Skullduggery in the Alps

    I do respect the Swiss: the Red Cross, Giacometti, Klee and Tinguely, Corbusier of course, and Dürrenmatt, the chocolate box beauty of old Bern and Basle, plus a peaceful and cohesive society.  But what o what got into those alpine burghers’ heads on Sunday?



    Last week more than 57.5% of Swiss voters and 22 out of 26 cantons voted to ban the construction of new minarets.  The proposal had been put forward by the Swiss People’s Party (UDC), the largest party in parliament, which claims minarets symbolize a quest for Islamic power.  In truth the vote was a skilful – and iniquitous – means of consolidating the party’s power.  It was wholly unnecessary as there are only four minarets in the country and, as with all matters Swiss, a range of laws already regulate their operation.  But that hasn’t stopped other European right-wing groups from welcoming the result and calling for other countries to take similar measures.

    Switzerland’s Foreign Minister, Micheline Calmy-Rey, said that the government is ‘very concerned’ about the ban.  ‘Each limitation on the co-existence of different cultures and religions also endangers our security,’ she said.  The Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan saw the vote as ‘a sign of an increasing racist and fascist stance in Europe’, adding that Islamophobia was a ‘crime against humanity’ like anti-Semitism.  Stephan Kramer of the German Jewish Council declared that the referendum could be ‘neither euphemised nor re-interpreted’.  For him it is simply an expression of Europe’s deep-seated aversion to Islam that aggravates the integration of Muslims.

    Across Europe one can assume with ‘relative certainty that not a single country that doesn’t have more or less similar fears of Muslims and would have similar results in the same referendum,’ Kramer went on to say.  In the UK the far-right British National Party aims to restore the overwhelmingly white ethnicity of Britain by offering ‘firm but voluntary incentives for immigrants and their descendants to return home’.  The BNP has links with Le Pen’s Front National as well as the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD), a pan-German nationalist party. It and the Swiss Peoples’ Party share a similar political philosophy.  A recent NPD political poster – showing a white sheep kicking a black sheep under the words ‘We’re cleaning up’ – was inspired by a comparable UDC poster.  When Barack Obama was elected to the White House, the NPD marked the historical event by claiming that an ‘American alliance of Jews and Negros (sic)’ aimed to destroy the United States’ ‘white identity’.



    If this business wasn’t so serious, it would be laughable.  The notion of limiting the migration of people in the modern age is regressive, illiberal, divisive, counterproductive and inflammatory.  It encourages the darkest characteristics of the human soul: selfishness, arrogance and the fear of The Other.  It springs from a lack of empathy and knowledge.

    The BNP has a nutty ambition to re-establish an ‘ethnically-pure’ Britain circa 1948.  I suspect the NPD imagines 1933 as the golden year for Germans.  In philosophical terms these parties’ narrow and chauvinistic nostalgia is no different from that of the Taliban, whose fantasy is to recreate a caliphate on a model of Mohammed's seventh-century Arabia.  Hasn’t anyone in these organisations read history books?

    To better appreciate the absurdity of the nationalist stance, perhaps we should take their arguments to their logical conclusion?  Why stop at banning minarets and expelling citizens who have lived in a country for only a generation?  The Swiss Confederation may have been around since 1291 but – in the UDC’s dreams – the country should now be broken up and residents returned to the walled city states of Lucerne, Zürich and Bern.  Those lacking the correct papers will be left to the wolves.  By the same token Germany should be disassembled, not simply into a Deutsche Bund of 39 sovereign states, but into the original tribal wilderness.  Brandenburg will be reforested and pagan gods restored.  In the quest for purity Bavarians will have to give their state back to the Gauls of course but the NPD Executive Committee will address the question where Munich’s residents will then live. 

    As for the UK, the island’s population will reduced to a few thousand ancient Britons covered by blue woad and deerskins.  No Italian (Roman) central heating.  No Saturday night curries.  No un-British Hindu-Arabic numerals (i.e. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9).   Not that the Brits will have time to miss such cultural niceties; they’ll be too busy trying to reattach England to Ireland using flint tools alone (the two land masses became separated at the end of the last Ice Age).

    Unless we are to regress into the dark ages, all Europeans who want integration must help –  as Stephan Kramer advises -- to ‘create a climate of mutual respect, acknowledgement and trust’.  A couple of days ago Egypt’s Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa, the country’s top cleric, called on Muslims in Switzerland to take legal action to reverse the ban.  Better would be if those earlier groups of immigrants – the Alemannia, Burgundians, Hallstatt and Helvetii – worked together to challenge the decision, and question how such a referendum on basic rights even came to a popular vote.  The good burghers should also learn not to fall for the skullduggery of political parties in pursuit of power.