> Srdja Trifkovic was a PR agent for Radovan Karazdic. Chronicles writer Paul Gottfried also writes for Telos.
> ...Over the past five years, the Soros network has given a successful
> start to previously nonexistent "gay" activism in almost all of its areas
> of operation. The campaign for "LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual,
> transgender] Rights" is directed from Budapest, where Miriam Molnar's
> 1999 policy paper published by OSI defined the "problem" as
> discrimination and the low level of acceptance, visibility, and political
> representation of LGBT's. It was necessary either "to convince the
> society to accept LGBT people as equal and let the society make pressure
> [sic] to the politicians (through media) to change laws" or "to convince
> the politicians that LGBT people are equal and that they need help in
> convincing the rest of the society." The overall goals were to generate
> discussion about LGBT identity within the community, to make them visible
> and "create a positive image," and to establish regular forums of
> discussion with other groups in the region. Specific tasks included the
> development of websites in English with subsites in local languages, the
> establishment of task forces that would react to all "homophobic" media
> outbursts in one "Pink Book," and the organization of two-week summer
> schools for teachers that would "provide training about discrimination of
> [sic] LGBT people, disabled people, overweight people etc."
In November 1999, a pilot project began at the Center for Publishing Development (OSI Budapest) on homosexual books in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia, and Slovakia. That same year, Nash Mir (Our World) Gay and Lesbian Center announced that it had been registered as an NGO in the Ukraine. From that moment, the group was free to pursue its stated goals, including "fight against sexual-orientation discrimination" and "homophobic sentiments in societal consciousness" and "assistance to upbringing of gays' and lesbians' self-consciousness as equal and valuable members of society." The group expressed gratitude for its legalization to the "Ukrainian branch of Soros Foundation Network (Renaissance Foundation) which lobbied our question in the Ministry of Justice and render [sic] legal assistance to us."
Gay.ru is a Soros-funded Moscow NGO that has developed "into an established and recognized Russian gay and lesbian center" and "the clearing house for lesbian and gay groups scattered across the country":
We keep contacts with all existing gay, lesbian, and AIDS organizations in Russia and maintain on-going correspondence and reporting to international gay and lesbian organizations . . . We have collected the biggest off-line library that features over a hundred Russian titles and some fifty English classic books on gay studies. It was greatly enhanced by the Core Collection on Gay and Lesbian Issues awarded to us by the Soros Foundation in 2000.
In Bucharest, Monika Barcsy of the local Soros branch bewailed the fact that, in Rumania, "the homosexual identity is stigmatized" and is one of the main bases for treating individuals as "the others" in an attitude of intolerance. Their families became the victims of prejudice "just because the society is unable to accept the legitimacy of same-sex relations as a 'normal' manifestation." The author singles out the Rumanian Orthodox Church as a prime culprit: "The problem is that many Christian Orthodox students' organizations and other student groups support the church." In 1994, she points out, more than 100 theology students began a series of demonstrations in front of Rumania's parliament against homosexual propaganda in the media and collected signatures demanding legislation to criminalize same-sex relations. Barcsy concludes by reiterating the standard Soros line:
Gay men and lesbians need rights that guarantee them the expression of their identity in the public sphere . . . [T]he legal status of gays and lesbians, their ability to move and appear in public, to speak out and act together should be considered a very good test of the civic openness. [It] can't be resolved with the new laws made under the pressure of different human rights organizations. Romania needs . . . to ameliorate the negative responses towards the homosexuals from the majority population . . . There are "problems" with the society as a whole, and the society's mentality can't be changed overnight.
A key pillar of Soros' activities is his dictum that "no-one has a monopoly on the truth" and that "civic education" should replace the old "authoritarian" model. Civic education does not have to be "just a dialogue" between a teacher and students, he says; in addition, "we have projects like health education, where people use new ways to discuss issues like hygiene, diet, and sex." While "this does not sound like traditional civic education," he continues, it is "a new way for teachers to relate to their pupils," just as citizens must relate in new ways to governments and elected officials in societies trying to become more open and democratic.
Accordingly, throughout postcommunist Eastern Europe, the Soros Foundation's primary stated goal is to "democratize the education system" by "instituting curriculum reforms." What this means in practice has been demonstrated over the past three years by Serbia's education minister Gaso Knezevic, a friend and confidante of Soros. Since the first day of his tenure, Mr. Knezevic has insisted that schools must be transformed from "authoritarian" institutions into "exercise grounds" for the "unhindered expression of students' personalities in the process of equal-footed interaction with the teaching staff, thus overcoming the obsolete concept of authority and discipline rooted in the oppressive legacy of patriarchal past." Mr. Knezevic started his reform with primary schools, with a pilot program of "educational workshops" for children ages 7 to 12. The accompanying manual, financed by the Open Society, rejects the quaint notion that the purpose of education is the "acquisition of knowledge" and insists that the teacher has to become the class "designer" and that his relationship with students should be based on "partnership." <SNIP>
-- Michael Pugliese