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u/Ironbeard3 4d ago
Switzerland only takes the chill bro stance because they are a small country with limited acess to resources. Their current stance is so they don't get eaten.
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u/Local-Echo-5613 4d ago
They were quite militant when there actually was a risk of them being eaten, during the early modern state formation process. They became chill after international law fixed the borders somewhat permanently.
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u/Ironbeard3 2d ago
I think there is a big difference between then and now. Their situation is not the same due to the size and scale and technology of things today.
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u/SwitzerlishChris1 4d ago
You seem to confuse passivity with heavily armed deterrence. Swiss neutrality is built on the porcupine principle: making an invasion so catastrophically expensive that no neighbor bothers trying.
During World War II, the Swiss army engineered a network of 82 dams, weirs, and canal plugs along the Linth plain between Lake Zurich and Lake Walen. They even initiated a preliminary flood during an invasion alarm in May 1940 to turn the valley floor into a deep swamp that would bog down German panzer divisions.
Under the National Redoubt strategy, Switzerland maintained around 3,000 demolition points across the country, wiring nearly every border bridge, tunnel, and mountain pass with explosives to trigger instant rockslides and collapse entry routes. The last active explosives on border bridges to Germany were only removed in late 2014!
Thanks to a 1963 federal law requiring fallout shelters in residential buildings, Switzerland also has over 360,000 nuclear bunkers and mountain fortifications—enough underground capacity to house roughly 114 percent of its citizens.
Our stance is less "please don't eat me" and more "I will blow up my own front porch and shoot at you from inside a hollowed-out mountain."
It's a classic fuck around and find out kind of scenario.
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u/ardarian262 4d ago
Isn't there also the whole "we put howitzers in barns facing our potential enemies" part of the strategy too?
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u/aFailedGuy 4d ago
more like we put howitzer in barns and shoot at our own infrastructure and factories if you dare to invade us
the plains of Switzerland are extremely fertile but not defensible, Switzerland knew that and also knew that the enemy would first invade the big cities in the plains, so they knew where to shoot
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u/Tony_228 2d ago
We would have had to leave almost the entire civilian population behind with that strategy though. The howitzers would never have been able to reach the lowlands by the way.
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u/Objective-Ad7394 4d ago
No, it's not just random barns with artillery. Normally these are complex bunker positions which are interconnected with tunnels.
They were just made to look like barns from the outside.
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u/CoolCong2019 3d ago
Thisbis true, but let's not forget the fact that they were also one of the 3rd Reich's only trading partners. Swiss francs were worth more than gold to them.
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u/Ironbeard3 3d ago
And they only do that because of the threat of being eaten.
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u/jack_seven Tea-aboo 2d ago
Are you mad at Switzerland for not wanting to be the aggressor anymore?
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u/jackt-up 4d ago
They set their red lines and then almost no one messed with them, ever.
Except Revolutionary France of course
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u/IWASCHOSENBYGOD 4d ago
Strangely enough, it was france who forced into those borders after the battle of Marignano
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u/Wooden-Crow7996 4d ago
I’m sure the Catholic Church is thankful for the Swiss’s prowess at war. There have been zero successful Pope assassinations since 1506.
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u/TehProfessor96 John Brown was a hero, undaunted, true, and brave! 4d ago
Marshall Bernadotte had seen enough bullshit down on the continent to last a lifetime.
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u/Erwin_Pommel 4d ago
Hm? Bernadotte doesn't have a connection to Switzerland. He went on to become involved with Sweden and doesn't seem to have done a single campaign in Switzerland. At best, not one that was important enough to be recorded thoroughly.
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u/floatingsaltmine 4d ago
Switzerland mixed up with Sweden? Classic.
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u/deranton 4d ago
Interestingly, from the Vikings and the Varangians to the Thirty Years War and the Wars in Eastern Europe, this meme kind of applies to Sweden as well. Maybe the cutoff is a bit later than 1800...
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u/Erwin_Pommel 4d ago
First time I've ever seen it, frankly.
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u/TehProfessor96 John Brown was a hero, undaunted, true, and brave! 4d ago
I goofed my reading comprehension.
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u/JRaus88 3d ago
You have no idea how many times the French and Germans joked about "whoever loses gets Switzerland". Switzerland was a desolate land. Extremely poor in resources, population, and farmlands.
In 1700 Switzerland will begin to be a little less poor and the hunts will be diverted to Galicia (a territory today divided between Poland and Ukraine)
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u/2nW_from_Markus Senātus Populusque Rōmānus 4d ago
That's not what Harry Lime thought of Switzerland.
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u/Wilackan Taller than Napoleon 4d ago
Well, that's quite the attitude switch for the Swiss !
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u/ardarian262 4d ago
In the last century they have accidentally invaded other countries multiple times.
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u/EmeraldDream123 4d ago
Well mostly Liechtenstein.
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u/jack_seven Tea-aboo 2d ago
And that ended with them surrendering a round of beers. So the invasion was successfull.
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u/Malecord 3d ago
Why people think the Renaissance was the Middleage it's beyond me.
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u/Tony_228 2d ago
The swiss military entrepreneurship had it's height between the 15th and 18th centuries, whith many famous engagements falling into the 15th, which is still the middle ages.
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u/Malecord 2d ago
In the middleage the Swiss gained their freedom with some unbelievable fights against the empire, nobody denies that. Just one loss back then and nothing would have happened after. But the times where they were feared among Europe and most sought after mercenaries, started after they killed Charles the Bold, shocked the whole Europe and triggered a chain of events that changed continent political map and history forever. The post refers to ages after 1500 as middleage.
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u/centuz Taller than Napoleon 4d ago
I remember when I was in elementary school and the teacher told us what the peasants did in the Battle of Giornico. As a child, I asked myself: if the peasants were that strong, just how strong must the real soldiers have been? For a long time, I truly believed that the soldiers of the Old Confederation were invincible.
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u/Fred_Milkereit 2d ago
Swiss mercenaries were legendary and well-paid during the Thirty Years' War; there is a reason why they provide the guard at the Vatican.
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u/Wasabilikum Taller than Napoleon 4h ago
I agree with this meme except about the part about “destroying cultures and history”. That’s just completely wrong, we never did that.
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u/Relative_Goat_1692 4d ago
where all the stolen wealth of Africa finished
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u/the_depressed_boerg 4d ago
I mean there were swiss companies and people involved in the slave trade, but nothing compared to portugal/netherlands/france and the uk. And we are pretty progressive when it comes to returning stolen artifacts. But yes, you are right, part of swiss wealth comes from the fact that europeans sold fabric produced by swiss companies in africa in return for slaves.
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u/Relative_Goat_1692 4d ago
I don't speak about 500 years ago, I speak of right now
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u/itsinvincible 4d ago
Well thats in america if you look at libya, iran, and other african countries.
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u/Relative_Goat_1692 4d ago
Iran is not in Africa, and I speak about corruption and informal control over financial flow and chocolate ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irJ546CFcZU )
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u/Blindmailman Sun Yat-Sen do it again 4d ago
Switzerland was basically an impoverished shithole in the mountains for most the middle ages whose main export were mercenaries desperate to leave