Swiss citizen soldiers and the enemy from within

Defence of democracy and neutrality

In respect of Swiss General Henri Guisan (1874-1960) and the Swiss Constitution of 1874

Honorable mentions and diploma from the Swiss Shooting Festival of 1924, awarded to the Swiss Military Gunclub of Bendel, a hamlet in the Swiss valley Toggenburg. For 100 years, until 1996, every Swiss man in compulsory military service was obliged by law to be a member of a gunclub.
 

From sometime in the Middle Ages, the Alpine country of Switzerland couldn't produce enough food for her population and thus exported people: soldiers, expert workers in factories and on large farms. In Germany, farm employees responsible for dairy cow management and milking are still called Schweizer (Swiss). Swiss mercenaries, named Reisläufer, who served in foreign armies in the Middle Ages, had contracts that obliged for them to be sent back to their homeland in case of her being attacked. Thus, the Swiss Confederacy had Europe's best army of the time, without having to pay for its maintenance. The Pope's Swiss Garde of elite soldiers is a remnant. The Swiss Confederacy invented neutrality, because it was situated in the middle of Europe and guarded the passage through the Alps.  Foreign armies fighting each other would have constantly marched through from north to south, from east to west, looting and destroying what came along their way, that being the way how soldiers fed and paid for themselves back then. During World War II, after the fall of France in 1940, Switzerland was surrounded by fascist and nationalsocialist armies and remained the only country on the European continent without totalitarianism. Their defence forces of citizen soldiers maintained armed and fortified neutrality, domestic peace among those aligned to different political parties. Swiss perseverance was reached under the leadership of General Henri Guisan, whose 150th Birthday is being commemorated in 2024.

For deterrence and defence against those that would try to attack and insurgencies from within, men who stayed at home in the Eidgenossenschaft, were required to get military training and continued shooting practice, which was why they had gun clubs, communities of farmers, craftsmen, merchants and tradesmen, all equal without regard to their social standing. Be they were poor or wealthy, they stood together to defend their homeland. In the 19th century, with the building of nations and democracy, after the service in foreign armies had been banned for Swiss nationals, the tradition of the gunning clubs was revived. For one hundred years, until 1996 Swiss militia men from the Swiss Defence Army were required to be members of a gunclub. Apart from the military gun clubs, there were workers gun clubs and local ones. As the Chief Commander of the Swiss Defence Forces stated on LinkedIn recently:

"The Swiss Armed Forces are Swiss citizens who perform a special duty for the security of us all. The Swiss Armed Forces defend our country and its people. Ready at all times to help and protect."

The philosophy of the Swiss citizen soldier derives from the customary legal concept of the Eidgenossenschaft, translated to Swiss Confederation, first mentioned around 1350 and meaning complex alliances between regions and cities, based upon an oath between equal members in contrast to the hierarchical feudal system of allegiance that required submission to superior lords and authorities. 

"Swiss confederations as an abstract legal term were alliances between equal members through an oath sworn to God as the highest form of self-commitment."

Scource: Dictionary of Swiss History (HLS), 2012

The feudal system was based on the institutionalized Christian belief that political power was given by God. It was hierarchical and often might over right.  The Swiss Confederation on the other hand was more of a system of equal rights, connecting regional and central power of the Eidgenossenschaft with the great European powers of the time. This type of foreign policy of a state situated between powers, connecting different cultures, political systems and allowing trade between them, was also in place in the Nasrid Emerite of Granada, the last muslim western European state in Al-Andalus Spain, before it was conquered by the Catholic Monarchs in 1492. The rulers were vassals of the Christian rulers to the North and at the same time connected to Muslim North Africa and enforced a tolerant co-existance of Muslims, Jews and Christians. The complex alliances of old-time Swiss confederacies included great European powers. Members were aligned to other members and not to the confederacy as a whole.

The case of the Swiss Confederacy has been brought up just recently in an essay in Foreign Affairs, on how such a concept could be realized for an Israeli-Palestine Confederation. This however is a completely different topic and it must be said that in western oriented thought and theory there have been many mistakes made, such as for example the Conderacy of the Southern States during the Civil War (1861-1865). Rivalries between the central powers and subordinate government agencies can be and are especially now and also in Switzerland a cause of much harm to democracy.

Citizen soldiers and spiritual national defense

During Enlightment and the movements for freedom and democracy in the 18th and 19th century, the ideal of the Swiss Confederacy was revived in literature, intellectual debates and politics. Take as an example the drama William Tell (1804) by Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805). During World War II Switzerland was not only prepared for military defence against the fascist dictatorships' armies all around her borders, but also had socalled geistige Landesverteidigung (spiritual national defense), a call to swear in the Swiss peoples to the cause of defending Switzerland and her democracy against totalitarianism from the outside and from within. In this sense, the Swiss Defence Force of citizen soldiers defend the people and their livelihoods and are not the type of militia who fight and stand for the mighty or the military as an organization of itself. The concept of spiritual national defense during World War II grounded on the understanding of the totalitarian nature of modern war after World War I and the infiltration of totalitarian ideologies into politics of the nations surrounding Switzerland speaking the same languages as the Swiss: Fascism in Italy and Nationalsocialism in Germany. Spiritual national defense was also directed against totalitarianist socialist and communist ideology, which however, was never really present in Switzerland. The workers movement and socialdemocracy were integrated into the Swiss political system from after World War I and a general strike in 1918. In 1943, Ernst Nobs (1886-1957) became the first socialdemocrat to take office as Swiss Federal Counciler. Spiritual national defense was about implementing culural values, taking in diverting political views, rather than propaganda and psychological warfare. Spiritual national defense was also rooted in the Swiss culture of liberalism that founded the modern Swiss nation in 1848, as stated in the preamble of the Swiss Federal Constitution today:

"The Swiss People and the Cantons ... resolved to renew their alliance so as to strengthen liberty, democracy, independence and peace in a spirit of solidarity and openess towards the world, determined to live together with mutual consideration and respect for their diversity, concious of their achievements... and in the knowledge that the strength of a people is measured by the wellbeing of their weakest member."

Swiss Federal Constition, revision adopted by the popular vote April 18th 1999

In 2023 Switzerland commemorated the founding constitution of 1848. This year, in 2024 there are three anniverseries comemmorating Swiss resistance and defence of neutrality:

• 150 years since the fundamental revision of the Swiss constitution in 1874.
  
  
• 150th birthday of the legendary General Henri Guisan (1874-1960), who created and led Switzerland's strategic deterrence of Nazi-Germany and fascist Italy during World War II, also keeping allied powers from using Switzerland as a base for combat, thus maintaining armed neutrality according to the Hague Convention of 1907.
  
  
• 125th birtday of Friedrich Traugott Wahlen (1899-1985), agricultural scientist, father of self-sufficiency in food production during World War II, leader of food security. After that war, Wahlen became Federal Counciler and Deputy Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations. 

Revision of the Swiss Federal Constitution 1874 and World War I

The the thorough overhaul of the Swiss Federal Constitution in 1874 was about installing more centralist powers for the federal government concerning the Swiss army and monetary policy, both being very controversial at the time. In order to appease those against, the constitutional reform of 1874 introduced the optional popular referendums, giving the people the last say in democratic decision-making. The Cantons didn't want to give up sovereignty, so it took some time and political debate for the revision to be passed and further decades for the changes to be implemented into Swiss law. The new military law only came into effect in 1907. The Swiss legal and political system requires more generally formulated constitutional law to be put into subordinate executive and cantonal law. The exception to this rule are the fundamental rights. These have to be followed by all parts of government and authority rule. In contrast to most other democracies, the Swiss Federal Constitution can be changed if necessary, either by referendum or reform. The highest Swiss federal court can also ammend corrections in order to aligne constitutional law with the legal system. The optional referendum was introduced with the revision of the Swiss constitution in 1874, in order to get conservative catholics on board for more centralization. They demanded that the people should have the last say over those in power. At first, militarists tried to rebuild the Swiss army after the model of the Prussian army, with discipline from the top down. The Swiss people paid a heavy price because of this during World War I. 

Conscripts mobilized to defend the border during World War I received no pay, leaving many families without the breadwinner and prone to poverty and hunger. Women, children and the elderly were left at home to work on the family farms whose horses had also often been drafted to military service. Food prices soared. Also, there was a lot of war profiteering from speculation. I once found an old Swiss-German newspaper from 1917 with articles of praise for the armies of the German Kaiserreich, as if neutral Switzerland was waging war on the side of the Germans. In this post, I want to write about history, but it must be mentioned that in what I call my involuntary investigative victim research during the last few years, and being particularily victimized in Switzerland after 2022, some of the bureaucratic correspondence included openly copied legal statements from evictions of farmers toward the end of World War I. The speculants dumped their foul debt on them. All in all, Switzerland was lucky during World War I that none of the warfaring parties had an interest in invading and conquering Switzerland. That was different during World War II. Totalitarian dictatorships hated small, independent countries in general.

Economic dispair for farmers and workers after WWI

It was women and men in dispair who went on general strike of 1918 in Switzerland. 100 years later, in 2018, there was much documentation on Swiss television on the general strike of 1918. Among those protesting peacefully were many women, demanding the price of milk for feeding their children to be lowered. Later on, in the 1930s it turned out, that those who had tried and failed to bring in the Swiss army to shoot at what they propagandized as communists and agitators during the general strike of 1918, were in fact militarists and sympathisers of German nationalsocialism and totalitarian rule in Switzerland. Rudolf Minger (1881-1985), farmer and activist in the cooperative movement of Raiffeisen, founded the political party of farmers and small business owners in 1917, who before had been aligned to the ruling liberal party FDP. The new farmers's party was first of the Canton of Bern, then on the national level in 1919.  Minger took the small business owners on board and collaborated with the socialdemocrats representing the workers, all affected by speculation and poverty at the end of World War I. In 1930 Minger became federal counciler. Together with General Henri Guisan and the agricultural scientist Friedrich Traugott Wahlen he was the leading man of resistance during World War II. Resistance was the term used to ward of feinds of society and democracy from the outside and from within, foreign armies and domestic totalitarian insurgents. Minger's party of farmers and small businesses over time became today's Swiss Peoples Party SVP, often accused of right-wing populism, even though they always had great men to the cause of the country in the Swiss government of Federal Councilers. General Guisan was from the Canton of Vaud, where classical liberals of the longtime ruling political Swiss Freedom Party (FDP), stood apart from the mainstream liberals and bankers of Zürich's Paradeplatz and took sides with the farmers' and small business party, maintaining Swiss classical liberal values. They took sides with the Swiss Farmers Union that had been founded in 1897 and brought the Vaudois FDP politician Ernest Chuard (1857-1942) into the Federal Council in 1920. He was an agricultural economist and chemical engineer. That liberal Vaudoise movement took up the slogan of 1860 implemented in the Swiss Constitution of 1874:

"Un droit! Une armée!"

 

One judiciary and one army for the Swiss Confederation of cantons, implying it to be the army of citizen soldiers and officers and not a military that could be sent in by a centralized government against the countries own peoples. The leading figure of World War II, General Guisan was from the Canton of Vaud and that liberal movement of Swiss patriotism.

Coat of arms of the military club of arms from its 30-year-anniversary in 1909.

The sportsmanship and social cohesion in the gunclubs worked against social dislocation and resurrection, mitigated the danger of war from within, especially during times of economic dispair. Switzerland is a small country whose natural environment doesn't provide a land base for growing enough food for its population. 

Switzerland used to be a poor country that even sent people away

Therefore, she needs to import food and other things that need to be paid for, requiring her to produce specialized industrial products for export. Before industrialization, Switzerland was one of the poorest regions of Europe, with not enough arable land for food production for her population, the Alps with their steep slopes and harsh winter climate taking up a large part of the country. The large families of the mountain farmers could hardly feed themselves. Therefore many had to leave the country and seek their fortune elsewhere. Sometimes the poor were even sent abroad by local authorities, as was explained at a tourist tour of the Alpine village of Elm in the Canton of Glarus. In that mountain town, a slate quarry collapsed in 1881, leaving many families without the breadwinner and farmers and workers without work and wages. There were not enough funds to fix the quarry and care for so many people without the means to support themselves, so the town council sent out a scout to claim land in the United States. Nothing was ever heard of him. The ones picked out to leave had their passage paid for and had to go into an uncertain future in a foreign country anyway.

Switzerland Swiss citizens who settled in other countries and got naturalized there, could keep their Swiss citizenship and pass it on to their children. Therefore there is a large community of Swiss citizens outside of Switzerland. Not all left by their own will. As in many societies and communities of former times, equality was not for everyone. Reaching its peak in the pseudoscientific belief in eugenics of the latter part of the 19th century until the first half of the 20th century, upon which the disciplines of economics and medicine were built, poor people and the handicapped, those who couldn't make a living on their own capacities, were considered to be a menace and bad genetics. Swiss communitiy councils sent poor people away for emigration overseas. Children were indentured into hard labor (Verdingkinder). Apart from the elite Reisläufer, there were adventurers, ruthless mountain warriors with no special training who left for the fun of killing and looting of war.

The Poor Man of the Toggenburg

Poor young Swiss men, who had no means of finding work to support themselves, whose families were often indebted, were spirited away by racketeers and recruiters from foreign military powers, such as the diarist and writer of social history to become known as the Poor Man of the Toggenburg, Ulrich Bräker (1735-1798), from my Swiss home region.

Ulrich Bräker (1793), The Poor Man of the Toggenburg in the Toggenburg Museum in Lichtensteig, Swiss Canton of St. Gallen.

Ulrich Bräker was pressured into foreign military service by a recruiter of the Prussian Army for fighting in the Seven Years' War (1756- 1798), a global conflict involving European great powers of the time. Bräker succeeded in deserting in the year of the Battle of Lobositz 1756. He returned home, married Salome Ambühl, from a better off family. Right after he returned home, Bräker became a trader in cotton, but without success. Since he had been allowed to go to school during winter and thus had learned to read and write during childhood, he documented his life experiences in diaries. After little success as a businessman, Bräker became a self-taught hobbyist of philosophy and fine arts, preaching morality, commenting on Shakespeare, while never really being accepted by the elites of his times. 

Symbol of exclusion and extortion

With the revival of antisemitism at its worst, the cult of death of Nazism and fraud in great power finance and politics today, of which I have become an unexpected victim and have documented on this blog, Bräker's most famous work The Poor Man of the Tockenburg (1785), is still being used as a symbol of diminishing educated, normal middle-class people like me into forced poverty by extortion. The book was given to me some time ago, in exchange for another one, so that now I suspect that was supposed to have been for making clear to me, I was supposed to submit to being made poor and to give up my livelihood because of a medieval, satanical legend of exclusion and impoverishment of people in order for others to have a greater share of fortune and wealth, taken up by eugenics, social darwinism and rassist ideology of Nationalsocialism based on geneology, from decades before I was born, predicting me to become the Antichrist who stole the Capital, or as interpreted by members of the government of St. Gallen and others: some psycopathic false Jewish Nazi matron from hell who stole the assets of Holocaust victims. This type of accusation, of course, only arose, because the implementers of crude mafia law from former times for disposing the foul debt from bad government finance and management, found themselves in the 21. century confronted with an educated person and a modern judiciary requiring evidence and legal proof. From the beginning of my stay in Switzerland, there had been hints from family and others:

"You get nothing."

For a long time, I didn't take such remarks seriously, because I didn't know that much about what had happened to my family in Nazi Germany during World War II, but only from general studies of history and economics. The pages of an old copy from a library in Zürich are now glued to a shop window in a building that is being renovated.

Pages of Bräker's The Poor Man of the Toggenburg glued to the shopwindow of a building under construction.

Of course, those book pages could also have been glued to the shop window because the building being renovated also houses the Toggenburg Museum of Lichtensteig that has the portrait of the author. Ulrich Bräker.

Front view of the building where a former furniture store is being renovated. It also houses the Toggenburger Museum that documents local history, including the portrait of the diarist, writer and self-trained philosopher Ulrich Bräker.

The house where Ulrich Bräker, grew up in the remote landscape of harsh climate Dreyschlatt, belonging to the town of Lichtensteig in the region of the Toggenburg, Canton St. Gallen. 

The father of The Poor Man of the Tockenburg, Johann Bräker was a heavily indebted farmer and nitrous boiler, who scrubbed walls and tore out parts of barns and old toilets saturated with nitrate, of which the liquid solution was boiled down for making blackpowder. This was not only a gruesom type of craftsmanship, but also stigmatized and often in conflict with local law and farmers, as the salpetremen were commissioned by ruling feudal authorities. Johann Bräker was notoriously indebted. At the age of 19, his son Ulrich Bräker, the later diary writer also was forced into the profession of salpetreman. He probably didn't have to tear out floors and parts of walls from farmhouses or barns, as other salpetremen did at the time, because there were many abandoned old farm buildings around in the Toggenburg then. Landowners and farmers in the Toggenburg of the 18th century often became impoverished and lost their holdings, according to the old records of the Ortsbürgergemeinde Wattwil that I once got to read when working as a local journalist.

Bräker comes home still wearing the uniform of the Prussian army. His brothers and sisters don't recognize him, are afraid. One of his older brothers grabs a hayfork for defence. 

The valley Dreischlatt, where Bräker spent his childhood, is a northern, narrow pathway to higher mountain pastures where there is hardly any sunshine. I did organic inspection there in 2000, when there was an eldery couple living in the Bräker home during Spring, Winter and Autumn. In Summer, they herded cattle in the higher located Alpine pasture owned then by the local community council Ortsbürgergemeinde of the next larger town of Wattwil. 

Customary laws of the commons in Switzerland 

In Switzerland the traditional local communities were divided between the political council, the educational council and the socalled local citizens community Ortsbürgergemeinde. The latter was responsible for social services, such as maintaining the poorhouse and orphanage, financed by the revenue from timber and fees from Alpine forests and pastures they owned and managed. Originally, the Ortsbürgergemeinde of Wattwil had received land for this from the prince abot of St. Gallen. When I drove up the road in order to take the picture of the Bräkerhaus, I drove past the ruins of buildings, one probably a barn, but the other a former home or farmhouse and three large, modern farm buildings. In this area of minor agricultural opportunities with long winters and sparse sunlight, there used to be heifers grazing, smallholdings of farmer-factory workers and simple holiday homes belonging to families whose forebearers had generations ago sought their furtunes in the metropolitan areas of Switzerland.

Ruin of a house in the surroundings of my Swiss home and probably what my two properties in Germany and Switzerland are going to look like, if I reach an old age. 

Modern barn in the same area that is not very favourable for intensive agriculture, most likely financed with debt, passing on their direct payments to undisclosed recepients. 

I passed three such barns driving up the short way to the Bräkerhaus. The elderly woman who lived in the Bräker home some twenty years ago, told me that without a greenhouse, she could hardly even grow beans in the summer. In Switzerland direct payments are granted for maintaining agriculture, safeguarding the environment, caretaking biodiversity such as by tending to hedges and fruit trees, keeping landscapes open, implementing animal welfare measures, mowing steep slopes. Direct payments are the principle instrument of Swiss farm policy since the 1990s and are paid out by the Swiss federal government to farmers meeting the requirements, with the cantonal agriculture departments as intermediaries. All requirements for receiving such government income transfers are coded in the Swiss constitution and agricultural law without any possible misinterpretation. Switzerland is a free market country, so farmers can spend their direct payments according to their own decisions and in many cases it's okay to use them for investment in modern buildings and machinery. However, robbing smallholders of their existence, driving legal owners into invented forced debt and from farming, puts the sensitive ecology of Alpine landscapes and social cohesion at risk, apart from ruthless discriminating expropriation and wrecking of life being an atrocious breach of law and cause of great suffering.

In Bräker's year of death, 1798 revolutionary France invaded Switzerland, a historic event marking the complex Swiss history of Helvetic Confederacy of cantons and centralized government, of sovereignity and submissioned areas (Untertanengebiete) of former times. Those battles were for more centralism or sovereignty of the cantons and also for the rights and livlihoods of the peoples against the powers of elites, be they political or economic. At the same time having to stand up against invasions of foreign armies and ideologies, determines the history and political landscape of Swiss neutrality, their army of citizen soldiers and society. 

Military gunclubs and citizen army for social cohesion

When I first saw the honorable mentions of the military gunclub on the walls of the auditorium belonging to the restaurant on the mountain side, I was impressed by the paper flowers. The pretty arrangements reminded me of the Munich Bürgerwehr in the aftermath of World War I, when unmoral soldiers and their commanders went after their own German citizens, because the militarists and soldiers of that terrible first modern war had been told by undemocratic elites that Germany hadn't really lost the war, but had been betrayed by the working class and labour-movement. That ideology of militarists of the time was called the stab in the back legend (Dolchstosslegende). In modern war, the situation when one of the battling armies has suffered military defeat and doesn't surrender, is a very difficult one, especially, when the war is about ideology or geopolitics. Not only is there continued suffering and death on both sides, but the losing war party can be inclined to turn against its own people, as was the case of Nazi Germany and Japan towards the end of World War II. If there is no surrender of the losing party in the situation of military defeat and continued battle, the soldiers of the winning war party can also turn to immoral crimes of war for taking revenge on their fallen comrades.

In Germany after World War I, the term Bürgerwehr should not be confused with the right-wing fascist Freikorps. The citizens militias were often called in by the socialdemocrat government and consisted of veterans, men with military training and qualifications in leadership, officers, who stood in the way of those maroding hords of the disorganized, disolving army of the Kaiserreich, persuaded them to give in their weapons and go home. In my house in Munich, there was a long list of guns my grandfather who was a member of the Munich Bürgerwehr and his men had collected and handed in to the authorities. From the end of the 19th century to the end of World War II, the dispute and fighting was from within, between militarists, undemocratic elite, dishonest looting and speculation in the financial sector and the proponents of democracy, prosperity and peace. It was a battle of ideas and ideologies, which today is called societal divide. After the first German democracy, the Weimar Republic was established, some of the Bürgerwehren became the Schutzbünde for the defense of democracy against military and fascist rebels and founded the Reichsbanner Schwarz Rot Gold, named after the flag of the German Revolution of 1848 and the Weimar Republik, today the national flag of Germany, as opposed to the red-white-black flag of the former Kaiser Reich. In Switzerland during World War II there were also such defenders of the citizens and peace against insurgents and invaders, mainly consisting of older men who were not conscripted to the citizen's army. They were called Ortswehr.

History: Territorial defence of democracy in Germany and Switzerland

Some of the Schutzbünde in the German Weimar Republic were prepared for armed resistance. However, most engaged in political dispute, but were organized in a military way in order to give structure to the lives of the many veterans of World War I whose reintegration into civilian life and society was still on the hold. The camps of the New Deal in the United States (US) for work  paid for by the government for the unemployed men during the Great Depression in the 1930s, building lodges and campgrounds in national and state parks was also organized in a military way, with discipline and hierarchy. Right after the Nazi-Party took power in Germany in 1933, members of the Schutzbünde were arrested and many shot in Dachau and two other concentration camps. In Switzerland, the more paramilitary right-wing groups were called Bürgerwehren. which however was probably more of a political movement. The policy of spiritual national defence kept Swiss militarists and fascists from gaining power. However, the concept of eugenics, popular since the end of the 19th century,  declared certain groups of people to be unworthy of living normal lives, wasn't called out and continued covertly in Swiss society even after World War II. Until the 1970s the Yenish, a group of marginalized, impoverished and vagrant people, were prosecuted, declared insane. Children were taken from their families. The Yenish were, as those the racist concept of the Nazis defined to be non-arian, and thus Jewish and other people who had no citizenship, in Germany until the founding of the Weimar Republic in 1919. In Switzerland only half of permanent residents of Jewish decendance had Swiss citizenship during World War II. Before the founding of modern states, people had no citizenship for different reasons, one being that there was no need to be a citizen of one town of kingdom, another being that merchants and traders who did business with other regional, feudal sovereignties, were neutral of they went into other town or feudal entities. However, because of the prosecution during Nazi times, the wide spread belief in eugenics, the actual beliefs of my forebearers and other people are in the dark, especially since after the repeated raids of my private quarters with the forging and taking of documents. I was raised without religion. My grandparents from my mother's side were free thinkers. However, the family culture and a type of natural religion was given to my through oral history and education. As of now, the special position I have, which is not at all confined to my person, but to many others for the same reason, is purely a Nazi and eugenics theory from decades before I was born, based on the rare disease my mother had and the presence of engineers, members of city councils during medieval times, entrepreneurs and men of commercial law, one of the worse conspiracy theories of modern times and a motor of the Holocaust. It seems to have been forgotten how terrible the Holocaust and the underlying ideology was.

Looking at the past with morality and disinformation

Today, it's easy to get all sorts of facts, opinions and stories about the times preceding nationalsocialist take over, World War II, Holocaust and who the victims and the perpetrators were from the internet, social media and gossip, be it wrong or right. Often this shallow information is then interpreted from the now predominant moral aspect, not taking into consideration that people then didn't know what was to come, nor the overall aspects from times of the past. 

Furthermore, there is a problem in western societies now on how to express patriotism, love of one's nation, the tradition, the culture one comes from. That also seems to lead to people no longer respecting one another, picking fights and spewing hate simply because the other has other views., be they political or concern the type of individualism in family life or profession. Fascism and radicalism is based on first exclusion, then extortion of minorities, while at the same time other minorities can take up arms against the majority, such as in acts of terrorism. The anti-communist stance of many classical liberals of the first half of the 20th century was based on some of those that called themselves socialists or communists were very radical and violent during the time between the World Wars. Some of those from the left wanted the same capitalist system as the moneychangers, the trusts, only with the difference of what they called the dictatorship of the people having ownership of industrial companies of massproduction and slave workers. The dictatorship of the people was then represented by corrupt party officials and other socialist elites. Others of these communists were plain anarchists, simply wrecking havock where they could. The workers movement in Germany and the US was divided, which was also a cause for the terrible economic crisises of the first half of the 20th century. This was not the case in Switzerland.  

Général Henri Guisan, Chief Commander of Swiss resistance in WWII

In the restaurant where I took the pictures of memoriablia of the gunclubs,  there was also a picture of General Henri Guisan. Today, this restaurant is owned by a well known family of politicians from the Swiss Peoples Party SVP. As I have already mentioned, in recent times this party has been considered to be populist right-wing, but its origins are from the political battling of speculation that robbed farmers of their existence towards the end of World War I. Switzerland had been unprepared for that first modern war. The ideologies of free market trade and liberalism back then had switched Swiss agriculture from more or less self-suffiency to large-scale dairy for cheese production for export. The grain required for the bread and animal feed was imported at a lower price than the cost of producing wheat in Switzerland. The traditional region for import to Switzerland was Ukraine, where there was civil war towards the end of World War I. It wasn't even because of communist soviet planned production systems taking over. In the traditional black soil areas that had fed Europe's cities for generations, the land was no longer properly managed and thus only very little could be harvested, which was not even enough to feed the populations in former Tsarist Russia. Swiss citizen soldiers in military service during World War I received no pay, often leaving their families hungry and desparate. The chief commander of the Swiss Army during World War I was Ulrich Wille (1848-1925), who supported the values of Prussian militarism, discipline and drills for the conscripts. 

When World War II came around, Switzerland was prepared. With the socalled battle of cultivation, Swiss agriculture was restructured to maximum food production for self-sufficiency. On top of the mobilization of well-trained citizen-militia, there was moral resistance, called Geistige Landesverteidigung, swearing in all parts of Swiss society against sympathy with Nazi-Germany and fascist ideology from within. The military commandership was given to General Guisan, a gentleman farmer from the French speaking part of Switzerland who was also fluent in German and understood the cultures and traditions of the populations of Switzerland speaking French, Swiss-German, Italian and Romansh, the language derived from Latin of the Alpine Canton of Grisons. He had studied agriculture in Germany, at the University of Hohenheim near Stuttgart, belonged to the already mentioned classical liberal movement of the Canton of Vaud and was against the militarism of General Wille before and during World War I. 

General Guisan (1874 - 1960), Commander of the Swiss Armed Forces during World War II on the slide during the conference commemorating his 150th birthday in June 2024.

In Switzerland the rank of general is only used during times of war or other national emergencies. Guisan was known simply as Der General. At the commemorative festivities this year, his grandson explained with an anectode the position and doings of Général Guisan: A schoolteacher had heard that there was a maneuver  going on in a forest near the village of her school and that the General would be there. She wrote him a letter asking him to come for a short visit to the school. Her argument was:

"The little boys in the schoolclass I teach, will be the future soldiers defending Switzerland. Maybe you could find the time to visit our school so that you could be a model for them and they will aspire to become good Swiss soldiers from an early age on."

 

The people in the village where the school was thought that the woman was crazy to write such a letter to the Commander in Chief of the Swiss Army during the perilous war. It wasn't said if she had just been a simple schoolteacher who didn't heed conventional submission to authority, or if she had been informed of the personal values and attitudes of the General for which he had been picked for the job of Commander in Chief of the Swiss Army during such difficult times. 

The General from the people

At the event commemorating Guisan's 125th birthday, the grandson reported how it happened. A few days later, towards the end of recess, when the children were going back into their classrooms, one of the little boys first glanced down the road leading to the school, then stormed into the classroom and yelled:

"The General, the General! He is arriving!"

That type of story had been told to him over and over again by contempory witnesses of World War II in his early youth, said the grandson of Général Guisan, now a very old man, at the festivities commemorating the 150th birthday of the Général. The General wore a simple uniform of the citizen soldier and a hat with a wreath with leaves and berries, generally considered to be a laurel wreath for victory. It could however, also symbolize the branches of an olive tree for peace. Victory for peace in order to stop the war going on on the other side of the Swiss border, but also to avoid war within the society of the neutral country fighting for its sovereignty when surrounded by Nazi German and its fascist allies Italy and the collaborating Vichy regime of German occupied France, while at the same time using diplomacy and military deterrence against allied powers who would have liked to use the air bases and land corridors in the middle of Europe when Switzerland was the only non-totalitarian entity in continental Europe. That is the fate of armed neutrality which according to experts means, a neutral country is willing to fight against both warring parties (Foreign Affairs, 2022).

Military hat of Général Guisan with wreath in the Swiss Army Museum

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All three men who stood out in overcoming World War II, Rudolf Minger, Henri Guisan and Friedrich Traugott Wahlen had a background in agriculture. The economics of agriculture, efficiency and food security were another important aspect of Swiss persistance during World War II. Swiss law for agriculture, property rights and land use includes a special legal framework for times of disturbed supply.

Agriculture, food security and national defense

The festivities in June of 2024 in Appenberg, Canton Bern, also commemorated the 125th birthday of another great man of resistance and for food security in general: Friedrich Traugott Wahlen (1899-1985), scientist in agriculture, designer of the Anbauschlacht, the restructuring of Swiss agriculture production during World War II for maximum self-sufficiency, politician, Swiss Federal Council and Deputy Director-General of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation FAO. After talks by the grandson of General Guisan and former Swiss Federal Council Adolf Ogi commemorating the two great men in the morning, there was a discussion with young scientists and politicians on the question of food-security, environmental issues such as climate change mitigation and if and how to augment production change in Swiss agriculture for more self-suffiency in order to have to import less foodstuffs into Switzerland and at the same time lower the environmental impact. Imports of agricultural produce into Switzerland today  are often produced in countries with lower environmental and labour standards than are mandatory in Swiss agriculture. The audience to this conference in Appenberg BE consisted almost completely of elderly men and women, who in their youth had met with contemporary witnesses, had seen the portrait of General Guisan hanging in their parents and grandparents homes, experienced the Swiss traditions for community of the people guarding Swiss Alpine landscapes and sovereignty with the philosophy of General Guisan and the Swiss Armed Forces of citizen soldiers. At the commemoration of General Guisan's 150th birthday on the Gotthard with its forts of military resistance, deterrence and defense against expected invasions of German nationalsocialist and Italien fascist armies during World War II, there were many young people, Swiss soldiers in uniforms stood by, foreign tourists stopping at the Gotthard passage took a tour of the legendary Swiss Alpine Fortress, symbol of resistance and fortified neutrality, the socalled reduit, a strategy implemented by General Guisan, calling on the Swiss military to retreat into the mountains. 

Swiss fortified and armed neutrality in World War II - symbol of resistance

The tunnels inside the Alpine mountaintops at the Gotthard and in the Swiss Rhine Valley were started in 1940, when after the fall of France, Switzerland was entirely surrounded by the troops of fascist and nationalsocialist armies. Before then, Switzerland had expected the French army to rush to its aid in case of an attack by Nazi-Germany or Italy. By 1943, the fortifications in the mountains were armed and ready to shoot. The tunnels, barracks and shooting racks were finished in 1945 and remained in use by the Swiss army and top secret until 1998. During this summer, part of the fortifications underneath the mountain top overlooking the Gotthard passage were open to the public with expositions about General Guisan and the Swiss strategy of deterrence, armed and fortified neutrality of Switzerland during World War II. As the framework of world geopolitics has changed and new threats to Swiss security have arisen, awareness and remembrence of Swiss resistance during World War II is rising. Just recently, there were pictures in the newspapers of the current Chief Commander of the Swiss Defence forces wearing uniform and hat of General Guisan.

Looking through an embrasure for a maschine gun from the inside of the Gotthard fortifications.

Military installments built into the rocks of the Alpine fortress.

Tunnel on the inside, leading to an escalator that today brings tourists to have a look at the inside of the Alpine fortress on the Gotthard.

The fortifications  Gotthard towards fascist Italy and those in Sargans close to the Austrian-German border are symbols of fortified military resistance of a small neutral country against greater powers that are at war with each other. General Guisan said to his officers in 1940:

"The Federal Council has assigned our army the task of protecting our independence that has lasted for hundreds of years. This independence has always been respected by our neighbors and we will make ourselves be respected to the very end. . . We can now be attacked from all sides and the army must adapt itself to this new situation and take a stand where she can defend efficiently on all battle lines. "

General Henri Guisan 1940

Switzerland only has a general during times of war or other times of great need. When elected general in 1939, shortly before Nazi-Germany invaded Poland, Guisan was clearly the man for resistance. From the latter part of the 19th century and during the first half of the 20th century, there was a battle between fascist-nationalists, militarists and democracy and wellbeing for all. Resistance was resisting great powers, not only defined by geopolitics and military strength, but also by economic actors, politicians, bankers, businessmen and mighty corporate trusts from other countries and from within. 

Totalitarian economics

Democracies and and judiciaries were not up to protecting the people from what we now consider to be fraud and corruption. Totalitarian economics impoverishes people and groups of people first, then makes them superfluous, a lesson learned from World War II and the Holocaust. Totalitarian economics is fueled by war speculation, but also causes continous war. Measures against totalitarianism are implementing rule of law (Friedrich August von Hayek, 1944) and what was called spiritual defense in Switzerland during World War II. Guisan faced opposition even from within military circles and others in higher or lower positions. Some were defeatists who saw Switzerland already beaten by the mighty German army. Others had sympathies with fascism and German nationalsocialism. And there were traitors who saw ways of making profit. Two very young men were caught passing on plans and maps of the Gotthard fortress to the Germans during its construction, sentenced to death and executed. They were interns in the office of the construction site and had permission to enter into classified areas of construction of the Alpine Fortress, even though that was not necessary for the work they had been assigned to do. So actually, there must have been higher up men who had intrigued them into treason. In a propaganda film shown at the exposition, Guisan is shown saying:

"I feel nothing for traitors."

The Alpine fortresses of World War II symbolise military deterrence against Italy and Nazi-Germany Attacken. Coping with forces and powers from within is different and has to take the social disruptions of times of war between armies and ideologies into account. As Guisan wasn't the distanced military officer, but often described as the General from among us, the people, the statue of the citizen soldier from the national Swiss exposition of 1939 symbolizes the citizen soldier, who gets up from work and family and puts on his military appareil.

Statue of the Swiss citizen soldier named Military Rediness by Hans Brandenberger (1939) in the Museum of the Swiss Charters of Confederation in Schwyz, Switzerland, photograph by Paebi.

Recently, the Commander of the Swiss Defence Forces recalled the situation that General Guisan was in after he was elected in 1939 and said that now the Swiss military under his command had similar challenges. Guisan was confronted with an army that wasn't equiped to its mission and strategies for defending the country against better equiped enemies. This however is not really true. 

Enemies from outside and within

For one thing, with the backing of the socialdemocrats, already in 1935 Switzerland had augmented government spending for defense and later issued defense bonds that were over-subscribed, and the people were prepared to stand together against the enemy from outside, as well as the totalitarian, fascist sympathants among their own population. One contemporary witness said:

"My mother whispered with the same tone of voice with which she told us that someone had cancer: That man is  a Nazi."

Enemies preparing to attack or already engaged in harmful tactics, can come from the the outside and from within. The enemy is not necessarily a foreign military sent to war by an official government, but can also be from economic powers, organised crime and terrorism.  As a small and neutral country whose economy is based on commerce and trade with other countries, Switzerland is heavily dependant on good international relations. There has been a societal change, especially in western countries, including Switzerland and Germany that has lead to disruption in society and what is called hybrid war, lawlessness, cybercriminality, surveillance methods and psychological warfare that is not from another country. That has been brought about by:

• technical progress (computers, commercialized internet, automation in industry and finance) without proper education and digital literacy (Edward Snowdon).
  
  
• demographics and irregular migration, including weaponized immigration.
  
  
• Fear of change resulting from an error code in the area of the brain responsible for belief, religion, causing irrational and uncontrolled hate and violence against others, such as in progroms, hate speach on social media and media overreach.

• more free time in western societies to spend with digital devices that ordinary people don't really understand.

• online gambling, speculation for war profiteering, failed debt management by individuals and governments (strategic corruption).

Fear of change, the anxiety resulting from economic and societal change has been described as the error code of the Jewish religion as waiting for the Messias while at the same time not wanting him to come because of not knowing if the Antichrist will come instead, as was induced by the right-wing extremist and Nazi-eugenisist Antisemitism of the Antichrist who stole the capital, of what I have become a victim and have described in earlier German posts. The German journalist Peter Hahne who is a Christian, says that a society without belief in something making life worth living, causes people to believe in demons and false religion such as fear of climate change.

The term hybrid war has been heavily criticized as being abstract, vague and distorted. It includes almost everything that is irregular and the word war suggests that its about geopolitical enemies, countries and their governments and military fighting each other, making it easy to blame other countries and governments, when in fact it is a phenomenon from within a society. However, if the once economic powerhouse of Germany is in decline, other economies profit, such as US businesses taking over contracts and relations with Swiss high tech export oriented industry, as has happened. Switzerland's main export market with 60 % of all destinations of Swiss over all export is now the US, when it used to be Germany.

Definitions of warfare

War has often been about ideologies and ressources, such as energy scources and materials. There are wars going on right now, but neither in Switzerland, Germany or the US. Some experts speak of the Wars Russia against Ukraine and in the Middle East as being World Wars, because of the world-wide public attention they are getting through media and internet, other governments sending weapons, advice and putting on political pressure. But still, there is nothing near the political, economic, military and humanitarian catastrophes of before and during World War II in Switzerland, Germany and most other European and western societies. As a political economist, who has personally been heavily affected by this change to the worst, I mention the following terms:

• economic and financial warfare
  
  
• strategic corruption
  
  
• political and economic exclusion, censorship

From further education as a journalist, I learned that it is not entities such as countries, governments, businesses or parts of societies, but that it is always humans interacting with other humans, be it in business between companies or geopolitical tensions and conflicts. The Chief Commander of the Swiss Army said that there is a lack of playing by the rules. He named some countries, but in my personal case and from following publicly available information, I couldn't make out any evidence of Russian or Chinese participation. Both countries have more or less free market economies, so they also can have people not going by the rules, engaging in predatory lending, fraudulous and criminal practice. Weakening the economy of a country, ravaging its farms, recruitment of traitors, has happened since the beginning of human civilization. In contrast to economic crisis, economic war is done on purpose and harms ordinary people apart from the losses of revenue and wealth for a country's economy. Personally and from the point of view as an economist in agriculture, I use the term operational risk. In banking, in enterprises, corporations and government agencies, operational risk is a type of risk that is caused by people, be they employees, managers or others associated with the particular organisation. Those can be from suppliers, customers, politicians or others that are in some way connected. In contrast to other sorts of risks, such as for example financial risk, where gains from taking risks have to be weighed against possible losses, operational risk has to be zero and precautions need to be taken. Most of operational risk is against the law. In Switzerland, Germany and the United States, measures and documentation of governance and compliance are mandatory and written into law, for private enterprises, government authorities and non-govenment organisations. 

Changes in the challenges for a military for defense

I strongly support the mentioned critisism of the term hybrid war, but will still use it for lack of other description for the changes in the challenges and how to meet those challenges. What we witness now, is the intrusion of harmful practices we generally associate with warfare into almost every aspects of everyday life, such as with surveillance, theft of name and identity, impairment of real and tangible property rights, blacklisting, cybercriminality. Moral hazard from the economic point of view is associated with assymetric information, meaning the perpetrator knows more than the victim, hides the information he is using to trick and harm that victim. Moral hazard often arises from regulation when those evading controles turn to more immoral practices. It could be that I am biased because of what happened to me. But the extreme rise in antisemitism by itself shows that there is a huge problem. 

In the period of time just after I had come to Switzerland, which was over thirty years ago, I put on my cv for job applications my US-American elementary school, because I thought it would be positiv to show that I had not only grown up a native English speaker, but in a viscinity where there was a lot of science and education and I could therefore not only read, write and negociate in English, but also at a high level of competence. When I was eleven, my father had me read the scientific publications he wrote as a highly acclaimed computer scientist, to check his writing on English grammar and style. I used the such trained competence later on in 1980 during a summer job with the company of Hewlett-Packard at my then German hometown, when typing scientific papers written by the head of research and development of that company. Actually, he had very illegible handwriting, so I had to make up alot that I thought made sense from the language, even though I didn't understand the topic of chemistry at all. He told me that he had never had such well written papers before and during my internship of two months the man sat at his desk and wrote one paper after the other for me to type. As for the elementary school on the cv, I gave that up pretty quickly, because I realized that that was very negative in Switzerland as to receiving a job. I only found out around last year why this had been the case. It was because there was a prejudice that going to Monte Sano Elementary school meant that my father had been a Nazi rocket scientist and war criminal from the Peenemünde V2 facilities. My father was 14 at the end of World War II and there are many articles by and about him on the internet. 

Subject of misinterpretation

When I was at international conferences during my time as a researcher in renewable energy, even once in the 2000s in Switzerland, during small talk in front of posters or at lunch, when I said that I had grown up in Huntsville, Alabama, because my father had worked on the Apollo Space Program, I would be asked, if I had lived on Monte Sano. When I said yes, eyes would widen and scientists asked me to collaborate. Several times I worked out possible projects and every time some Swiss departments of finance for research swooped in and put other people into the contracts. By the time blacklistings had wrecked my career as an engineer and economist completely, after twenty years of being a farmer, journalist, researcher, aid to management of a well-known Swiss industrial company, organic farm inspector and other things, with articles in the internet, I was quite often told, even by well meaning people:

"You are a special case."

I grew up with the very inspirational experience of being part of an enormous effort of around 300 000 people to put man on the moon, engineers, scientists, employees of industrial companies and others, a project of economic stimulus, innovation, scientific progress, about which just recently the Italian economist Mariana Mazzucato wrote her book Mission economy - a moonshot guide (2021) , translated into many languages and sincerely recommended by the Guardian to all those wishing to implement a new surge of innovation in order to meat the challenges of today, especially those posed by climate change. In short: anyone can today for any minor misinformation, surge of envy, willful or not, be put into the situation of being in a warzone in your own home in a peaceful, prosperous country and of loosing everything. On plus, neither truth, morals, legal proceedures and laws in place have any meaning, its only about picking a person's name of a list by computers for lynching, bets on death and dropping foul debt. As an official of the terrorist Hamas put it in the context of the war in Gaza: Israel has mandatory military service for its citizens over 18, so any Israeli over the age of 18 is not a civilian, but a soldier and thus in case of war, can be tortured and killed. 

As rumours go, that is expanded to others who are considered or accused of being something, having the wrong family heritage other and the argument is taken up by elected governments of perfectly democratic and peaceful countries elsewhere. Up to this day, I haven't got an answer to the open letters and other publications on this blog, apart from continued oppression, the latest of which being St. Gallen debt collection offices publishing on the internet my refusal of handing in my aged vehicles without resale value, registered and insured to my name, at the parking lot of my Swiss hometown's government. This is no peculiar anecdote. My farm insurance company agent told me that they have many clients in the same situation as myself, of hostile take over of farms and assets. Farm policy for preservation and maintenance of farms, including income policy for farmers, has always been a core pillar of Swiss neutrality, not only for food security in times of disturbed supply to the country that has difficulty in feeding its own population without extensive imports, but also to ensure the landscape of the Alpine areas to stay habitable, support workplaces and infrastructure there. Already there have been catastrophes just recently with landslides, whole houses being washed into the Lake Maggiore. In the valley of Saas, close to the famous landmark of the Matterhorn in the Canton of Valais, landslides have wrecked roads, locked in tourists and natives for the fourth time this summer. Those are areas of neglect of forests and Alpine pastures for decades, with depopulation due to no opportunities for employment and business, or tourism being the main economic sector. But my visits to Alpine pastures and other events on Alpine farming have brought to light much degradation with unsustainable shrubbery, long grases and invasive plants growing on steep slopes. 

Neu challenges for security forces in the neutral state

In Switzerland there is now much debate on meeting the new challenges for military security and some new measures have been taken, such as providing conscripts of the Swiss Defense Forces with courses in combatting cybersecurity, so they will also be experts in this in their civilian lives and workplaces. However, Chief Commander Süssli said that there is a problem of recruiting women to Swiss military who are not required to do mandatory military service and that many soldiers leave the military after mandatory training for civil service, which is now in Switzerland also allowed instead of serving in the army. But most urgently, there is a deficiency of equipment for all soldiers in case of an emergency mobilization which is a problem of government finance. At the onset of World War II, the Swiss Army was in fact quite well equipped. The Swiss government had issued a defense bond, asking Swiss people to put their savings into defending the country. However, things changed when France fell in 1940, because Swiss military strategy had taken into account that France would come to Switzerland's aid in case of an attack by fascist Italy and nationalsocialist Germany. After the war, it turned out that there had been such plans. 

In Swiss democracy it is Parliament that has to decide on finances and therefore investment into the military competes with other expenditures of government. There are so far three suggestions to solve this dilemma. However, in the ongoing debate, there is also incertitude on how to meet the new challenges of what has been defined as hybrid war and the threat of conventional war because of the ongoing wars and the possiblity of them expanding. One point of dissent within Swiss politicians and people is on the collaboration and alignment with Nato and the contracts with the European Union that are currently under negotiation. Switzerland has been a participant of the Common Market. Most important is the position of neutrality, which has already been challenged. There are even actors speaking publicly of abandonning neutrality, as the formerly neutral states Sweden and Finland have done since the attack of Russia on Ukraine. Therefore it seems necessary to look into the aspects of neutrality. As the quote from General Guisan concerning the situation during World War II suggests, neutrality is a question of respect of others. The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) once wrote in an essay that self-esteem of a person primarily depended on what others thought of him. Despite there being many self-help guides and advice from psychology, we can't always make others respect us by the way we behave and present ourselves, the worst possible case for wrecking self-esteem of the individual being antisemitism and racism. 

What German Nazis and their Swiss sympathizers thought

Neutrality is often considered to be a type of weakness to be imposed on a country so it can't defend itself. Interesting enough, in the exposition in the Gotthard fortress concerning General Guisan and Switzerland during World War II, there are several quotes from Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), other Nazi leaders poking fun at Swiss neutrality and military measures during World War II, and even from Guisans opponent in military strategy of the time, Ulrich Wille junior (1877-1959), the son of Ulrich Wille (1848-1925), Swiss general during World War I, said in 1940 when Switzerland was surrounded by Italien fascist and German nationalsocialist troops:

"Anyway, it would be best for our country to demobilize now. Then the General wouldn't be able to stay in power, because his position and function would expire automatically."

Worst even from the Nazi German head of propaganda Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945) on Switzerland:

"A cold-blooded people, stubbornly self-centered to savagery, constantly using the same tactics: bartering, putting off, evading, blackmailing. A strategy of war that is not for victory, but for survival. . . in short, their heart is with the Allies, the Germans will get their bowels."

Goebbels only came into contact with Swiss traitors, antidemocratic sympathants of fascism and totalitarianism, who had conspired against the Swiss government and secretly taken up negotiations with Nazi-Germany.

After World War II, Ulrich Wille junior became the founder and longtime president of the organisation Pro Juventute which until the 1970s for reasons of eugenics took children of the Yenish from their parents. General Guisan responded to the attacks of totalitarian enemy propagandists with the following:

"Whoever enters our country will be our enemy. The enemy will encounter an absolutely united army and a peoples spirited by one determination. There will be only one Switzerland and one power of will to battle against such an enemy."

Dispite their harsh propaganda, the Germans and the Italiens in World War I didn't attack, even though detailed plans to do so were found after the war. The last time others tried to force Switzerland into weak neutrality was at the end of the Napoleanic wars in order to keep French troops from resurging from behind. This treaty of 1815 is up to this day not recognized by Switzerland. 

Neutrality 

Neutrality is not a single concept. It can be considered to be a type of insurance policy against domestic threats against democracy and wellbeing of the people and from foreign powers against the usually small neutral state (Foreign Affairs, 2022) and can be understood in different ways. Neutrality is not about taking sides.

" Being neutral does not include the privilege of being between right or wrong, or decency or indecency."

President Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969)

Swiss neutrality is based on international humanitarian law of the Haag Conventions of 1907, ratified by Switzerland in 1910. According to the treaties of Haag, a neutral country is not allowed to become a member of an international alliance and in times of peace it has to keep from engaging in legal contracts that would undermine its neutrality in case of war. Switzerland has a number of laws in place such as regulations for the export of weapons in order to respect the treaties of the Haag Conventions on neutrality. Only once was weak neutrality prescribed to Switzerland, which was at the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, in order to keep the French army from regenerating and attacking from behind lines. Up to today, Switzerland doesn't  acknowledge this treaty. 

Swiss neutrality derives from the philosophy and political system of the confederacy, as described in the beginning of this article, of maintaining complex ties, obligations and liabilities between subordinate governments of the Cantons, federal institutions and other countries, including great powers. In general, neutrality is considered to be an option for a nation state, if it has resources that potential enemies would want to conquer and profit from, but don't do so, because it would lead to war between those greater powers. In Switzerland, this is still the Alpine passage, but also the asset of having a neutral country in the middle of Europe, respected for its negotiating powers, peace-making efforts, where international organisations have set up their institutions, a country with stable democracy and safe and powerful finance and banking system, where other countries can bring in their wealth and have their pension funds managed. Most of this has been impaired, because the Swiss have forgotten their past. The former Swiss counciler of finance, Ueli Maurer has said that Switzerland seems to be suffering from dementia, the same type he experienced with a close relative. When I first came to Switzerland, they celebrated, probably as the only country, the beginning of World War II. What seemed to me and almost all of my Swiss friends to be very peculiar, I understand now. In the year Nazi-Germany attacked and invaded Poland, 1939, there was also the national exposition that marked solidarity of the Swiss people against fascism and totalitarianism. 

Armed and fortified neutrality

The Swiss call their neutrality armed, when experts say, it is fortified. Armed neutrality means that in case of other countries fighting a war, the neutral country is prepared to battle both adversaries. This was the case during World War II. It would have been of great advantage to Allied forces to have airbases in Switzerland and a number of US bomber planes were forced to turn back by Swiss fighter planes that were stationed inside mountains with short runways, so foreign planes couldn't land. At the very end, Swiss anti-aircraft defense even had to shoot some allied planes down, a very difficult decision, as one report stated. It must be noted that Allied military, especially the US also had officers and soldiers with, militarist ideology. One of the aspects of that being the hate for small, strong democratic countries. That, I believe is the lesson that needs to be learned in Switzerland: Stop making yourself look small and weak and rebuild the values and soft powers you used to have.