Soros is a passionate believer in "personal autonomy" and "compassion", both of which are euphemisms for legalising drugs and euthanasia. He has thrown his vast resources behind the global campaign for assisted suicide, which has gathered momentum ever since it was legalised in Oregon in 1994. As for drugs: Soros strongly backed the referendum in California to legalise cannabis that narrowly failed last month. He has devoted tens of millions to the "medicalisation" of the issue, with considerable success in America and elsewhere. He has extended his campaign to make unrestricted abortion available on demand into Russia and Eastern Europe, even though abortions already exceed live births in some of these countries, which face demographic collapse. Soros is the apostle of what Pope John Paul II called "the culture of death".

Despite his image as the archetypal capitalist, Soros is a man of the Left, albeit of an eclectic kind. Like Stalin, he sees himself as "an engineer of men's souls", and like Trotsky he wishes to consign the old order to the dustbin of history, in favour of his own "New Economic Thinking". His latest project is a "School of Global Policy". Globalisation for Soros is a kind of permanent revolution — "global markets need global regulations" — that spells the end of national sovereignty. Hence he believes in unlimited immigration — understandable, given his odyssey from Nazi-occupied Budapest via London to New York — but opposes the integration which made his spectacular career possible. 

Soros has a highly prestigious vehicle for his ideology in the Central European University in Budapest, which he founded. Last year, he gave a lecture series there, denouncing capitalism as the enemy of the "open society" and predicting the decline of American democracy. But he told his students, all is not lost: "President Obama has the right vision. He believes in international co-operation rather than the Bush-Cheney idea of might is right." Such ex cathedra indoctrination has no place in the academy. But Soros has given half a billion dollars to his university. Nobody dares to contradict him there.

This professed disciple of Popper is fond of charging those who try to falsify his theories with "Orwellian propaganda". But Soros himself has pioneered the latest form of Newspeak. Among the many enemies of the open society, some are more equal than others. And some are simply megalomaniacs.