Who is more crazy, the pacifist or the warrior?

by Christian Campiche,* Lausanne

(18 October 2022) Official Switzerland insists – it will buy the American F-35 aircraft. What for?

At the same time, the Swiss army’s budget is being increased by 2 billion francs. Who is offering more? The only advice I would give to federal councillor Mrs. Amherd and to all members of the Swiss General Staff is to read the life story of the Swiss apostle of peace, Max Daetwyler. What an extraordinary person! And I am not in the habit of indulging in eulogies.

Born in Zumikon, he is described in the online encyclopaedia as Zurich’s “most original” person. And for good reason: in 1914 he was 28 years old when he refused to join the army. He was classified as an intolerable psychopath and committed to a psychiatric clinic. Stop! The “Art brut”,¹ the label of the weirdo – isn’t that the fate of every person who that doesn’t fit in?

A career as a conscientious objector, a draft resister begins. Daetwyler protests against the civil war in Spain and China. His commitment saw him spend many more months behind bars, including in 1944 after he tried to call for a cessation of hostilities. No one is a prophet in his own country.

But Daetwyler is more than an exalted man allergic to cannon thunder. He is a pacifist at heart. In 1932, he met Gandhi in Romain Rolland’s garden on Lake Geneva and was guided by the wisdom of the world’s most famous hunger striker.

For the rest of his life – he died in 1976 – he only left his organic vegetable garden, his wife and his two children to travel across Europe with a white flag in his hand. In 1964, the man with the long beard can be found on Red Square in Moscow, raising his flag of brotherhood and peace.

Of course, from here I hear the taunts of the lecturers of strategic sciences. Utopia is dangerous, people like Daetwyler are just irresponsible jokers. Raising the white flag, adopting a defeatist attitude – are you crazy? Don’t you see what is happening in the world?

However, I ask you: who is more crazy, the pacifist or the warrior? The one who slams the brakes and decries the murderous development, or the one who presses the accelerator?

* Christian Campiche, 1948, is a Swiss journalist, essayist and novelist. He was a journalist with the Swiss Dispatch Agency (1980–1988), deputy editor-in-chief of Bilan magazine (1989–1994) and the daily newspaper L'AGEFI (1994–1996). He headed the business section of the Journal de Genève (1996–1998) and La Liberté (2000–2007). He is a contributor to the online newspapers Infosperber, journal21 and sept.info. In 2003, he founded the Swiss online newspaper La Méduse, which he still runs today.

Source: https://www.infomeduse.ch/2022/10/02/du-pacifiste-ou-du-guerrier-qui-est-le-plus-fou
(Translation “Swiss Standpoint”)

1 “Art brut” is a collective term for self-taught art by amateurs, children, people with a mental illness or a mental disability and social misfits, such as inmates of prisons, but also socially maladjusted people. (wikipedia)