Long live my own sovereignty!

The magic hat

It is empathetic that the kind of people who rule the world are concocting even more sophisticated forms of power to preserve it for themselves. The fiascos of the past are not to be repeated. The fate of kings, which used to be the norm, hardly invites one to reach for the crown any more. If His Majesty has not been stabbed to death, slain in battle or beheaded on the scaffold, the constant fear that some upstart would chase her from the throne has lingered on her neck. No matter how strong the castles, no matter how numerous the guards and cannons, no matter how deterrent the sanctions threatened to the unruly, the rule remained eternally shaky. In order to save their skin, they finally had to find a system that guaranteed them power and life at the same time. Why then, they will have asked, should we present ourselves as living targets? Let's make ourselves invisible!

Through the invention of democracy, they succeeded in this in a seemingly ingenious way: With great pomp, they put the people in the royal chair, while they themselves discreetly hid away. Henceforth, avoiding the public became one of their supreme principles. 

The newly crowned "sovereign" must have felt like Hans in Luck! Since time immemorial, the beleaguered people had had nothing but hardship to endure. Not only did they struggle for their own meagre existence, no! - the masters also had to be fed. 

Who would ask twice to get rid of the ravenous parasites?

The confusion

Now we are the masters, the people rejoiced. We elect our parliament, government and judges.

And they voted blithely.

We are free! Life is getting better!

The years went by and the people felt miserable.

When they began to get upset, the newspapers promptly said that the people in Russia and elsewhere were in dire straits. For a few moments, the people found comfort in the misery of others. As soon as the doubts continued to gnaw, they read the question, "Do you want conditions like in Russia? Since they already knew - as I said from the newspaper - that the conditions there were terrible, they declined with thanks. They did not want to go back to the Dark Ages either, they affirmed, when history professors used to report on the barbarism of that time. Although the people had neither looked into Russia itself, let alone lived in the Middle Ages, they faithfully believed all the authorities.

We have the most ideal form of government imaginable, democracy! Why is there this daily chaos, this unspeakable stress? What the hell is going on?

The answer is amazingly simple.

The fraud

The sceptre has been handed over to the people without the Reich treasury! This - filled with all the immeasurable treasures of the present and the past - the powerful have kept for themselves. The people remained poor as church mice!

The lords have transferred their fortunes into the "sociétés anonymes" (SA), the joint-stock companies. They brazenly had it guaranteed in the constitutions that all their property was untouchable and that they could do as they pleased with it.

As we know, they have made ample use of this and have had a single machine factory built, complete with all the trimmings, wherever democracy is officially and on paper. The people built them. And who operates them? The people!

Wars of conquest are no longer necessary. On behalf of the masters who reside everywhere and nowhere, the "democratic" peoples supply the entire world with mass-produced trash and rubble. The relationship of the buyers as subjects is established through the price of the goods: only those who have previously sold their labour to the masters can pay.

Miserere nobis

The Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, all the emperors in the South, West, North and East have always taken peoples into their power. A sharp look at the present day proves that - apart from the new names of the systems - everything has remained the same. The masters of America, Russia, China or elsewhere let themselves be served by their serfs and they rule their hemispheres with them.

The result is sobering. Despite the most strenuous efforts, all attempts to establish the rule of the people have failed. Who would think that democracy should finally be realised? It is quite obvious that democracy is not compatible with human nature: There will always be a few mutts who feel the need to lead the herd. Switzerland may serve as an example. After seven hundred years of "democracy", it is full of plutocrats. They have become masters of their trade. Not only do they hold their own in their paws, but they also manage the blood money of their foreign colleagues.

Down with the dictatorship of the plutocrats!

The rule of the people is proving to be an illusion. No one wants to be a servant either. If, therefore, the rule of all and the rule of individuals over others are out of the question as state systems, the ideal form of coexistence is the rule of the individual exclusively over himself.

Why is all hell breaking loose at the moment?

It is the masters in office who are clamouring and shouting: "Here comes another one who wants to foist anarchy on us!

Their excitement is understandable. They have always allowed themselves to be served. They have forgotten how to cultivate the fields and feed themselves. If there were no one to dominate, no more lackeys, they would starve to death!

The essence of monarchy is servitude. In democracy, as they tolerate it, it is exactly the same. Anarchy, however, which excludes domination over everyone else, forces independence. The monarchs lacked this quality. It is foreign to their successors, today's plutocrats. Unable to provide for their own existence, they must fight, for better or worse, to preserve the system that feeds them and provides them with all the other comforts on which they depend. Accordingly, they rail against anything that challenges their rule over the people. Even back then, when they marketed their "democracy", they succeeded in painting anarchy on the wall as a spectre, in making it a dirty word. It had no chance against democracy. Today, after the failure of democracy has been clearly established, things look a little different.

Not only has democracy never existed, it is also theoretically and practically an impossibility: everyone can never decide on their needs at the same time. Just imagine if every one of the few billion people on earth were to express their current wishes at the same time. The result would be an unimaginable chaos. Eternity would not suffice to compare all proposals in voting procedures.

Reality is - despite democratic constitutions - the rule of individuals over others. Even where the people vote, it is only individuals who prevail with their questions and thus their interests. A law never arises simultaneously in the heads of all, but is in its origin the spawn of a single brain. Its inventor stands out from the masses with one typical characteristic: In the upcoming conflict, he has the necessary power to enforce his law. All the others fall by the wayside with their ideas. The "rule" of the defeated is ultimately reduced to agreeing with the only one, so that they can claim that "we were in favour of it too". In this way, they are caught in a double trap: their own trap and that of the lawmaker.

What does such a trap look like?

Let's pick an example from the forest of laws: the Debt Collection Act. It states that a "creditor" - that is, someone who has money owed to him by another person - can send a debt collector to the house of his "debtor" who is unwilling to pay and, if necessary, take the money or its equivalent by force.

As is well known, only a tiny minority owns the "big money", while a majority of people owe money to this minority.

Now how on earth can a majority be so stupid as to agree to a law that obliges them to pay a few their enormous debts?!

Quite simply. The money lords have smuggled the debt collection law into the people's souls with a clumsy trick: "If you have money, you don't need to work, you can live comfortably on the interest. But you can all own money. If you lend it out and the debtor pays you neither money nor interest, you can force him to do so. The condition, however, is that you do not take the referendum against the debt collection law passed by parliament."

The eyes of the people began to shine with hope. At last, the longed-for opportunity to escape the misery of this world presented itself. Who could still be against the law?

But the money lords who spoke in this way were not for a moment unaware that the masses would never have money - because they already had it. There was never any intention of spreading money among the people. On the contrary, it was and is guarded like the apple of their eye. It lies deep underground in concrete and steel vaults. Portions of it are made available to debtors as loans. If someone defaults on interest or repayment, there's the famous debt collection officer who gives the defaulter a run for his money. The Debt Collection Act provides excellent services to the money lords. It has taken over the functions of the bailiffs and their lansquenets who used to collect tithes. 

The result of this little analysis does not provide any reasons against anarchy, but merely reveals the highly selfish interests of the plutocrats. With their money power, they dominate the people of this world.

If you put an anarchist and a plutocrat side by side, the latter comes off decidedly better than the former. The prime example of the anarchist is the peasant who just shuttles back and forth between his hut and his piece of land, owns his own well or cistern, is not connected to any road or electric line and does absolutely no trade. The prototype of the plutocrat is the entrepreneur who has the anarchist's hut torn down and a factory built on his meadows and fields, which conditions the organisation and infrastructure of a whole city and eventually the whole world.

It is clear that no one except the entrepreneurs and their profiteering lackeys actually wants this. So down with the plutocrats. This clears the way to proclaim Our Free State, as We mean it.

Let's have it then.

Long live our own sovereignty!

In our state there are no kings and subjects, no masters and servants, no directors and subordinates, no bosses and employees, in short - no relationships of superiority and subordination. He is distinguished by the fact that he does not know this paper which calls itself the constitution. Why should we allow ourselves to be restricted in the infinite diversity of life by such a scrap of paper? What was valid yesterday may already be obsolete today. We would have to sort out and file papers every day? We are not idiots!

Our national territory is the size of a shoe sole. That spares us the envy of our dear neighbours. In the entire history of mankind, not a single war has been fought over such a small territory.

We do not know airspace in its strategic importance. In the course of our lives, its volume slowly swells, then shrinks again and finally disappears altogether. Instead, we claim a place under the earth for the period of our decay. No one disputes all that either. 

How big our nation is can be easily estimated by describing our borders sideways and upwards and downwards. We do not need counters, statisticians or calculating machines: a finger is enough.

With such a myriad of people, the batches are quickly distributed. King without servant, servant without king, a bit of fool, a bit of runt, a bit of everything. We don't need a finance minister. We do not work with money, but with torso, head, hands and feet.

Ideally (we will come back to reality later) we build a hut, swing the hoe and make clothes. As a matter of principle, we don't trade, because you have to cheat or you get cheated.

Because we don't have a sabre, we can't rattle it. Our army is exactly one man strong, as is our police force. In war, we are either overlooked or every army withdraws because it would make a complete fool of itself to attack us. The sole of our shoe irritates no one, we have nothing to defend. The threat that our wife would be raped and our child violated does not impress us. Those who want to conquer us do not have to toil soldiers for months in the barracks in order to raise their most primitive instincts to white heat.

Our part-time Minister of Foreign Affairs knows no protocol. Meetings with nationals of foreign states, whether they are the same size as ours or larger, are dealt with on a case-by-case basis. Whoever acquires the right of hospitality with us has also gained a friend.

The worst thing that can happen to us is to suffer a violent death. What do we care. In any case, we will not reach eternity sooner by dying peacefully.

The reality

We undoubtedly have a rather sophisticated reason of state. Even if someone were to claim us as citizens, there would be no state to be made with us.

However, it remains rather unclear how we swing through all the storms and doldrums of life. It all sounds a bit like a jungle, unfit for the third millennium.

Let's explain the practice with a few biographical notes.

The Kaffir

In fact, we were not born as cave dwellers or pile dwellers. We saw the light of day in the middle of the Second World War in a hamlet situated at 47° north latitude and 8° east longitude.

Without considering our then or future consent, we were dragged into a church, splashed with water and, on top of that, enrolled in a communal register. We were henceforth considered Roman Catholic subjects of the Helvetic plutocracy. We were to experience what that meant for a quarter of a century. After that, we first inwardly and then formally renounced the clerical and secular masters. Since we are now just over half a century old, it is easy to calculate that we have spent half of our lives under foreign and half under our own rule.

Our maternal grandfather was a schoolmaster, our paternal grandfather was a schoolmaster, our father was a schoolmaster, our mother was a schoolmaster. We went to school from the first day.

Oh my goodness!

In our farming village, half a dozen farms and the cheese dairy were grouped around the church. A tavern rounded off the village. There was no pharmacy, so the innkeeper, the priest and the teacher probably represented the traditional three powers - business, church and state. There was no trace of separation of powers. We know positively that our civil servant father eagerly frequented both the church and the economy.

Our father's house was - it just so happened - the schoolhouse, which lay alone in the middle of the countryside. At the same time, it served the children of our hamlet, as well as those of a hamlet a little further away, as a place where the plutocrats had their future staff trained at the expense of the people. However, we didn't know that at the time.

Our mother was hired for the first to third graders, our father for the fourth to sixth graders. The mother threw a spanner in the works of the authorities by giving birth to eight children within nine years. She was replaced by two convent women, who also lived in the school building and eagerly helped to nail us down to the prevailing discipline and order.

In the confessional, after the extent of the child blessing began to emerge, our mother asked for permission to use the usual contraceptive practices. The request was denied.

Our first impressions are of the grey, smelly building, the spring with the flowering meadows and the country road. There, the big world rolled by: horse-drawn carts and, as the only motorised vehicle, the lorry of the "Papieri", as the paper factory about five kilometres away was called. At periodic intervals, the cart loaded with a metal barrel rumbled along the natural road. The chemicals used in paper production flowed out of a perforated iron pipe. Previously, the slurry had been directed into the river next to the factory. The observed fish die-offs forced the new disposal method. The directors must have thought it would be less sensational and more useful for killing the weeds in the street. 

We rolled around in the poisonous puddles that formed. It may be that the baths helped us throw off the yoke of the masters.

Our father not only mastered school, but also defended his fatherland to the delight of his students who therefore enjoyed school freedom. In the year we were born, his classroom was used to house Polish refugees. Our mother fancied a Polish officer all her life, so that a double paternity cannot be ruled out. We would therefore have a registered father and a natural father. According to Polish law, we would have been Polish before our declaration of independence, and Swiss according to Swiss law.

There we have the salad!

The celibate nuns and our procreative and childbearing parents were a bad match. The final row occurred because - I don't know which of the eight of us was the culprit - the contents of a chamber pot poured out of the window onto the bonnet of one of them.

The village

Our father was transferred to the village with the paper factory. Earlier, there had also been a milk processing factory there, which belonged to a now global food multinational. This information should spare the troubled readers from having to check the map to find out where our birthplace is. 

We were just ready to be sent to kindergarten. One day, the little bag of one of the girls hanging in the cloakroom was missing. Our nursery school teacher announced that the policeman would come the next day to investigate the theft. That morning we said goodbye to our mother as usual. Halfway to the kindergarten, we hid in a bush, waited there for the time to return home and pretended at home that we had visited the kindergarten. Even though we had not committed the crime, the prospect of meeting the country policeman spurred us on to this unusual behaviour. Threats of him, the madman who would come for us, hell and who knows what else, were part of the daily routine and inevitably led our tender childish soul down the path of highest "virtue".

Prevailing morality forbade our father to break the marriage. So he met secretly with his mistresses. To avoid arousing our mother's suspicions, he took us along too. We were given sweets, reading material and handicrafts by extremely kind women. It remained a mystery to us why the ladies could be so rude as to just leave us and disappear with our father for a while after the much appreciated kindnesses. We still didn't understand the connections even when we were asked about such details by a judge when we were young.

The case came about because our mother had caught our father in flagrante delicto in the bed of another, younger woman and because in his trained lack of imagination he could think of nothing more clever than to sue for divorce. The first instance rejected the complaint. The second court upheld it. The third court sent the case back to the second. The second court confirmed its judgement. The third finally dismissed the case. The fight lasted five years, the mother won the case and lost her husband.

She took full advantage of the fact that official morality proved her right and put our father in the wrong. She diligently antichamfered with the priest and the school president. Our father's situation became impossible. He could no longer stand the daily running of the gauntlet, separated from our mother, quit his job in the village, moved to the anonymous big city and continued to teach school there. For the duration of the trial, the family was cut exactly in half. One boy and three girls were assigned to the father, one girl to two boys and we to the mother. She also moved away and got herself employed as a teacher in a mountain village. We were interned in a convent school. 

In defence of our parents, it must be said that they did not implement their own values, but were imbued with the inane morals of ruthless, scrupulous and merciless masters. Having to breed their slaves on command and have to shepherd a flock of eight children through was by no means a good thing.

The concentration camp

To understand the bestiality of the German soldiers, one must know the barracks drill to which they were subjected. The Swiss plutocracy is best explained by describing its educational institutions.

The boys' boarding school that absorbs us is designed for an eight-year stay of the pupils. We enter the second class in the last trimester and immediately get caught up in the whirlpool of unheard-of cramming. There is no subject that is not on the programme. One exam follows the other; at the end of each school year, the entire material is examined again.

The day begins in summer at half past five, in winter at six with the radical shrill of the bells installed in the dormitories and other parts of the building, both inside and out. A supervisor makes sure that the sleepy crowd of boys is all assembled at the washing facilities. Bell. Mass is celebrated in the chapel. Everyone kneels in his place. After a few months, we master the art of alleviating the agonising need for sleep by propping ourselves up on the elbows on the upper slat of the bench, tilting our bodies forward and thus at least dozing - uncomfortably, but still. In this position we eagerly await the Sanctus announcing the imminent end of the ceremonies. Escaping the ordeal by playing truant is out of the question. The invigilator posted at the back can easily spot any gap in the rows. Bell. First half-hour study in the hall of the same name. Bell. The flock flocks to the dining halls for breakfast. Bell. First lesson begins. Bell. Followed by the second, bell, the break, bell, the third, bell, the fourth, in which we count the half-seconds, bell, lunch, recreation, bell, the second half-hour study, bell, the first school lesson of the afternoon, bell, the second, bell, the Zvieri, Bell, the "big" two-and-a-half-hour study, Bell, short break, Bell, continuation of study, Bell, dinner, recreation, Bell, last half-hour study, Bell, evening devotion in the chapel, immediately followed by washroom, dormitory, 2115 hours lights out. On Tuesday and Thursday the two school lessons in the afternoon are cancelled, otherwise full programme. Sunday there is no school, additional long mass in the morning in the monastery church with sermon, in the afternoon guided walk in column of two and with cap, great study.

It was strictly forbidden to leave the institution without permission or even to have relations with the opposite sex. Anyone caught was given the consilium abeundi, the "advice" to leave the school.

Retreats were held once a year. Three days of strict silentium, obligation to devote oneself to the reading of "edifying" books, which were given from a special library, non-stop sermons and lectures by external speakers. We remember Father S., who described in a shirt-sleeved manner how he had completed an apprenticeship as a butcher before his "vocation" as a priest and had overcome the temptations to do unchaste things by swinging a bundle of nettles over his naked body. In this way, the awareness of our own guilt and sinfulness was drilled into us. But we did not dare to walk naked through the corridors at night and look for nettles outside, especially in winter. So we kept on sinning and, on top of that, endured the torment and suffering of our heavy guilt and imperfection.

Farm life

We spent all our holidays, which lasted four months in the institution, with farmers. That was before the farms had been converted into small or large machine factories. After all, even then a farmer had to feed four families in the city - in addition to his own - so that they could put their potential to undiminished use in the service of the plutocrats. So although we too worked four times too much than was actually necessary, we counted the months, weeks, days, hours and minutes in the asylum like felons until we could run away to the country.

Today, statistically speaking, one Swiss farmer has to feed the mouths of twenty city dwellers. The consumers, however, do not have to be Swiss. The plutocrats cart, ship and fly its products around the globe. Even the most pointless transports are suitable to be used as a means of dominating the whole world. So the Europeans, Americans, Asians, Africans and Australians eat Swiss cheese and the Swiss eat cheese from Europe, America, Asia, Africa and Australia.

The next educational institution!

After the monks, university professors of jurisprudence completed the work of our education. The stars of freedom, democracy and the rule of law began to shine above Wilhelmtell, Morgarten and Sempach Switzerland.

In our souls it remained dark.

As in the previous fifteen years, instead of acting out our natural urge to move, we were stuck on school desks. The atmosphere in the lecture halls was unbearable. Our organism correctly refused the dryly served theory with indomitable leaden sleep.

We tried to find out on our own, rummaged around in the law seminar library and picked out a federal court decision from the immense shelves.

Help - the Chinese have conquered us!

The abstract brain acrobatics were not only simply incomprehensible, but also inedible. No wonder that - when lawyers are among themselves - their wives are conspicuous by their absence. The chatter is unbearable.

We were looking for a method to learn the new language in a more elegant way after all the foreign languages we had already learned. We applied - which was unusual for a student - for a job as a clerk's assistant at a district court, were accepted and thus unexpectedly gained an unvarnished insight into the colourful judicial kitchen. Our task was to take notes of the hearings, write the minutes and edit the verdicts. 

The material began to cook.

One afternoon, the judges had, as usual, enjoyed a good drop of red wine in the pub and the obligatory drink, and a divorce case was being heard. The lawyers were washing the parties' dirty linen. We eagerly took notes.

What do we hear? Loud and clear, the longest-serving judge snores out into the hall.

We did not quite manage to maintain the dignity of the court required by law and tame the threatening fluctuations of our abdominal muscles. One of his colleagues put an end to the priceless spectacle by brushing past the snoring man under the pretext of opening the window and giving him a violent blow in the back.

From now on, we understood the grey theory at once and - back at the alma mater - we could count ourselves among the few who knew how to answer a question sprinkled by the lecturer. By passing our exams, we got rid of the sword of Damocles that had been hanging over us for the whole of our studies and was spoiling our lives.

Taxi driver

We financed our "education" - apart from other jobs - mainly as taxi drivers. For shorter or longer periods of time we had to deal with people from all walks of life, crammed into these tin boxes: from the director, who was not yet allowed to afford his own chauffeur, to the stinking drunk who threw up his misery in our car.

Sacked! Quo vadis?

As we have observed, our fellow sufferers have bridged the gap between the preached ideal and the pitch-black reality with, among other things, the drinking rituals in the student fraternities.

They advanced to become loyal public servants.

This anaesthetic strategy did not suit us. We too were dragged to the orgy. But we resisted the whipping orders to drink.

Our refusal meant exclusion from the group. That was our good fortune. Instead of wasting our time marching in the herd and making both civilian and military careers, we withdrew for a whole year with the declared aim of thinking exclusively about the future. We spent the first six months in an alpine hut, where we developed the first principle of our nascent Free State: Sticking our noses into everything.

First, in order to be able to prove the one-year internship required for the bar exam, we hired on again at the arch-conservative court of a provincial town as assistants to the clerk. According to custom, he wanted to take us to each judge and the other staff to introduce us. We immediately explained to him that he could save himself the trouble. We would introduce ourselves. No sooner said than done. The judges we visited reacted in a slightly embarrassed or even astonished way. The lower court staff was spontaneously pleased. On the third day, the president of the court told us that it would probably be best if we left. Thanks to our well thought-out plan, we were flexible enough to put his idea out of his mind again.

After half a year, he summoned us to his president's room. To emphasise the importance of the occasion, the vice-president also sat at the big meeting table. We were accused of having a bad work ethic because we were regularly unpunctual in the mornings. This was true, we explained without hesitation, because as a matter of principle we did not use an alarm clock, so that we always arrived at the court well rested. Moreover, the judges' work ethic is bad. Their punctuality leads to them aggravating the fate of the convicts early in the morning with their wrong decisions. It would therefore only be an advantage if they were also late.

Both made a befuddled impression. The president reacted like a textbook lawyer: he vigorously rejected the accusation of having a poor work ethic. To dismiss us immediately without notice did not occur to him or the vice-president. They were too much under the impression of our words. We bailed the court out by taking our own leave a few days later. According to our calculations, we had served the practice time required for the bar exam. However, that turned out to be a fallacy.

Next, we took on a smaller and the largest insurance company as well as the largest producer and distributor of goods in Switzerland.

For three years in total, we studied the bowels of the Helvetic plutocracy meticulously, unabashedly, without shyness or scruples. We afforded ourselves the luxury of spending another year at the world-famous Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, where we were shown all the disciplines of a university, and concluded our snooping with a six-month internship in Swiss "development aid" in Africa. As for the quality of this aid, suffice it to say that Switzerland understands it to include the business activities of its plutocrats in the "Third" World.

That's right!

We have seen with our own eyes the seduction and shameless exploitation of the jungle people.

"Give me a firm point..."

We had checked everything and knew all the laws of the Helvetic plutocracy. Not a single one did we find good. Having to live in a state where every law is against you means hard back-breaking work. We did not think for a moment of submitting, but looked for a way of life in which we could realise ourselves and at the same time resist efficiently. Since every system of domination mercilessly combats any kind of resistance, we had to be clever, on our guard and expect everything, including the worst.

The castle gate of the Helvetic plutocracy hangs on two powerful hinges: criminal justice and coercive psychiatry. We had to apply our leverage there.

The criminal justice system secures the plutocrats' property system. Whoever cracks the safe ends up in prison. The penal code has also been foisted on the people with the eternal same trick: The few owners have made them believe that everyone can acquire property and thus participate in the power of property. However, they wisely told him, the thieves must be deterred with the threats and sanctions of the penal law. They concealed from him the fact that they already owned all property. Anyone who wanted or wanted even a small portion of it would immediately be caught in their spider's web.

Let us take house ownership as an example. A have-not has not the slightest chance of buying one unless he first goes to the bank of the plutocrats and gets a loan there. The interest is calculated in such a way that the full amount of the loan drips out of the borrower in periods of about fifteen years and he still owes the full amount. Because his other obligations eat up all his wages, he can never repay the loan. As a result, he pays interest for the rest of his life and bequeaths the debt and interest obligation to his descendants, so that they too remain chained for life.

"The penal law protects your life and your health", the plutocrats have coaxed the people. The legions who have been and are being killed or crippled in their dangerous factories and other enterprises, with the vehicles they produce on the streets and in the institutions they have pushed through, prove the opposite. The criminal law serves the plutocrats as a pretext for the powerful police and judicial apparatus with which they primarily have their own lives, property and order guarded. They move the people like tin in a sandbox.

The extent to which they have blindsided them with their propaganda can be gauged from the reaction when a policeman shoots down a money robber. Although the robber is obviously doing exactly what the plutocrats are secretly doing, the ordinary citizen thinks it serves him right.

Even more perfectly than the criminal justice system, compulsory psychiatry fortifies the plutocrats' bulwark. Anyone who does not conform or refuses to obey their order is declared mentally ill, locked up in an institution and tortured there.

Since a mental illness can be constructed from practically every behaviour and every expression, compulsory psychiatry has absolute carte blanche. If someone even dares to claim the opposite, i.e. not to be mentally ill, he or she is certified as being inconsiderate. The lack of insight, in turn, is judged to be an essential characteristic of the diagnosed mental illness: a diabolical trap.

We have nested ourselves in the Helvetic plutocracy as defenders of the criminally, psychiatrically and otherwise persecuted.

Lawyers' collective

With four like-minded colleagues and just as many principles, we founded the notorious Lawyers' Collective in the financial metropolis of the Helvetic plutocrats almost two decades ago: all members had equal rights and duties, we never defended an economically stronger against an economically weaker, our fees were adapted to the social circumstances of our clientele and anyone could come to us unannounced for advice.

We immediately attracted the crowds of the criminally, psychiatrically and otherwise persecuted, the "workers" harassed by the plutocrats, tenants and, of course, the competent lawyers' guards, who condemned us to hefty fines for "intrusive recommendation".

The cat and mouse game with the plutocrats and their ministrants had begun. The hunting grounds were inexhaustible. We were constantly chasing the potentates in the affairs of our numerous clients and on our own behalf, and they were chasing us with their altar boys.

Since we had soon got to know our friends down to the marrow of their bones, we were well able to assess our risks and operate at and above the limit in such a way that success and failure always balanced each other out. After decades of trial and error, the phrase "it's bad to always lose, but it's just as bad to always win" was incorporated into our reason of state. If we noticed an exuberance of success, we pedantically made sure to accept lost cases and not to try to win them with another trick.

In the two educational institutions we had learned to master respect and decency with somnambulistic certainty. Respectlessness and indecency became an integral part of our state policy, which we began to cultivate in a disgusting way. In precise doses, we spilled just enough of it to be noted badly and yet not enough to take disciplinary action against us. Thank God, however, we were anything but perfect, so that disciplinary and other proceedings against us were nonetheless aplenty.

Lawyers used to address each other as Herr or Frau Kollega. We called everyone obstinate by name or, if we didn't know him, asked for him first.

The insignia of the judiciary and the legal profession include a suit and tie. We came to the hearings in all other clothes but these.

Once we almost ended up in jail because of that. A dealer from better circles had been accused by the Swiss justice system of competing on the domestic drug market by importing a kilo of heroin. Our client was led into the courtroom by two policemen, dressed in a shell, tie, patent leather shoes and handcuffs. We appeared in our obligatory lottery gear. The debates dragged on and lunch time. The two policemen standing guard in the audience seats in the courtroom were relieved by two colleagues. We had already finished our defence speech, we lounged boredly on a chair, while our client with the judicially compliant gestures in perfect pronunciation, shell, tie, patent leather shoes and unchained made his last speech. In vain. The verdict was guilty, the president declared the trial closed, our client strode solemnly out of the hall, we packed our briefcase and the two new policemen guarded us closely at every turn. To them, we were the culprit. It was only when the president, in a flurry of excitement, drew their attention to the mix-up - nid dä, der ander döt! -they raced after our client and were just able to put him in chains in front of the court gate.

Lawyers are required, at least in the upper court, to use written language. From our very first appearance, we made it explicitly clear that we would speak as we saw fit. We used dialect at will and, on top of that, cultivated free speech. An opening with "Dear Mr. President, comma, dear Mr. Judges, comma, dear Ms. Clerk of the Court" could never slip through our fingers, which is why we did not have to react, like that unfortunate colleague, after discovering the lapse with an embarrassed smile and a shrug of the shoulders that demanded understanding. We simply refused to dictate our speeches, including punctuation, into a tape recorder and immediately order a secretary to put them down on paper without mistakes. We did not use a secretary at all.

Our impromptu speeches and the personal presence associated with them were not appreciated at all in a judicial world that could not bear direct confrontation with the misery of those "subjected to violence" and had therefore striven for and largely realised the pure, exclusively written and thus secret file process. It was precisely for this reason that we consistently demanded the uncomfortable oral, public trial.

Not that we were brilliant orators. We had deliberately never attended a school of elocution or practised diction. In contrast to our writings, in which we diligently transpose the crap and rubbish stored up during our time in the asylum, our speeches are peculiar, fresh from the liver, thunderous or sluggish, unpredictable and wrong-headed.

The only thing that counts is action. We recognise words only as the by-product of such action. The deed of a lawyer is to visit his client in the asylums, to associate with him, to stand beside him in the interrogations and negotiations, to vigorously oppose his point of view to that of his adversaries, so that he may feel more secure and be able to afford to behave more confidently than when he has to face the phalanx of his henchmen all alone.

The skirmishes with the state and judicial powers were our daily bread. In one of our first pleas, after only a few sentences, we were asked by the president to get down to business. We promptly reacted by saying that we had been maltreated with Roman literature in the reform school. We countered that his objection reminded us of Tacitus, who already two thousand years ago in his treatise De orationibus had spoken of those judges who were more concerned with power and violence than with law and justice and who had called on the defender to come to the point. But if he still did not want to come to the point, they impatiently remarked that they were in a hurry. "We have just heard from you, Mr Meier, that we have to get to the point. Now we are just waiting for you to tell us you are in a hurry."

Immediately we continued to palaver undisturbed. The presidents were not to be envied. They knew how to conduct a negotiation and rattle off the usual phrases. The sentence "get to the point!" was usually enough to trigger a hasty apology from the defence lawyer. But they were usually not prepared for the defender to hit back and were therefore overwhelmed to continue the exchange of blows.

We, however, consistently practised the ping-pong game. Against the more stubborn of the presidents, who did not want to give up even after our reprimands, we always came up with something tricky: "We would like to draw your attention to the fact that you can fine us or file a complaint with the lawyers' guards. We will then have it checked in the corresponding appeal proceedings whether you are not representing a pronounced party point of view here". Only rarely were we forced to say: "You can cut us off. But then the hearing will be cancelled!" No one dared.

Today, if it pleases us, we talk beyond the hour and calmly ask for another appointment to continue the negotiation. Interruptions by the presidents have become most welcome, we even encourage them: "Surely it is better to engage in dialogue than to be condemned to celebrate our perverse monologues in this musty courtroom."

If a particularly energy-sapping skirmish is in the air, we stock up on enough food and drink. We fill our glass in the hall and don't forget to offer a sip to the court as well. Strangely enough, the court is never thirsty. While we make the necessary sounds with our vocal organs, which include the tongue, we simultaneously shove a banana or something else easily digestible between our teeth, crush the food, swallow it and can thus easily counter any intensification of the commotion.

Unforgettable for us are the experiences with our younger daughter, who often accompanied us not only to the office, but also to court, when our househusband and advocate work collided. During a hearing, when we were pleading and she had already walked around our half of the hall, which was divided into two parts by the barrier, tugging at the curtains and otherwise playing all kinds of mischief, she slipped through a gap to the other side and suddenly became aware of the judges sitting in their chairs, who had previously been hidden from her. Surprised, she stopped, beamed all over her face and began to wheedle the gentlemen in gibberish. Since there are no rules of procedure on what to do in such a case, they had no choice but to stare at her and at us in turn. It is hard to imagine how they would have reacted if our daughter had not crawled back but around their trouser legs.

Our request for an adjournment of the court hearing for the purpose of changing the nappies made judicial history.

Our strategy is, of course, strictly calculated. With our speeches, we drive the court crazy, leisurely stoke its indignation and aggression against ourselves, and thus trap it in a natural reflex. For it can never allow itself to vent its anger on our clientele. The entanglement leads to a favourable judgement.

In order not to have to admit this to themselves and still get one over on us, the judges have spread the myth that, in addition to the legal reasons for mitigating punishment, another exists: being defended by us. What they take as a belittlement, we could take as a compliment. However, since we, as our own sovereign, are no longer dependent on the judgement of any earthly authority, we have become indifferent to praise and blame.

While the usual defence lawyer, handing over the copy of his dictation to the court in Gutkindart, requests at the very beginning of his reading that his client be found guilty and punished appropriately, we take a sharp look at the court clerk and admonish him to note that the defence explicitly makes no requests. We want to take them by surprise, to disrupt the ceremony.

Even what we have to say on the matter itself was and is unpopular. One letter, for example, of the Helvetoplutocratic penal code forces the judge to apportion punishment according to the offender's "previous life". Of course, it is one of these dead letters. If it were to come to life, this fine society would immediately collapse, as we are in the habit of blatantly expressing, because it would become obvious that everyone had a weighty share in the past life of the future perpetrators, so that the whole gang would have to stand before the judge and not one individual alone would have to pay the bill for the events and omissions.

Our method of making the judiciary's art of suppression unpalatable is simple and impressive at the same time. While the public prosecutor is giving his flaming speech of accusation, we note down the time he spends on the course of events and the biography of the perpetrator. When it is our turn, we let the court hand us the files, pick out the tiny personal file of our client and lay it demonstratively next to the pile of files on the crime itself. We also pull out earlier judgements and count the lines and pages on the person and the deeds of our client.

The results are always devastating for the justice system. If the crime lasted five minutes and the perpetrator is twenty years old, the prosecutors, who would be obliged by law to investigate the incriminating and exculpating circumstances with equal care, talk for one minute about the person and one hour about the crime. The personal dossier, only a few millimetres thick, consists of forms from which it emerges that the perpetrator has parents, possibly siblings, and has gone to school. In the sentences, the past life takes up a few lines, the crime whole pages.

The preparation of our defence consists mainly of meticulously researching the lives of our clients and rolling them out in the courtroom. After that, their deeds explain themselves as the logical consequence of all the miseries and frustrations they have been exposed to in their lives so far.

The classic career of the almost exclusively male property delinquents, for example, begins in the parental home. The father is uneducated and condemned to do the lowest paid jobs as a factory worker and the like. He takes out his frustration on the family in drunkenness and after losing control. The son cannot count on any support at school. The parents, unused to talking, shy away from talking to the educated teacher. Their own school days still weigh heavily on their stomachs. They have no teaching skills. The son slowly slips to the tail of the class. In order to still be considered something, he entertains his classmates with original and cheeky pranks. These, in turn, do not fit into the school routine at all. Instead of receiving constant praise, like the best in the class, he gets nothing but reprimands. And he becomes the scapegoat. The first embarrassments - warnings, repetition of the class - cement the situation. The years pass. The comrades break up. The son of the middle or higher cadre is already cruising around on a motorbike. Such a purchase is completely out of the question for his family. Our youngster's fingers are already itching. His well-trained cheekiness takes care of the rest. He elegantly swings himself onto the foreign motorcycle without any identification - unfortunately without the slightest idea of police efficiency. He is caught and ends up in a reform school. The doors to a "bourgeois" career are sealed. Soon he will join us in front of the bars of the court and watch with some amazement as, after the spreading of his life story, we also take apart the biography of the president of the court and go on to the last sentence: "If you, Mr Meier, had been born into our client's milieu and he into yours, you would now be in the dock and he up there on your pedestal".

We hardly need to explain that such a consistent and all-round reversal of the tables gets to the heart of the matter. The opposites appear for what they are: Irreconcilable. Soon we can spare ourselves the trouble of passing our time with diplomatic phrases.

The doctrine that the perpetrators are solely responsible, as incessantly proclaimed by the scribblers of the plutocrats, is shattered by the hundreds of known fates of subsequent criminals and their social circumstances, which are like two peas in a pod. On the contrary, property delinquency - along with the drug problem, the mainstay of "crime" - is the direct consequence of the prevailing property system. Just as the plutocrats have camouflaged their dictatorship as the rule of the people, they must, in order to complete their deception, put everything, and precisely because they are guarding a false property order, the delinquency for which they are mainly responsible, in the context that is most favourable to them: the blame is put on others and they themselves wash their hands of it.

The wind blows most sharply in the field of forced psychiatry.

We still remember one of our first clients who visited the counselling centre of the Lawyers' Collective as soon as it opened and explained that she had received a summons from the city doctor. We offered to accompany her. Two of us went to see the doctor. Astonished, our presence was noted. Probably because of this, we were asked very politely to take a seat and engaged in a trivial discussion. After about five minutes, the door opened and two heavy-set men in white coats entered the room. "So, Mrs. G.," the doctor rose, "I'm afraid I'm going to have to admit you to the psychiatric hospital."

This would certainly have happened if we had not been there. We also stood up with a jerk and briskly asked the doctor to join us in the next room. He followed us. We closed the door and told him that there was not the slightest reason to order the most severe sanction of all - deprivation of liberty - against the will of our client. She had not harmed a fly. The only reason would have been the fact that she had told her neighbours and the police officers they had called that there was lightning and sparkling in her one-room flat in the city at night. 

We believe that it was not so much what we said but how we said it that made the doctor abandon his plan. On our own, our client and we strode out of his large, pale building.

Besides being field, forest and meadow lawyers - we even stuck our noses into a patent case - we spent the first decade shifting the focus of our practice to criminal defence, but immediately after our first encounters with the practices of coercive psychiatry we resolved to stir up this wasps' nest in due course.

In the Helvetic plutocracy, not a bone cared for the defence of the psychiatrically immersed. The cases bring neither fees nor success, but enormous expense, all reasons that do not arouse enthusiasm in the ordinary lawyer. He would much rather be lured by a plutocrat as a member of the board of directors of a public limited company. He eats his bread and sings his song.

Our state policy and the needs of the compulsorily psychiatrised, on the other hand, coincide perfectly. They want out of the madhouse and we want them out.

The road has been rocky. Rejected, rejected, rejected were the verdicts of the prison guards. We had to listen to the scandalous stories of the victims, dig through the mountains of files, look for the other informants and, on top of that, organise our fee. Our clients were among the poorest. Our requests to be appointed as lawyers for the poor were practically without exception rejected. We were arrogantly told that the application for dismissal was futile.

We, on the other hand, thought to ourselves: "Just wait, you little fellows, we'll get to you yet!" We armed ourselves with hunter's patience and began to calculate not in years but in decades.

One of the most impressive things we experienced was not the wall of the institution, but this other wall of silence and defence. Regularly, the prison doctors strictly refused any discussion. They hid behind medical secrecy and could not be persuaded to talk even by our clients' explanations that they were released from this obligation.

Those who have to keep quiet have a lot to hide. So we set off. We spent weeks roaming the desolate corridors of the asylums. With alert ears and open eyes, we registered what was happening and found confirmation of what hundreds of clients had told us: Something is going on here in an uncannily cleverly camouflaged way that bears the name Inquisition and, since fascism and the Nazi methods, also these names. Only the pyres and ovens are missing.

The Inquisition made dungeons and crude torture plausible with the defence of the true faith and Hitler his camps and refined torture with hygiene and eugenics. Today, confinement in closed psychiatric institutions and torture with insidious neurotoxins are marketed - get this! - as "welfare".

The time was ripe

Ten years ago, we started defending forced psychiatrists on a large scale. As an example, we would like to present the case of Karl.

Karl the Little

During the Second World War, Karl's mother, who lived in the financial capital of Switzerland, wrote a long, somewhat long-winded, handwritten letter to her home town, complaining that her husband was constantly insulting her and politely asking for help. The city council summarily handed the letter over to the guardianship authority of the aforementioned metropolis with the remark, which was not justified by anything, that it suggested that the author was obviously mentally disturbed.

It is important to know that this authority works hand in hand with compulsory psychiatry. It is also responsible - alongside any doctor - for the forced admissions to the asylums.

She immediately set an official of the so-called investigation service in motion, who spied out the circumstances of Karl's family and wrote a report about it. It was underlined that his father had been interned in a psychiatric institution for several years at the end of the First World War. Karl himself, who attended primary school, was somewhat retarded in his mental development.

The dossier was opened: The father a psychiatric internee, the mother obviously mentally disturbed, the son somewhat mentally retarded, and all this in a country that had been significantly involved in the development of those eugenic theories that had led to the mass liquidation of people with so-called mental defects in its northern neighbour, and which had never publicly distanced itself from its involvement.

What had to come, came to pass. After all kinds of mischief - riding his bike without lights, pissing out of the window and the like - Karl received one month in prison unconditionally (sic!) as a first offender for stealing a bicycle wheel and pump, and further prison sentences for other minor offences. In no time at all he was also incapacitated, the dossier, as we know, had already been opened with the authorities.

In prison, the guardian had a conversation with his now 27-year-old ward, which, as he reported to the guardianship authority in writing, had been impossible. Karl had only ever demanded that he wanted to work as a self-employed sign painter after his release. He, on the other hand, had made it clear to him "that this was not possible, but that he now had to learn to do regular work and to obey the orders of others".

He could not have put the reality of the "free, democratic constitutional state" into words more precisely!

It did not help our Karl in the least that the guardian's requests were clearly unconstitutional, since the plutocrats had had freedom of trade and commerce specifically guaranteed in the Swiss Federal Constitution, and another provision demanded that all people be treated equally. It did not help him that until then he had actually made his way through life as a sign painter and with the periodic support of his father, but in any case without the slightest public welfare contributions.

When Karl was at liberty again, the guardian sent him to the employment office, inquired whether he had "complied with his order" and learned that instead of his ward, his father had gone to see him.

He immediately sent two policemen to look for Karl and they found him. He was, of all things, labelling a dairy shop! The two policemen dragged him away from his work and took him, as ordered by his guardian, to a work education institution 80 km away.

Karl - rightly - did not agree with this measure. - and refused - also rightly!  - to the best of his ability. The director of the institution reported the failure of his efforts to the guardian. He made short work of it: he personally took Karl to the same psychiatric institution to which his father had already been sent.

The story took place at the time of the "Cold War", when official Switzerland, along with the entire West, was barking against the Soviet Union and pilloried the internment of people there without a court sentence.

It has not said a word about the fact that it systematically imprisoned thousands and thousands of people in its own country, including our own Karl, without a court ruling.

For twenty-three years, Karl did not come out of the madhouse. He was tortured daily with the forced administration of severely effective chemical substances. As was later determined by an expert, his body and nerves were irreversibly damaged.

Karl demanded his release practically every day - in vain.

Seven years after the ratification of the European Convention on Human Rights, Switzerland became comfortable in allowing the psychiatrically persecuted to appeal to a court. When we took over Karl's defence, he had already done so of his own accord.

We often visited our client in the institution and collected the several thousand pages of files from the various instances. The court set us a deadline to justify our client's application for release, just when the lawyers' guards had once again forbidden us to practise our profession.

The two right people got together!

We had cashed in our one-month ban because we had ridden our bike through a one-way street as usual. Coincidentally, two guardians of Helvetia were standing there at the time. Our offer to settle the matter on the spot in the designated fast-track procedure was rejected. Although we were able to show them the keys, they suggested that the bike might have been stolen and that it should be checked at the police station.

The ritual there begins as usual: "I accuse you of riding the wrong way through a one-way street. What do you say to that?" "We exercise our right to refuse to answer." "This right does not exist in the present infringement proceedings". "We insist on our right". This goes back and forth for a while. The head of the post interferes and advises the colleague in charge to note down in his report what he had seen and what our answer to his remonstrance had been. "That is correct," we interject. The security guard boils and points to the bench in the guardroom: "Sit there". "There is no rule that says we have to sit down, we prefer to remain standing". The measure is full. We are brutally grabbed and manoeuvred into a police cell.

Nothing better could have happened to us. In those few moments we were able to comprehend a phenomenon that our clients have told us about many times, but which we had never really understood: The arrest shock.

For a few seconds we were close to losing our minds.

We don't know why we didn't lose it. Probably our sovereignty had already developed to such an extent that we had become untouchable. In any case, we composed ourselves and began to inspect the cell. It was whitewashed, had a closed upper window, was lit by artificial light and was absolutely bare: no table, no chair, no picture, no jewellery, nothing, nothing, nothing. On the walls, on the other hand, we noticed abrasions from rubber soles everywhere, traces of rampaging people.

The whole perfidy with which the powerful rule the world became clear to us at that time, practically in one fell swoop. We connected the experience with the experiences we had gathered in the educational institutions, in the barracks of the Swiss army, in the psychiatric institutions and everywhere where people are forced and ordered. There, not some random concepts, but mechanisms of oppression that have been tried and tested since time immemorial and constantly developed further are passed on from rule to rule and systematically implemented.

The holding cell is only a tiny part of the huge arsenal.

Of course, few of the executors see through the subtle methods. The judge who orders an arrest is not present at the execution. The policeman who takes action sees the reactions, but thinks that's just the way it is. If he were to refuse the order to arrest, he would lose his job and also the small sense of power that his office gives him.

If the practices are nevertheless seen through after a longer period of time, a few ingenious reforms are quickly announced, which, for example, the re-functioning of the monarchies into democracies, only perfect the rule.

After a good half hour, the door opened and the two altar boys of the Helvetic plutocracy drove us back to our bikes in their car. "This will come back to you," we announced. The next day we filed a complaint with the public prosecutor's office for deprivation of liberty and abuse of authority. After about three months, a colleague held it against the two of them. They responded with a counter complaint: We - unarmed - had frightened them - each with a revolver in his holster - by making serious threats.

The criminal case against the two policemen was dropped without further investigation, we, on the other hand, were charged, found guilty and, although we had asked the court to sentence us to the maximum penalty without mercy, we were only sentenced to conditional imprisonment. We had to give ourselves the same commentary that our clients have to hear: The sentence is not even worth the scrap of paper. Strangely enough, our appeal to the Swiss Federal Court against this scrap of paper was never dealt with and the sentence was therefore never entered in the criminal record. This turned out to be the case when we were summoned to appear before the court for the second time. Under the personal data of the indictment we were listed as "without criminal record". (The new indictment ended in an acquittal for a change, although again we would not have cared about a conviction). With enormous effort, the criminal justice system did not achieve the slightest effect; we, on the other hand, extensively gained priceless experience.

The aforementioned professional ban, with which the lawyers' guards tried to hit us twice after the criminal "conviction", also remained without any effect. The ban concerned our appearance in civil and criminal proceedings, but the court, which had to decide in Karl's case, saw itself, in order not to have to observe the stricter regulations of those proceedings, as one of the administration, to which the lawyer's monopoly did not apply. Every layman and ergo also a lawyer with a professional ban could be a representative. We retreated to a house in the mountains for almost a month, ploughed through the files, wrote an extensive, fulminant critique against the sinking of our client and submitted it to the court just before our disbarment expired.

As was to be expected with a general success rate of less than 5%, the court rejected the dismissal action out of hand. We were not deterred and appealed to the Federal Court. However, because we knew that our client's chances were even slimmer there, we visited him in the prison one after the other with six journalists organised by us. When the editor-in-chief of a well-known magazine wrote to the prison director with a few unpleasant questions, Karl was released within a week. For almost ten years now, he has been living in the financial metropolis again, running his circles to the delight of some and the annoyance of others.

And how did his appeal proceedings turn out? The highest court - although he had already been dismissed! - did not want to dismiss him either. It also stubbornly rejected an appeal against his wrong decision.

The case of Karlus was only one of the numerous cases in which we directly proved the high-handed federal judges wrong...

PSYCHEX

As the only lawyer in the plutocrats' stronghold specialising in the defence of forced psychiatrists, we became the victims' contact point. We could not possibly cope with the mass influx. Something had to be done! We founded the PSYCHEX association and gathered together those who were willing to defend forced psychiatrists. The response to the association's appeals was enormous. Suddenly, the incarcerated were no longer alone in the wilderness. The association made a breach in the walls of the institutions and thus in the system of power. 

At the judicial level, we forced a change in procedure. The three-member court panel that judged the dismissal petitions in the first instance was dominated by two psychiatrists. One of these gentlemen visited the "applicant" in the institution, wrote a written report about it, had it circulated to the other two and ticked off in his favour. In the first eight years of the court's existence, an average of 10 of the 250 to 300 dismissal petitions were approved each year.

We demanded that all three should be brought before the court to hear the internee in person. The Federal Court rejected this position the first time, but accepted it when we persistently repeated it in another case. When we showed up at the prison for the lower court hearing in the next case, again only the medical officer appeared. We told him he could go straight home because the court was unseemly. But the court stuck to its old practice. We had to run to the Federal Court no less than four times until the gracious lords who govern the metropolis of the plutocrats decided to change the court rules. In the first six months of the following year, more than 40 and exactly 110 forced psychiatrists were released via the court in the next full year.

We don't think anything of it, because we see the signs very clearly and know that the plutocrats will never give up their terrain and are already thinking of new ways to plug the small hole that has been created. At the moment, an "enlightenment campaign" of the institutions is running at full speed, the proceedings for disbarment brought against us by the lawyers' guards are piling up again and the number of judicial dismissals, which was previously publicly accessible, is being kept strictly under wraps. The examples could be multiplied at will. 

The 53 Swiss psychiatric institutions with their 13,000 beds, which are always full, have an annual budget of well over one billion francs, with daily rates of more than 350 francs per bed. The budgets of the chemical factories, which contribute their poisons for the compulsory treatments, are not cheap either. All those who are licking their chops at this cake will strictly reject in chorus the accusations of our compulsorily psychiatrised clients that they are being deprived of their freedom and tortured, claiming that they only have their care and well-being in mind. Their great clamour will stifle any criticism. While we are shouting here from the desert, the huge propaganda flood of the plutocrats is shooting through their media. It has already happened and there will certainly be no shortage of further attempts to declassify our description of reality and the conclusions we draw as wrong, bumbling, cranky, out of touch with reality or naive.

What do we care. We know what we have seen with our own eyes, heard with our ears and smelled with our noses.

Revolution or individual resistance?

If we imagine the state of the world as a huge, as yet unlaid mosaic picture, we have had half a century of time and opportunity to search for and place the matching little stones - piece by piece. Slowly the work has grown. With each stone, the picture becomes sharper and it becomes easier to find the right place for each stone that has not yet been set.

Of course, we have not sat at the tables of those who are heading for the trillions, nor have we taken part in the negotiations in the Kremlin or the Pentagon. Nor do we need to. The results of the decisions taken there - each time delayed - are unmistakable. We know from world history what monsters people can become. The present is full of their traces.

Of the two options, radically overthrowing a dictatorial system or standing up to it on a case-by-case basis, we have chosen the latter. Revolutions are useless. Even though the pyramid tends to topple from time to time with a roar - one tip always remains at the top. For this reason, we have merely proclaimed our own sovereignty. In a world that has been thoroughly dictatorial since time immemorial, we do not expect such free states to now sprout like mushrooms.

"Kick yourself out of the sun!" (Diognes)

Hunter-gatherers spend no more than two to three hours a day foraging for food. Since the plutocrats have had the earth's crust covered with asphalt and concrete, humanity has been at their service for eight hours a day for five days, and the rest of the time they track down the bait they have set out.         

We try to get by somehow. Our family consists of four heads and we are forced to squeeze just enough from the plutocratic system to meet our basic needs in the world it has usurped.

Dwelling

Our roof over our heads corresponds to the dream of the small speculator who copies the big ones. More than thirty years ago, he bought a meadow of 50 by 100 metres from a farmer in a suburb of the metropolis, built sixteen little houses on it and sold one of them to our mother, who later also moved to the metropolis. She had to borrow the purchase price from the plutocrats. There is a fence on all four borders, built by our four middle-class neighbours. When our mother wanted to sell us the property, we refused. Our two daughters have become the owners and also the loan debtors. According to Swiss property law, it is not we who can show them the door, but they can show us the door. We wanted to play this power into their hands in order to halfway make up for the advantage resulting from our age and experience.

Another important advantage is that we cannot be blackmailed. Our personal pursuers are completely up in arms if they want to get their hands on us financially.

We pay the bank loan interest to the plutocrats. Our anger grows with each instalment. We are constantly thinking of ways and means to get rid of these tributes.

The situation is downright grotesque. In Switzerland, the overwhelming majority of residents are mortgage and rent debtors. Creditors make up a vanishingly small minority. Nothing would be easier for the majority than to decree in a law, for example, the abolition of all interest obligations for housing in one fell swoop or, in the sense of a gradual transition, to stipulate that the mortgage interest would automatically be amortisation payments of the mortgage debt and the rental interest down payments on the purchase of the rental flat with mandatory transfer from the owner to the borrower or tenant in the land register after a period of, say, 15 years.

The fact that such absolutely obvious solutions are neither discussed, let alone implemented, is proof of the sophistication with which the plutocrats have the people in their grip. If such a discussion were to begin, they would start howling like wolves, slip into their sheepskins and drone non-stop into everyone's ears that the whole economy was crashing, everyone would lose their livelihood and suffer starvation.

Which, of course, is not true at all!

The proof is provided by every time of upheaval. In Germany, the inhabitants of the bombed-out houses no longer paid rent. While the West German plutocrats immediately began to tighten the screw after the end of the war and squeezed interest for the flats out of the tenants again, in East Germany housing became practically free. The East Germans did not starve. Anyone who looks at the conditions unimpressed by the plutocrats' disruptive whispering will notice that West Germany has increased quantitatively, but the quality of life has regressed enormously. In East Germany, quantitative growth has been modest. On the other hand, they are far superior to the West Germans in terms of quality of life. We have travelled to both countries and can therefore form our own opinion. We decidedly prefer the bright, interested and hospitable East Germans to the over-saturated, rushed and hardly approachable West Germans. In the case of the East Germans, only those who have already had their bacon pulled out of their mouths by the plutocrats are moaning. When they have eaten it, we will talk to them again.

The southern Slavs, whose lives we have been observing from close quarters for more than two decades, are currently at war. Before the outbreak, tourists flocked en masse to the Adriatic coast and pumped billions of foreign currency into the country every year. Besides all the other reasons, these billions are ultimately responsible for the war. The Croatian plutocrats simply did not like the fact that the Serbian plutocrats had channelled a considerable part of it into their stock exchanges. Why share it with them? So - following the example of their Western comrades and in agreement with them - they declared "democracy" and independence in Croatia and closed the borders to Serbia. It is quite clear that the directly affected goats there did not put up with this. Who among the Western plutocrats - hand on heart! - would tolerate such a thing? They, too, would react immediately with war if their sinecures were blocked. With the right inflammatory propaganda, any army can be mobilised. The Serbian army has also been mobilised in this way. A few shells aimed mainly at the tourist strongholds in Croatia so frightened the foreign guests that their flow abruptly dried up.

Our continuous on-site inspections have shown that the quality of life of the inhabitants of the Adriatic coast is not one iota worse, despite the sudden loss of billions in tourism. On the contrary. In the past, they were practically unrecognisable during the four-month season. They raced around like hunted monkeys and did immense work: milking the tourists and even cultivating their fields or fishing in the sea. Today they suddenly have time in abundance. All the tedious milking has fallen away. Of the money they made from their toil, the largest chunk went into the coffers of the Croatian and Serbian plutocrats anyway. The rest was taken from them through the sale of cars, television sets, stereos and the like. This only added to their workload, because now all these devices had to be maintained, repaired and replaced from time to time.

Just as the inhabitants of the Adriatic easily coped with the drying up of the tourism billions, the Swiss would also easily cope with the loss of the interest billions for housing. They would return to the essential, easily met needs and, driven by less money, find employment and leisure that costs nothing in abundance.

But it just won't happen. We will have to solve our little interest problem, when the time will have come, as usual, individually and with the resources of our own Free State.

Food

We feed ourselves on the vile foodstuffs such as the plutocrats offer in their department stores.

Clothing

Our clothing has already come up. The textile industry does meagre business with us. Tonnes of old clothes are discarded. We help ourselves.

Transport

The twenty kilometres to our office in the metropolis and back to our roof is carried by our bicycle in summer and winter and in all weathers. We find that if a horse doesn't need an umbrella, neither do we. Our best ideas come to us on the bike. In the office, in the law courts and in the institutions, all we have to do is put them into practice.

In the Helvetic plutocracy, it has become customary for people to prefer to get around by car. An average wage earner has to work a whole day a week to be able to afford such a vehicle. Those who do without may lie on their lazy skin for 2.4 months a year without a guilty conscience. The annoyance of the car manufacturers should not bother him any further.

Heating

The heat of our house, which we insulated ourselves, is generated with wood that we collect in the forest and bring home with the bicycle trailer. The big wooden beehive, stocked for three years, does not fit at all into the neighbourhood.

The speculator who sold our mother the house had an oil burner installed. We tore it out. When the boiler started to leak, we wouldn't have known where to get the money for a new one. At that very time, however, we boxed a man out of the institution who had money for a change. The invoice amount for the new wood heating and our fee were practically the same.

Such coincidences are part of our daily routine.

Pleasure

Our expenditure on amusements is zero. Our life is more exciting than any detective novel. We don't subscribe to newspapers, the television has ended up in the dustbin.

Health

For the past quarter of a century, we have been suffering through all our ailments and illnesses without seeking the services of a doctor or a pharmacist. We have cancelled our health insurance.

Repairs

Since we acquire little, there is little to repair. All repairs that we can somehow do ourselves, we do ourselves.

Expenditure

All in all, our expenses are less than what the Helvetic plutocracy calls the minimum subsistence level.

Work

Our office, like our state, is a one-man operation. The furniture comes from a second-hand shop or is begged for.

Our work is governed by the principle of "less is more" and by the principle of completion: we do not, like most lawyers, take on clients until we no longer know where our heads are, so that everyone comes up short, but dose carefully. Those who call upon our arts leave our office with what they want. We compose the letter, complaint, grievance or whatever together with them. If it goes to a hearing, the arguments emerge from the discussions and the joint reading of the files. What is important sticks in our minds and is also presented. What doesn't come to mind is obviously also unimportant. The rest of the fodder is provided by the opposing parties and instances at the scene of the event. We do not know the fear of forgetting something that is rampant in the legal profession. For us, the most honest justification of a complaint, an answer, an appeal or a judgement is the succinct "because we like it that way". What goes beyond that is lawyer talk and the sand that everyone shovels into each other's eyes. We have developed the ability to look up a court decision exactly at the point where, after many digressions, the hard-core assertion is made, which cannot be further substantiated and which also finds no support in any legal text. In view of the infinite variety of life - there are no two cases that coincide - these texts can be manipulated at will anyway.

We don't know the expenditure item "library". We know what we want. We don't need to look that up with any commentators. As feudal-salaried altar boys of the plutocrats, they only compile arguments against our clientele anyway.

Mail and telephone calls are dealt with immediately, erroneous decisions are passed on the same day if possible. However, we are tending to distance ourselves from the "legal process". We have already definitively booked the European Court of Justice and the Federal Court. We feel that even the lower courts will soon have to miss the pleasure of our presence. We don't want to be glued to the judicial glue until the end of our lives!

Our style means that practically every day we reach the point where we run out of work. Next to our daily bike rides, this is the most fruitful time. What we touch upon as one such "unemployed" will particularly disturb the plutocrats and their adlates.

Accounting

We command no servants and own no assets. Our administrative burden is minimal. We do not need to control anyone. So, to give an example, we do not need double-entry bookkeeping. A simple "milk book" is perfectly sufficient to compete against the tax bailiff. With very rare exceptions, we have not been invoicing for over a decade. Our clients have no money and therefore could not afford a lawyer. It has become a matter of course for us to organise our fees ourselves. It consists almost exclusively of the small or shakily reduced compensation that we receive from the lawsuits we win and the applications for poor relief that are not rejected.

Income

All in all, our income is exactly the same as our expenditure. We have not the slightest reason to be dissatisfied.

Island

For the past 13 years, we have retreated every year for about three months to an island in the Mediterranean Sea and live in a hundred-year-old house that we have renovated ourselves and which is located in a semi-abandoned village. Like mosquitoes to the light, its inhabitants have been drawn to cities all over the world.

On the island we recover from our burdensome commitment, create distance, draw new fantasies and strength to be able to parry the attacks against our clients and ourselves and to be able to lead our counterattacks. Without these retreats, we would have beaten ourselves up long ago and left ourselves at the mercy of the guardians of the plutocrats. They have become an obligatory part of our state policy.

We can repair electrical, plumbing and all household appliances, which is why we are welcomed by our neighbours in the village when we turn up with our toolbox. They exchange our services for their fresh crops. From eating them, we derive our competence to judge the lousy quality of the food in the Helvetocratic supermarkets.

With the barter economy, we come closest to our ideal state. We have no income, but also no expenditure. We experience for ourselves how astonishingly little humans actually need to live. Hardly can we be more aware than here on the island of the tributes extracted from the people and the ludicrous expense that the plutocrats are making with their luxury and its protection by the military and the police, among others.

Since we also support their rule with every cent we spend, we develop ever more sophisticated methods to stem the flow of money.

We are passionate about steering a sailing boat through the sea and into the teasing harmony of wind and waves. The usual thing would be to scam so much money out of our clientele with ordinary lawyer work that we could buy or charter a yacht. We would never dream of such a thing. Instead, we have made a disused sailing boat that was left to us seaworthy with minimal means, so that we can afford the adventure of lonely voyages in the open sea. If we capsize, we dive into the cockpit and pull a ball stowed in the spinacker halyard down to the masthead. This gives us the necessary buoyancy to bring the mast into a horizontal position and, standing on the centreboard, we can soon get it fully upright. The feelings that visit us out there do not help us badly to move in the swamp of the Helvetic financial metropolis. 

Money and love

We contrast the prevailing principle of earning as much money as possible with ours, namely spending as little as possible. Accordingly, we do not need to rake in money. We don't put a centime aside, which has led to the fact that the lawyers supervisory authorities who once prosecuted us for a fine imposed on us only obtained a certificate of loss issued by the debt collection officer. They quickly made that the subject of a case against us as well. (We believe there will soon be no more charges that have not already been brought against us).

Our poverty of money is not a principle born of necessity. In the asylums we have been perfectly equipped with the stuff it takes to be an altar boy of the plutocrats. From toilet cleaner to general manager, we could fill every post, collect all the wages together and bathe ourselves in money. Nor has there been any lack of attempts by plutocrats to lure us and put us at the service of their interests. We have sent them all packing.

We wouldn't know what it was worth spending money on either.

Soon after our release from the reformatory, we became the lovers of a filthy rich woman with experience of life. She invited us to London to her private suite. First she had us chauffeured to a clothing shop at the best address and outfitted under her expert guidance. She returned to her chambers with an elegant young gentleman. On one of our first forays without her company - we had planned to go to the highest tower to get a view of the city - we did not use the taxi as recommended, but the underground and rummaged in our breast pocket for money for the ticket, and found ourselves holding 10,000 English pounds in our hands. That was quite a lot of money back then in the 60s. In the evenings, we used to dine in noble company in the same kind of places. The only thing we remember from all these occasions is that we were served in such a courteous manner, as never before or since in our lives. A little twitch and there was such a guy standing there. From the table we went to the roulette table. When we confronted the lady there about the "nudge", she inconspicuously pushed a stack of chips over to us as an answer. We didn't touch it. Not that night, but on another evening we watched her blow the table so that the establishment's available cash was no longer sufficient and she had to leave it with a check. We attended the concerts, cabarets, film premieres and always sat in the best seats. We saw what the English dismantled in the colonies and put in their museums.

Coincidentally, our affair coincided with a time when the army of the Helvetic plutocrats had summoned us to complete a military refresher course. Failure to do so meant jail. We discussed the problem with our lady. On the same day, we received a doctor's certificate stating that we, who were in good health, were ill without ever having seen us. We sent it by airmail to the commander-in-chief of our company. The booklet said that we had been excused from duty in absentia.

The lady initiated us into the art of love. She was enchanted by our responses. That in turn touched us. And so it went on and on. For three months now, she spent huge amounts of money every day and did not show the slightest signs of fatigue.

It was not the love that became too much for us, but the fuss.

We travelled back to the speculator's house of returns.

She called us once more and we answered this call to bid a wistful farewell. On this occasion she prophesied that we would take a beautiful young girl as our wife.

The prophecy came true.

Money and more money

Since word got out that we are an extremely tenacious lawyer, we have been confronted again and again with offers to take on assignments in which much, very much money is being fought over. Although we know from the outset that we will never carry out the mandate, we nevertheless allow ourselves to be instructed comprehensively. It is about inheritances, division of property, business divisions and much more. One of them wanted to hire us because he accused a Swiss bank of defrauding him of several millions. We deliberately kept him warm for a longer period of time in order to gain a more detailed insight into the bank's behaviour.

In all property crimes there is always an "injured party" who has to suffer a "pecuniary loss".

The poor man!

We lack any insight to admire its would-be plutocrat principle and regret its damage.

We have had and continue to have the opportunity, to the point of exasperation, to trace the effects and implications of money on people globally and individually. Our conclusion is incontrovertible: money brings unhappiness.

Those who have it have to spend a lifetime worrying about keeping it. And those who have none pine for it for life.

We do not feel the least desire to waste our precious days with such nonsense.

Free spirit

The most outstanding element of our own free state is our consciousness of being a mere mortal. We crack problems we encounter with the simple statement that our death is imminent. Momentarily, the problem is solved. Only what can still claim importance in the face of our death is really important. These are the questions about where we come from and where we go to and about the mysteries of life in general.

We consider not only ourselves, but every human being as an ordinary mortal. Whoever strives to build himself up before us in his glory, we reduce to the moment of his last breath. All that glory is immediately over and done with.

Unlike all these states that look back with pride on the centuries of their past, tirelessly conjure up the great future and yet have nothing but to constantly cover up their miserable present, we know that our Free State will not outlast us for a single second.

Whenever we confront nationals of foreign states with our domestic and foreign policies, we are preaching to the choir. At the bottom of their hearts, people know or suspect that they are being hugely short-changed by the water-preaching and wine-drinking seducers of the people. What most of them lack are just the few sentences that succinctly describe the deception. The fact that we provide them with the text is a relief. Finally, when we realise together that the imposing facades of the powerful of this earth are without exception hollow, we almost feel a little sorry for them. In the end, the deceivers deceive themselves.  

The meaning of life

We have spread out the theory and practice of our peculiar free state. They are not instructions on how to rake in maximum profit with minimum effort. It should have become clear that we neither want to be a person sitting at a cash register, putting the goods on the conveyor belt with our left hand, reading the prices, typing them in with our right, calling the total, collecting coins and notes, nor a director supervising everything and certainly not the plutocrat bagging the money.

If we recapitulate the meaning and purpose of our lives so far, we have been trained to take on functions in the production, distribution, disposal of goods or in the service sector for the benefit and piety of the money lords.

But instead of being a capable success-rate enhancer, we have spent the other half of our lives on the side of those people who permanently disrupt and sabotage the plutocrats' enterprises.

From the point of view of school economics, we are making an outright bad investment.

We do not know how long we will continue to wander on this earth. Our goal is to spend the rest of our lives as that perfect anarchist who sets up his hut next to his field and burns all bridges to "democracies" or the like.

Perhaps in this way we will succeed in discovering the real meaning of our lives on a quiet corner of this earth. 

Hvar 1993

The Coronation

Prophetic words! Just as I was writing them down, I received an anonymous letter in Hvar saying that they had nothing against me, but that my wife was a Serb and that the Serbs were waging war against the Croats and killing Croats. My wife had to leave the country as soon as possible. This prompted us to look for a small farm of about one hectare in Serbia. We found it.

The immediate reason for definitely breaking down my tents in blood money metropolises could not have been more typical. As is well known, the subjects there are permanently under the thumb of tax lords. They tried to harass me, too. According to the tax law, every self-employed person is obliged to record and document his income and expenses. For the reasons I have already explained, my balance sheets regularly turned out so miserable that only a minimal head tax flowed into the state coffers. Because no one wanted to take this off my hands as a lawyer, I was summoned to appear before the commissioner responsible for me every two years.

The ritual was always the same: I entered his dreary little room with the aforementioned "milk booklet", my file of receipts and a prepared A3 sheet of paper, into which I had cut a small window with scissors, big enough to show a number. In the booklet there were only two columns labelled "On" and "Off" and the corresponding text "Fee" and "Expenses" respectively, as well as an order number which corresponded to the respective receipt stowed in the folder.

I willingly handed it over to the official, explaining that the tax law only required a minimal list, which my series of numbers easily met. "Show me the receipt for the income item so and so", he opened his examination. I let him tell me the file number, opened my folder and covered the contents of the document with my prepared sheet. I guided the little window on it to the place where the number written in the booklet appeared. He was then allowed to take a look at it. "Everything else is attorney-client privilege," I repeated in a tone that brooked no contradiction. After a few more spot checks, in which the entries in the book and on the receipts matched exactly, he turned around, hacked the assessment decision confirming my tax return into his typewriter and handed it to me for signature with the remark: "Nothing but expenses".

This official had obviously understood that I was no ordinary lawyer and that my sophisticated economics were not theory but practice.

In 1994 the tide turned. A new tax commissioner, who had been educated in the same institution as I, of all places, had become responsible for me, a greenhorn and careerist in one person, who at the very beginning of the audit grandly trumpeted that his sharp methods had already brought in millions for the state. He did not like the way I let him look at my cards at all. After a few rehearsals, he stopped the exercise and declared that I would be informed in writing. I was promptly served with an order to hand over all my bank documents. My telephone calls to about ten colleagues revealed that no one had ever heard of this. So I cut out the pages with the lawyer's section from the telephone book and filed a motion for evidence that all of the approximately one thousand lawyers in the blood money metropolis listed in the enclosure were to be questioned as witnesses as to whether they had had to produce their bank documents in tax proceedings. If this was not the case, I would be treated arbitrarily unequally, which would violate the constitutional principle of equality.

Of course, the bailiff knew very well that such an evidentiary procedure would have been highly unfavourable for him, which is why he went straight to the next prank and self-importantly assessed me with some fancy figure that would have brought the state treasury about a thousand times my usual poll tax.

He seriously underestimated me! To make fun of the honourable gentlemen, I challenged his decision, which led to a hearing before the competent Appeals Commission. At that time, during my annual retreats, I had just had the opportunity to sail yachts far across the seas, which I made possible for myself, free of charge and carriage paid, by ferrying them thousands of miles. I have only touched on the sheer arbitrariness of the official in my scolding of the tax assessment. With the wise saying that one crow does not peck out another's eye, I clearly foresaw the verdict. I duly emphasised this. My arguments culminated in the cheerful declaration that it would be an honour for me to receive a Swiss debt collector on the high seas. "Do we even have to listen to this," one member snapped. The meeting was closed.

Since my exodus was already programmed, I immediately deregistered in Switzerland. When asked where, I replied that it was nobody's business. While I was already abroad, the hefty bill from the tax office fluttered to my old address. It has remained unpaid to this day. The authorities did not even try to collect their "credit". Based on my tax files, they reliably knew that due to the lack of attachable assets, only a loss certificate would have resulted.

So after all: "Nothing but expenses...".

Now I no longer have to fill out tax returns, enrich health insurance companies, pull out my wallet or credit card at every turn. I have even managed to liquidate my children's mortgage debt and with it the interest burden - how, remains my state secret.

In a first phase after my brilliant departure, I still commuted back and forth between the new centre of my life's relationships and the place of my former work, only to travel to Alpine Germania every other winter from the turn of the millennium onwards and - as Tucholsky did for his time - to realise each time again that "everything is still the same".

There is no question in my mind that I, as an original farmer, have found my way back to the most efficient life strategy of all and have thus crowned my own sovereignty.

The ingenious pact with nature

Whereas in Switzerland I was one hundred percent dependent on agriculture, food, other industries, intermediaries and services to meet my basic needs, this has now been reduced to around five percent. I produce my own food - apart from oil, sugar and a few other products. My house and farm are maintained by me. My clothes come mainly from garments discarded in the West. I earn the minimum amount of money, about one-twentieth of what I would need in a plutocracy, by counselling forced psychiatrists and their relatives, who come to the PSYCHEX association via the internet.

My everyday life is exciting and varied. I wouldn't want to change places with a president, bank director, factory owner or one of their lackeys. Without false modesty, I can say that I know - as far as is humanly possible - what holds the world together at its core.

28 October 2004                           Edmund Schönenberger