a space to foster critical thinking—"at that time an alien concept at most universities in the former Communist bloc.”
Conspiracists like Orban and today’s Republican Party operatives make Soros, like any scapegoat, into something he is not. He has no designs on anything but a better world. Close scrutiny of his philanthropic and political generosities demonstrates that he is consumed to strengthen the human freedoms that Fascism and Communism erased in his youth, and that still stalk the world.
Republican politicians, many of whom heavily disguise their awareness of facts and real truths, have started attacking Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who has dared to prosecute an ex-president for hushing up payments to a porn star, falsifying his books thirty-four different ways, and evading electoral finance laws, as a stooge of Soros. They have done so despite the uncontradicted evidence that Bragg and Soros have never met, that legal contributions now linked to Soros came instead from a Soros funded PAC in 2022 during the district attorney’s electoral campaign.
Last week, this use of Soros as a scapegoat was employed by a recently appointed woman Republican U.S. senator in Mississippi to attempt to justify her refusal to let the candidacy of a very well-qualified Black local judge and prosecutor go forward as a federal district judge. The candidate in question was backed by Mississippi’s other (elected) Republican U.S. senator, by a former Republican governor of the state, and by the former head of the Republican party in Mississippi.
Why does Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith belatedly oppose the nomination? The candidate, she said, was smart and well-liked in his district. But he had received “significant support” from Soros, she alleged. Just as in the Bragg example, the Black local judge had never talked to Soros. All he and Bragg had done was to receive money from a PAC that disburses money to many candidates using Soros’ cash. Scott Colum, the district court aspirant, explained that he never knew that money would arrive from Soros’ committee, never asked for it, and learned about the donation only when “I read about it in my hometown paper.”
Soros made his many billions mostly by selling the British pound short in the 1990s and then by investing the proceeds effectively. He does favor and contribute to causes that advance progressivism. In the post-Trump era, that certainly equates more with Democratic than with Republican candidates, Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a sometime Republican, now does pretty much the same.
Orban, Rep. Jim Jordan, Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and other questionable upholders of freedom pepper their opposition to democratic and Democratic innovations and actions, in Hungary, in Mississippi, and in the halls of Congress by scapegoating Soros and employing hints of old-fashioned twentieth century anti-Semitism. Hitler and Stalin cheer from the sidelines. It is past time that we labelled the tropes and memes for what they are, and called out the lies that Putin, Orban, Jordan, McCarthy, and many others propagate for narrow partisan political pursuits. We must (to paraphrase a long ago Republican speech writer) condemn the nattering nabobs of negativism – everywhere.