Who is Klaus Schwab?
Aside from the architect of your doom I mean. A not so deep but irritating dive.
First a disclaimer: This is the tutorial version of Klaus Schwab. Despite the fact I’d love you to read my substack if you already know the basics of his history you can probably skip.
You know him, you love him. Everyone’s talking about him. He dresses like a Bond villain and talks like one too. Klaus Schwab.
But who is he? What’s his history? What’s his character?
Klaus Schwab is the son of Eugen Schwab. A man who ran a company that manufactured turbines and flamethrowers for the Nazis during WWII. He was born in Ravensburg, Germany. And if that doesn’t complete the Bond villain aesthetic for you alongside the German accent and cult robes I don’t know what will.
If these details are acknowledged they are often followed by saying the Gestapo monitored his family and interrogated his mother for using a Swiss accent in public at some point during their time working for the Nazis. Nothing ever came of it though as far as I can find. The Gestapo thought they were good enough Nazis to stick around.
But I’d not argue the sins of the father are the sins of the son. He can’t be held responsible for his fathers choices only his own. Even if details of his family are few and far between and the ones known are worrying. So who and what does he serve?
First the low hanging fruit: For those concerned with workplace power dynamics and their abuses he married one of his assistants. #MeToo
He’s a mechanical engineer who graduated in 1961, though from what I can find he has not done any mechanical engineering. His CV lists “experience on the shop floor of many companies” before he became an assistant to the Director General of the VDMA. That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, just that details about his past are harder to come by than they are for most public figures. After 3 years of that he went to work for his dads Nazi flamethrower company - admittedly they no longer made said flamethrowers for the Nazi government. He also received a doctorate in Economics and Masters in Public Administration.
He has 17 honorary doctorates and countless medals of honor from various countries in Europe. He received the 2018 Friendship Medal for outstanding contribution to 40 years of China’s reform and opening policies. We can see how well that worked out.
What is easier to find is his serving for the Bilderberg group and the dystopian darling known as the World Economic Forum. He worked on advisory boards for the UN and was a professor in Geneva for Business Policy.
Depending on how you want to interpret all this he’s either a high profile do nothing Think Tank guru like so many others… just one of the richer ones. Spending more time on boards than doing work. These types are not uncommon and can be found just as easily in the US beltway area. And it’s not impossible this is all it is. Though I’d argue this is enough to oppose nearly anything he cooks up. These people are the kind of smart that allows them to do mental gymnastics to reach an end rather than the kind of smart that lets them see good premises and follow them to a good conclusion.
But the alternative is he’s a born and bred Nazi that has managed to worm his way into global advisory positions. And what he advocates for certainly isn’t far from it. It’s just rebranded and the racialization has changed form. And that risk certainly makes him worth opposing.
Regardless of what’s most likely he certainly has the ear of world leaders and especially European ones. And in that role he hopes to institute a whole world government. He has praised the current leaders of China, Russia, and Canada. Pick your preferred joke and/or reason to hate him.
Ideologically he has an agenda that is totalitarian whether you think the ends are good or bad ones. As an author, one of the two things he’s best known for right now, he advocates for reshaping society into something called Stakeholder Capitalism. A merger between the power of the state, supposedly the people via unions, and corporations. Though in practice if you look at the structure of his own organizations the people aren’t terribly involved. And his salary is… quite hefty.
If this sounds a lot like fascism coming from the son of a man who worked for the Nazi war machine it’s because it meets the dictionary definition. He often uses the redefinition of terms and basic marketing to mask his true goals and methods. An example: Since 1979, he has published the Global Competitiveness Report which redefines competitive to include environmental sustainability goals arbitrarily chosen. Making it a measure of nothing in particular beyond compliance with an agenda. And measures of this nature are used to determine where institutional investors will invest. By extension that can mean it controls where you can invest as retirement funds are held by these same institutions.
I can’t speak to his intentions, what he believes about himself or his ends and methods. I can only speak to what little I see out there about him. And I don’t really care if he is overtly evil and manipulating or if he’s innocently pushing for what is really just rebranded fascism. The man seems to have lived a life that could make it be either one. All I know is this. No villain thinks they’re not the protagonist of their story.
So you tell me… what are we looking at?