Quote:
Originally Posted by Slartibartfas
They have abolished that "gun control" mentioned in the article above recently. Swiss are not obliged anymore to have a weapon at home.
They also have abolished the huge fortress system that would have turned 1/3 of Switzerland into a freaking unconquerable alpine fortress guarded by heavy weaponed mountain bunker-barracks aiming at the incoming valleys with bomb proof artillery. The plans to evacuate the Swiss into this alpine fortress in case of attack and give up the cities outside are no more.
Switzerland reacted by that on the changing reality. It has only one neighbor anymore, the EU and there is no way, that this neighbor would invade, nor is there any sign that anyone else would invade the EU, and even less that the one would like to conquer Switzerland afterwards.
Last but not least, why has Switerland not been attacked in WWII? Because it was the bank for all sides. No one deliberately bombs his bank away. Not to forget that it was a mountainous bank as well, and everyone who saw the mountain war during WWI between Austria and Italy knows that this is hard fight with little reward.
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Good points, but you're still leaving out some things:
"Neither Nationalist nor Socialist: How the Swiss Kept Their Freedom in World War II"
(by Walter Olson of the Manhattan Institute, from Reason Magazine)
An "island of liberty and harmony in a sea of dictatorship and discord" and "a citadel of peace through stormy centuries," to quote a 1938 New York Times analysis; "it is a land of hard work and frugal habits, of justice and cleanness and tolerance, of the very essence of live-and-let-live" -- and, not incidentally, the bulwark of free-market capitalism in Europe. To say that Switzerland enjoyed a favorable reputation in America until recently would be to understate matters. Today, after a relentless and astonishingly one-sided media campaign, there is scarcely a horror tale about the Swiss too extreme or absurd to be picked up in the press.
The assault began with widely circulated allegations -- the truth is less clear-cut than news reports have made it sound -- that Swiss banks swallowed great sums deposited in private accounts by victims of the Holocaust. (At press time, Swiss banks had reached a tentative agreement to settle those allegations, and avert threatened sanctions, by paying more than $1 billion.)
Picking up its own momentum, the indictment soon expanded into a depiction of the Swiss as a nation of heartless profiteers, "Hitler's silent partners," working to advance the Nazi cause without being shot at. In June the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center made worldwide headlines by issuing a report claiming that pro-Nazi activity "thoroughly saturated...the core of Swiss society." Teenagers now grow up hearing that the Swiss spent World War II rooting for the Axis powers.
Now Stephen Halbrook, an attorney and well-known Second Amendment expert (he's the author of 1984's That Every Man Be Armed), has taken a much-needed look at the Swiss wartime record in a new book titled
"Target Switzerland: Swiss Armed Neutrality in World War II." The book not only provides a starting point for all future discussions of Switzerland's military role in the war, but also makes an interesting contribution to the literature on both federalism and gun rights; according to Halbrook, Switzerland's traditions of extreme decentralization and of a well-armed populace played a key role in preserving its freedom in an hour of peril.
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