Copyright (c) 1997 - Ingrid A. Rimland
"If we are to accept the absurd hypothesis of prolonging the war, then the Germans in purely arithmetical terms, with Swiss support, could have financed exactly 2.36 war days. Hitler after all was conquered by the Allies militarily and not economically.
The disposable real annual income of every Swiss dropped during the war from 1772 francs in 1939 to 1636 francs in 1944. Such was not the case in America where the gross national product increased between 1939 and 1944 from 90.5 billion dollars to 210.1 billion dollars.
In the same period, the pro capita income in the United States increased from 691 to 1,518 dollars, or correspondingly from 3,100 to 6,800 francs.
That, Mr. Eizenstat, is the truth with regard to neutral Switzerland's alleged profit seeking!
The Eizenstat Report constitutes an attack on our state pillars of neutrality and sovereignty. It amounts to an inadmissible interference of a foreign state in our internal affairs. No sovereign state can tolerate this sort of interference.
We Swiss must be fully aware that the Eizenstat Report does not represent a misjudgment pronounced by the American people but one by a state secretary of the present administration in Washington.
Comments voiced unofficially by leaders of Swiss industry and politicians to the effect that the Clinton Administration is also being strongly pressured by Jewish organizations in New York is irrelevant. Even if it were so, our country could not accept such a justification. And even then, the report should be dismissed.
Eizenstat's verdict that neutrality is "immoral" is offending and represents an affront to international law.
The accusation of "legalism" is nothing other than the expression of a way of thinking which places the power of mighty nations above the law and rights of the small state.
The small state of Switzerland did not prolong the war through its trade with Germany. The United States should rather ask what the great powers did or did not do to facilitate or prolong the war.
Swiss political strategies, embellished by an expensive New York advertising agency, have deteriorated into utterly wrong and dangerous strategies. Our negotiators have been innocently begging the United States of late to measure Switzerland not on its past, but on its good intentions to finally "reappraise" its history and pay for the sins of its forefathers.
Occasionally the idea is expressed that one should concentrate on the present and the future, that it is pointless to explain our history to Americans, and that they would not understand it anyway.
This is wrong. Even the American people can be convinced by good and historically well-founded arguments. The exclusion of the past is being interpreted in America - and rightly so - as the sign of a bad conscience, the suppression of unpleasant awkward facts. We are not ashamed of our history. And especially not the history of the Second World War!
It is the task of our government to explain the interrelated facts to a largely unknowing world audience and to clearly repudiate intentional slander and misrepresentation. Whoever governs, whoever actively identifies with a cause, whoever fights for the rights of his own country and commits himself to Swiss self-determination, must at times bear the loneliness of rule. Whoever fails to endure must relinquish leadership. But our foreign policy officials in Bern and those on the other side of the Atlantic are having great difficulty in living with tensions and coping with the occasional withdrawal of affection.
In the so-called "reappraisal" of Swiss history, it is above all the Left which is gaining attention at present. It is not surprising that its members are the very ones who distinguish themselves today as moralistic, hypocritical "appraisers". (T)he leftists, after the catastrophic failure of real socialism, have nothing more to offer for the present and the future and are trying to at least seize the past. But how credible are they?
Are the leftists, countless of whom have admired Soviet socialism with all of its atrocities, the credible "reappraisers" of Swiss history?
We are not supposed to know anything about it, but we are supposed to pay for it!"
Thought for the Day:
"Your instinct is truer than you know."
(Maurice Samuel in "You Gentiles", p. 143)