Klaus Schwab: Ernst Blofeld or the Lord Humungus?

Cinematic archetypes of unconstitutional and unelected leaders.

By John Leake

For a long time Klaus Schwab has reminded me of Ian Fleming’s villain, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, who is the head of the SPECTRE (Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion) international crime syndicate. Blofeld has a colorful background that was presented in Thunderball:

Blofeld was born on 28 May 1908 (which is also Fleming's birthdate) in Gdingen, Imperial Germany (now Gdynia, Poland); his father Ernst George Blofeld was Polish, and his mother Maria Stavro Michelopoulos was Greek, hence his Greek middle name Stavro. After World War I, Blofeld became a Polish national. As a young man, he was well-versed in the social science disciplines, but also in the natural science and technology disciplines. He first graduated from the University of Warsaw with a degree in Political History and Economics, and then from the Warsaw University of Technology with a degree in Engineering and Radionics. He was then hired by the Polish Ministry of Posts and Telegraphs and appointed to a sensitive communication position, which he used for buying and selling stocks at the Warsaw Stock Exchange.

Foreseeing World War II, Blofeld made copies of top-secret wires and sold them for cash to Nazi Germany. Before the German invasion of Poland in 1939, he destroyed all records of his existence, then moved first to Sweden, then to Turkey, where he worked for Turkish Radio and began to set up his own private intelligence organization. During the war, he sold information to both sides. After the defeat of Erwin Rommel, he decided to back the Allied war effort, and was awarded numerous medals by the Allied powers after the war's end. Blofeld then moved temporarily to South America before founding SPECTRE.

Klaus Schwab was born thirty years after Blofeld. According to Wikipedia:

Schwab was born to Eugen Wilhelm Schwab and Erika Epprecht in Ravensburg. His parents had moved from Switzerland to Germany during the Third Reich in order for his father to assume the role of director at Escher Wyss AG, an industrial company and contractor for the Nazi regime. Schwab's family was monitored by the Gestapo, which in 1944 also interrogated his mother (who was from Zürich) for speaking with a Swiss accent in public. Schwab was raised Catholic. He is a citizen of Germany although he has three Swiss grandparents and two Swiss brothers.

Schwab attended 1st and 2nd grade at the primary school in the Wädenswil district of Au ZH in Switzerland. After World War II, his family moved back to Germany where Schwab attended the Spohn-Gymnasium in Ravensburg until his Abitur in 1957.

In 1961, he graduated as a mechanical engineer from Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, which awarded him a doctorate in engineering entitled: Der längerfristige Exportkredit als betriebswirtschaftliches Problem des Maschinenbaues (Longer-term export credit as a business problem in mechanical engineering). He was also awarded a doctorate in economics from the University of Fribourg, and a Master of Public Administration degree from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. … In 1971, Schwab founded the European Management Forum, which was renamed as the World Economic Forum in 1987.

Like Blofeld’s SPECTRE, the World Economic Forum has regular meetings of strange rich guys who operate globally, above and beyond the jurisdiction of any particular constitutional republic. Whereas SPECTRE is an unabashedly criminal organization, the WEF operates primarily through what I call VSRs—that is, Virtue Signaling Rackets.

VSR operations involve presenting oneself as possessing special knowledge and technology for solving mankind’s problems and persuading stupid and venal politicians to support your schemes with public funds and sweetheart government contracts. By enlisting clever international PR firms, VSRs like the WEF have become very adept as packaging their plundering operations as “saving mankind and the earth.”

To be sure, my reflections on the amusing similarities between Blofeld and Schwab are not original. The satirists at the Babylon Bee also noticed and reported on it.

This morning I saw a video of Klaus Schwab vehemently proclaiming that “Nobody will be safe if not everybody is vaccinated.”

This reminded me of the great dystopian warlord, the Lord Humungus, from the 1981 film Mad Max II: The Road Warrior. After his patience is tested, he tells the rebel group that has retreated to a fortification in the Outback: “Nobody, nobody, gets out of here alive.”

So, who was the Lord Humungus? Director George Miller revealed little about the warlord’s back story, but we do get a few tantalizing clues. His gun case contains the following:

A photograph of the couple appears to be from the WWI-era (1914-1918). The man is wearing a British officer field uniform (tunic, Sam Browne belt, jodhpurs and cavalry riding boots) and the woman wears fashions common around 1916-1920. There are two silver medals (possibly service medals), two commonwealth service stars, a large Prussian Totenkopf and Australian Military Forces uniform insignia amongst others.

Thus, it appears the the Humungus was possibly an Australian soldier who descended from a German military family. His possible German ancestry is further hinted at when he recites a few lines from Goethe’s poem “Der Erlkönig,” about a father who rides on horseback across a winter landscape at night, carrying his very young son in the saddle. Unbeknownst to the father, the little boy is dying, and in his dying moments, he sees the Erlkönig, the “Elf King,” coming to take him. The father cannot see the the Erlkönig coming ever closer, but the little boy can.

“My father, my father, and do you not hear
What the Erl-King quietly promises me?”
”Be calm, stay calm, my child;
Through dry leaves, the wind is sighing.”

"Do you, fine boy, want to go with me?
My daughters shall wait on you finely;
My daughters lead the nightly dance,
And rock and dance and sing to bring you in."

The Australian and Hollywood masters of cinema have had a long love affair with German villains, which was doubtless ignited by the spectacular villainy of the Third Reich. In real life, Klaus Schwab plays the role with great elan.