Shot for Shoes

Lessons of Tyranny Unlearned

No one trusted. Suspicion and terror hammered emotions into thick shields of silence and isolation. Nothing was common among people, except the expectation of betrayal and treachery.

Those were abundant. Corruption was king. It’s happening again.

Tal, one of seven Magyar chieftains who conquered what is now Hungary in about 895AD, beginning a legacy of shifting wars.

Teenaged runners for the Jewish council in Budapest in 1944 delivered deportation documents to families they had grown up with in synagogue. These families were corralled in a downtown neighborhood where Jews had been herded, mandated to wear six-inch yellow stars – mocking the Star of David – to identify them as Jews.

Deportation documents were death sentences.

The scars last a long time. On the Danube River in Budapest is a memorial to Jews who were taken to the dock in 1944. Arrow Cross Party fascists, aligned with the Nazis, used the documents to justify arresting Jewish families to deport or execute them. They marched Jews to the river edge forcing them to remove their shoes, then taking their shoes for plunder. The fascists then lined people up and shot them, husbands, wives, children. Some were tied together in threes; one was killed so all three fell into the river letting the dead body drag the others under to drown. Babies were thrown in the air and shot.

The frenzied Arrow Cross Party filled the vacuum of fleeing Nazis with their own brand of genocide. Formed from the 1935 roots of fledging Nazism, the Arrow Cross Party-Hungarist Movement took power Oct. 15, 1944. Before Russian communists toppled them six months later in March 1945, the fascists had murdered 10,000 to 15,000 civilians, mostly Jews and Romani Gypsies, a nomadic Steppes people. The Arrow Cross Party deported more than 80,000 people to Nazi concentration camps in Austria – contributing its share of more than 500,000 Jews that Hungary sent to Nazis during the Holocaust.

The Hungarian hysteria of racial purity was an infection from the “science” of Turanism, an academic search into the linguistic ancestry of pure Slavic peoples who eventually settled in modern-day Hungary. Under the guise of rationalism and academia, intellectuals colored the ethic nationalist nature of Hungarian fascism and the Arrow Cross Party.

One of the Jewish teenagers delivering deportation notices didn’t wear a yellow star. His father changed the family name from Schwartz to Soros to camouflage their Jewish origins and bought papers from corrupt officials identifying him and his family as Christians to escape their Jewishness and the mandated Jewish star. Young teenager George Soros must have been traumatized by his runner experience, quickly learning the arts of corruption and social perception as tools of survival.

Hitler called Budapest a fortress city; it has been a warring ground for centuries. The crossroads of Pannonian, Hunnic, Roman, and Celtic invasions, spiritual conflicts from paganism to Christianity and back, war from Ottoman hegemony to Habsburg monarchy, Hungary is marked with conflict, broken armor, and political testing.

Russian Stalinists erected this statue to celebrate defeat over Nazi tyranny only to impose later their own tyranny.

Once Russian communists secured Budapest and Hungary in the wake of World War II, apparatchiks turned party slogans like “freedom,” “unity,” and “power to the people” into war against the Hungarians they had liberated. Through voter fraud, political treachery, and broken promises, Russian-backed communists nationalized industrial companies, banned religious and civil organizations, and dominated local public administration and bureaucracy. The Hungarian Constitution of 1949, modeled after the Soviet Union constitution, was approved and Stalinist Russians changed the name of the country to the People’s Republic of Hungary.

Ironically, in 1947 the Russians built a monument on Gellert Hill across the Danube to celebrate liberty and the communist deliverance of Budapest from the Nazis. The Russians later used the hill as an artillery base to control Budapest and the Hungarians. During the 1956 Hungarian revolution against communist tyranny, Russians fired from the hill killing about 2,500 civilians to repress their rebellion.

More than 200,000 Hungarians sought political refuge abroad during the uprising. Stalinist communism didn’t end in Hungary until 1989.

Budapest’s bellicose legacy is thick in the air even today. Walking down the streets, locals don’t look you in the eye. The grand promenade, Andrassy Avenue, where horse-drawn carriages once pranced carrying aristocrats and bankers, is now just another road where people look down as they walk by under shields of silence and isolation.

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George Soros left Hungary and worked at London merchant banks before opening the world’s first hedge fund, Double Eagle, in 1969 with $12 million in managed assets. He later changed the fund’s name to Quantum Fund and became a billionaire through short selling on a United Kingdom currency crisis, stock swaps, and other exploitative strategies.

Leading economists began accusing Soros of triggering international financial crises for “fun and profit.” Soros moved massive amounts of funds to influence markets, economies, politics, and minds. His money supports many activist groups, including the fascist Antifa, a purported antifascist group; Black Lives Matter, a communist front organization; and various defund-police groups. He also has supported recreational-drugs initiatives and euthanasia activism.

A journalist for the Japan Times Weekly reporting on Japan’s struggling 2013 economy said the financier never acts alone “since he needs local mafia, corrupt politicians, terrorists, phony NGOs, and lunatic-fringe ‘financial experts’ to get away with the gang-rape of vulnerable economies.” In the wake of Soros influence and hostile takeovers, results are all-too predictable, journalist Yoichi Shimatsu wrote: “pensioners losing their life savings, factory closures, nations deprived of their resources, countries stripped of their sovereignty and, more cruelly, tons of child-sex slaves and human organs for sale on the streets.”

Stuck in Totalitarianism

The billionaire says his success is largely dependent on his theory of economic reflexivity, derived primarily from social science research. Reflexivity is seen as the conscious reflective activity of individual participants in groups, cultures, and economic systems. Investors’ perceptions affect the trading environment – the market – which in turn changes individual perceptions and creates predictable and controllable behavioral loops.

Soros also applies this to political activism, using techniques of propaganda, violence, and verbal assault to affect perceptions and launch social action that creates self-fulfilling prophecies of doom and brutality. Under the guise of rationalism, his Open Society Foundation supports activism, language abuse, and politics that seek to destroy traditional cultural and political perceptions to direct change – change that aligns with his perceptions of what should be.

He calls it an “open society,” representing what his London University of Economics professor, Karl Popper, envisioned as a society that overcomes the strains of civilization through reason and open debate. Restraints on speech and exchange of ideas don’t solve problems but lead to centralized totalitarian control, Popper wrote.

After suffering the polarized tyrannies of fascism then communism, Soros’s idea of open societies must have changed. Either end of totalitarian authority is not good, he learned, and the radical extremes of either must be avoided, but he seems more to exploit them than avoid them. He has taken it upon himself and his Open Society Foundation to alter cultural and social perceptions through sociological manipulation and violence to break down any sense of common understanding, tradition, or historical legacy.

Much of his profits he donates to leftist political causes internationally and nationally in the U.S., even down to local elections and activism.

Western culture seems to accept this, supported by dumbed-down educational systems and a value-less, amoral cultural entropy. Many people live in an eternal present without

personal accountability. Theodore Dalrymple writes in his book, Life at The Bottom: The Worldview that Makes the Underclass, that uneducated, unaccountable young people are condemned to a “present that merely exists without connection to a past that might explain it or to a future that might develop from it.”

“Theirs is truly a life of one damned thing after another. Likewise, they are deprived of any reasonable standards of comparison by which to judge their woes. They believe themselves deprived, because the only people with whom they can compare themselves are those who appear in advertisements or on television.”

Easily manipulated by emotion and victimization, given a language of political correctness, many young people are caught in activist battles designed by elitist rich people for control and profit. Yet, these youth act as if they know something.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was executed by Nazis, warned us. “Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice.... Against stupidity we are defenseless.”

***

For I have seen violence and strife in the city. Day and night they go around it on its walls; Iniquity and trouble are also in the midst of it. Destruction is in its midst; Oppression and deceit do not depart from its streets.

Popper fled Vienna to New Zealand in 1937 to escape Nazism and Jewish pogroms in Austria-Hungary. He returned to Europe after World War II to become one of the 20th century’s most influential philosophers of science as he struggled with understanding the rise of totalitarianism – whether by the left or the right.

The only way to stop the trauma and damage of war cycles, Popper contends, is to develop open societies, the idea being that freedom of thought and speech allow societies to address complex issues of civilization with reason, not elite tribalism that only seeks to ensure elite power and dominance.

Soros, though, despite his alleged support of open societies, continues to impose elite power by destroying the ability to speak openly or to discuss what’s right or true. By funding brown-shirt mob violence and supporting groups that use language and name calling to intimidate and coerce, Soros is just another tribal elite with a profit agenda to protect.

Linguistic imperialism destroys any ability to discuss or communicate without the hammers of accusation, intimidation, shame, coercion, confusion, and outright lies. It destroys truth for perception to tighten centralized control.

Delusion reigns. Trust is destroyed.

The American revolution was about building an open society where citizens address the issues and develop solutions – not government, not bureaucrats, not rich elite who play with the power of a nation to control and exploit.

The American revolution was against monarchy and totalitarianism and promoted citizenry power. However, corporate and political elite are seeking increasing control through monopoly, economic slavery, and delusion by managing the highest levels of politics to promote class and racial warfare to justify their ends.

Popper warned against the destructive forces of people fearful of losing or sharing their power, whether open political power or closed-door corporate power. They conjure their own authority and proclaim their rights over all other rights. No common morality exists, only their perception of good and right, wise and foolish, as defined by them. They do what is right in their own eyes.

The outcomes usually generate mass stupidity among unwary people, like those that left the shoes of murdered Jews on the banks of the Danube.