Switzerland

Switzerland, officially the Swiss Confederation, is a bourgeois state in Europe located mostly between the Alps and Jura mountains. Its banking industry, one of the most corrupt in the world, has a significant role in the world's economy, with its financial sector accounting for about 10% of national GDP — the second-highest proportion in Europe and only outdone by Luxembourg's 27%. Switzerland originated with the Swiss Confederacy around 1300 AD through a series of agreements between small states within the Holy Roman Empire. These states, which later became "cantons", formed a loose confederation largely to facilitate trade, spending the next few centuries expanding by purchasing nearby counties and otherwise attempting to conquer them. Following the defeat of Napoleonic France, Switzerland proclaimed in 1813 its intention for strict neutrality from then on. In Switzerland, women were only granted equal civil rights in 1971, granting them the right to vote and be elected, though other problems like lower wages remained.

Politics

Since the mid-1990s, the most popular party by a considerable margin has been the Swiss People's Party, an anti-immigration, right-wing populist party with quite a lot of fascist roots that despite this also has an LGBT wing, true to the form of liberalism. As for socialist parties, one of the most popular is the Swiss Labor Party, which was founded in 1944 and is the successor to the Communist Party of Switzerland. There is also Solidarity, a Trotskyist party that focuses on environmentalism and feminism. Both of these parties get just under 1% of the vote however. Switzerland also has a social democratic party which is the second-most popular party in the country and whose stated long-term goal is "overcoming capitalism". It used to be a part of Socialist International but left in 2017 in favor of the Progressive Alliance, thus changing membership from a socialist international to a social democratic/progressive one. While the party also opposes lowering taxes for high-income citizens, it still finds favor with some of the petite and middle bourgeoisie.

Atrocities

Whereas the United Nations led a boycott against South Africa because of its apartheid policy, Switzerland refused to participate except for ceasing the sale of arms to the South African government. Otherwise, it actually lobbied on behalf of South Africa through the Swiss–South African Association, which defended the apartheid regime and white supremacy in the country on the basis of white people's "right to exist". Political equality between blacks and whites was deemed problematic if not impossible, with this attitude extending towards the United States as well. Nelson Mandela was ridiculed by the SSAA which said he was mentally unfit to lead the country. There was also the active participation of Swiss industry in helping the apartheid regime to develop nuclear weapons, involving the supply of "highly sensitive technology" and violating both the UN arms embargo as well as Switzerland's own. According to a report, the Swiss government was aware of the illegal deals but "tolerated them in silence, supported some of them actively or criticised them only half-heartedly". Even when the US and other Western nations imposed broad embargoes against South Africa in the 1980s, Switzerland refused to join, arguing that this would violate its neutrality and have no practical result anyways. In 2002, Swiss Banks UBS and Credit Suisse were hit with a $51.3 billion lawsuit over their dealings with the apartheid regime in spite of international sanctions. South African human rights lawyer Dumisa Ntsebeza, coordinator of the case, said "The regime would never have survived so long if it had not gone on being supported ... by firms whose only goal was profit" — the banks however said they were unaware of the suit and denied responsibility. This was not long after the 1998 payment of $1.25 billion by Swiss banks over hoarding Holocaust victims' bank accounts. Incidentally, Swiss companies profited from the Nazi war machine while also having no qualms about buying gold looted from Jews, with Jewish refugees themselves turned away from the Swiss border even if they had deposited their gold in the country for safekeeping. In fact the Swiss government infamously requested Germany to mark the passports of Jews so as to facilitate denying them admission, with most Jews seeking sanctuary in Switzerland ending up dead in German death camps. Paul Grueninger, a Swiss police chief who aided thousands of Austrian Jews to escape to Switzerland in defiance of regulations, was dismissed from his post and charged with fraud — and exonerated only 55 years later, posthumously.

Gaddafi's views on Switzerland

In July 2008, Swiss authorities arrested Muammar Gaddafi's son Hannibal Gaddafi and daughter-in-law for allegedly beating their servants at a hotel, detaining them for two days. Muammar Gaddafi retaliated by shutting down local subsidiaries of the Swiss companies Nestlé and ABB, arresting two Swiss businessmen for supposed visa irregularities, canceling most commercial flights between the two countries, and withdrawing about $5 billion from his Swiss bank accounts. At a G8 summit in July 2009, Gaddafi publicly called for the dissolution of Switzerland and the division of its territory between France, Italy, and Germany. A month later Hannibal Gaddafi stated that if he had nuclear weapons, he would "wipe Switzerland off the map". In February 2010, Gaddafi called for an all-out jihad against Switzerland in a speech, where he further described Switzerland as an "infidel harlot" and apostate for its 2009 ban of minarets — for which Switzerland was widely criticized even by many Western countries. He called for a "jihad by all means", defining jihad as "a right to armed struggle", which he claimed should not be considered terrorism.

Lenin and Switzerland

Vladimir Lenin visited and lived in Switzerland several times. He first visited the country in the mid-1890s to meet members of the Emancipation of Labour, a Russian Marxist group based in the country which Lenin hoped to connect with the "Social-Democrats", a Marxist revolutionary cell Lenin was a senior figure in. He then stayed in a health spa before traveling further to Berlin. After he joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party Lenin met up with other Russian Marxists in Corsier, Switzerland, where they held a conference that resulted in the founding of Iskra, the newspaper of the RSDLP, in Munich. A few years later Lenin fell ill and the board of the newspaper moved its base of operations to Geneva in his absence. Later in 1904, when Lenin became ill from stress from arguing with Mensheviks, he took a holiday to hike in rural Switzerland. In 1907, when the Tsarist government sent its secret police after revolutionaries, Lenin fled to Switzerland for a short time before moving to Paris in December 1908 at the decision of other prominent Bolsheviks. Before World War I broke out, Lenin traveled to Bern with his wife to have surgery for her. When the war began he was briefly arrested and imprisoned as he was in Austria-Hungary then, after which he moved to Bern and then Zürich in 1916, where he remained until he went back to Russia to begin the October Revolution.