George Soros’ New Venture

The announcement that George Soros will commit $1 billion to create the Open Society University Network (OSUN) has flooded the mainstream media and the internet in the last several days. The announcement has attracted public attention and certainly deserves a closer look. George Soros is a currency speculator with political ambitions. His goal is to remake the world. The idea of the “open society” goes back to the period of the Cold War when Karl Popper, a British philosopher, advanced it as a response to the Soviet threat. It has been largely neglected since then. George Soros has turned the open society into his personal ideological tool that he uses to realize his political ambitions. He has already spent over $32 billion of his money to achieve this goal and he is determined to continue pursuing his agenda. George Soros and his organization – Open Society Foundations (OSF) – are very political in orientation. Soros himself characterizes his activities as “political philanthropy” – a euphemistic term he uses for what we commonly call buying political influence. Politics comes first. All other ventures of the OSF, including educational ones, are directly related to politics.

There is some confusion in the rationale for creating OSUN. Soros himself is the source of this confusion. On one hand, he writes in his articles that the goal of OSUN is to help educate “young people and promote ‘personal autonomy.’” On the other hand, he also stresses that he wants to use education to “fight nationalism, climate change, and to promote the ideal of open society.” These two orientations are at cross-purposes. Fighting nationalism and climate change and promoting an “open society” are clearly political in their orientation. The title of Soros’s article devoted to OSUN is “How a Democratic Counteroffensive Can Win”, which also points to the political nature of this new venture. When politics is infused in education, the result is usually indoctrination.

Soros made the initial announcement of the new project in a speech he gave at a dinner funded by his organization at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The speech was clearly political in nature. For much of it, Soros talked about the current political situation in the world and the threat of authoritarianism. Only at the end of the speech did he include a lengthy section dealing with the new educational venture. The inclusion of education in what essentially is a political speech confirms that OSUN is primarily about politics, not education (however conflated the two may be in Soros’s mind). The tone of Soros’s speech in Davos is somber. He recognizes that the wind is no longer at his back and he has to fight an uphill battle. He notes political setbacks that his agenda has suffered in the last few years. He does not have much hope for the impeachment. He also recognizes that the Democrats are likely to lose big in the next elections as the mood in America increasingly turns against them. However, he urges his audience not to give in to despair. Soros points to some positive signs, but he is not particularly sanguine in their assessment. He says that there is an urgent need for a long-term strategy. That’s where OSUN comes in. Soros emphasizes that the future of his lifelong goal now lies in education.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/01/george_soros_new_venture.html