He would be the ultimate villain in a James Bond film. The one who would like, depending on the day, to eradicate half of the world’s population through a pandemic, subject the rest to a totalitarian dictatorship, all with the support of new technologies allowing permanent surveillance of all. For Elon Musk, the sulphurous boss of Just that. What not to read about Klaus Schwab, the president of the World Economic Forum who organizes the Davos forum every year, the 2024 edition of which ends this Friday, January 19.
This 85-year-old German economist, who in 1971 organized the first edition of the “European Management Symposium”, an unpretentious meeting of a few entrepreneurs and economics professors, transformed his event to make it the great annual mass of liberalism. Enough to stir up all the most lively conspiracy theories. Take the world’s most influential political and business leaders, put them in a swanky Swiss ski resort, add a very tight invitation list and an admission price that can approach six figures (excluding heads of state, who are invited), debates on the future of society and global economic systems, and you have the explosive cocktail to disappoint any conspiracy theorist. This year alone, Volodymyr Zelensky, Emmanuel Macron, Antony Blinken, Javier Milei, Chinese Prime Minister Li Qiang, without forgetting the boss of OpenAI Sam Altman and the CEO of Microsoft Satya Nadella took the podium.
“The Great Reset” or the end of democracies
But the theories targeting Klaus Schwab go much further. A work, published in July 2020 with the French economist Thierry Malleret and named Covid-19: The Great Reset, made him one of the favored targets of the complosphere, joining Bill Gates or George Soros. Best known for its English version The Great Reset, this book seeks to provide avenues for reflection on the necessary evolution of the capitalist model at the dawn of the pandemic. “A world that is less divisive, less polluting, less destructive, more inclusive, more equitable and more just than the one we lived in in the pre-pandemic era.” The Davos forum, in parallel with its negotiations on business very important informal meetings, has always aimed to try to formulate proposals and reflections on the future of liberalism and multilateralism, like the theme of the 2024 edition, “Rebuilding trust”, or even the place more important taken by environmental issues in recent years.
Nothing fundamentally very innovative, then. The book did not meet with any particular commercial success. But it is this term “Great Reset” which has stuck, and has since become the catalyst for all conspiracy fantasies, particularly on the part of far-right movements. That’s it, one of the leaders had expressly declared it: the objective of the globalized “elites” is indeed to “reset” the world population and bring about a new world order. Obviously, through a global pandemic, which would in turn restrict all freedoms, abolish individual property, destroy democracies, to bring about a totalitarian world government. In France, its most concrete interpretation was the conspiracy documentary Hold-Upreleased in November 2020, and which largely contributed to spreading all these theories.
If, with the end of the pandemic, one could have imagined that this movement would slowly die out, this was not the case. The spiral was launched. Posts on social networks claimed that Klaus Schwab’s father, Eugen Schwab, had been close to Adolf Hitler and had run a concentration camp in Germany during the Second World War. A rumor quickly denied by the AFP.
Without forgetting the accusations of pedophilia from the boss of the Davos forum, an unconditional fan of the QAnon movement, according to whom the world elites are engaged in pedophile, cannibalistic, Satanist crimes… The latter quickly forget that their guru Donald Trump himself went to Davos in 2020, the first American president since Bill Clinton in 2000. And if he had never been to the Swiss ski resort before, during his career as a man of business is above all because he had never been invited there.
“Disease X”
Every January, all the rumors come out about what is going on in Davos. While it is of course necessary and healthy to question this elitist event with dizzying figures – 409 million Swiss francs in profits last year for the organization, more than 1,000 private jets chartered in 2022 according to Greenpeace, a annual contribution to the World Economic Forum at more than 50,000 euros per year according to Business Insider -, this criticism has today become the receptacle of all theories.
Latest example: the organization of a round table this week to “prepare for disease X”. It was enough for conspiracy theorists to assert that the world elites were already deliberately preparing for a next pandemic… when this term is in reality that of a hypothetical fictitious pathology created in 2018 by the WHO, so that medicine can work on the possibility of a future global epidemic. It even added it to its list of priority diseases and pathogens for research and development, alongside Covid-19 or the Zika virus. Far from the fantasies of the complosphere, then. “I would like the people who attack the forum, or who attack me, to read better what I write or what I say, because almost all the quotes circulating around me are false,” Klaus lamented. Schwab from Franceinfo in 2023. It seems that it is already too late.