Swissness as the Swiss People's Party defines it

banning minarets, walling the country against immigration

The political megatrend in Switzerland, as demonstrated by the latest politician's rating published by Neue Zürcher Zeitung, shows a clear polarization towards the extreme poles on the left (social democrats SP and greens GP) and the extreme right (Swiss People's Party SVP/UDC). No wonder the climate is rapidly deteriorating, the political propaganda is becoming increasingly aggressive in style.
The popular initiative launched by SVP which aims at the country-wide prohibition of erecting minarets has unleashed an aggressivity unknown in Switzerland since the times of the Sonderbund war in 1847.(In Europe, the type of propaganda in use has been first seen in Germany during the Weimar Republic -1918 to 1933- with avantgarde artists like Heartfield and Grosz on the forefront, and was brought to perfection later by the propaganda machines of the Soviet Union and of Nazi Germany). This "Shock and Awe" propaganda style disappeared after World War II. It reemerged in the Sixties, and later has been used for commercial advertising (e.g. by BENETTON)
The latest victim of the SVP propaganda machine has been the Roman-Catholic bishop Kurt Koch who is accused of being a traitor after having declared his opposition to the initiative.
The term of "Landesverrat" (high treason) has become more and more fashionable lately inside of the SVP and is used every time a member of that party vocalizes the slightest dissension from the official party line.

One question arises from this political trend: is the SVP consciously trying to put this country on a path that could end in a either a reenactment of the German Democratic Republic which had to protect it's territorial integrity by a wall and an order to kill anybody willing to cross the border, or produce a copy of the wall the Israelis put up against the Palestinians?





The Swiss People's Party has given proof of exploiting xenophobic and racist tendencies since the arrival of Christoph Blocher at it's commands and continues to show a will to proceed to a political and ethnical homogenization of the country under the cover of protecting a liberal market economy, and it consciously takes the risk of triggering readiness for ethnical cleansing in the brains of modest citizens by it's propaganda methods.
The left has been surprisingly shy and has failed to come out massively against the minaret initiative, but on the other hand has tried to copy the SVP propaganda style by publishing a poster displaying a photography of Doris Leuthard, federal minister of the economy, with hand full of blood, as an illustration for the argument to ban export of weaponry from Switzerland, another popular initiative to be voted on november 27, 2009.
Meanwhile, the fact that posters of the minaret initiative have been banned from public advertising areas in some cantons has led to a well orchestrated outcry by the initiative committee over repression of free speech and censorship...

Poor Switzerland.