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[footsteps, car honks]
[ominous music plays]
[sound of paint being sprayed]
The Hungarian government has launched
[IN HUNGARIAN: STINKING JEW] a countrywide anti-migrant poster campaign
depicting George Soros.
-Most Americans have no idea who George Soros is,
but he is one of the most feared men in the world.
-Blood spilled in the Ukraine.
Blood spilled in many other places
where Soros put his fingers.
-We all need to wake up to who George Soros is
and how big his organization is.
[glass shatters]
-A major takedown of George Soros is in process.
-George Soros is one of the richest men in the world.
-He would be blamed for the financial collapses
in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan and Russia.
What's the difference between philanthropy and political activism?
The uber leftist is behind much of the political strife in this country.
A Nazi collaborator literally.
The world's biggest drug trafficker.
-Hillary Clinton's largest single donor.
-He's a traitor to the United States.
-If you want to know who's financing radical Islamists
in Egypt and Syria, it's George Soros.
-Do you think George Soros funded the neo-Nazis
who marched in Charlottesville?
-Wouldn't it be interesting to find out?
-George Soros is one of those evil people in the world.
-This man is the spawn of Satan.
-I talked to somebody who knows George Soros.
They were in his house. It's all black.
With black furniture.
What a freak, man.
What a demon. No wonder.
[ominous music ends]
-What are the worst things that people have said about George?
Where they're not even talking about the man,
he's something else now.
Um... that he's not one of us.
-But you're being very kind with that
because they say, you know,
I've read things where he's a demon.
He's a global conspiracy.
He's the Elders of Zion.
Why is George perceived in such a way?
But this is a very dark thing.
He's not one of us meaning that he's different.
He's Jewish.
He's a speculator.
For some people,
he's a man responsible for the financial crisis,
a man who speculates against the interest of the country,
a man who wants to interfere in our affairs.
For such people what he does, what he stands for,
what he supports are unacceptable.
He's our enemy.
He's not one of us.
I think that this is something very dark.
He's not a human being.
He's one of the person
about which it's very popular
to construct a conspiracy theory
or to be targeted as a major reason
for this or that developing.
So, if people don't know
what is happening in the world,
George Soros did it.
There is something special
and potentially problematic
about single individuals
having their voice multiplied so much
because of the amount of wealth they command.
He's someone who has enough money, enough staff
that in many ways you have to think of him as a sovereign.
And I think sovereigns,
someone who is unaccountable and unconstrained
inherently makes people very nervous about their power.
I don't think people understand the scale of Soros' influence.
There's never been this much money in the system
designed to reorder society,
money that's not accountable to any political system.
I mean, that's the problem.
It's a battle of ideas at the most fundamental level.
-When one person has the monopoly on truth
or one group or a government,
when people are denied the right to speak,
people are denied the right to express themselves
whether it's in the form of religion or culture,
their gender, their sexual orientation or race,
there are so many ways
that people's freedoms can be diminished or denied.
And it goes all the way from censorship
to imprisonment, to physical harm.
At issue is really a clash of those
who want an open society
and those that want to deny people rights.
They want to deny people rights for their own power,
for their own personal gain
and that's what George Soros is against.
George Soros is envisioning a world
where one person has access
to the same benefits of society as another.
That's the clash of ideas.
-Excuse me.
I think we have permission
to go in and speak to this lady.
Who are these people?
-Every one of you are terrorists-
I don't care what you say.
Every Muslim is a terrorist, period.
Talking that fucking stupid Spanish around here.
-Where would we be today if not for that civil war?
-Where would we be without slavery?
Are you serious?
-I don't think there ever was genocide to begin with.
-Today will become known as Black Wednesday.
-It was the day Europe's currency crisis
finally exploded.
-George Soros gambled five billion pounds
selling while sterling was still high,
but intending to buy back cheaply
if the pound devalued and make a fortune.
-You took the whole Quantum Fund
and bet one and a half times that.
That's really called betting the ranch.
-Watch out. Excuse me.
The government raises interest rates twice in one day to 15%
in its all-out battle
to prop up sterling.
But after a frantic day's trading, the pound plunges again.
Today has been an extremely difficult and turbulent day.
-George Soros made a billion dollars almost overnight.
What kind of man would stake more than his entire fortune
against the Bank of England
and then give away so much of the winnings?
-In 1979 you started to fund the students at Cape Town.
And why did you feel like that was something to do?
I think probably the best thing is to go at my life.
Either we can start with my life
-Okay.
or we can start with the philosophy.
Philosophy, you get lost or I get lost.
So, probably better to start at, you know...
I was born in 1930 in Budapest.
From perhaps a somewhat unusual middle-class family
because my father was a rather unusual person
and had a tremendous influence on my life.
-Budapest was a very nice place to live in if you had the money
and if you were of the right background.
Swimming pools, bars, cinemas, cafes, restaurants,
excellent theater and concerts.
Academy of Music was really quite well known.
About 25% of the city's inhabitants were Jews,
like the Soros family, like mine.
Then it turns out, that it's all a dream
and we are not accepted.
[somber music plays]
Really, the formative experience was 1944,
the German occupation.
[cheers and applause]
It was the Holocaust that was visited on Hungary
in a particularly virulent way,
because the pace-
400,000 people killed in a matter of a few weeks.
So, it was a crescendo of the Holocaust.
[GEORGE SOROS] My family was Jewish
and this meant we became targets during the occupation.
I would have perished if my father had not understood
the gravity of the situation early on.
My father obtained
the identity papers of the concierge.
And the man offered to do whatever he can to help.
And we lived through the German occupation
with false identity.
Not only did we survive,
but actually my father helped a number of other people
also to survive.
That shaped my outlook on life
preparing me to face harsh reality.
And instead of giving in, actually trying to prevail.
-When we were young, we used to dance.
We don't dance anymore.
I don't have any pictures of when we were young.
-Do you remember when you met George?
-Yes, I met George
when we were around the swimming pool
and his father walked around with him on his shoulder.
When he grew up, he had a hard time with his mother,
with his father and with his brother.
They were all pretty tough on him.
They really were.
And he was beaten up a lot with young other boys.
And I remember he was around seven or eight
and his father made him climb very high up to jump.
And I was terrified. And his father said, \"Go, go.\"
I mean, his father pushed him and pushed him.
He ruled everybody.
When he said, \"Jump,\" you jumped, believe me.
My father has certainly talked
about how influential he was
and how much he looked up to his father
and how important he was to him.
As much as any son will see their father as a hero,
my father really had that experience
of his father taking risks and being creative and clever
and extremely astute; recognizing that something is happening
and not shielding yourself from it because you don't like it.
That was Tivadar's ability in that moment
was he could see the world was going upside down.
The State which is meant to protect us
is going to be our enemy.
We have to do dramatic things just to survive.
[GEORGE SOROS] He taught me there are abnormal times
when the normal rules don't apply.
In normal times, if you follow orders, you generally get by.
But, then, if you followed the orders you would actually perish.
It was in October 1944 in Budapest
when Jews were not allowed to buy cigarettes.
And since George and his father
lived under fake Christian identity
and did not wear the yellow star on their coats,
their father was able to go at tobacconists
and buy a pack of cigarettes.
And when they came out,
there were some Jews standing there
and asked George's father to sell them a few cigarettes.
And then he distributed all the cigarettes
among those Jews.
And George asked the father, \"Why did you do this?
\"It's so dangerous for us to come here.
Why did you give the cigarettes to them?\"
The answer of the father was,
\"Because I don't want the Jews
to think that all Christians are bad.\"
Not because he wanted to be a good person or he had a good heart.
That was not the reason.
The reason was something more fundamental and deeper.
Thinking about the future after all those horrors
when Jews and Christians will have to live together once more.
George told this story
because it had a great impact on his way of thinking.
-The war is something
that's very hard for us to identify with.
Fifty-five million people died globally from the war.
Massive destruction of housing and infrastructure
and schools and hospitals.
And little kids at this time
should never have experienced that kind of life.
This is going to leave a lifetime impression.
[somber music plays]
[somber music continues]
[bombing in the distance]
-The Nazi troops were driven out
and a new tyranny replaced the old.
[GEORGE SOROS] Soviet occupation involved an active military operation
raping and looting
on a pretty substantial scale.
-And the Russians came in and the first thing they did,
they shook hands with my father
and his palms were soft.
So they yelled at him, \"Capitalist!\"
and they put him against the wall with a gun at his head.
And then they wanted to take me to the General.
I was 16 at the time.
The Russians were awful.
And they picked up young people on the street
and some of them they just shot.
-Communism is a dream for a better world.
Somehow, you're going to get abundance,
social justice, peace and happiness
delivered through class warfare.
Now, if the old world is discredited
and it's full of rubble
and six million Jews have been exterminated,
you can see how the dream for a new world
or a better world would have resonance.
The problem for the communists,
you can't get to abundance, social justice and peace
by arresting, deporting
and murdering people for political reasons.
We grew up aware of the hardships
that our parents had seen in Europe.
My father used to tell me bedtime stories
about the Soviet occupation of Hungary
and, you know, where his father was always the hero.
My mother talked less about her experiences
growing up in Germany during the war.
But we were very aware that they were immigrants.
We were very aware that it was war and discrimination
that had pushed them out of Hungary.
[GEORGE SOROS] After the war, I went to London.
And there I got to know Karl Popper's book,
'Open Society and Its Enemies'.
And that had a big impact on me
because it helped me to put my own experience
of Communism and Nazism and these ideologies
into a theoretical framework.
He made the point that there is a similarity
between Nazi regime and Communist regime
because they both believed that they have the ultimate truth.
And since nobody is in possession of the ultimate truth,
if you have a dogma like that, you have to impose it by force.
So, Communism and Nazism had something in common.
That is something that really grabbed me.
He proposed the alternative,
which is an Open Society
which is based on the recognition
that nobody is in possession of the truth
and therefore you need a critical process.
And you have to respect other people's opinions and interests
and find a way for people with different views
to live together, which is, of course, a democracy.
-When you came to this country after being educated in England,
what was in your mind?
What did you expect to find?
What did you want to find and have you found it?
[GEORGE SOROS] I chose the West
because I sought for freedom.
But to be frank, I came to America to make money.
[audience laughter]
I knew he was a hedge fund guy.
This was before there were thousands and thousands of hedge funds
like there are now.
And I knew that he made more money
than anybody else on Wall Street.
My skill was always in being ahead of the crowd
because I had this flexibility in my thinking.
We mostly act like sheep.
And George Soros is the one person who doesn't follow the sheep.
In fact, if he sees a lot of the sheep running in one direction,
he's likely to think, \"Let me look at the other direction.
What are they running from?\"
As we observe the world, as we think about the world,
as we theorize about the world,
as we form our ideas about the world,
that has an effect on the world
and the way the world actually behaves.
And that's the reflexivity
that George Soros has so forcefully articulated.
I'll give another example.
I'm skiing in San Moritz.
And I buy the Financial Times.
And I read Rolls Royce got into financial difficulty.
And by the time I got to the top of the mountain,
I called the broker,
give him an order to buy British Government Bonds, Gilts.
That's just reading.
You know, I wasn't thinking about buying Gilts, but...
-Explain to me, because I don't understand.
Why does-? I don't understand.
Because it would have enough effect on the British economy
that the government would lower interest rates.
And if you lower interest rates, then the price of Gilts go up.
So, that's an example of how things get connected.
And at the time when I was really on top of the financial markets,
I could see these connections.
The main lesson that I learned during the war
is to expect the unexpected.
I mean, the situations that you get into
are so out of context with what you have grown up with
that you have to examine
the framework in which you think.
And then you realize
that we all work with pre-conceived ideas.
And those ideas don't necessarily correspond to reality.
So, there is this gap between perception and reality
and that's the gap that I have really kind of explored
and also exploited.
-What's it like to have a lot of money?
Well, first of all,
it's very pleasant.
because you don't have concerns.
It also gives you a degree of freedom.
And it also gives you a degree of power.
-The act of making money,
the stress and intensity of it made him miserable.
It was really difficult and unpleasant
partly because he was taking extraordinary risks.
-In my normal life,
I found the people around me rather boring.
And in fact, I would say that,
I spent a lot of time of which I have no memory
because I wasn't really there.
I just wasn't interested.
I think there were a number of transitions
that were occurring simultaneously.
He was getting divorced from my mother.
At that point in his life he had sort of made more money
than he could ever spend in his life.
He was getting demotivated by the business
and it was in some ways a very unhappy time.
Just when I sort of reached 50
and had been extremely successful,
it took a lot out of me.
It was very draining
and it didn't seem worth putting all that effort
and taking all that pain and punishment
that running a hedge fund meant just to make more money.
That was all part of this period of turmoil.
What's the meaning of my life?
Why am I doing what I'm doing?
And I asked myself why am I doing it.
[sounds of the city]
[menancing music plays]
-Given the situation,
the situation as we find it here in South Africa,
we had to exploit alternative means
to solve the problems or to restructure society
without endangering the future of the Whites.
I mean, basically, one may dither about it,
but it is a matter of White survival.
-This Nationalist Party
has been governing South Africa for 26 years
under very difficult circumstances.
And I say to you, apart from anything else,
the merit of the National Party lies in the fact
that it has been able to help support South Africa
for 26 years in the face of all these difficulties.
[cheering and applause]
[PROF. GERT OLIVIER] -We are trying to tell the world our intentions are good
and they can be explained
in terms of Christian moral principles.
But, of course, this all will take time.
[menacing music continues]
-George Soros had been very taken
with the anti-Apartheid cause.
-We believe that in our country there shall be no minority.
There shall be no majority. There shall just be people.
And those people will have the same status before the law.
[GEORGE SOROS] I got to know Africa from the inside
because I had a friend.
He was lecturing in sociology.
And he decided to return to Africa.
And that gave me an opportunity to come and visit him.
And I got to know the South African situation
from the Black point of view.
-George could envision a post-Apartheid South Africa,
but he thought what was needed were educated Blacks
who could play a part
in the governance of a future South Africa
that was not ruled by the White minority.
All I say as an Afrikaner, we got news for you.
So, we will have news against those black South Africans
who want to take us over.
And if we're taking the matter to a crunch,
we will and must, necessarily,
if we believe in the survival of our nation, fight them off.
[gun shots, people screaming]
You people, let's get you out now very quickly, okay?
Okay.
Because you people are the fucking cause of this now.
-Yeah, all right. -So get out.
Okay.
[GEORGE SOROS] -I thought this is a place
where you could really make an impact
by empowering through education.
-Those scholarships were for Black students.
There was a need to make funds available
to pay for accommodation, make funds available
to pay for books that would be required,
but also for living expenses.
We did find out that there was this benefactor, George Soros,
who was behind those scholarships.
[GEORGE SOROS] That was my first serious philanthropic enterprise of my own.
If there were these individuals who didn't know who I was
and were willing to help,
what responsibility does that put on me
to then emulate and also pay it forward?
What can I and the others do to ensure
that we built the South Africa we want to live in?
-I did have juvenile fantasies of saving the world.
So, I had the sort of what I called, \"messianic fantasies\",
which I think most adolescents have.
I've been somewhat more successful
of actually acting out those fantasies.
For him it was critically important to show
that you're not simply helping people like you.
You're not just morally responsible for your part of the world.
As in, you're not simply responsible for your family
or for your country.
That in a certain way you're responsible
for everything that is happening in the world.
And I do believe that the symbolism of the South Africa,
the fact that you have this white Hungarian
who probably didn't know very much the place,
going there was also a message
about the borders of our moral responsibility.
The idea is that if you want to be free,
the only conditions for this to happen
is that everybody should be free.
[birds chirping]
-Human Rights Watch would meet every Wednesday morning.
And George began attending those meetings
really because of his interest in what it looked to be
like an incredibly uphill struggle
to try to ensure protection for rights
in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe.
Not everybody was arrested by the police.
But everybody has the fear that, \"Oh, we had a drink yesterday
\"and I made this statement,
could he tell this to somebody?\"
And I do believe this nature
of the everyday horror of the system
is something that is totally forgotten.
-And it's a terrible system of universal informing,
universal following.
You cannot trust a single person there.
It's quite possible for a son to inform on his father
or a wife on her husband,
not to mention what friends can do to friends.
How long can a man go on living like that?
[SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
I don't know.
-I would invite people
who had come to my office with their stories
and let them come and tell people what was happening,
tell them what was happening to their father
or their mother or their uncle.
I think he learned, as we all did,
by sitting around the table
of those Wednesday morning meetings
learning about what was happening
and then talking about what we could do about it.
Participating in the work of human rights
was kind of a learning experience for me.
It was my apprenticeship.
-He thought individuals could make a difference
in dealing with oppressive regimes.
A grantee of mine
was a school friend of George Soros'.
And he told me that there was this rich man
somewhere in the States I should contact.
But I couldn't find him.
Nobody knew George, but George found me,
so, this is how we met.
He asked me how much I needed.
I said, \"Well, 10,000 would be really helpful.\"
And he said, \"What? $10,000?\"
And I said, \"Oh gosh, I asked too much.\"
But then I stood up for it
and said, \"Yes, that will be really great.\"
He just shook his head and said, \"Think larger.\"
-So, you began to move around Eastern Europe making alliances...
...with pro-Democratic individuals. - Yes.
-Investing in human beings.
-You see, all I did was to find them and to support them.
And all the work was done by them.
-And with your money and...
Yes, my support.
-One of the things that totalitarian regimes did
was control by surveillance and control of the media,
how people talked to one another.
So, when the Soros Foundations began to give copying machines,
people could communicate with one another in ways
which the government found harder and harder to control.
His idea was you have to support a lot
in different places
to help open society.
[VO] The threat was that their criticism of the Communist Party
and the socialist way of life
would become a platform for attacking the regime,
could turn into an organized political force.
That was what we were afraid of.
-He financed a huge variety of programs
like travels of researchers, scientists
and the young who attend courses at western universities.
These purposes did have a common denominator
which was opening up the country.
[GEORGE SOROS] I could see an opening in the Soviet system.
I sort of interpreted it as a boom-bust kind of sequence
which was approaching the bust.
I look at history the same way as I look at financial markets.
I think of financial markets as a historical process.
In other words, that they're not really tending towards equilibrium.
They'll never go back to where they came from.
They always move forward in some way.
And the same is true of history.
[crowd cheers]
Perhaps, besides John Paul II,
Gorbachev and Lech Walesa,
he played the most important role
in getting rid of communism,
his efforts in these countries.
That was the kind of the adventure,
the particular satisfaction for me
to engage in that kind of activity.
-It was a sea of Russian people, I mean, that's what it was.
-That's insane to even see that many people.
-This was in 1991, you know, the curtain came down and all of that.
And it was a free concert in the airfield
as far as the eye could see and it was just people.
We get on stage and do what we do.
And that helicopter would come down close
and they were yelling at people, like, \"Stop!\"
People were moshing or going crazy.
And down in the front there, there were guys in uniforms.
So, they're standing there in their uniforms
and after three or four songs, they're like, \"Fuck this.\"
And they took off their stuff
and they're out there head banging and having a good time.
So, we saw the transformation of a closed-down society
to freedom right before us individually in people.
It was awesome.
There are very few people in the world
that wake up in the morning and say, \"I want to change the world.\"
And most of the people who do that are to be feared.
There you have Hitler, Stalin, Genghis Kahn.
You have kinds of megalomaniacal, violent people
who think somehow their relationship to the world
is one that invites domination.
That's not the normal response people have.
People wake up in the morning and say,
\"Can I get through the day? Will I be in one piece?\"
So the kind of vision that makes someone think
they can have an impact on the world
is a level of ambition that inhabits very few people.
I'm wondering to what extent
you think your ideas about the international community,
about reform, about all the things you're involved in,
got a better hearing
as you accumulated great sums of money?
That people assumed, \"He's got to know what he's talking about here,
because look at all the money he's made.\"
Well, absolutely.
The fact that I have a platform is entirely due to the fact
that I have made a few billion dollars.
[audience laughter]
In a way, the financial markets
served as a laboratory for testing my ideas.
So I think the fact that I've been successful
at least sets up some, let's say, justification
for thinking that there is something in those ideas,
that they are not all nonsense.
-In '92, George had been investing for a decade or more
in trying to bring the downfall of communism,
of socialist totalitarianism in the former Soviet Union
and Eastern Europe and elsewhere.
And then that objective was accomplished
much more rapidly than he or anybody else anticipated.
And at that point he had to ask himself the question,
these societies in former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe
are trying to establish open societies,
well, what actually is the model open society?
The idea of an open society is, you know, what are the levers,
what are the aspects of society that have to be free and open
in order to give members of that society
the opportunity for expression and participation?
Voting is one aspect of that, but there are many others.
You're saying Eritrea is going to wait three or four decades
before it holds elections?
Maybe more, maybe more. Who knows?
Well, aren't elections a central element of a democracy?
And if you don't have elections, then you don't have a democracy.
It depends on what you mean by democracy.
I think probably the most defining feature
of a modern open society is institutionalization of doubt.
Is questioning things.
And I think free press, independent press
is the best means for that, is the best tool for that.
Imagine a President who pointed out a journalist
and threatened him in saying
that this journalist will pay a heavy price.
And afterwards, I was shot at.
[gun shot]
The law can be an instrument of liberation and equality
and fairness or it can be an instrument of oppression.
-Kalief Browder at the age of 16
was accused of stealing a backpack,
held at Rikers for more than a thousand days
without a trial before he was released.
-The judge told me if I plead guilty,
I would be released from jail that same day,
but I didn't do it.
Freedom of expression of all kinds,
but certainly artistic freedom of expression
is absolutely fundamental.
People need that freedom
whether they exercise it or not, they have to have it.
-Religious conservatives in Iran are not kidding
when they warn against so-called decadent Western behavior.
Six men and women were arrested
for dancing on YouTube to the song, \"Happy.\"
Freedom of religion,
but not the right to deprive others of similar freedoms
in the name of religion.
-Nabila Korad is 17.
She and her older sister, Hind,
refused to take off their scarves in school and were expelled.
Education.
Education that has critical thinking at its heart,
not just becoming literate.
-Roma children are on the margins of society across Eastern Europe
where poor access to education stifles opportunities.
Rights are an aspiration for how we want to live.
I decide how I live,
what I say, what I think, whom I love,
who I associate with and who I want to be.
This is what open society is about.
It's not simply certain values that you can recite
and it's not about basically certain philosophy.
It is the idea of a self-correcting society.
I actually remember in high school
a classmate asking me,
\"Why would your father give to the Hungarians
when they tried to, you know, kill your family?\"
And he said that he was determined to go back
and help create a society of which he could actually live.
-There may be many people alive today
with a vision of how they would like to change the world.
George Soros must be one of only a handful
with both the means and the determination to do so.
You'd like an example?
How about his recent commitment
to give 500 million dollars to Russia
over the next three years
to improve education and health care
and to retrain the military for civilian jobs.
[LAURA SILBER] -There was a sense that societies
could be transformed
that with resources you could build democracy,
freedom, open society.
[GEORGE SOROS] Meeting interesting people,
being at the height of the times.
being involved in history
was something that really intrigued me and attracted me.
The philanthropy started gradually
and then it became, you know, this huge enterprise.
[LAURA SILBER] -George started expanding his work
and expanded from Central Europe
to all over Africa, all over Latin America,
all over Asia, all over the United States
working in over 120 countries.
What they do is to try to get to the grassroots people
to see what they think of their society,
how they can participate more openly,
how can their views be taken into account?
[GEORGE SOROS] When we see a problem that we feel needs addressing
and if we can identify a group of people
who happens to know it and understand it
and have a way of dealing with it,
then we empower him or an organization to do it.
-How do you know
people aren't going to take advantage of you?
I tend to give it the benefit of the doubt.
So, I start off basically...
acting in a trusting sort of way
and see what happens.
As long as I don't lose trust, they are in charge.
They know better what the situation in the country is.
Quite often their perception is different from mine
and usually they are right.
It was about 20 years ago.
At that time we went to 144th Street
which was one of the worst places in Harlem.
There were like no white people on 144th Street.
It was so unusual to have someone from the outside
come to 144th Street.
And then we looked down the block
and there was this one guy walking down 144th Street.
He had gotten off way before the school.
And it was George,
and I just couldn't believe that was George Soros.
He was trying to figure something out for himself
and he didn't want the filter of a bunch of sycophants
trying to translate.
He wanted to go directly to these young people and talk to them,
which is what he did; we had a table.
We had kids sit around it and George asked them
what it was like growing up in Harlem,
what were their challenges, what were their fears,
what did they feel good about?
And he decided that he wanted to help.
My father was very much my role model,
but he was helping people all his life on a personal basis.
He was doing it retail, person-to-person.
And I was doing it wholesale.
I was spending a large amount of money
on people whom I did not know.
People tend to feel that these problems are so huge,
leave it to the governments, leave it to others.
What can I as an individual do?
But George never has that attitude.
George always feels an individual can make a difference
and doesn't hesitate to try.
Then what happened?
How did you have a war
when you had such a wonderful culture?
We didn't see what the Nationalists were cooking up.
[explosions]
-Two-thirds of Bosnia
has been attacked by Serbian forces.
The Serbs were not attacking anybody else territories.
They were defending themselves.
[gun shots, screaming]
As we have said before
we are not and we cannot be the world's policeman.
-George Soros today made the biggest single donation
several of the biggest charities in the world have ever received.
What is going on in Bosnia today is genocide.
I feel it particularly strongly,
because as a Hungarian Jew,
I was myself a potential target for genocide.
-And at that time I was with the United Nations
and I was working in the Department of Peacekeeping Operations
and was also very much engaged
in what was happening in the Balkans.
And George, although he wasn't in the UN or in government,
was so incensed by what was going on,
that he was very active.
[ARYEH NEIER] -George Soros did a lot of things
that helped keep Bosnia alive.
[LAURA SILBER] -He tried to restore water to Sarajevo,
tried to restore electricity.
[gun shots]
[ARYEH NEIER] We provided gas heating for people.
We brought seeds in
so that people were able to grow their own food
during the siege.
And a major effort to sustain cultural activities.
And while all these battles were ongoing,
Soros managed to bring us the newsprint.
And in a way, news was important for people in Sarajevo
almost like bread because they would leave the shelters
to get bread and to get news.
-After the Dayton Peace Agreements in Bosnia,
George had given more money to implement the peace agreements
than the U.S. government had.
[IVAN KRASTEV] -Listen, they're big countries.
There's European Union. There's the United States.
Why is a single individual, nevertheless how rich he is,
should be the one to go and to get Sarajevo saved?
I do believe the logic of all this
is telling the people, first, you're not alone,
and secondly, something could be done.
[LAURA SILBER] -In that day, there was no
international system of justice
for bringing people to the dock
for the crimes that they had committed.
The Yugoslav Tribunal was the first one.
And George played a role behind the scenes
of helping see that that court was formed.
[LAURA SILBER] It was a stunning turn of events
to see them forced to hear the testimonies of others
and to see how power can be stripped.
-How do you measure success and failure?
When you make an investment,
your investment is a fantastic object
that you find very alluring.
When you actually achieve your objective,
it turns into something else.
So, the fantastic object fades or loses its luster.
And it is a source of disappointment.
-George has been involved with Myanmar for decades.
He was involved with that country when it was entirely closed off.
And at one point bet very, very heavily on Aung San Suu Kyi.
-You have a global reputation as a freedom fighter,
a human rights activist in a way an Asian Nelson Mandela.
-I don't know whether I'm like Nelson Mandela or not
and I know people often compare me to him.
-In retrospect,
I can see how fallible my judgment was.
-They're beating, butchering and burning he said.
That's what they're doing over there.
-[VO] When they started shooting,
people came out of their houses to see what was going on.
Then the helicopter arrived and they started shelling the village.
-Do you ever worry that you will be remembered
as the champion of human rights
who failed to stand up to ethnic cleansing in her own country?
No, because I don't think there's ethnic cleansing going on.
I think ethnic cleansing is too strong an expression.
-There's a lot of people
who would have been so embarrassed
by that earlier bet they'd made
by the faith that they've thrown behind an individual
that they never would have either continued to engage
or they would have been afraid to change course in midstream.
George has ended up stepping up
and becoming this enormous champion for the Rohingya.
-Do you think on balance that your philanthropic work
counteracts the more ruthless decisions that you had to make
when you were a financier?
No, it has no connection.
I'm not doing my philanthropic work
out of any kind of guilt
or any need to create good public relations.
I'm doing it because I can afford to do it and I believe in it.
Well, Soros is the embodiment of the problem.
I mean, Soros has an amazing effect on policies
like at the ground level in dozens of countries.
And that's deeply resented by people,
people who live in those countries.
Why is this guy who we don't know anything about
sending these NGOs into our country
to influence the way that our country's run?
This man is playing God.
These are just the things that he has donated to.
I just want to show you because we don't have a lot of time.
This is less than half of them.
But other than that, there's nothing to see here.
Just move on with your lives.
-There are other philanthropists, like Bill Gates,
who are not tagged in the same way.
People take him on his own terms
that he made a fortune and wants to spend it
on making the world a better place.
George's offer is not either couched in those terms
and certainly not accepted in those terms.
He relishes controversy and debate.
And he is in his own words and by his own account,
a political philanthropist.
And, you know, that means that to large slices of establishments
who are in favor of status quos from which they benefit,
he is a threat.
There are people who are very, very annoyed with you, Mr. Soros,
for the money that you are putting into projects
that relate, for instance, to drugs in America.
-Very much so. And I'm happy that I irritate some people
because I know that I'm doing something.
-The Bush Administration
and the Nazi and Communist regimes,
all engaged in the politics of fear.
To make comparisons
between the President of the United States
and these regimes,
a lot of people are going to say what are you thinking?
When President Bush said,
\"You are either with us or you are with the terrorists,\"
that's when I was reminded.
But I should have probably kept it to myself.
-Do you think that rich people
have undue influence in politics?
Yes. Yes.
I don't use my money
to gain political influence for my private interests,
which is what many rich people do.
-There's a lot of misinformation out there
about what he's done or why he's done things.
And then sometimes, you know,
even people who are attacking him,
they'll say he's done something,
and I'll think that's right, and absolutely.
And I'm very proud that he's done that.
So, sometimes the information is correct,
but it's a matter of perspective
on whether it's serving some social good
or destroying the fabric of society.
[LAURA SILBER] -As George Soros continued to expand his philanthropy,
he began working with people and groups
that were taking on thornier problems
such as drug policy, criminal justice reform,
gay rights, gay marriage, immigrant and minoriy rights
and women's reproductive rights.
And the more issues he became involved with,
the more enemies he began to make.
-Soros has no problem
wading into the most divisive possible issues:
immigration, abortion, drug use, the Roma, you know,
things that really inflame people's emotions.
And that's one of the reasons he's so widely despised.
These are really touchy issues
and for an outsider to come in
and be like, \"No, no. You gotta do this,\"
that engenders a ton of resentment.
The fact that I have become involved
in so many different issues
and have taken controversial positions
is now actually working against me.
-Your father's considered the bogeyman.
How does that make you feel?
Well, he's become demonized by one community
because he is synonymous with liberal cause.
-Who's funding Black Lives Matter?
One of the big donors seems to be George Soros, our old pal.
This is a George Soros funded anarchist effort.
-Those who are stirring it up, many of them work
for George Soros' front organizations.
-That wasn't a spontaneous event.
It was organized by far left groups
which receive millions of dollars
from the liberal activist, George Soros.
-Do you believe George Soros is behind all of this?
-I tend to believe it.
I believe it fits in his attack mode that he has
and how he uses his...
The world makes more sense
if you simply have a single, 85-year-old mastermind
pulling all the world's strings
and doing the things that you fear and dislike.
Next call comes from Batavia, Illinois.
[WOMAN CALLER] -Uh, yes. Mr. Soros, I was wondering
if you would like to apologize to Holocaust survivors
that you have exploited and to the American public at large
who you have tried to manipulate
with your devious and un-American activities?
-Mr. Soros? -No, I'm afraid that I can't do that.
You can continue accusing me, but until you give some evidence
on the basis of which you're basing these accusations,
I can't oblige you, I'm sorry.
Last year I was invited
to the Global Anti-Semitism Forum.
At the very end of the conversation,
we asked for questions.
And the first person who stood up said,
\"You have not spoken about why George Soros is a Nazi.\"
Half the audience, several hundred people,
got up and applauded her question.
Well, look. I think it's always in these attacks
on somebody like George, you know,
what makes them powerful is there are small fractures
or elements of truth
in which is concocted into something
which is completely untrue and false and shameful.
[NADINE EPSTEIN] -He was 13-years-old when the Nazis
came to Budapest.
And his father sent his boys out to live separately.
And George was sent to live
with an official of the Ministry of Agriculture
whose job was to inventory Jewish estates
where people, Jews had left.
And on one occasion, George was brought along.
And George walked around the estate.
In fact, he writes at one point that he was just scared
that people would realize that he was a Jew.
And he spent several days there, or a couple of days there.
And then they went back to Budapest.
And from that, people have extrapolated
that he was a Nazi collaborator and that he helped.
He was 13-years-old.
-This guy is a guy
who knowingly assisted in the execution of Jews.
[NADINE EPSTEIN] -There's a whole history of Jews
being portrayed as controlling money,
controlling the banking systems.
At the same time,
Soros is becoming more and more political,
a donor, a larger donor
in the Democratic Party in the United States.
Some people hate him because he's Jewish
and some people hate him because of his politics.
And often those two come together.
Who is this rich guy who came to America,
became a billionaire, to bash America and all this?
You are now falling into the trap of your colleagues on Fox who-
-No, no, no. -Which shall remain nameless
because I think they are so disreputable
I wouldn't want to mention their names.
-Mr. Soros, I don't think- -I respect you.
-That's why I came here. -I know.
-What I'm asking you- -Let's talk about policy.
-No, no. Because this is part and parcel of the same story.
-The whole story.
Let your public find out who I really am,
what I really stand for.
I chose this country as my home, right?
And I want this country
to be worthy of the principles that have made it great.
And now we are losing those principles.
We are being misled.
We need to correct it.
I think it's tragic that the guy who did more
to overthrow communism in Eastern Europe
than pretty much anyone else in America,
is hated by the American right.
And that's before we get to Hungary,
a country which he has done so much more for,
created a university for.
The current Prime Minister, Orban,
even went on a Soros scholarship.
And yet is described in appalling anti-Semitic terms
as a threat to Hungary.
[STEPHEN KOTKIN] You need stories.
There's a well of stories about enemies,
gypsies, Jews, George Soros.
You also need a story about your greatness,
your historic greatness in the past
in the mists of time somewhere
that your enemies are keeping you from achieving today.
They're not enabling you to be the great country
that, of course, everybody knows you are or should be
and were at one time.
There are times when I'm depressed
and some times when I am overwhelmed.
I get up,
but I do get knocked out from time to time.
-[VO]One thing's for sure,
the refugees should be tied to a fence and shot.
Then others wouldn't dare come.
-[VO]We don't want other nations
to come and disturb our Christian values.
We made a set of assumptions about the direction of the world,
following the end of the Cold War.
It seemed as if progress was absolutely assured.
But now, as we look from one region to the next,
we are discovering that it's actually possible
to bend the arc of justice back towards a corrosive prejudice
that is violent not only in its rhetoric,
but in its treatment of citizens, migrants, refugees.
Institutions that we thought were strong,
resilient, sustainable, are more vulnerable,
are more exposed than they've ever been before.
-Let me say something which is not easy to say.
We were very successful
in persuading people to distrust political processes,
distrust institutions and distrust politics in general.
And this is what feeds populism.
There will be someone who will come
and will help us to solve our problems.
We should follow him
and then we can disregard the institutions,
disregard the checks and balances
which make life complicated.
We don't need compromises.
We need quick and effective solutions.
-You have the distinction of being the one German leader
who has raised the possibility
of actually shooting refugees on the border.
-Well, I actually never said that.
-What you did say in the paper if I can remind you is that,
\"German border guards
must prevent illegal border crossing
and even use firearms if necessary.\"
-The President of the Philippines
has just admitted
that he used to personally kill suspected criminals.
Just to show to the guys that...
if I can do it, why can't you?
Mass hangings there, horrific conditions,
trials of blindfolded prisoners one to three minutes.
You can forge anything these days
and we're living in a fake news era as you know.
Everybody knows this.
-Now, are there still 20,000 or more political prisoners?
[VO] The standards that you live by do not necessarily have to apply
to the standards that we live in our own countries.
But do you not get concerned when you read these accounts
of young men who say they've been tortured for days?
Does it concern you
as a matter of law and order in the Republic?
George does not have much sympathy
for these majorities that feel threatened
because his idea is there are people who feel threatened
and there are people who are threatened.
There are all these excluded people
that they're trying to find their voice.
I want them to be heard.
Does it mean that he's buying, subscribing to everything
that these groups or some of these groups are pushing for?
I'm not sure, to be honest.
But this is the interesting story.
You're not supporting this
simply because it fits to all of your ideas about the world.
But it fits to your general principle
that if you're going to keep this voice unrepresented,
this is going to hurt society as a whole.
I think it's important to distinguish it
in democracy and open society
because a democracy through elections
can lead to majoritarian rule which is not open society.
Open society is characterized by the protection of minorities.
-It's not simply just caring about those immediately around you,
your kin, your tribe,
the people like you, who grew up in your neighborhood,
in your home.
But it's caring about everyone, everyone's right.
Doesn't matter where they come from.
The Final Solution was only declared in 1941.
You had been with Hitler for 10 years when that happened.
Yeah, but, you know, that the Final Solution was a secret
and it was a secret to me, too.
-He said that what he regretted most
was his tacit agreement, \"Billigung\" in German.
His tacit agreement to the murder... of the Jews.
And then when this was published in German in Die Zeit,
he added a footnote which said,
And I phoned him and I said, \"Well, what does this mean?
\"You cannot look away from something you don't know.
If you looked away, then you knew.\"
And he said, \"Let us never talk about this again.\"
There was a woman who was hiding him during the war.
Oftentimes we would go to Budapest to see her.
At that particular dinner
she complained to him about all this awful work
the Foundation was doing for the Roma.
And my father... was horrified.
He said, you know, how could this woman,
she saved my life
because I was a minority.
And she hates the Gypsies.
I mean, she hates another group of people.
-Where does hate come from?
I always wanted to understand why these things happen
rather than to hate my perpetrators.
It's hard to put it in words
the kind of treatment... we had to go through.
I ended up in this place called Omarska
which was only about five kilometers from my village.
I went to school there.
So it was quite a shock
to be guarded by my classmates, schoolmates,
even by one of my teachers.
We were dehumanized to such a level
that it became possible for them to kill
and to feel absolutely nothing.
Very often to torture people for days on end.
It is still quite hard... to accept one-hundred percent
that people you grew up with could do something like this.
When we talk about these atrocities,
people think that some humans
are more predisposed than others to kill,
to commit these crimes.
And I'm certain that's not the case.
If you want to see what a genocider looks like,
go to your bathroom and look in the mirror.
I'm afraid... it's true.
[somber music plays]
-Reality is extremely complex, infinitely complex.
And in fact, its complexity is compounded
by the need to simplify.
And the way we simplify makes it more complex.
It's a struggle to try to understand what's going on.
Whatever interpretation I develop,
whatever frame I create,
is bound to be biased, or incomplete, or distorted.
So, I realize that nevertheless I have to create that frame
because I need to simplify it enough
to be able to make decisions.
It's a constant struggle to try to understand
what actually happens in the world
and how to make the world a better place.
-The situation is that of a Black man
who in a black room looks for a black hat
which may not be there.
That is the situation.
Now, what can he do?
That's all he can do.
He can tentatively try for the black hat,
tentatively.
That is more or less
the situation of someone who wants to solve a problem.
[GEORGE SOROS] Trying to improve the world
is more difficult than making money
because in making money,
you can reduce all the consequences
to a common denominator
which can be expressed in dollars, preferably, not in cents.
And you have a bottom line.
When you are engaged
in trying to improve the world,
they cannot be added together.
The contribution that you make
to what you might call this nebulous thing,
the common good, that is the return.
-Looking back over it now, do you have regrets?
I was under the impression that with all my efforts
basically none of them really succeeded.
But I then discovered that they actually did succeed,
several of them.
But what came out
didn't really resemble what I was hoping for.
It wasn't as alluring and attractive
as when I imagined it.
But it's not only characteristic of my philanthropy,
but it's actually characteristic of,
one might say, perhaps of all human endeavors.
-We need people to understand
the power they have within them.
There's this wonderful book
written by a 12th Century Sufi poet
entitled, 'The Conference of the Birds.'
And it's about a flock of birds
that are looking for a leader.
And one of them says,
\"I know where we can find the leader for us.
\"But we'll have to fly through some perilous valleys.
\"And you may not want to do it.
\"There's a valley of fear, a valley of hatred,
and then there are valleys of love and so forth.\"
Well, when they finally arrive at their destination
and they're expecting to see the leader
who will then, you know, take them the rest of the way,
what do you think they see?
Well, each bird is standing in front of a mirror.
And I think what we want to inspire in people
is that while, of course they need to look up at giants
within the sort of the rights field,
it's important that they realize within all of it,
within each person there is a conscience
that they need to activate.
It is the task of a freedom fighter
when you see that the end of your days has come,
to live a tradition of bravery,
determination to face even death for your own principles.
And I thought about it.
It was not because I was brave,
but because one had a duty to perform.
[LAURA SILBER] -George is part of a network of people.
There's a whole world full of people
who are on that march,
who are doing the same things in different ways
to help protect the rights of others
to live the lives that they choose to live
without fear of persecution.
[ISTVAN REV] This is what I learned from him that
even if there is no hope
you have no other choice but to fight and to get engaged.
I was playing the market in order to win, make money.
And I got very involved in it.
And there was a moment
when I thought I was going to have a heart attack.
And I thought that if I die now, I lose.
But if I get blown up in fighting for an open society,
I don't think that I have lost.
I'm willing to stake my life on that.
[uplifting music plays]