He's not a WEF official, 'top' or otherwise. He does seem to be the flagpole some WEF members use to run the flag up, just to see if anyone salutes but he has no official position. Actually he seems like a nice-enough second tier historian who got famous when his book Sapiens became popular in certain academic "influencer" groups.
From Lead Stories, July 27:
Did a top World Economic Forum official call for the "elimination" of conspiracy theorists? No, that's not true: The man described as a "top WEF official" in the article making the claim doesn't work for them and doesn't have any authority to decide things on behalf of the Forum; more importantly, that person never said "dangerous conspiracy theorists must be eliminated" in the interview cited as the main source.
The claim originated from an article (archived here) published by the People's Voice on July 25, 2023, under the headline:
Top WEF Official: 'Dangerous Conspiracy Theorists Must Be Eliminated.'
Here is what it looked like at the time of writing:
(Source: The People's Voice screenshot taken on Thu Jul 27 19:19:12 2023 UTC)
The headline does not match the content of the article -- that quote never appears again in the published material:
(Source: The People's Voice screenshot taken on Thu Jul 27 19:04:23 2023 UTC)
Contrary to the headline, the very first opening paragraph discussed access to the internet, not "elimination" as claimed:
A top World Economic Forum (WEF) official has called for so-called 'conspiracy theorists' to be banned from accessing the internet due to their 'dangerous' belief that a global cabal of elites control the world.
....MUCH MORE
Well there you go.
(sort of) Not eliminationist. Unless you count the censoring as eliminationist. As some pretty serious scholars do.
If interested see also an April 2022 post on that topic:
....This piece and yesterday's picture of the San Francisco drug store where everything is locked up except the sunscreen reminded me of some happy time eliminationist rhetoric that was very popular a few years ago, at least in some circles....Eliminationist Discourse in a Conflicted Society: Lessons for America from Africa?
1. The phrase ―eliminationist has been used by David Neiwert, a journalist who has long covered right-wing discourse and action in the United States. Joshua Holland, The Terrorist Threat: Right-Wing Radicals and the Eliminationist Mindset, AlterNet (June 12, 2009), http://www.alternet.org/story/140578/. Niewert credits the phrase to DANIEL GOLDHAGEN, HITLER‘S WILLING EXECUTIONERS: ORDINARY GERMANS AND THE HOLOCAUST (1996). Holland, supra. The book explains the rhetorical mechanisms and socio-economic dynamics that led Germany‘s non-radical majority to acquiesce, then accept the race politics of the Nazi regime. See generally GOLDHAGEN, supra. ―Eliminationism claims a moral purpose, holding that political opponents are ―a cancer on the body politic that must be excised—either by separation from the public at large, through censorship, or by outright extermination—in order to protect the purity of the nation.
That's a footnote!
To repeat:
"―Eliminationism claims a moral purpose, holding that political opponents are ―a cancer on the body politic that must be excised—either by separation from the public at large, through censorship, or by outright extermination—in order to protect the purity of the nation."
The phrase is used in Holocaust and other genocide studies, as here re: the study of the Einsatzgruppen, the Ordnungspolizei "German Order Police" and their henchmen, the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police and the Trawniki Men in the Generalgouvernement in occupied Poland; and in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and the Byelorussian SSR.
This was the Holocaust by bullets, the murder of some 1.5 to 2 million people outside the Nazi murder factories system (Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor and Treblinka.)
The Holocaust by bullets included the two day killathon of 33,771 souls at Babi Yar outside of Kyiv and the less-well-known Aktion Erntefest (Harvest Festival) outside Lublin Poland when 43,000 were shot to death, also in two days. Along with the Odessa Ukrainian SSR massacre in 1941 by Germans, Romanian allies and Ukrainian collaborators where over 30,000 people were murdered, those were three of the ten thousand locations across Eastern Europe where populations were simply annihilated in place.
It would also apply to the Hamburg scum in Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland and Father Desbois, whose book Holocaust by Bullets notes some of the 1744 slaughter sites his work has uncovered,
I bring up all this history because the use of eliminationist talk is a direct precursor to genocide. Which makes the series of Medium posts by Peter Leyden and Ruy Teixeira back in 2017-2018 so interesting.
The Great Lesson of California in America’s New Civil WarWhy there’s no bipartisan way forward at this juncture in our history — one side must win....
