Kerry Howley

What single person shall we blame for the crushing of Myanmar’s August uprisings? I say the late General Ne Win, who nationalized the economy, isolated the country, banished the political opposition, and pushed Burma toward its present state of decay. George Wittman says… George Soros.

Soros is not the only source of financing and technical assistance to Burmese dissidents, but, according to Thai political sources, Open Society is the one spending the most. Overthrowing an oppressive military junta may be a worthwhile aim, but having some plutocrat funding his own international paramilitary operation is the ultimate in autocratic ambition, to say nothing of ego satisfaction.

Soros would argue that his money goes to encourage peaceful, non-violent civil disobedience. To do so in Burma, where the innocent activity was launched against a brutal, entrenched police state, is a moral crime. Only if a government in power is at least relatively respectful of human rights can unarmed civil disobedience work as an effective political device…

OVERTHROWING POLICE STATES is a job for special operations personnel and professional soldiers — and even then it doesn’t always work that well. It seems, however, that George Soros believes the world awaits his particular brand of affluent leftist activism that sends well-meaning monks and students to the hospital, prison and too often, death.

It is inconvenient to this analysis that the Burmese are actual human beings, complete with individual drives and histories, rather than humanoid automatons controlled by Americans the American Spectator does not like. George Soros did not in fact introduce civil disobedience to the Burmese people, and I find it highly unlikely that tens of thousands of long-suffering monks were inspired to march by a jowly Hungarian-American financial speculator. Americans always seem to think Washington has more leverage in Rangoon that it actually does, but it’s especially weird to drag partisan resentments into the morass.

Aside from the implausibility of the claim, it’s not clear whether Wittman is upset because Soros is acting outside the rule of governments, or because he is encouraging these pansy ways of overthrowing Than Shwe. If Soros trained some “special operations personnel and professional soldiers,” rather than advocating civil disobedience, would that be acceptable? Say Soros–sorry, “some plutocrat funding his own international paramilitary operation”– trained his personal army to slaughter Than Shwe’s crowd and install Suu Kyi at absolutely no cost to you, the American taxpayer. Should we worry about his ego? Or just clap? Being a plutocrat who funds his own pointless international paramilitary operations is clearly bad. Effective ones, I’m not so sure.

But back to Soros’ actual crime. It’s possible to recklessly encourage acts of civil disobedience, but generally this is done by governments falsely intimating that protesters will be backed by force. I really did get a sense in 2004 that some of my Burmese friends were waiting for world savior George Bush to roll in on a tank and unfurl the “mission accomplished” banner right over Sule Pagoda. I’m not prepared to accuse either Bush (Laura is the self-styled Burma activist) of encouraging this notion, but it’s out there, and Mr. Soros had very little to do with it.