Soros' Trojan Horse in Greece

[catgeorge]

Another great article by Victor Gaetan. One of my favourite independant thinkers from the spectator

https://spectator.org/greece-george-...gainst-europe/

He was mocked for exaggerating risks to the economic order in his 1998 book, The Crisis of Global Capitalism. Last year, he declared, “The EU is on the verge of collapse,” in a New York Review of Books interview. His end-of-year assessment for 2016 was: “Democracy is now in crisis.” At the global elite retreat in Davos, Switzerland, this year, he predicted Donald Trump’s inauguration would be bad news for the stock market.

Regarding Greece, Soros routinely anticipated disaster in the first years of its financial crisis.

In a 2011 speech in Vienna, he declared, “We are on the verge of an economic collapse which starts, lets’s say, in Greece,” making break-up of the Eurozone “probably inevitable” — a cataclysm that could produce zillions in easy money for high-flying speculators like George Soros, as one of his Greek acolytes pointed out.

But something changed.

Soros saw potential for a different kind of upheaval centered in Greece that intrigued him more than merely adding to his personal money mountain: blowing up borders.

In 2012, George Soros began focusing on migration in Greece, calling it a crisis before it was one, setting the stage for a cataclysm that engulfed the continent three years later.

In October 2012, the billionaire wrote an op-ed for the Guardian, “Helping Migrants Would Show European Solidarity.” To revive the EU’s original vision, Soros announced he would establish “solidarity houses” in Greece modeled on safe houses set up for Jews by Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg in wartime Hungary.

Among Soros’s goals was to assist refugees held in inhumane detention facilities. The program would also help the Greek poor, he wrote, otherwise the aid risked provoking xenophobic, neo-fascists.

In 2013, Soros created Solidarity Now, a program to provide shelter and other assistance to displaced people, as promised. He put a close friend in charge, another money guy, Stelios (or Stylianos) Zavvos, CEO of Zeus Capital Managers. Through Zavvos, Soros associated with a wide range of Greek elite in politics, finance, and shipping, as captured in a National Herald account of Soros’s role as godfather to Zavvos’s daughter.

A critical move in the science of agitation is identifying an impropriety that makes your opponent vulnerable then clubbing the opponent with it. Think of the Soros-financed #BlackLivesMatter movement.

Saul Alinsky codified the technique in his 1971 classic Rules for Radicals, which OSF published in Macedonia on USAID’s dime!

In Greece, OSF used longtime ally Amnesty International to paint the target.

To block the most popular overland route for undocumented people seeking entry to the EU from Turkey, Frontex, the EU agency on border security, helped the Greek government put up a 6.5-mile steel fence at the Evros River. Frontex also armed Greek border police with search dogs, night-vision goggles, and helicopters.

Illegal crossings into Greece plummeted on this key border: from 6,000 arrests in July 2012 to 45 six months later.

As a result of the blocked land border, the main smuggling route between Turkey and Greece shifted to the sea. As the number of undocumented migrants transiting from Turkey to Greece on the Aegean jumped between 2012 and 2013, the Hellenic Coast Guard increasingly used “pushback” tactics, repulsing boats away from the Greek coast into Turkish waters.

The practice violates international law, a fact that Amnesty International (AI) highlighted in its report Frontier Europe: Human Rights Abuses on Greece’s border with Turkey, published by its London-based International Secretariat, where research is centered, in July 2013.

That office received $500,000 for 2013 from Soros, though it got nothing the year before.

AI’s report received extensive media coverage in Greece and beyond and led to a second Amnesty exposé nine months later: Greece: Frontier of Hope and Fear.

Syriza started in 2004 as a big tent of extreme left-wing entities — with caricature-like names such as “Renewing Communist Ecological Left” (AKOA) — but burst on the national scene in 2012 as the only political party consistently standing against the painful austerity measures imposed on Athens by “the troika”: the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the European Commission, and the European Central Bank.

Tsipras’s youth benefited the party. His political provenance as a teen communist was ignored.

Soros sponsored a trip to the United States for Tsipras in February 2013 through a think tank he founded in 2009, the New York-based Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET).

In meetings with the State Department and Treasury, the IMF, the Brookings Institution, and not to mention the New York Times editorial board, Tsipras reinforced his message that despite his extremist pedigree, the West could do business with him.

But he also put on his angry face at Columbia Law School declaring, “We have become the guinea pig for barbaric, violent neoliberal policies,” and insulted Germany, while warning about rising neo-fascism.

Back in Greece, Syriza won big, first in European parliament elections in May 2014 then in parliamentary elections called in January 2015.

Because Syriza was three votes shy of a parliamentary majority, Tsipras allied with a small center-right party, Independent Greeks (ANEL), to govern.

The first sign that Tsipras, an atheist, rejects cultural tradition and norms (probably more than so-called neo-liberal economics) came at his swearing in as prime minister: He refused to take his oath of office from the Greek Orthodox Archbishop.

The DCLeaks hack of OSF documents last summer confirmed Soros’s engagement on and enthusiasm for illegal migration, especially the version playing out in Greece.

It was revealed that Open Society-Brussels created the Xen Fund — for Xenophobia — to identify and support proponents of “diversity migration” among NGOs, academics, journalists, and even elected officials beginning in 2012.

Last May, in a nine-page memo, OSF’s International Migration Initiative described the Mediterranean crisis as the “new normal,” congratulating OSF for having actors in place to take advantage of “new opportunities”: “Events in the Mediterranean… present new opportunities for reforming migration governance at the global level…. Our longstanding interest and investment… means we have many of the right partners and are positioned to help others navigate this space.”

WikiLeaks revealed on July 10, 2015, Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff, John Podesta, contacted the former president on behalf of the White House, asking Clinton if he would try to persuade PM Tsipras to make a deal with the EU for a debt relief package — despite Greek voters having voted “no” in a referendum on such a deal held just five days earlier. Similar calls to other elite also went out from the White House.

Within days of the U.S. charm offensive, Tsipras caved.

In fact, almost from the minute he was elected, Tsipras turned his back on his electorate to negotiate with the troika.

Syriza’s first finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, recently revealed Tsipras threatened him to concede to international bankers in July 2015, so he resigned instead.

Last week, Tsipras convinced the Greek parliament to endorse pension cuts and tax increases — inspiring street riots — to unlock a $7.5-billion financial package from EU lenders, an amount that almost matches payments due to international creditors of $7 billion when “bonds mature” in July.

Seven years into this “crisis,” Greece is groveling for a loan to repay creditors.

Greek journalist Petros Arguriou notes Tsipras has done a 180 degree turn away from the positions he advocated in 2015 — the defiant anti-austerity platform that won his election.

“He is trying to make alliances with practically everyone — the Greek Orthodox Church, which was supposed to be the enemy of every committed Marxist, with each and every compromised businessman, with drug dealers… he’s not even being selective,” Arguriou said.

“He’s everyone’s friend except the people, like every left-wing politician,” the analyst concluded.

Meanwhile, illegal migration between Turkey and Greece increased again this spring; what prevents a surge like the summer of 2015 is a fragile agreement between the EU and Turkey that has held for more than a year, but it’s a floodgate that could break.

Where is George Soros in all this now?

Always a step ahead, he’s working on flipping Macedonia (with help from Obama holdovers). Against a conservative government maintaining tight border controls, Soros and OSF are close to empowering a destabilizing Muslim-socialist alliance advocating ethnic separatism, a list of leftist social solutions, and… an open border with Greece.

Six senators requested the State Department investigate the puzzling grip George Soros continues to have on U.S. foreign policy in Macedonia and elsewhere.

As the Heritage Foundation’s Mike Gonzalez explains, these senators can’t get a straight answer, because Obama-appointees continue to run the levers and pulleys of the U.S. foreign policy machine: “Career bureaucrats are running the government.”

[epirot]

Greece was created by Soros' ancestors.