In Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Sweden (and other Scandinavian countries) are frequently cited as models for all humanity. In contrast, the other Sw European country, Switzerland, is mentioned only in passing, and no attention is devoted to Switzerland's avoidance of war, even though much of the book is devoted to international warfare.
That the Swiss managed to remain at peace during WWI and WWII is far more of an accomplishment than that the Swedes managed it. Sweden is not strategically located. It's not on the way to anywhere other than Norway. Switzerland, in contrast, is on the way to the Rhine, Rhone, Po, and Danube river valleys. And still, the Swedes were basically the Nazis' patsies during WWII, Thus, Hitler mounted plans to invade Switzerland but called them off as too costly.
And while Sweden was an ethnically homogeneous society in the 1940s, Switzerland has four national languages.
There are various reasons for why we hear more about Sweden than Switzerland. For one thing, the Swedes tend to loudly evangelize their culture as a model for the world, while the Swiss tend to keep their mouths shut. More fundamentally, the Swiss example is bad for Pinker's overall thesis that there has been a general trend toward Swedishness, which reduces both international warfare, hunting, militarism, guns, isolation, cosmopolitanism, spanking children, and so forth and so on.
The Swiss example raises doubts about Pinker's overall argument: To stay at peace, the Swiss in the 20th Century had a highly militarized society, with constant weekend drilling of civilian reserves, and a national obsession with rifle shooting. To maintain internal peace, the Swiss devolved domestic government down to the cantonal level, which are overwhelmingly monocultural. The Swiss stayed out of most international organizations, not joining the UN until 2002. The Swiss stayed out of the European Union, which is why the Swiss franc has gone through the roof recently as the Euro has teetered. Culturally, the Swiss tend to be somewhat more conservative than the Swedes, although this is all by European standards.
In case you are interested in more, here's a 2000 piece I wrote for VDARE on Switzerland.
In case you are interested in more, here's a 2000 piece I wrote for VDARE on Switzerland.
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107 comments:
Anyone that thinks Switzerland was 'neutral' during WWII and wasn't yet another German stooge is a fool.
Do you think the Nazis would have tolerated an independent state so close by? The Swiss new full well that they wouldn't stand a chance against the SS divisions.
The Swiss may well be on their way to being Sweden-lite.
I remember when Euro-liberals were crowing over the fact that some African immigrant was voted to the Swiss Federal Assembly a few years ago.
Still, the Swiss aren't 'diversity is strength' types, so I imagine that guy must have been quite conservative to get a hearing.
"In Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Sweden (and other Scandinavian countries) are frequently cited as models for all humanity."
Well, if most nations could be small, have lots of space, homogeneous, have people with reasonably high IQ, and etc, I suppose the Swedish model would work. But the idea of turning Zimbabwe or Peru into Sweden via Swedish policies is ridiculous.
Also, Swedish don't like Swedenism. They wanna be more like Americans: more diverse. And so kids are made to watch state propaganda videos that call for blanda ho, blanda ho.
Malmo is the future of Sweden, and it looks like the urban ghetto in America or France.
If Pinker wants to preserve the Swedish model, he better hope Sweden remains mostly Swedish.
Also, Sweden could afford to be holier-than-thou because it didn't have to fight any wars or risk anything. It's easy to act moralistic from a distance without having any relevance whatsoever.
Another thing. Sweden as a nation was possible because at one time it had been a formidable military power. It sent a msssage to neighboring kingdoms "don't mess with us cuz you'll get your ass whupped." If Sweden had been progressive-Swedish since the beginning of time, it would have been swallowed up by other powers. But Sweden remained Sweden cuz more often than not, it did the attacking than being attacked.
"Anyone that thinks Switzerland was 'neutral' during WWII and wasn't yet another German stooge is a fool."
It was officially neutral.
It was officially neutral.
An ego-saving arrangement. They were about as neutral as Vichy France.
Swedenism is the ultimate paradox. Swedes could gush about those noble negroes, the wonder of diversity and multiculturalism, universal human rights, and etc, etc because they were mostly abstractions and ideals in what is generally a homogeneous and isolated Sweden.
From afar, they could make believe that American blacks are all decent like Bill Cosby and that criminal ones are merley victims of white 'racism' and could be turned into decent people with lots of love. In a way, Swedenism is like white elitist liberalism in America. Liberals in places like Minnesota and gated communities in NY don't have to deal with the real problems of diversity. Their view of reality comes from Ken Burns documentaries, NPR political correctness, and books by Pinker and the like. So, they can pretend that their ideals are the panacea for reality. But real reality is something else.
If Sweden were to really turn into a multi-culti society with lots of blacks and Muslims, Swedenism will vanish, and Swedes will wake up to reality.
It's like many animal lovers don't live close to dangerous animals and so they idealize animals from afar. If they came face to face with a grizzly bear, their animal-love-ism would have to be revised.
In a way, Swedenism is like white elitist liberalism in America. Liberals in places like Minnesota
Well, as you may know, Sweden and Minnesota have one or two things in common.
"Anyone that thinks Switzerland was 'neutral' during WWII and wasn't yet another German stooge is a fool."
I give Swiss some credit for neutrality because unlike the Swedes or Vichy French, the Swiss for the most part didn't actually like the Nazis. How many Swiss volunteers fought on the Axis side?
"An ego-saving arrangement. They were about as neutral as Vichy France."
But without being invaded. Always a good thing.
But without being invaded. Always a good thing.
Yes, they privately waved the white flag so as not to have thousands of SS men storming into the country and squadrons of German bombers flying overhead.
But to spin this as neutrality is just pathetic.
The Swiss were the financial front men for the Nazi regime.
In that role they were essential.
They also permitted vast Nazi financial crimes to route through their ledgers.
The OSS calculated that Switzerland contributed more per capita to the German war machine than Germans!
That the Swiss managed to remain at peace during WWI and WWII iyes but that was anti semitic
@anon 1:40.. you're a clown. only a fool would attack a mountainous country where all citizens are armed, all bridges and tunnels mined.. and to what strategic end? The cache of swiss army knives? Swiss cheese?
"Malmo is the future of Sweden, and it looks like the urban ghetto in America or France."
We hear this all the time, and I'll repeat what I've said before: My elderly mother spent a week in Malmo this summer and said it was lovely, and, no, she didn't notice exceptional numbers of immigrants.
Cennbeorc
"An ego-saving arrangement. They were about as neutral as Vichy France."
Evidence, please. Did they, for example, send Swiss Jews off to the concentration camps? Foreign Jews?
Cennbeorc
I'm reading Pinker's book and I don't think he's as biased towards red state values as you think, aside from a dislike of religion. I think Sailer is just hypersensitive to this stuff and seeing it where it's not.
Oh, and if Switzerland had been where Belgium is it probably wouldn't have avoided war. It was just lucky. On the map of Europe someone has to be.
"We hear this all the time, and I'll repeat what I've said before: My elderly mother spent a week in Malmo this summer and said it was lovely, and, no, she didn't notice exceptional numbers of immigrants."
Well, it depends on WHICH part of Malmo. There are good lovely pts of St. Louis and the really bad parts.
The thing is... demographic favors the darker part of Malmo.
And before we attack Switzerland for doing business with Nazis(and other evil regimes), let's remember some American bankers funded the Bolsheviks and guys like Armand Hammer laundered money for Lenin and Stalin.
And before Gaddafi's downfall, what were all those democracies doing rolling out the red carpet for him and offering to do business?
I mean if democracies act like this with a nation that poses no threat to them, can we blame Switzerland for doing what it had to in order to survive?
Btw, Hong Kong served as financial conduit to the rest of the world for the Chinese communists since they came to power. In fact, Mao chose not to take Hong Kong just for that reason. Mao's regime was evil, but no one blames Hong Kong(and its British elites) for what they did. So, all this Swiss-bashing over what happened during WWII is something of a joke.
(And let's not forget Israel was chummy with South AFrica, and vice versa.)
only a fool would attack a mountainous country where all citizens are armed, all bridges and tunnels mined..
If the Luftwaffe had worked the countryside for a few weeks, there wouldn't even have been a need to invade with ground forces.
Sweden's social, economic and political advantages are part of its people's extended phenotype. They're now in the process of destroying the genetic foundation of their success as a country.
If the Luftwaffe had worked the countryside for a few weeks, there wouldn't even have been a need to invade with ground forces.
yeah, strategy worked great in England and i guess there was no need for d-day as well....
let's remember some American bankers funded the Bolsheviks and guys like Armand Hammer laundered money for Lenin and Stalin.
the bolshiviks made anti-semitism a captial offense (and de facto the practice christianity).
who, whom, some animals more equal than others and all that...
Swedes are a funny bunch. They seem to be possessed with both moral pride and moral guilt. In terms of pride(or moral narcissism), Swedes can say OTHER nations conquered the world, enslaved blacks, killed Indians(though I'm sure Swedish-Americans did some of that), and etc. while the peace-loving Swedes stayed at home.
So, Swedes act like they are good whites.
But Swedes may feel guilt over having traded with great powers with blood on their hands. Swedes didn't just trade with Nazi Germans but with British and French imperialists, Belgian imperialists, and etc.
But another reason for guilt could be Sweden managed to avoid most of the horrors of Modern Europe. Even though Swedes were not the reason for the horrors, they may feel that they glibly stood on the sidelines and watched while other peoples suffered greatly. Swedes don't have a narrative of oppressing other people(at least in more recent history) but they don't have a victim-narrative either(that makes a people feel holy in our age). French may have been imperialists, but they have the Nazi occupation narrative. Brits have the London Blitz narrative. Russians have the narrative of suffering under Stalin and Hitler. Poles have the narrative of all sorts of horrors. While much of Europe was being destroyed, Swedes went about the business of living like everything was normal as usual. World blew up; Swedes vacationned and danced. This probably left a bad taste, especially since Swedes didn't do anything to stop the slaughter. Swedes may not have been responsible for WWI or WWII but they didn't lift a hand to help either side.
So, I think Swedes tend to be rather hysterical in fantasizing its own guilt and suffering. How else do you explain a movie like GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO where lesbians are oppressed by sadistic bureaucrats and crypto-Nazis are plotting some bad shit.
Do you suppose the stupidass Nobel Prize had something to do with why Swedes became such insufferably sanctimonious pricks?
Suppose Nobel had never created that prize. What would have been Sweden's standing in the world? Okay, Abba(some of whose songs I like). But what else? Okay, Ingmar Bergman, great director,and Jan Troell too, but what else? Not much else.
It was the damn Nobel Prize which put Sweden on the cultural, moral, intellectual, and political map as the arbiter of what is best, noblest, moralest, goodyest, intelligentest, and whateverest. So, for over a century, Swedes have been acting like judges of the entire world as to what is the best of the best in arts, science, and morality. Every year, 7 billion people on Earth looks to that dinky nation with a few million people to tell us what is the bestest of the bestest.
And I think maybe this made Swedish heads swell with self-importance.
Maybe Swedes wouldn't act so much like judge-and-jury of the world if Alfred Nobel had never come up with that dumbass prize.
I LOOOOOOVE the iSteve commentariat. Only place you can "learn" that whether a country fights for another country or not, and whether a country is invaded by another country or not, are negligible historical footnotes.
You guys are awesome.
Refer to the vast financial aid the Swiss supplied to the Germans.
Which financial aid? The Swiss DID BUSINESS with Germany - as well they should, because there was a chance Germany would win and it would be wise not to antagonize a victorious Germany too much.
And VAST financial aid? Vast? Germany had almost the entire European continent at her feet for years, and yet the Swiss contribution was VAST?
Certainly the Swiss must have been useful to Germany - but not much differently than the "neutral" United States were to Britain before Dec 1941.
The cultural marxists, for instance famous international artist Thomas Hirschhorn, were very upset when "right-wing populist Christoph Blocher" entered the Swiss coalition government a few years ago.
http://goo.gl/nGMbt
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/27/arts/design/27hirs.html?smid=tw-nytimes&seid=auto
Lest we forget: the Swedes assisted -- in a MAJOR way the SECRET development of the FLAK 36 ... aka the 88mm triple threat gun.
It was routinely described as the most feared German weapon of the war.
Historically the Swedes and the Swiss were at the absolute heart of the Thirty-Years War.
Sweden, under Gustavas Adolphus II pretty much invented the modern European army. He changed war from pikes to muskets -- in three ranks with bayonets.
He established the procedure for raising mass armies -- the raising of regiments area by area. This policy has endured for centuries.
As for the Swiss: they were ejected from the mercenary guild entirely - -by the treaty. Only one entity was exempted: the Papacy. This is why Swiss guards still stand at the Vatican.
In the 17th Century no pikemen were more feared than the Swiss. They had a nasty habit of not staying bought -- and would flip sides for lucre. In which case the battle was re-decided in a flash.
Both Sweden and Switzerland wore out their welcome worse than Nazi Germany.
That's where their pacifism springs from.
yeah, strategy worked great in England and i guess there was no need for d-day as well
England was further away and had a formidable air force you idiot, with Switzerland being next door they would have been able to carry out round the clock bombing raids with short turnaround times.
Cold war Sweden had mandatory military service and was much more seriously militarized than Switzerland was.
If the Luftwaffe had worked the countryside for a few week
yeah just like us and the soviets did in afghanistan.
We hear this all the time, and I'll repeat what I've said before: My elderly mother spent a week in Malmo this summer and said it was lovely, and, no, she didn't notice exceptional numbers of immigrants.
This is true. Major American cities are so associated with blacks that European cities feel very white comparably.
But to spin this as neutrality is just pathetic.
It was neutrality.
"So, I think Swedes tend to be rather hysterical in fantasizing its own guilt and suffering. How else do you explain a movie like GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO where lesbians are oppressed by sadistic bureaucrats and crypto-Nazis are plotting some bad shit."
Agreed. Swedes seem to be among the most fanatically puritanical (I mean this in the modern sense of course) of all European groups. There is something about them and U.S liberals (of which libertarians are a distant offshoot) in the U.S where they have to go "all in" with regards to ideologies...You know, they can't make nuances between the worst and best aspects of an ideology. They have to commit themselves completely to all the platforms even if they don't work so well in reality. I guess it's idealism versus pragmatism. Maybe the Swedes are idealists, and the Swiss are pragmatists. I prefer Switzerland as a model nation myself.
Switzerland, in contrast, is on the way to the Rhine, Rhone, Po, and Danube river valleys.
You seem to have a strange sense of topography. Those rivers start in the Alps, and the only roads to their valleys that involve Switzerland are from Switzerland. Before the blasting of roads through the mountains, Switzerland just stood in the way of getting from one place outside of Switzerland to another on the other side of it. HItler never invaded the joint because it would have achieved nothing in geographical terms. It wouldn't have given him access to anything he didn't already have access to.
From Target Switzerland-
"As Winston Churchill recalled, "of all the neutrals Switzerland has the greatest right distinction... She has been a Democratic State, standing for freedom in self-defense among her mountains, and in thought, in spite of race, largely on our side.""
Aren't they the same country?
I LOOOOOOVE the iSteve commentariat. Only place you can "learn" that whether a country fights for another country or not, and whether a country is invaded by another country or not, are negligible historical footnotes.
You guys are awesome.
Quite frankly, this kind of sophistry is much more typical of a Marginal Revolution comment thread - I expect a little more historical literacy from an iSteve thread (though it seems to be due mostly to a single Anonymous commenter).
Switzerland in WWII.
On a personal note about Sweden vs Switzerland in WWII. My dad was a navigator in a B-17 that got shot down but managed to make it to Sweden. As a "prisoner" in Sweden he was interned in the extra bedroom of a wealthy Swedish family. During his time as a POW he drank, chased women and learned to sail. This made the summer of 1944 the best time of his life. Ironically, he was able to get out of the army early because he had been a POW just like the guys in Bataan. A friend of his who was a bombardier got shot down in Switzerland. He was interned in a miserable prison camp in which he was frequently mistreated (although probably not as much as in a German prison camp) and was not released until the end of the war.
England was further away and had a formidable air force you idiot, with Switzerland being next door they would have been able to carry out round the clock bombing raids with short turnaround times.
... and how did that strategy work out in afghanistan?.
Closer bases?? Germany did have bases next door when they got france. anyway the point remains.. you can't bomb a mountain country into submission. Its been tried with bigger bombs and faster planes than the germans had.. the russians tried it and we tried it in afghanistan. and again, what would be the point? eventually the germans would have to move in.. for what, exactly? But we know at what cost- it would have been very very high. As another poster pointed out, belgium might not have been an aggressor, but it was 'in the way' during WWI (and II) and thus, the germans attacked, but switzerland unless YOU WANT switzerland, has no strategic value...
no one has mentioned that the Swedes let the germans through their country when they attacked Norway??
I don't think swedish women are that hot.. kinda overrated. but swiss women... I was there (in the french speaking part) didn't see any...
The Rus were Swedes. Biggest empire the world has known.
That doesn't count because
a) it was a thousand years ago and the statute of limitations does expire
b) all the imperialists left Sweden and the good Swedes stayed behind
c) the people conquered by the Rus were not real dark-skinned
The Swiss did send foreign Jews who took refuge to Germany to be killed in Concentration camps. The policy was not centralized, varied, and could sometimes be avoided with a hefty bribe (and sometimes the Swiss just took the bribe and deported them to death anyway). These mind you were generally High IQ, German speaking Jews.
However Hitler was right next door, he invaded Norway which had no real strategic importance. Switzerland had factories, skilled workers, and transit to troops in Italy and the Med all worth something. The Swiss model of armed neutrality failed under Hitler's mass military. Later under US/Soviet nukes. Still the Swiss keep it up. If it won't beat Hitler or Stalin, it can beat other things.
Yes, I did a business deal with an old WWII B-17 crewman. They got shot up over Germany and limped the plane to Sweden and bailed out. They were interned for the war in a Swedish resort, and got all their hardship pay as POWs. After the war, as an official POW, the U.S. government put him up for a year in a hotel on the beach in Santa Monica.
He didn't have any complaints.
Sweden stopped going to war after Peter the Great defeated their imperial ambitions during the Second Great Northern War.
Oh, and if Switzerland had been where Belgium is it probably wouldn't have avoided war. It was just lucky. On the map of Europe someone has to be.
It's hard to get more lucky on the map than the US, yet we find a way to get entangled in every war fought any place on the globe. So let's not deny the Swiss their particular genius for avoiding war.
To maintain internal peace, the Swiss devolved domestic government down to the cantonal level, which are overwhelmingly monocultural.
That appears to contradict Neocon principle No. 1: the only way to avoid civil war is the centralization of power.
The job of the people running Sweden and Switzerland during WWII was to do the best thing for their country, not to satisfy the desire of whiny American internet nerds in 2011 to fight Hitler to the last drop of someone else's blood.
"Anybody who blames the 'Joos' for the liberal sickness of Western Civilization should look at Sweden (or Minnesota) for that matter."
You have a point, but Nordic folks in Europe and America get much of their news and info of the world from liberal Jewish sources.
It is true that there is a tradition of sober do-goodism in Protestantism, but the cult of white guilt is something that was given extra push b the JEws.
"Anonymous said...
Anybody who blames the 'Joos' for the liberal sickness of Western Civilization should look at Sweden (or Minnesota) for that matter.
These characters are the ultimate SWPL types and not a Jew in sight."
Yes, I'm sure that Minnesota's junior Senator, Al Franken, would agree with you.
Nobel Sucks said:
Suppose Nobel had never created that prize. What would have been Sweden's standing in the world? Okay, Abba(some of whose songs I like). But what else? Okay, Ingmar Bergman, great director,and Jan Troell too, but what else? Not much else.
Sweden has 29 Nobel winners. True, half of them seem to be the case of Swedes awarding Swedes but even half is still pretty damn impressive. Guys like Tiselius, Arrhenius, Svedberg and von Euler totally deserved it.
"And while Sweden was an ethnically homogeneous society in the 1940s, Switzerland has four national languages."
This seems like a PC comment to me. Basically, these are four white Anglo/Saxon/Celtic languages.
If the four languages were English, Ebonics, Mexican, and Chinese like here in the U.S. then it would be surprising.
Anonymous 11/1/11 9:39 PM:
This seems like a PC comment to me. Basically, these are four white Anglo/Saxon/Celtic languages.
It's one Germanic language and three Italic ones, and you don't seem to be familiar with the case of the Flemish and Walloons. It could have been otherwise.
...there has been a general trend toward Swedishness, which reduces both international warfare, hunting, militarism, guns, isolation, cosmopolitanism, spanking children, and so forth and so on.
The antlered population of Sweden might take exception to the claim that the Swedes have reduced hunting.
As for guns, I don't know about Sweden, but neighboring Denmark and Finland treat gun ownership more liberally not only than most of Europe, but in some areas, e.g. automatic rifles, than the United States. And border inspection between these countries is less than that between Arizona and California.
It's easier to get a machine gun in Scandinavia than in America, and it's easier to get an abortion in America than in Scandinavia.
the swiss are better bankers than even the jewish bankers, and better at deterring hostile neighbors than israel, by forcing every single man to own and use a rifle. so there's that.
a swiss guy stayed at my place for 2 weeks last year, chatted with him in english and german while he was around. he said he did not like being in the army while he was in it, nor did he like having that SIG 550 in his apartment. but it is what it is. that's what you do if you're swiss. also, in switzerland now, you can give back the rifle after a couple years. you don't have to keep it forever.
Der Schweiz is culturally Teutonic--a Protestant mirror image of Bavaria/Austria with a scenic French quarter--and it's misleading on your part to characterize it as a multilingual Sailer Strategy success story. The isolationist posture is the legacy of political stalemate during the Thirty Years' War, and also due to the fact that they're rich. It isn't because they're secretly studying Sam Francis or Buchanan. Go there (nice country btw, esp. Bern & Lausanne) you'll find many people in line with the European ideological norm.
p.s. as everybody above already said: they were basically pro-Nazi during the war. Just like Sweden!
you saw this about switzerland?:
Good Fences: The Importance of Setting Boundaries for Peaceful Coexistence [pdf]
@anonymous - "Oh, and Vichy France didn't deport French Jews...."
well, they couldn't just deport all those dairy farmers. (saw it in a movie, so it must be true.) what would've become of the french cheese industry?!
(~_^)
Larry,
Great story. From what I know about the Swiss your Dad's friend's experience is not surprising. Not because of Swiss sympathies for the Reich but because Swiss tend to be dicks to foreigners in general.
Lots of fun going on here.
1. First, we should note that Swedes do pretty well in the US too. Better than in Sweden, even, on most measures. (Even David Brooks noticed in a column last year, if I recall correctly).
2. Re: Swedish and Swiss neutrality. Both Sweden and Switzerland were neutral, but German-leaning*, for rather obvious reasons. Having the Wehrmacht to the north, west, south and east of you will tend to push people in that direction.
*until roughly 1943, after that there was a drift towards the Allies, for similarly obvious reasons.
Having read through original Swedish press accounts of the war though, regarding the holocaust, etc. it´s pretty clear that Sweden was still at the core a mostly free country with liberal sensibilities.
3.) Re: Whiskey, Norway having no strategic value? Perhaps if one considers about one-third to one half of Germany´s high-grade iron ore supply to be of "no value". Hitler and Churchill both digressed from your opinion, however. Hell, even the *British* were keen on occupying northern Norway for that same reason.
4.) Re: Malmö, it is overall a pretty nice place with a substantial low-grade ghetto (I.e. Rosengård). Just as in the US, if you stay away from the bad part of town, you won´t really notice much unless you look for it.
5.) Sweden´s last war was not the Great northern war, but the Napoleonic wars, that were even more transformative for Sweden, in that Finland (Swedish for 900+ years) was lost and Norway was conquered.
6.) Swedes used to be pious protestants, these days they are pious liberals. Although the really old-time religion during the 20:th century used to be Socialism and Communism in various incarnations.
These days, they have migrated towards a more Americanized world view, and have traded in their Mao, Pol-Pot, et al, for Michael Moore, Zinn, Obama, Chomsky et al. Sweden is americanized to a rather ridiculous degree.
/A Swede
However Hitler was right next door, he invaded Norway which had no real strategic importance.
Norway was THE opening gambit of the war. 1940 war reports, which I actually read in the old newspaper collections, were all Narvik, Narvik, friggin Narvik. (Why? ask wikipedia.)
Norway kept its importance after Russia entered the war. Because it has geopolitical importance. If reading a whole book is too much before having an opinion, you may again start with wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_convoys_of_World_War_II)
or actually looking at a map.
"And while Sweden was an ethnically homogeneous society in the 1940s, Switzerland has four national languages."
"This seems like a PC comment to me. Basically, these are four white Anglo/Saxon/Celtic languages."
From Wiki:
German (63.7 %),
French (20.4 %),
Italian (6.5 %),
Romansh (0.5 %)
Switzerland is really Franco-German or German-Franco. Notice that a whopping 64% of its people speak German. Italian-speakers are only 6.5% of the population(and maybe they are of northern Italian stock, which means they are industrious than the lazy kind in the South).
Maybe its many mountains made it possible for different groups to live in their own little world. Also, maybe Switzerland is, in some ways, like a small America. America was created by Europeans who wanted out from their original nations. Maybe Switzerland welcomed Germans who were persecuted in Germany, French who were persecuted in France, Italians who were persecuted in Italy, and etc. So, even though German-Swiss, French-Swiss, and Italian-Swiss didn't see eye tot eye on many things, they shared the exiled narrative.
Well done, sir:
The job of the people running Sweden and Switzerland during WWII was to do the best thing for their country, not to satisfy the desire of whiny American internet nerds in 2011 to fight Hitler to the last drop of someone else's blood.
After the war, as an official POW, the U.S. government put him up for a year in a hotel on the beach in Santa Monica.
Steve, that reminds me there was a german pow camp near santa barbara.. they fed them the cheap local food - you now - oranges fruits and such- one german solider who was captured during (i think) the bulge, was pulled out of the coldest winter in european history, and whisked to california.. to be fed what were luxury foods. guess what he did when he got released?? Got a visa and moved to Santa Barbara.
Anybody who blames the 'Joos' for the liberal sickness of Western Civilization should look at Sweden (or Minnesota) for that matter.
guess who the biggest single media owner is in Sweden. The Bonnier Family. Zioniist. Funny how that always happens.
blaimng exclusively - is dumb, but the open borders policies are almost always pushed through by groups like the ADL.
in the UK look at the lord leven scandal - he said to blair, in so many words , don't worry about $ or voters, just do two things: a. attack iraq b. open borders.
I had always assumed that a large part of the reason for historic Swiss neutrality was BECAUSE of their different language/ethnic groups. It would have been difficult for the Swiss to have supported one of Europe's big power-players, such as France, Italy, or Germany, without creating domestic tensions.
Compare the neutrality of Switzerland wrt Germany in WW2 with the US neutrality before we got into the war--there is no comparrison. Switzerland continued to do business with and make some compromises with both sides, in an attempt to keep their independence despite being surrounded by a much more powerful country.
By comparison, we remained neutral on paper while actively supporting the British Empire and actively opposing the Japanese until the Japanese bombed us and we declared war. We then allied with Stalin in order to beat Hitler. I am no historian, but I don't see how we could possibly be in a position to criticize Switzerland for its behavior in WW2, either in terms of remaining neutral or in terms of compromising with evil in order to keep your own country intact and your own people safe.
Way too much of our image of WW2 is built on the brilliantly artistic propaganda made before, during, and after the war by Hollywood. Reality is much, much messier and grayer. As a starting point on that (remembering the claims of Swiss deportation of foreign Jews to near-certain death in Germany), it's worth remembering Operation Keelhaul, where we forcibly deported huge numbers of Soviet refugees back to the USSR, and thus to near certain death or imprisonment in the GULAG system. Or our earlier refusal to accept Jewish refugees from Europe, which left Hitler with more available victims for his murder factories.
Ah, but that stuff doesn't appear in US propaganda movies glorifying the "greatest generation" and the "good war."
In Heller's Catch-22, one of the American airmen (Orr) makes it to Sweden and the novel ends with Yossarian trying to emulate his achievement (from the Italian Med). It really seemed the place to be in the eyes of the US Army Air Force in Europe.
Regarding the post-war influence of Scandanavian politicians let us not forget:
Trygve Lie, Norwegian, 1st UN Secretary-General
Dag Hammarskjöld, Swede, 2nd UN Secretary-General
Interesting to see that despite the Vidkun Quisling pro-Nazi regime in Norway during the war, a Norwegian got the top job in the new world order. Some other countries at the end of the war which had professed neutrality during it, such as Argentina, found joining the UNO initially quite difficult because of their questionable stance regarding the Axis. Yet an actual allied state had one of its own head the UNO.
Jews have often asked 'Is it good for the Jews?' Pinker's book could be called 'It is good for the Jews.' Though Pinker discusses the whole of human history, it is essentially to justify and uphold the current order as the best of all possible worlds. Why? Jews have it so good. Though Pinker is politically liberal, his argument is 'conservative'; so, what is he trying to conserve? The current Jewish-controlled NWO.
Had such a book come out in the 60s--when wasp-Americans still held much power--from a conservative white gentile author, most Jews would have condemned and mocked it. But notice how Jewish book critics are praising Pinker's book from coast to coast? Why? Because fellow Jews pick up on the signal of what the book is REALLY ABOUT--'It is good for the Jews'.
A book like this by a white conservative author in the 60s--or earlier--would have defacto served to defend the white-dominated order, with all of history leading to the glorious peace and harmony secured through Western domination. Such a narrative would not have been acceptable to most Jews. Jews are accepting Pinker's narrative now only because they now know that they are the rulers of the NWO. They wanna defend what they own. Like TREE OF LIFE, Pinker's interest in BIG THINGS is just a ruse and/or justification for the validation of particular beings in the present. Though Pinker professes to disdain religion, his book is very much in the Biblical tradition. In the Genesis, God promises the Jews that they will be a great people and come to inherit the world. Pinker's book essentially says this promise has come to be. Jews have been blessed with the ownership of the world; all of history led to this great moment. He doesn't say it blatantly, and it's possible that he sincerely/consciously believes all the stuff he's saying. But probe deep into his heart, and his book is a work of Jewish triumphalism. Indeed, notice his selective use of facts and data.
Similarly, Pinker was all for 60s upheaval when it was happening. It loosened the power of the white majority, conservatives, Christians, the older generation, and etc. That was all cool and groovy. But now that his kind control and own America--are on top--, he wishes people would be 're-civilized', which means to be 'socially engineered' according to political correctness. So, when 60s revolution undermined white power, Pinker endorsed it. But now that he wants to secure Jewish power, he wishes the mobs would behave better. Spit at the powerful white goy but smile at the powerful Jew. It's all so shifty. When the white goy was the prison warden, Pinker was for the prison riot. Now that the Jew is the prison warden, Pinker wants the prisoners to behave. Also, Pinker wants the people to believe that the greatness of the new order is due to political correctness of 'equality', 'humanitarianism', 'gay rights', 'minority rights', etc. But again, are Jews really for those things cuz they prize them OR because, for the time being, those things are 'good for Jews'? Notice how Jews play a two-faced game with Muslims. They support US military bashing Muslims in the Middle East and forcing Western values and systems on those Muzzie barbarians, but in the US Jews support Muslims as people and culture who must be protected from evil white Christians. Pinker is too smart and too devious to really believe all the horseshit he's peddling. In its own way, Pinker's book is to Judeocentrism what Buchanan's nutty book CHURCHILL, HITLER, AND UNNECESSARY WAR is to Germanocentrism. There's no way Pinker would have written this book if US today was dominated by white conservatives or if Chinese dominated the global system. Such a book at this--'this is the best of times'--has a way of justifying the status quo. The status quo is now something that Jews--Pinker and many of the book critics--like because they control it.
Pinker's argument that 'this is the best of times' is hardly original. Westerners have believed in progress--and the world getting better and better--since the Enlightenment. And even before that, there was a sense of change and progress with the discovery of new worlds and new riches and new knowledge. And there was a sense of things getting better in the 19th century too, though rapid changes did inspire apocalyptic rhetoric from the likes of Marx, Nietzsche, and the Romantics. It was really WWI and then WWII that shook the idea of progress and things getting better. And then there hung the cloud of possible nuclear holocaust. Even so, there were experts who throughout the 50s and 60s said the world is getting better and better, what with the postwar boom. Even communist nations experienced their own booms in the 60s. And I remember reading several articles in the 90s by historians and anthropologists who argued that, taken as a whole, the modern era was less violent than the earlier periods of man. So, there is nothing original about Pinker's argument. His litany as to why the world became a more peaceful place is also chockful of timeworn cliches: rise of government, rule of law, change in attitudes, and etc. Absolutely nothing new here. So, why are book critics pretending as though Pinker's book is the FIRST AND/OR THE MOST IMPORTANT on this subject? Because Pinker links his thesis to political correctness. He is saying the world is safer and nicer today than ever because of PC, and we need more PC to make sure there is more peace and justice.
People need to remind themselves... the very things that led to more peace can lead to more violence. Things that once led to A can later lead to B.
Roads once took Romans to conquer and control other territories. Later those roads were used by non-Romans to sack Rome.
Free trade which did so much to build the wealth of the British Empire later did much to hurt the British economy. We are now seeing the same with the US. When US had more to sell to the world, free trade was good for America. With the rise of China, the very thing that led to the trimph of America may lead to its tragedy.
Christian morality was at one time good for Western power. White Christians used Christianity as justification to conquer other peoples in the name of 'bringing them to Christ and salvation'. But Christian morality is now harmful to the West, instilling white people with guilt for all the sins they've committed against non-whites.
Meriotocracy once led to greater equality. It made it possible for smart poor people to rise in the world through business and academic success; no longer was privilege solely in the hands of the aristocracy with their blood lineage. But over time, meritocracy created a new elite of super-intelligent elites--many of them Jewish--over everyone else. And the underclass today is really one of superdummies.
"Switzerland does not HAVE an army. Switzerland IS an army." ..that is to say... DON'T POKE the F-ing bear.
If we broaden the definition of 'violence', it could be there's less physical violence among modern people because of the effective uses of psychic and emotional violence. After all, not all violence is physical. Violence can be emotional, which is why some people call for 'hate speech' laws and laws prohibiting words or gestures that sexually harass women.
Political Correctness is a form of violence. It unites a community by singling out and targeting 'the hateful'. So, if a person working in the NY media opposes 'gay marriage', he or she is vilified and shunned by others. He or she may not be physically attacked, but he or she is made to feel 'evil'. Under pressure of such emotional violence of PC, he or she may come around to conforming with the prevailing dogma. Same happens in Evangelical communities if one were to support abortion or Darwinism. Even if the heathen is not attacked or burnt at the stake, he or she is made to feel wicked and satanic.
But it is PC that has, via the use of modern psycho-political techniques, perfected the art of emotional violence. Of course, PC justifies itself in the name of 'justice', 'equality', 'diversity', and 'tolerance', but it would not be effective without its use of emotional violence against those who aren't with the program. PC doesn't simply say, 'be more tolerant to gays'; it says, 'if you're not with the gay agenda, you are less than human and have no place in respectable society!!' And so many people have been browbeaten into going along. Since people don't like to admit they're cowards who follow like sheep, they try to suppress their shame by becoming even more pro-gay than gays. Also, the term 'racism' is emotionally the most violent term in America. It is used to attack, smear, defame, and ruin careers. While some 'racists' are indeed bigots and lunatics, the term also applies to anyone who dares to speak the truth about racial realities. It's gotten to a point where people with 'racist' ideas cannot get good jobs or obtain high positions. Most Americans are deathly afraid of being labeled a 'racist'. This is not just a moral issue. It is an emotionally violent one. Calling someone a 'racist' is akin to socio-emotional lynching, the modern witchhunt. A person who is accused of 'racism' may not be physically attacked but he could well be economically, professionally, and socially ruined. ADL and SPLC are, in this sense, forces of violence in America.
Terms like 'racist', 'sexist', and 'xenophobic' aren't merely used to describe or argue a certain moral or social point but to attack and destroy enemies or rivals. They are emotional weapons. Just as the n-word was used to put blacks in their place, terms like 'racist' are used to put everyone who dares to speak the truth on race 'in their place'. A black guy who's been called a n-word may not have been physically attacked, but emotionally he was violated. Similarly, a person who is called a 'racist' is emotionally destroyed in society. Now, this isn't to say some people accused of 'racism' aren't bigots. Some indeed are. The point is terms like 'racism' isn't merely used to condemn the real bigots but anyone who refuses to toe the PC line on racial realities.
One may argue that psychic or emotional violence is still preferable to physical violence. If PC, via emotional violence, forces people to tolerate one another more, it's worth the price. But if the stark truths are suppressed and forbidden, will they go away? If we pretend that massive third world immigration to Europe is wonderful and good(because PC condemns via emotional violence any dissenting view as 'xenophobic'), will reality truly be wonderful and good in the future? Or, will suppression of truths by PC in the name of social peace pave the way for much worse violence when Europe is filled with low-IQ and ultra-violent louts from Africa and Muslim nations? If you force a person to keep eating but not allow him to shit, how long can he hold out before he has the biggest shit of all time?
Uses of emotional violence by PC are far more formidable today with all of America(and much of the West)connected and integrated by media, government, public education, pop culture, and etc that have instant access to and influence on just about every community.
All of America can instantly be conditioned to HATE, TARGET, AND VILIFY a certain figure or idea.
Look at what happened to Tracy Morgan over his gay remark. The PC lynching was done in the name of tolerance, but it sent a loud and clear message that certain expressions will not be tolerated and careers will be destroyed.
This kind of social/emotional control and violence is nothing new. There was a lot of it in Christian Europe, and it helped to reduce physical violence. The fear of emotional or social shunning pressured many people to conform, making for a physically more peaceful society. But crucial to the order was the use of emotional violence.
Emotional violence can also be made to turn against the self, a form of control-mechanism. Suppose a person wants to hit someone or rape someone, but the ideas/values/images planted in his head make him loathe himself for having such thoughts or desires. He feels emotionally violent against himself.
Anti-racists sometimes realize that they have 'racist' feelings, and they seek to purge themselves of such evil thoughts. Thus, turning violently against oneself--emotionally but sometimes even physically as in the case of Christian or Muslim self-flagellation--, one prevents oneself from turning violent against others.
So, other-violence is reduced by increasing self-violence. A white person may be less violent today toward non-whites, but this is partly because he is more self-violent in emotional terms. If he gets angry at a non-white person and finds himself wanting to use racial epithets, something inside him kicks in and makes him attack his own 'racist' self. By violently hating and fighting his own 'racist' demons, he hopes to be more peaceful with people who are different from him.
Indeed, Jewish PC policy seems to imply that for white folks to be nicer to non-whites, they must be more self-critical, self-hateful, and self-violent.
There was something like this, albeit in a more nakedly clinical way, in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE. Alex is made less violent toward others but not because his soul is cleansed of violence. Instead, the violence is made to direct inward. If he feels violent feeings toward others, his body/emotions violently attack the self. The violence is still there but boomeranged back to Alex.
There seems to be something similar in the double-meaning of Jihad. There is jihad as meaning other(directed)-violence, or Muslim violence against the wicked infidel.
But there is also jihad in the sense of a devout Muslim confronting and battling his own inner demons.
One form of jihad is physical and outward, the other is emotional and inward. But both are violent and can achieve peace by vanquishing or purging the enemy.
"I remember when Euro-liberals were crowing over the fact that some African immigrant was voted to the Swiss Federal Assembly a few years ago."
This in and of itself is not bad. If there are some Africans in Europe and they wanna get along and be good citizens, nothing wrong with that. But if such things gives the impression that 'because these blacks are okay, it means we should welcome MORE blacks from Africa', that is nuts.
Whiskey is incorrect - Norway was strategically vital to Germany. The Norwegian port of Narvik was the transit point for Swedish iron ore when the Baltic was frozen. The British were well aware of this and planned to seize Norway but Hitler moved first. As for Switzerland, their WW II policy was prudential rather than foolishly heroic and more power to them!
I remember some phrase along the lines of: "Swedes work hard all week for the German war machine and pray for Allied victory on Sundays."
"And let's not forget Israel was chummy with South AFrica, and vice versa"
Given that the worst crime of Apartheid-era South Africa was that it was "undemocratic" on a continent that's become a byword for failed experiments in democracy, I'm going to say that "chumminess" with South Africa is hardly on par with collaborating with communists (or Nazis, for that matter).
Peter A - I give Swiss some credit for neutrality because unlike the Swedes or Vichy French, the Swiss for the most part didn't actually like the Nazis. How many Swiss volunteers fought on the Axis side?
German speaking Swiss certainly fought for the Germans.
Swedes were in the Waffen SS - Viking Division.
If the Luftwaffe had worked the countryside for a few weeks, there wouldn't even have been a need to invade with ground forces.
Britain was heavily bombed between lets say mid 1940 and mid 1941. There seems little doubt that ground resistance would have been greater in 1941 than in 1940 or 1939.
The Swiss model of armed neutrality failed under Hitler's mass military.
Priceless!
no one has mentioned that the Swedes let the germans through their country when they attacked Norway??
That I don't recall, but Sweden did allow German troops to cross Sweden on their way to the Russian Front. Sweden also supplied chromium to Germany until the last possible moment-in March 1945, the same month the Allies forced Juan Peron to declare war on the Axis. Also google for information on Sweden's eugenics program that continued until 1975.
Sweden wasn't so liberal before 1945:
http://conswede.blogspot.com/2008/07/social-paradigms-shift-eg-our-view-on.html
To illustrate what I talk about. Louis Armstrong visited Sweden in 1933. In all the news papers he was describe as something monkey-like let loose from the jungle. All across the line! And in the reviews by the most serious music critics.
Who would have imagined in 1933, that twelve years later Western Europe would undergo an America-led cultural revolution which would lead to the common belief that there are no differences between races?
Translation of two of the quotes:
Knut Bäck in Göteborgs-Posten, November 1933:
"This world is strange... No protests are raised against how the jungle is let loose into the society. Armstrong and his band are allowed to freely wreak destruction."
Sten Broman in Sydsvenskan, November 1933:
"Dare I say that he at times had something monkey-like about him and sometimes reminded of, according to our perceptions, a mentally disturbed person, when he pouted with his mouth or gaped it to its widest open and roared like a hoarse animal from a primeval forest."
The third quote compares the concert with a natural disaster, and Armstrong's trumpet with a hell machine. The only good thing coming out of it, he says, is that it solves to old dispute of whether monkeys have a language.
This is what Europe looked like, up until 1945. And since some people will live under the misconception that this was a phenomenon of the '30s, I here provide a quote from the Swedish Encyclopedia, Nordisk Familjebok, the 1876-1899 edition (here and here).
"Psychologically the negro can be said be on the level of a child, with vivid fantasy, lack of endurance, ... can be said to lack morality rather than being immoral ... etc."
It was iron ore, not chromium:
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/assets1.html
The U.S. military particularly deplored Sweden's continued critically important exports of iron ore and ball-bearings to Germany and its tolerance for the transit of German soldiers and war materials across Sweden and through the Baltic under Swedish naval protection. During the last half of 1943 and the early months of 1944, the United States sought to cripple Germany's ability to continue the War by carrying out a concentrated and costly bombing campaign against ball-bearing production in Germany combined with trade negotiations, including preclusive purchasing arrangements, intended to cut off Swedish ball-bearings to Germany.
Did Pinker touch upon humor and popular dance/music? Both humor and popular dance/music seem to be double-edged swords. Violent ruffians often laugh at their victims. Violence can be a kind of fun orgy, and plenty of thug rappers mix humor with brutality.
And popular music, especially with rise of rock n roll, unleashed wild youthful eneriges that sometimes led to violence.
But humor can also have a pacifying effect. Suppose a Jew-hater sees a Jew as a 'Christ-killer' and 'leech' and wants to hit him. But suppose he becomes a fan of a Jewish comic who says the funniest things. Though hating the Jew, he also finds him drawing pleasure from the Jew. Eventually, he may rather prefer hugging the Jew than beating the Jew. Humor is pleasure, and the Jew who doles out humor is appreciated by people who are grateful for the jokes.
The Jew may initially have made fun of himself---playing the clown--before the goyim because if he poked fun at goyim, the goyim might get pissed off and hit the Jew. But as goyim began to crack up at the Jew, the Jew gradually poked fun at goyim, and then the goyim began to laugh at other goyim and even at themselves. Take DUCK SOUP where Chico and Harpo drive goyim nuts. But instead of identifying and siding with the goyim against the Marx Brothers, we find ourselves laughing with the Jewish comics at the expense of the goyim(who really represent us dummies). Thus, our sense of 'us vs them' is weakened. We come to love the Jew, even when he's poking fun at us.
The spread of humor via modern media-and-democracy also had the effect of making people less obedient of their leaders. People began to see rulers and elites less as almighty and more as ridiculous pompous fools. If democratic freedom had been allowed in Nazi Germany, comedians would have poked fun at Hitler, and many Germans would have come to regard Hitler as a clown--which is why THE GREAT DICTATOR was banned in Germany.
Though Hitler did use humor to attack his enemies and make Germans laugh, the rule was NO ONE could make jokes about him or laugh at him. Hitler Youth were raised to worship him. Such lack of humor led to the humorless killing machine of the SS. It could be that Gaddafi lost support amongst his people because in his old age, he looked more and more laughable in his silly costumes. People began to laugh at the clown and could no longer take him seriously as a 'great man'.
Indeed, tyrants fear humor, parody, lampoon, and satire. Humor has a way of loosening the authority and respect of the rulers and elites who can be ridiculed and laughed at.
Of course, humor is also used as a political weapon, but while humor may undermine reputations, it doesn't kill people. Individuals like Rush Limbaugh and Jon Stewart became powerful thru their use of humor. It wasn't so much that they said intelligent or truthful things but that they made their side laugh at the other side.
Liberals understand this. It's possible that the most powerful political force in America is late night talk shows. Though not explictly political, talkshow hosts read lines prepared by mostly liberal Jewish comedy writers. The audience is generally made to laugh at the opponents of liberals, and so the people come to regard conservatives as idiots, fools, morons, etc. Don't poke fun at gays or gay parades--no matter how ridiculous they are--but poke endless fun at the Christian Right and people opposed to the gay agenda as repressed, stupid, superstitious, bigoted clowns. When gays initially said Teletubbies is a gay-friendly show, no one made jokes about it. But when Jerry Falwell picked up on that story and made the same remark, he was roundly ridiculed by liberal comedy writers as 'paranoid'.
So, there are tons of jokes about people who oppose 'gay marriage' on late night TV shows. Thus, millions of viewers come to think: 'opposing gay marriage is unhip, square, stupid, hateful, ridiculous, and something to laugh at'. In 2008, comedy writers almost never touched Obama. In fact, his treatment by the media was humorless and highfalutin. Similarly, there is a rule that forbids any jokes about MLK. We can joke about Jesus and God but not about MLK. Crack a joke about MLK and you're blacklisted from the comedy circuit. Sarah Silverman pretended to make fun of MLK but she didn't really push the buttons that mattered: his womanizing and physical violence to prostitutes, his academic fraud, his dirty political tricks and lies.
And generally, jokes about Muhammad are forbidden cuz Muslims might go nuts. As we saw with the Muhammad cartoons in Europe, humor can trigger violence. But, if the Muslim world eventually came to appreciate greater humor and could even laugh at Muhammad, they would be less violent with their religion.
Popular dance/music also has a way of bringing people togther. Before the white race and black race intermingled socially, their music went back and forth. Even during the era of slavery, whites sometimes enjoyed black music and black music drew from white music. Whites began to feel and act more black through stuff like Jazz and rock n roll before they integrated with blacks. Music goes beyond blood and soil. Even though Nazis made claims of 'Aryan music', German music was appreciated and loved all over. And even during the time of slavery, whites could hear music from black quarters, and vice versa. Even if blacks were not allowed into white areas, music traveled freely through air.
Even white southerners came to love Elvis Presley, and as such, they became indirectly linked to black culture even as they rejected integration. But over time, musical culture also affected one's identity. If one loved the blues, wasn't one soulfully kinda black? And as Jazz borrowed elements from classical music and stuff, it gained the cachet of sophistication, which meant serious musical intellectuals also took Jazz more seriously. It had a way of dissolving the barriers not only between black and white but between high and low.
And with so many famous Jewish musicians--pianists and violinists especially--, Jews became integral to the preservation of classical music, the soul of the West.
Swedes were in the Waffen SS - Viking Division.
THere were Indian and Punjabi SS regiments as well. Diversity!
All the countries of western Europe could have been safe from Nazi attack as Switzerland was. The fact that no conflict was sought with this country by Germany shows that Hitler didn't seek any conflict with western Europe. It was only because Britain declared war on Germany following Chamberlains' imbecelic and moronic pledge to autocratic military-junta ruled Poland that it happened. Denmark and Norway were invaded only because of war with Britain and France (Churchill's violation Of Norwegian neutrality didn't help either). Likewise the low countries and France were occupied only because of the war declaration. Greece was only occupied becuase that buffoon Mussolini had to be bailed out. Had the western Europeans (meaning the British and to a less extent, the French), like the Swiss, just looked after their own affairs and not tried to be the European continents' "police officers" none of them would have been invaded. "WW2" in Europe would have been an exclusive German-Soviet war. The British and the French, could have watched the show on the sidelines and subsequently taken whatever measures (if any) they thought was needed. As Switzerland shows, there is a lot to be said for being a free agent in international affairs.
Sweden wasn't so liberal before 1945:
http://conswede.blogspot.com/2008/07/social-paradigms-shift-eg-our-view-on.html
To illustrate what I talk about. Louis Armstrong visited Sweden in 1933. In all the news papers he was describe as something monkey-like let loose from the jungle. All across the line! And in the reviews by the most serious music critics.
I've got news for you - that was liberalism before 1945, all over the world. Why do you think liberals were so big into eugenics? (Another fact flushed down the memory hole)
quick and dirty comparison.
sweden 9.4 million people
switzerland 7.8 million people
sweden $50,200 nominal per capita GDP
switzerland $68,700 nominal per capita GDP
second highest per capita GDP in the world, excluding a few tiny nations with less than 1 million citizens. only norway and it's oil bounty are rolling in more money.
you know i think i'm going to do a brief investigation into east germany, and look at just how far behind that place was by 1989 and how dramatically it has been brought forward in 20 years after reunification. on wikipedia it says per capita GDP was estimated at $9800 in 1984. adjusting for inflation that's about $20,200. by 2010, germany had brought that all the way up to $40,600.
that's a $30,800 increase in 20 years in real dollars and a $20,400 increase in adjusted dollars. has any nation in the world had such a huge effect in such a short time? and what would the prospects be for north korea in a korean unification?
"The Swiss new full well that they wouldn't stand a chance against the SS divisions."
Every Swiss mountain pass would have been a little Thermopylae for the Germans.
With respect to the anonymous troll's comments about Switzerland:
1) The Luftwaffe bombed Stalingrad to rubble. Literally. How did that work out?
2) Switzerland's dealings with Nazi Germany didn't stop Hitler from wanting to invade the country. He was not a fan of the country, calling it "a pimple on the face of Europe". He had his military staff draw up plans to invade Switzerland, but after he got enmeshed in a war of extermination with Russia, invading Switzerland was no longer in the cards.
"THere were Indian and Punjabi SS regiments as well. Diversity!"
And Bosnian Muslim ones too, along with French, Swedish, and others. In fact, one of the fiercest units in the Battle of Berlin was a French SS unit.
I will have to ask my co-ethnics in Hollywood to highlight the diversity of the SS in their next WWII movie.
With every increase in FREEDOM, there needs to be an increase in RESPONSIBILITY or SUPERVISION.
It's like parents tell their kids, 'more freedom means more accountability'. Children have less freedom, but when they mess up and get in trouble, adults take the responsibility(or at least decent parents do). We believe that kids, being simple-minded and 'innocent', cannot be held fully responsible for things they do. So, as kids grow up, they are offered the promise of more freedom but also acculturated to be more 'adult' and take responsibility for their own actions.
Ideally, as kids learn to how to drive a car and learn about sex, they are also taught to be responsible with their actions cuz being wild and crazy with cars and sex can lead to problems.
Traditionally, that was the meaning of American freedom. The notion that freedom has to be earned; that young people had to be civilized and raised to be adults and act grown-up.
Thus, American adults are free individuals with the knowledge that freedom doesn't mean acting like ANYWAY THEY PLEASE or like louts and animals; it also means if they abuse their freedom and get in trouble, they have to take responsibility.
So, to earn freedom, one has to learn how to handle one's freedom.
If there's increase in freedom without concomitant increase in responsibility, freedom becomes dangerous and crazy. It's becomes 'anarchic', the freedom of beasts, louts, and thugs. Listen to rap music, and it's like listening to adult-sized babies throwing tantrums whose message is 'I WANNA DO WHATEVER BUT I BLAME YOU FOR WHATEVER GOES WRONG'. It's an infantile attitude on freedom.
When there's an increase in freedom without the culture of responsibility to accompany it, society needs to increase SUPERVISION.
In a community of responsible free adults, a storeowner can trust his customers. Most of them will not steal even if they can cuz they have values(and would feel inner shame if they did steal).
But in a community of infantile free adults, a storeowner must regard all his customers as potential thieves who will steal if given half the chance. Thus, the store needs surveillance cameras, alarms, steel gates, security guard, etc.
The problem with the black community is it's filled with infantile adults with freedom but no sense of accountability--and since the adults are infantile, their kids don't grow up to be any better. If they don't steal in certain stores, it's not because they have a sense of shame and morality but because they fear getting caught and going to jail.(Understanding of right and wrong may not be enough. Even if a person knows stealing if wrong, he may do so if he hasn't been conditioined to feel shame and self-loathing if he did steal.)
Since the 50s and 60s with the rise of black-influenced youth culture, there's been an increase in freedom without responsibility, without shame: the world of CLOCKWORK ORANGE. And since liberals who control much of society find notions such as 'shame' as old-fashioned and reactionary, they don't stress or try to restore it. 'Shame' and responsibility are conservative while uninhibitedness and spontaneity are liberal(and liberating). But, freedom without shame and responsibility has led to increase in crime and sexual lunacy. What is to be done about it? Some liberals say the problem is not morals but social injustice. Blacks commit more crime cuz of 'oppression' and 'despair'. When they loot, they are not having fun but acting out of enraged desperation.
Some liberals do admit there is a problem, but their proposals call for more technology--all those big brother cameras in UK--or more programs to 'educate' kids and 'raise their consciousness'(which however usually amount to 'blame whitey for racism' and only serves to justify black and underclass violence even more).
When conservatives call for a return to traditional morality, lights go on in liberals' minds: 'father knows best' patriarchalism, sexual repression in the 50s, segregation, bland lily white suburbanism, etc.
Also, liberals find 'immorality' as an explanation for social problems to be 'naive' and 'simpleminded'. Raised in the truth of 'social sciences' that 'rationally' and 'psychologically' explain social problems in a 'scientific' and 'intellectual' and 'progressive' manner, it's beneath educated liberals to believe in the worth of traditional morality.
Even when liberals do come around to valuing something like 'marriage', they stress how it must be 'fixed' by 'empowering the woman' and adding 'gay marriage' to make marriage 'cool and hip and inclusive'.
I don't know if Pinker deals with rap music, but if he didn't, he's missing out on a world phenomenon that is turning underclass kids into perpetual thug-infants and turning middle class kids into anti-role models. When well-to-do educated kids' idea of mainstream culture is thug-scum who howl foul-mouthed nursery rhymes, what hope is there for any kind of re-civilizing process? At least hippies in the 60s had something of a higher vision. At least Captain America in EASY RIDER was wise enough to say 'we blew it'. Boomers had a problem growing up, but they did grow up. Can we say that about the current generation hooked to Lil Wayne and 50 cents?
"Hitler mounted plans to invade Switzerland but called them off as too costly."
Or they simply called the plans off as strategically unnecessary, given that Switzerland was surrounded, and had no aspirations towards helping or joining the (then-)British-led alliance. Of course, this explanation goes against the Hitler Myth, that he was as arbitrarily and insanely aggressive as a bored video-game player today.
In fact, given this historical paradigm we have, the record shows that the Germans were remarkably restrained:
Consider this:
"Field-Marshal Erhard Milch told me [that] when Luftwaffe generals asked Adolf Hitler for permission to start using poison gas, he refused. He said that Germany was bound by the Geneva Convention on gas warfare, and would never be the first country to implement its use. Winston Churchill on the other hand, in a drunken fit on July 6, 1944, ordered unrestricted gas attacks on six major German cities (see my forthcoming 'Churchill's War', vol. iii); only the concentrated efforts of his general staff prevented the onset of this madness." (Source).
"Hitler mounted plans to invade Switzerland but called them off as too costly."
Put it another way:
All belligerents at war make plans to invade neighbors. In fact, all major-power non-belligerents at peace make plans to invade neighbors, if the need arises, too.
Canadian tabloids occasionally wave around "U.S. plans to invade Canada" from the early 20th century. There were such plans.
If we had a prevailing Howard-Zinn understanding of history, commentators today would say: "The ImperialistAmericans mounted plans to invade Canada, but called them off as too costly".
(Actually, this was true in both the 1770s and the 1810s, and came close in the 1840s ("54'40 Or Fight"), if I'm not mistaken).
anon troll:
Yeah, not declaring war worked out really well for Czechloslavakia, Poland, Austria, Yugoslavia, and the USSR. Clearly, that was all you had to do to be safe from Germany in the mid 30s through 45.
Another interesting case of neutrality was Franco's Spain. Franco had received a lot of help from Germany in winning the civil war, but turned out not to be too interested in getting Spain caught up in the middle of the second world war. As with Switzerland, this turned out well for both the world and for Spain.
Adolf probably called them all kinds of names ranging from pimple to boil but had praised their voelkische greatness just as often, and it wasn't his top priority anyway. I've seen this Swiss laundering from 2nd Amendment guys. Not counting unrecorded inner qualms they would have been OK with a German imperium, to an extent. Although the tetchier criticism is an example of David Hackett Fischer's "historian's fallacy"
Sweden's more grayish, since their politics were always tilted by the bigger neighbor to the east.
Sweden also militarized to stay at peace. This began in the early 20th century, where concerns over Russian naval expansion led to the construction of numerous coastal fortifications and coastal battleships (small but heavily armored, big-gunned ships designed to operate in shallow archipelagos).
During World War Two Sweden's militarization expanded dramatically, and Sweden forged ahead with the creation of a nearly complete military-industrial complex. By the late 1940s Swedish industry was turning out indigenously designed jet fighters and modern submarines. Conscription was universal, and numerous arms caches and wilderness supply depots were spread across the country. Sweden's highways, like the Autobahn, are designed so that aircraft can land on them.
The only other small country with such a vast military-industrial complex is Israel. Today with the end of the Cold War the society has largely demilitarized, but the military-industrial complex is being sustained by an increase in exports.
I've got news for you - that was liberalism before 1945, all over the world. Why do you think liberals were so big into eugenics? (Another fact flushed down the memory hole)
You've been watching too much Glenn Beck.
Eugenics and racialism are obviously inherently anti-egalitarian-therefore rightist in essence. That doesn't mean that progressives and leftists
didn't sometimes (*many* times) violate egalitarian dogma in the service of their utopian projects (putting to the side *non* utopian projects that involved improving living and working conditions for the urban proletariat). Also Marx, Jack London and many other socialists of the 19th and early 20th Centuries were mainly thinking in terms of the *white* working class and generally had rather low opinions of non-whites. That didn't stop Marx from being an enemy of black slavery and a big booster of the Union cause.
Switzerland, because of its small-government, pro-gun attitude (not to mention the powerful SVP), is not nearly as sexy for liberals as Sweden is. Unfortunately, it's not as sexy for conservatives either because of its reputation as a center for banks and international organizations.
icr:
And yet, there was quite a bit of overlap between socialists and eugenecists in the early 20th century. My impression is that this was a lot more than an occasional failing of their adherance to their ideology. The basic conceit of socialism is that you can get a better society by managing a lot more of that society (particularly the large industries) centrally, rather than allowing decentralized management. Alongside that, it was common to believe that a lot of other parts of society--nationalism, religious belief, treatment of women, class identity--could also be improved by some top-down management. In that context, it seems to me that eugenics fits very well with the larger thread of thought--along with educating people out of their primitive nationalistic prejudices and silly superstitions, you could improve the whole society by engaging in top-down selective breeding--sterilizing the inferior, encouraging more children by the superior.
"who blames the 'Joos'"
Thats what passes for a serious anti-anti-semetic argument around here?
Mis-spelling the word 'Jews'?
But humor can also have a pacifying effect.
I've gotten to the point where I can suss out your posts within the first few lines. Don't change a thing.
""who blames the 'Joos'"
Thats what passes for a serious anti-anti-semetic argument around here?
Mis-spelling the word 'Jews'?"
Worse than misspelling "misspelling", or "Semitic"?
Almost all the posts cover WWII, and little else. Sweden has been around since the 10th century AD, and Switzerland for only a few centuries shorter.
Yet, posters focus on 6 years - presumably because those are extensively covered by movies. Why should Steveosphere posters let their worldview be so heavily colored by moviemakers? Do you think those people have your interests at heart?
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