In The New Republic, Martin Peretz relates this comment by Democratic party bank roller George Soros, as reported in the New York Times’ online “Davos Diary“:

America needs to follow the policies it has introduced in Germany. We have to go through a certain deNazification process.

No, says Peretz, “you are not seeing things. He said de-Nazification. He is not saying, in the traditional manner of liberal alarmists, that the United States is now where Weimar Germany was. He is saying that the United States is now where Germany after Weimar was . . . In the old days, the Amerika view of America was propagated by angry kids on their painful way to adulthood; now, it is propagated by the Maecenas of the Democratic Party.”

After noting that “nobody seems to have noticed” Soros’ remark, Pertz adds:

Imagine the outcry if Republican moneybags . . . had declared that Hillary Clinton is a communist or that Bill Clinton’s America had been in need of a certain de-Stalinization process. But I hear no outcry from Soros’s congregation . . . There seems to be a renaissance among liberals of the view that there are no enemies to the left. I hear no Democrats expressing embarrassment, or revulsion, at Soros’s comment. Whether this silence is owed to their agreement or to their greed, it is outrageous.

Now comes Peretz’s coup de grace. On December 20, 1998, there appeared this exchange between Soros and Steve Kroft on “60 Minutes”:

Kroft: “You’re a Hungarian Jew …”

Soros: “Mm-hmm.”

Kroft: “... who escaped the Holocaust …”

Soros: “Mm-hmm.”

Kroft: “... by posing as a Christian.”

Soros: “Right.”

Kroft: “And you watched lots of people get shipped off to the death camps.”

Soros: “Right. I was 14 years old. And I would say that that’s when my character was made.”

Kroft: “In what way?”

Soros: “That one should think ahead. One should understand that—and anticipate events and when, when one is threatened. It was a tremendous threat of evil. I mean, it was a—a very personal threat of evil.”

Kroft: “My understanding is that you went … went out, in fact, and helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews.”

Soros: “Yes, that’s right. Yes.”

Kroft: “I mean, that’s—that sounds like an experience that would send lots of people to the psychiatric couch for many, many years. Was it difficult?”

Soros: “Not, not at all. Not at all. Maybe as a child you don’t … you don’t see the connection. But it was—it created no—no problem at all.”

Kroft: “No feeling of guilt?”

Soros: “No.”

Kroft: “For example, that, ‘I’m Jewish, and here I am, watching these people go. I could just as easily be these, I should be there.’ None of that?”

Soros: “Well, of course, ... I could be on the other side or I could be the one from whom the thing is being taken away. But there was no sense that I shouldn’t be there, because that was—well, actually, in a funny way, it’s just like in the markets—that is I weren’t there—of course, I wasn’t doing it, but somebody else would—would—would be taking it away anyhow. And it was the—whether I was there or not, I was only a spectator, the property was being taken away. So the—I had no role in taking away that property. So I had no sense of guilt.”

Peretz’s conclusion:

So this is the psychodrama that has been visited on American liberalism. We learn Soros never has nightmares. Had he been tried in a de-Nazification process for having been a young cog in the Hitlerite wheel, he would have felt that, since other people would have confiscated the same Jewish property and delivered the same deportation notices to the same doomed Jews, it was as if he hadn’t done it himself. He sleeps well, while we sleep in Nazi America.

For my part, I imagine the following headline:

Major Democratic Party Contributor Exposed as Former Nazi Accomplice