George Soros and right-wing billionaire Charles Koch have teamed up to stop 'endless wars'

[Celerity]

https://www.good.is/articles/soros-koch-stop-war

Say the name George Soros to any die-hard Republican and they’ll probably recoil in disgust. The Hungarian-born billionaire has donated billions to progressive causes throughout his life and is the subject of wide-ranging, unfounded conspiracies spread by conservatives. Soros has been falsely accused by the right of everything from paying people to participate in the 2017 Women’s March to trying to bring down the global currency market.

Charles Koch is one half of the controversial billionaire libertarian-minded Koch Brothers, a partnership that has given hundreds of millions to right-wing political causes. The Koch’s have a long history of using their money to support tax cuts and the rollback of environmental protections. Their company, Koch Industries, is the third-largest polluter in the U.S.

Koch and Soros have teamed up for a cause that sadly has too few champions in America these days: peace. While this partnership seems shocking to some, there is an overlap in the progressive and libertarian Venn diagram of beliefs. Libertarians and progressives tend to agree on LGBT rights, immigration, abortion, criminal justice reform, drug decriminalization, and U.S. military intervention overseas.

Koch and Soros’ new endeavor is the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a tribute to former president John Quincy Adams. On Independence Day in 1821, Quincy declared that the United States “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”

“The Quincy Institute is an action-oriented think tank that will lay the foundation for a new foreign policy centered on diplomatic engagement and military restraint,” the institution’s website reads. “The current moment presents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to bring together like-minded progressives and conservatives and set U.S. foreign policy on a sensible and humane footing. Our country’s current circumstances demand it.” According to The Boston Globe, the institute will likely advocate for deep cuts in military spending, a withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and Syria, a return to the nuclear deal with Iran, and an end to regime-change campaigns in Venezuela and Cuba.

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[Laffy Kat]

1. Strange bedfellows to say the least.

Hopefully, will make some RWNJs heads explode.

[Mme. Defarge]

2. Formidable!

Wow! Let it be so. And thanks for posting.

[elleng]

3. Peace may cost kochs some of their billions.

[hatrack]

4. Oh, look, a think-tank! Yay, world peace!!

The same Kochs who are so very concerned about the justice system and prisons?

Uh, yeah, right . . . . such great fucking humanitarians.

[Celerity]

5. another article

The War Against Endless War Heats Up With Koch-Soros Salvo

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-war-against-endless-war-heats-up-with-koch-soros-salvo

In “one of the most remarkable partnerships in modern American political history,” the left’s favorite enemy, Charles Koch, and the right’s favorite enemy, George Soros, are combining forces and finances to fund a new think tank, in Washington: The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft that aims to end the American “forever wars” that have defined the first two decades of this millennium, and move past the foreign policy that led to them.

The Institute is named in honor of John Quincy Adams, who when Secretary of State, wrote on July 4, 1821, an admonition to his fellow Americans to try not to spread American power abroad:

[America] goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own… She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself, beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force… She might become the dictatress of the world: she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.

This advice was revived by revisionist socialist historian William Appleman Williams in the late 1950s, and became a credo for anti-imperialist activists on the left. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who while serving in the White House under John F. Kennedy, had been hostile to Williams, later began to reference Adams’ advice himself during the Vietnam War era. And in our current era, it is often referred to by writers in the pages of The American Conservative.

Following Quincy’s approach, the Institute promises to work on “ending endless war,” “democratizing foreign policy,” and favoring diplomacy. The use of armed force,” its principles assert, “does not represent American engagement in the world.”

Their attempt to build a bi-partisan think tank composed of opponents of the exercise of U.S. power abroad and of any military intervention, especially war, is not a new phenomenon. But it is a new attempt—this time with real money behind it in a $3.5 million first-year budget, including $500,000 each from Soros’s Open Society Foundation and the Charles Koch Foundation. Founding member and anti-interventionist scholar of the U.S. military and foreign policy Andrew Bacevich notes the group will invite “both progressives and anti-interventionist conservatives to consider a new, less militarized approach to policy” instead of “endless, counterproductive war.”

snip

[riverine]

6. Actually Soros fights socialism as much as he does fascism because both are authoritarian

Open Society as seen by its father Karl Popper:

Definition
Karl Popper defined the open society as one "in which individuals are confronted with personal decisions" as opposed to a "magical or tribal or collectivist society."[15]

He considered that only democracy provides an institutional mechanism for reform and leadership change without the need for bloodshed, revolution or coup d'état.[16]

Modern advocates of the open society suggest that society would keep no secrets from itself in the public sense, as all are trusted with the knowledge of all. Political freedoms and human rights are claimed to be the foundation of an open society.