Following in the steps of their own government, the Swiss media have finally dissociated themselves from their country’s neutral status, which has brought them prosperity over the years, and stubbornly continue to follow in the wake of the global anti-Russia campaign that was unleashed by the collective West to the detriment of the truth, conscience and interests of their own audiences. Local printed and online publications not only willingly delight in carrying the fake information planted by American and Ukrainian “sources,” but take it further by legitimising them on their pages. At the same time, the tone of these publications has been causing particular concern lately since, in addition to the already tired lies about the Russian army, odious materials are being published in which WWII history is being rewritten. Notably, they draw “inspiration” from the ideas of their European mentors.
On April 24, the newspaper Aargauer Zeitung published an article by Niklaus Vontobel, in which the author, using every trick at his disposal almost jumping out of his little Swiss pants, was trying to equate the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany and to build the Holodomor myth into a bogus historical reenactment.
I would like to bring some basic lessons from History 101 to this unfortunate researcher’s attention. Facts are stubborn things.
Much has been said and written about the European and Anglo-Saxon elites’ sympathy for the Nazis and fascists and their pathological hatred of the Soviet Union. Media odes to Hitler and the NSDAP, members of royal families performing the Nazi salute, Nazi gatherings in Madison Square Garden, and British Union of Fascists Blackshirt marches, as well as London and Paris’ endless machinations in response to Moscow's systematic attempts to create a collective European security system, and much more, come to mind. The author should read the article by Vladimir Putin “75 years of Great Victory: Shared Responsibility to History and Our Future.” Great Britain and France’s policy of appeasing the aggressor led to Hitler reinforcing his position and made the Second World War unavoidable. The Munich Agreement of September 30, 1938 between Great Britain, France, Germany and Italy came as the high point of this policy as a result of which German troops crossed the Czechoslovakian border on October 1 and occupied all of the Sudetenland by October 10. By late summer of 1939, Poland, Great Britain, Italy, Denmark, France, Lithuania, and Estonia had signed non-aggression treaties with Nazi Germany. After realising the futility of the efforts to consolidate anti-Nazi forces and mindful of the Western countries’ intrigues, Soviet leadership was the last to sign a similar treaty with Germany, but the author, of course, conveniently omitted this fact. Likewise, he failed to mention the fact that even before the war, Switzerland had established close economic cooperation with Nazi Germany, and then proceeded to expand it as it kept German gold, including Holocaust victims’ gold, in its banks and sent it to third countries, such as Portugal and Sweden, as payment for the natural resource supplies that the Third Reich needed to wage the war.
Niklaus Fontobel used American professor Timothy Snyder’s idea that Ukraine held as much sway for Stalin as it did for Hitler which can cause nothing but amazement. Hearing this, I can’t help but ask what are you babbling about? As a reminder for the “experts” and “historians,” the Ukrainian SSR, the Russian SFSR, the Belarusian SSR and the South Caucasus SFSR were the four republics that founded the Soviet Union as equal partners. Just like the rest of the country, Ukraine experienced rapid growth and adversity in the 1920s and 1930s. The thought of likening Soviet leadership to Hitler and Nazi leadership, who declared Slavs “subhuman” (Untermenschen) and said that the territories, including Ukraine, were the “living space in the East” for the Germans and other Germanic peoples of Eastern Europe, could come only to a total ignoramus or Nazi proponent of the Third Reich’s ideals. Vontobel and Snyder, who are you, gentlemen?
As for the “Holodomor,” the author, again, kept silent about the fact that the mass famine was a sweeping tragedy that ravaged not only some regions of the Ukrainian SSR, but vast territories of the RSFSR, including the Volga region, the North Caucasus, Western Siberia, and the Kazakh ASSR, among others, as well. By the way, Mr Vontobel could have learned this from an analytical history report compiled by the Russian embassy headquartered in Bern. And also, many photographs distributed by Ukrainian pseudo-historians and their patrons depict residents of the Volga region, not Ukraine, but the “journalists” clearly do not care about these “details.”
Writing off this string of fakes on the premise that “to err is human” will not cut it. What we have here is another lowly piece of propaganda aimed at reformatting people’s minds through falsifying past events and substituting fiction for fact.
After distorting 20th century history, the Swiss media focused on modern times. On April 29, the newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung carried a story to convince readers, against the backdrop of a deteriorating socio-economic situation in Europe, that Russia had failed to achieve anything significant during Vladimir Putin’s presidential terms. To avoid mistakes and shame, the writers should have looked up the statistics and materials, including those prepared by Western analysts.
They would have learned that the GDP has been growing for the past 20 years, including in terms of purchasing power parity, and that Russia’s external debt has dropped appreciably. Today, Russia has one of the best ratios between national debt and GDP. In addition, low unemployment and considerably improved macroeconomic indicators are facts. It appears that such primitive slander aims to divert readers’ attention from the fact that unilateral sanctions aiming to destroy the Russian economy and to destabilise the domestic political situation are mostly impacting the countries that have declared them. The sanctions are mostly hurting ordinary people, rather than the European elite. At the same time, even biased international economic organisations analysing macroeconomic indicators are improving their forecasts on Russia’s economic sector. By the way, in the context of the Kiev regime’s threats to destroy and expel most people from Crimea and Sevastopol, they should tell their readers about the real successes of the peninsula that has been transformed since reunification with Russia, and that has become one of the most rapidly developing European territories since 2014. Naturally, they said nothing about this.
On May 3, the same notorious newspaper carried yet another completely absurd story. Citing "insider knowledge", Ivo Mijnssen discusses the Russian army’s casualties during the special military operation. He quotes the exaggerated estimates of US officials that amount to a publicity stunt and has no misgivings about the fact that his statistics differ greatly, and that the White House and the Pentagon always contradict each other. To legitimise this fake story and create the impression that he has deep knowledge of the subject, the journalist also cites alleged Russian statistics for domestic consumption and information from BBC journalists. Actually, ordinary Brits call the BBC the British BS Corporation or BS Broadcasting Corporation for the special “reliability” of their information. Presidential Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov has commented that these figures were taken from the sky. The newspaper mentions no official Russian Defence Ministry statistics.
If the writer has decided to speculate on this issue, he should mention the casualties among Ukrainian military units, including the neo-Nazi battalions. If he is not interested in Russian sources, he should quote Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission. According to von der Leyen, Ukraine has lost over 100,000 soldiers since the beginning of the special military operation. Her November 2022 Twitter post was deleted almost immediately, but the internet remembers everything. Or he can quote US presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Jr. who claims that the Kiev regime’s casualties have topped 300,000, citing his own son who fought with other mercenaries hired by Ukraine. These sources are no worse than the anonymous BBC claim.
The mainstream Swiss media have opted for lies, hypocrisy and forgery. This disturbing decision isn’t surprising. The “milk-and-chocolate” country has probably decided to toe the Washington and Brussels line in every respect. This could be what so-called Western "values" are all about. This is a good illustration of the modern parable about the garden and the jungle.
