Preventing Half a Billion: The Swiss Example
The Swiss People’s Party (Schweizerische Volkspartei, SVP), the largest in the Federal Parliament in Berne and a member of the country’s ruling coalition, has launched a campaign to collect the 100,000 signatures necessary for a referendum to reintroduce into the penal code a measure that would allow judges to deport foreign felons once they have served their jail sentence. In addition, the party intends to table a law allowing the entire family of a criminal under the age of 18 to be deported as soon as his sentence is passed.
“We believe that parents are responsible for bringing up their children,” says Ueli Maurer, the Party’s president. “If they cannot do it properly, they will have to bear the consequences.” The SVP campaign resonates with many Swiss voters, since foreigners are five times more likely to commit crimes than Swiss nationals. In addition, to the shrieks of shock and horror from European bien-pensants, the Party’s current campaign poster shows three white and one black sheep on a Swiss flag—with the latter being discretely kicked out by one of the former.
In 2004, the SVP successfully campaigned for tighter immigration laws using the poster showing dark hands reaching into a pot filled with Swiss passports. It further drove the multiculturalists wild with a poster featuring Osama bin Laden on a Swiss identity card and the caption, “Don’t let yourself be bullied.” As it happens the warning was based on a sound precedent: one of the al-Qa’ida leader’s half-brothers, Yeslam, lives in Switzerland—and holds a Swiss passport! Another advertisement that appeared in newspapers across the country had the banner headline “Will Muslims soon be in the majority?” It warned that “the birth rate in Islamic families is substantially higher than in other families,” that at present rates of growth Muslims would outnumber Christians within 20 years, and that “Muslims place their religion above our laws.” All three claims were true, but nevertheless they were termed “racist” and “xenophobic” by the press all over Europe. Had Switzerland joined the EU in 2002 such ads would have been illegal.
The party also has put forward a proposal to ban the building of minaret towers alongside mosques. One of the SVP leaders, Justice Minister Christoph Blocher, is an outspoken opponent of the country’s Orwellian anti-racism laws, which he rightly sees as a major violation of the freedom of speech.
A person with the title of the “United Nations Special Rapporteur on Racism” and with the befitting name of Doudou Diene declared earlier this year that a “racist and xenophobic dynamic” that used to be the province of the far right was becoming a regular part of the democratic system in Switzerland. The SVP is unimpressed. “He’s from Senegal where they have a lot of problems of their own which need to be solved,” says Dr. Ulrich Schlüer, a senior Party official who is one of the authors of its current proposals.
He has already succeeded in his campaign to ban the minaret: “We are not against mosques but the minaret is not mentioned in the Koran or other important Islamic texts. It just symbolizes a place where Islamic law is established,” he says—and Islamic law “is incompatible with Switzerland’s legal system.” There are but two mosques in the country with minarets and planners are turning down applications for more, after opinion polls showed that half the population favors a ban.
Switzerland already has the strictest naturalization rules in Europe. If you want to become Swiss you must live in the country legally for at least 12 years—and pay taxes, and have no criminal record—before you can apply for citizenship. It still does not mean that your wish will be granted, however, and the fact that you were born in Lausanne or Lugano does not make any difference. There are no “amnesties” and illegals are deported. Even if an applicant satisfies all other conditions, the local community in which he resides has the final say: it can interview the applicant and hold a public vote before naturalization is approved. If rejected he can apply again, but only after ten years.
All this is intolerable to the country’s enlightened Europhiles who run the federal government in Berne. They want citizenship applications to be processed centrally, “along national guidelines,” taking the decision out of the hands of local communities. They insist that resident aliens, a fifth of the country’s 7.5 million people, need to be “fully integrated” and that the natives must accept the “reality” of multiculturalism. For the second time in a decade such proposals were defeated in a nation-wide referendum two years ago. Swiss voters rejected a government initiative to grant automatic citizenship to third-generation Swiss-born aliens and to simplify naturalization for the second generation. Most French-speakers (18 percent) supported the proposals, but they were heavily outvoted by the country’s German-speaking cantons which account for two-thirds of the population, and by the Italian-speaking Ticino (6 percent).
The successful “no” campaign was orchestrated—you’ve guessed it—by the SVP. Its leader, maverick millionaire Christoph Blocher, first achieved prominence twenty years ago when he founded a lobby group, the Campaign for an Independent and Neutral Switzerland (CINS). Blocher (66) is a strong opponent of the European Union who successfully fought a proposal to take Switzerland into the European Economic Area in 1992. He has also successfully campaigned against the abolition of the Swiss army (1989), against involving Swiss troops in UN peacekeeping operations (1994), and against the country’s EU membership (2001). He also campaigned against UN membership in 2002, but in what appears to have been an untypical fit of absent-mindedness the Swiss decided otherwise.
Swiss local democratic institutions of very long standing are still managing to survive in spite of the tendency of state bureaucracy to centralize all power. Except for a few years of centralized government of the “Helvetic Republic” during Napoleon’s occupation, Switzerland has been a confederation of local communities as established in the Pact of 1291, with most responsibility for public affairs in the hands of the local authorities and its 20 cantons and 6 half-cantons. In other words, Switzerland is still today what the United States had been before 1861.
At least one civilized country in the world continues to uphold the right of local communities to decide who will qualify for naturalization. Unique in today’s Western world, this healthy sense of Swiss citizenship reminds us of the Greek polis. It reflects an underlying assumption of kinship among citizens that cannot be fulfilled by mere residence and observance of the rules. Naturalization in Athens was possible but difficult; it was a rare privilege and anything but a right. Likewise in today’s Switzerland if you want to belong, but do not belong by blood, you have to prove a high degree of cultural and civilizational kinship with the host-society. Like in Athens, in today’s Switzerland citizenship includes the right and duty to fulfill certain functions, among which military service is very important. It is remarkable that to this day every Swiss male over 18 must be prepared to serve in the country’s citizen-army; after completing their basic training they keep their weapons at home, and refusal to perform military service is a criminal offence. The thought must have crossed the mind of a few Swiss reservists that all too many aspiring foreigners could never be trusted with those weapons. The Swiss understand, even when they do not know, that the collective striving embodied in “We the People” makes no sense unless there is a definable “people” to support it. They sense that many immigrants have no kinship with the striving and no connection to the “people,” except for the unsurprising desire to partake in its wealth.
This sense is light years away from the “multicultural” understanding of citizenship promoted in the European Union and in North America. A widely reported sob story from the time of the last referendum on citizenship illustrates the gap. The Swiss are not “quite ready to accept the reality of a multi-cultural society,” complained Radio Netherlands International. It bewailed the fate of one Fatma Karademir, 23, who was born in Switzerland and has never lived anywhere else but under Swiss law she is Turkish just like her parents. The Independent was equally indignant that Fatma’s application for citizenship was rejected by her village and she’ll be able to reapply in ten years:
And when she finally does come before the citizenship committee, Fatma knows the fact that she has lived all her life in Switzerland will count less than the answers she gives to the committee’s questions. “They ask if I can imagine marrying a Swiss boy, or do you know the Swiss national anthem, or which team I would support if the Swiss have a soccer game with Turkey. They ask such stupid questions.”
The fact that Fatma calls such questions “stupid” illustrates (1) that she was quite properly denied naturalization; and (2) that the village (town, commune), and not some enlightened bureaucrat in Berne, should continue to have the final say in the matter.
And talking of soccer, let us recall that match in Los Angeles between Mexico and the United States in February 1998. The stands were full of Mexican flags. The fans booed The Star-Spangled Banner, and a few brave souls who dared wave American flags were pelted with beer cans and food debris—as were the American soccer players. No doubt many of the offenders were U.S. citizens. One can only wish that they, and people like them, were subjected to the test of a Swiss village naturalization board.
17 Responses »
Trackbacks
- Conservative Heritage Times » It’s Switzerland yet again
- Swiss democracy thwarts the multiculturalists « Immigration Watch International
Entries(RSS)
"...one of the al-Qa’ida leader’s half-brothers, Yeslam, lives in Switzerland—and holds a Swiss passport!"
Just out of curiousity, has this person been implicated in or connected to terrorist activities?
Great article, Dr. T!
Its time for a write in vote for Christoph Blocher for our next "decider".
Mr. Trifkovic:
Excellent article, especially the relation between Fatma's plight (I wept frankly) and the soccer match in LA.
Relevant anecdote: last week my car was towed from Brooklyn to Manhattan. While riding with the affable hispanic driver, he asked me "what is your nationality." American I said. "Yeah, I know, but what is your nat-ionali-ty" he emphasized. There in a flash this man let me know he understood the difference between a nation and a state better than our leaders and the establishment conservatives, and that he explicitly, like them implicitly, did not consider the US a nation-state but a state composed of many nations. But it gets better.
Knowing what he meant all along, I decided to give him a history lesson on WWII and on how I came to be. "Okay, so you're European...but how come you speak Spanish? You don't really look latin; you look more Italian or French, but bigger, you know." It is not his fault, of course, that he regards the Latin People of that boot-shaped land as something non-"latin," the word today being synonymous with non-white. In fact, in NY all the words essentially mean the same thing: spanish, latin, whatever; it all means a non-Anglo. He seemed to enjoy the aporia of so many non-Anglos being Latin and yet not like him. He laughed about it. He loved "spanish" food but had never heard of gazpacho; he loved latin food but didn't know what Alfredo sauce was. But wait, isn't Alfredo a latin-spanish-hispanic name? How mcan it be Italian, much less European?
What a mess we've created!
From my frequent visits to the Interpol web sites (I target mainly the criminal activities in Austria, Italy, U.K. Spain and Sweden). Austria would do well to follow suit of the Swiss, it seems to have between 80% and 95% of Albanians who are listed under Serbia-Montenegro citizenship - probably on account of the passports they carry. I wonder where would they be deported?
A few comments and corrections.
1. The thing that is causing some amusement in Switzerland is that the deportation of foreign felons is already provided for in Swiss law, and is standard administrative practice, it just isn’t in the Penal Code! The decision is currently made by civil servants who are responsible to elected officials, who, in their turn, have to respond to public opinion, whereas if it were in the Penal Code, the decision would be made by judges who, by definition, are constitutionally independent of the politicians precisely so that they will not make decisions in response to public opinion. Changing the rules would actually make it MORE difficult to deport people!
2. I would guess that the provisions concerning the deportation of families would infringe the European Convention on Human Rights, to which Switzerland is a party (remember Dick Marty and the rendition flights!). It amounts to imposing a sanction on persons who have committed no crime. I’m sure people like Maurer know that and I would assume that it is an electoral stunt (there are elections in September).
3. Neither the Swiss nor the EU envisages Switzerland joining the Union anytime soon, although Switzerland participates, on a bilateral basis, in the Schengen area (i.e. no frontier controls). Nonetheless, let it be said that statements made by political parties cannot, by definition, be contrary to Community law. The content of freedom of speech is a matter for the Member States. Don’t forget that the now infamous cartoons were a matter exclusively for Danish law.
4. The Swiss Army is one of the great myths of American ignorance about Europe! The system Dr Trifkovic describes has been hugely modified, both in the sense of now having a much greater standing army, reducing the length of military service and permitting people to serve all their time in a single block, thereby dispensing them from service for the rest of their life. Swiss troops now serve with various multinational and international peacekeeping forces and all of this is presided over by Blocher’s SVP colleague, defence minister Samuel Schmid. Incidentally, the problem with the traditional Swiss military service system (one month per year for men between 18 and 50) was that it was ... encouraging immigration! Swiss employers preferred foreigner workers, whom they didn’t have to release for one month a year, and Swiss workers were being discriminated against!
I couldn't resist to share this from today's BBC
"European governments should regard immigration as an "enrichment" not a threat, EU Justice Commissioner Franco Frattini told a conference in Lisbon."
Europe is going real fast down a real drain, sourced from:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6993405.stm
On the other hand some Europeans are resisting in a humorous way, and no, it is not an article from "The Onion":
http://www.agi.it/italy/news/200709131553-pol-ren0060-art.html
An interesting anecdote:
Visiting the Art History museum in Geneva I ran into an African American who had lived in Switzerland for 20 years. His chief complaint: the Swiss treat everyone fairly and equally but that it is almost impossible to figure out what they really think about you because they are very private and he was bothered by it.
My experience, limited as it has been, is that if you're not looking to cause trouble and/or commit a crime the Swiss are one of the nicest people I've met on the planet. The extremely low crime rate and strong civil society has produced a people proud of their Canton, and at the same time good samaritans.
With regards to foreign visitors, including diplomats with "immunity" the Swiss attitude expressed to me over a few beers was: your welcome to visit and do business, and enjoy or country but if you decide to engage in violence against each other or us expect to be quickly subdued, a little roughed up, and delivered to justice, and if you are a diplomat - you'll get roughed up and then later get a verbal apology as you're asked to leave the country.
Thats why on a late night in downtown Geneva you can ask any woman for directions [even if its hand signs because you don't speak French or German] and they'll be happy to help you with no fear.
Nevertheless, back home in the States one of my friends from highschool was a Swiss transplant who left Geneva because nothing ever happened there [too boring] no murders; quiet streets; and a somewhat libertarian bent on vices as long as they stay in one part of town and are strictly monitored by the police. Nothing to rebel against. So he moved out, but is still proud to be Swiss. Although he does admit that it is the best place on the planet to raise a family.
On a more serious note for white nationalists: A Swiss citizen regardless of race who has been accepted by the local community is completely accepted and integrated.
Also talking to the Swiss their identity is tied to their Canton not to Switzerland; and the Swiss themselves do not have local voting rights when they move from one Canton to another and also need to wait a decade and demonstrate their loyalty to that Canton to be able to vote in local affairs.
What can I say besides the Calvinism - I love Switzerland.
Whoops small error meant to say:
Also talking to the Swiss I've found that their identity is tied to their Canton not to Switzerland; and the Swiss themselves do not have local voting rights when they move from one Canton to another and also need to wait a decade and demonstrate their loyalty to that Canton to be able to vote in local affairs.
This gives me the opportunity to repeat myself: "What can I say besides the Calvinism - I love Switzerland. [I add the caviat about Calvinism because I'm a Roman Catholic]"
Would you advocate the Canton system for Serbia and a Militia Army?
It seems like a good idea based on my knowledge of things.
Remembering my Serbian Mother.
Donald
Swiss employers preferred foreigner workers, whom they didn’t have to release for one month a year, and Swiss workers were being discriminated against!
In a land of banks, should we be surprised that $ triumphs over measures aimed at fostering the common good and protecting the community?
A Swiss citizen regardless of race who has been accepted by the local community is completely accepted and integrated.
But don't they have to prove their loyalty first, before they can gain citizenship?
The leaders of Europe are race traitors, pure and simple, enemies of their own fatherlands, and should be dragged screaming from their homes and offices, beaten, and then burned to death for their 'race-crimes'. This applies to any politician who cannot prove that he has spent every minute in office trying to eliminate as much of the colored presence in Europe as possible.
Free speech, by the way, is for white patriots only.
Furthermore, Dr. T., you need to cut out the constant quasi-equivocation (probably to satisfy your leftist, civil-rights supporting employer) on racial issues. The threat to Europe is not (only) Islam, it is race. To paraphrase a great American patriot of an earlier era, ONE colored resident on any piece of European soil is one too many.
I intensely dislike the alien presence on American soil, and recognize that there are perfectly morally satisfactory arguments to remove such persons. However, America is a nation with a long immigrant history (albeit of white arrivals), it did have a non-white aboriginal population, and our own ancestors either imported or allowed the importation of African slaves.
Europe, however, is the WHITE CONTINENT. It is the homeland of our white nation, the soil where our ancestors literally evolved from earlier hominid forms. It is OURS, and we have complete moral sanction to tell these filthy Muslims - or any other racial aliens - to GET OUT NOW - or face military retribution and immediate extermination. If the aliens revolt, and attack Europeans, EXCELLENT! Then we can get on with it, though I suggest we cull our own herds first of any race traitors, whether secular or Christian being irrelevant, and only later nail the savages. The strength of the wolf is the strength of the pack - and vice versa.
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/7DF51D57-E32F-4DAE-A962-7E397C3A4B92.htm
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2007
DNA tests divide French opinion
"One of the cornerstones of the campaign that saw Nicolas Sarkozy elected French president in May was his promise to stem illegal immigration.
Yet his latest attempt to do so has been described by some critics as unjustifiable, discriminatory and arbitrary and is dividing public opinion.
A bill currently being debated in the French parliament would encourage potential immigrants wishing to join family members already in France to undergo a DNA test to prove they are related. ... ... ..."
(BTW, Sarkozy is a Hungarian Jew convert to Catholicism)
Why are Swiss 'foreigners' more likely to be charged with a crime whereas 'young Swiss males' may be let off with a caution for the same offence?
You make it sound as if so-called foreigners engage in baby-eating. Either you think of crime the same way for everyone or you don't. In the latter case, you, as a "true Swiss" just want special treatment over people who may not have been born there, or were born there but are not Swiss enough for your scrupulous tastes. Why is it so easy to label people by race/ethnicity and make them representative of a fictionalized whole? If a true Swiss would never commit a crime, then when does the entire country get deported? And where to?
And according to your unspoken dictates, Swiss must always mean white. Way to go! p.s. what is a multiculturalist (like a person who doesn't want to terrorize their suspiciously brown neighbours?)--clear that one up for me.
take care