Is he fucking joking? Lots of people in the US were arrested, harassed and intimidated while and for protesting the war in Iraq. ____________________________________ Travis W Fast Ph.D ABD York University Political Science Toronto, On ----- Original Message ----- From: "Doug Henwood" <dhenwood at panix.com> To: "lbo-talk" <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Thursday, February 15, 2007 11:48 PM Subject: [lbo-talk] Soros responds, then Peretz
> Correspondence
> George Soros v. Martin Peretz
>
> Only at TNR Online | Post date 02.09.07
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> artin Peretz falsely accused me of having been a "young cog in the
> Hitlerite wheel" ("Tyran-a-Soros," February 12). I need to set the
> record straight. In 1944, when the Nazis occupied Hungary, my father
> arranged false identities for his family. He placed me with an
> official of the Hungarian Ministry of Agriculture who claimed that I
> was his godson. In return, my father arranged a false identity for
> the official's Jewish wife. In my capacity as 14-year-old godson, I
> accompanied the official on a trip to inventory the estate of a
> wealthy Jewish family that had fled the country. That is the episode
> "60 Minutes" quizzed me about in the interview that Peretz quotes. In
> the same interview I also said "I had no role in taking away that
> property." The facts are documented in Michael Kaufman's biography,
> (Soros: The Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire). I have also
> described the events at length in my own books and my father, Tivadar
> Soros, gives an account of our adventures in 1944 in his book
> Masquerade.
>
> As regards my use of the term "de-Nazification," I am not too proud
> to admit this was a bad choice of words. I certainly do not put the
> United States and Nazi Germany in the same moral category. What I
> meant was that the United States needs to engage in a profound soul
> searching about the harm the war in Iraq has done to others and
> ourselves. Post-war Germany underwent such a process to its lasting
> benefit. Perhaps truth and reconciliation would have been a more
> felicitous expression, although it is also inaccurate because we need
> to be reconciled with ourselves not the terrorists. For the record, I
> am not equating the U.S. to South Africa either.
>
> George Soros
> New York, New York
>
>
> Martin Peretz Responds:
>
> George Soros lived through the depredations of Nazi Germany. I only
> learned of them from books and the oral testimonies of others. But
> nearly every scholar of this darkest era describes the difficulty of
> excavating the precise narrative of events from the trauma and chaos
> that defined them. Soros points to his own father's memoirs, for
> instance, which paints a more complicated picture than the son's
> response. But this is quibbling. What provoked my article was not
> Soros's biography; it was his casual suggestion that America has "to
> go through a certain de-Nazification process." I am glad that my
> article spurred him to abjure his words--and doubt that he would have
> retracted them in its absence. If he hasn't noticed, America is now
> in the midst of an anguished debate about Iraq. No one in that debate
> seems intimidated or has been arrested. About half the country seems
> to be completely against the war. More are against it when you take
> into account those who have some mixed feelings. Opposing the Bush
> administration in this free country hardly qualifies as an act of
> dissidence. Even after this clarification, I find his logic utterly
> baffling and his assumptions no less pernicious.
>
>
>
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