I wanted to go with much harsher language for the title of this post. I wanted to go with The Swiss Betrayal but it sounded like a cheap Cold War era spy novel.
Instead, I chose to go with the truth. And that is easy.
On a day, which will truly live in infamy, and to which future generations will point accusing fingers at, the 28th of February 2022, the Swiss Confederation abandoned its 507-year-old Neutrality.
The Swiss chose to abandon and in fact betray the old proven principles of non-intervention and non-partisanship 20 generations of their forefathers had espoused, for the sake of immediate gratification. They deludedly imagined that their actions will be judged as morally correct by history. But in fact, they did so because their financial arithmetic yielded a better return on investment (ROI) in the short term.
As for the medium and long term, to heck with that.
Let future generations worry about those pesky things… or pay for the consequences.
But they were wrong. Even in the immediate future, they were so wrong to sacrifice so much political capital for so little financial benefits. To be honest with you, I fail to see how they got anything in return for their betrayal.
The entire old continent, and Switzerland is situated right in the middle of it, is plunging into a literal Dark Age due to energy shortages, caused by short-sighted and moronic politicians, foregoing the need to take care of their nations’ needs. Inflation is rampant, although it doesn’t affect Confoederatio Helvetica, yet. You see, when you sit on a sufficiently plushy cushion made of gold and CHF, inflation is the least of your worries. In wartime, people flock to a reserve currency like the Swiss franc like bees to honey. And that protects your money. But for how long, I wonder.
Because an economy is based on a few things, the most important of which are two: energy and raw materials. You either have it (i.e., Russia), or you don’t (i.e., Switzerland). Outside this paradigm, there is no economy. And this is a lesson the old continent is learning at a very fast pace.
The problem is compounded by the fact that Switzerland has also disarmed for the longest period, going from a country that could field a 500,000 strong well-prepared, well-munitioned and robust male militia in 1949, to 100,000 men and women, in 2023.
74 years ago, these men could be summoned to battle readiness within 24 hours because they kept their arms and munitions in their own homes, so that no centralized structure could be incapacitated by a potentially dastardly first strike. Instead, they had 500,000 individual arsenals hosting 500,000 assault rifles, small arms, and tens of millions of rounds of ammunition, as well as the trained capacity to use it at tactical distances of up to 300 m.
Today, the Swiss militia are still able to keep their assault rifles at home but the ammunition must be housed at the local Zug Haus (arsenal). What do you think that entails in terms of troop mobilization speed? Is this something that will speed up mobilization in case of war or perhaps slow it down a tad… or more?
My guess is this will slow it down by a lot, adding to the confusion thus permitting a prospective enemy to launch a first strike that will transform the physical state of that ammo from solid to gaseous.
And for those who will come at me with the adage that wars are no longer fought like this by infantry in trenches, I got some bad, very bad news for y’all. They are and guess who will have to waddle through the rain and mud when that happens?! Yeah, you, exactly you, ladies, and gents. Because why?! Because feminism, that’s why!
Unfortunately for all those who have always gullibly believed war is akin to a video game console, where the operator is far removed from his targets, operating drones remotely from somewhere the enemy cannot attack, the news is horrible. In war, the enemy is always quite close to you, and that is good, because getting shot, stabbed, or pummeled into a bloody pulp is not necessarily a death sentence. Sometimes it is, but most time, when you get wounded, your side or the other side will evacuate you.
Most battle casualties are from artillery, rockets and missiles. Basically, explosions are responsible for a vast majority of KIA, WIA and MIA.
And that means all wars are fought by boots on the ground, not drone operators or IT specialists. The latter have a big role to play for sure. But it’s still the battle infantry who get to die for the ground they must take to win the war. That’s how it is because wars are waged over territory. And if your side doesn’t win ground, then the best outcome they can hope to get, is a draw. But that only applies if you managed to stop the enemy on the border, cause if they’re in, and you cannot push them back, they are in to stay.
But coming back to the Swiss defense situation, before they were neutral and armed to the teeth. Now they are neither neutral, nor armed to the teeth, as there is a strong push from the Liberal Left to disarm the Populace, which hitherto had been one and the same with the Army. So, once they implement gun control in Switzerland, the country will need to ask other powers for protection. And we all know how that turns out in the end. If you are too weak to protect yourself, then you are also ripe to be conquered by your Protector(s).
For Pete’s sake, this is the business model of the Mafia.
In the end, the Swiss have utterly let me down. They disappointed me. But that’s on me, folks. That is entirely on my own conscience. Because it was I who put them up on a pedestal. And it is also I who took them down when they confirmed my worst fears. They never deserved to be there in the first place. But I wanted, I so desperately craved to have a model to aspire to. In the end I was deluded. I imagined Switzerland to be something that it never purported to be. I actually thought that they were that shinning beacon of light, reason, and common sense that our world needs more than air.
But they could never be such an element. They are people after all. And people are deeply flawed. We sometimes take our own delusions for reality and that’s how we step into a world of hurt. A wise man treads carefully when it comes to certainty. For there are few and far between. Dealing in absolutes, one great character once said, is the province of Evil.
I agree.
“In every declining civilization there is a small “remnant” of people who adhere to the right against the wrong; who recognize the difference between good and evil and who will take an active stand for the former and against the latter; who can still think and discern and who will courageously take a stand against the political, social, moral, and spiritual rot or decay of their day.”
Donald S. McAlvaney
Götterdämmerung 