This is how Swiss media call for even more war

by Christian Müller,* Switzerland

Dear guests

It is a pleasure for me to be able to speak to you at the invitation of the organisers responsible here. However, what I am to talk to you about is anything but a pleasure. It is a really sad story!

A long – critical! – letter to the editor on a military topic to the“Badener Tagblatt” in 1964, on the basis of which Werner Geissberger, the regional editor of the“Badener Tagblatt” at the time, asked me to write more often and also on other topics for the „BT”, became the start of my profession as a journalist.

Unlike many of my colleagues who dropped out of their studies at university in order to be able to write more – which was of course more fun than studying – I, however, completed my studies in general history and constitutional law with a dissertation on social history and obtained a doctorate (Dr. phil I), not least in order to be able to pursue another occupation in the field of education, for example, and – important! – so as never to become dependent on a newspaper publisher for financial reasons.

Professionally, I became a journalist, then editor, then head of department, then member of the editorial board and finally personal deputy to the owner of the “Badener Tagblatt”, Otto Wanner, until he changed political colours in 1978 – and not for the first time in his life – and slid massively to the right. That was also the reason for leaving the “Badener Tagblatt” and going my own way via the position of editor-in-chief of the then “Luzerner Neuste Nachrichten” LNN and later a media manager at Ringier and still later an independent media consultant and then as CEO of a Swiss media group.

Why do I mention these details from my life? My so-called professional career began with the correction of an erroneous article. That then determined almost my entire life. And because of my so-called career, I also know both sides: that of the journalist and that of the publishing manager, who is responsible for the economic success of a media company. I was also on assignment in Prague for several years, where I experienced at first hand that not everything in another country is always the same as in my own country – not least in the area of the media, nepotism and corruption.

Despite a rich professional background in the media, I could not have imagined five years ago how brutally the media scene can change completely within a very short time – for the worse.

There are three points I would like to highlight very briefly:

1. many young journalists are indeed „journalistically“ trained professionals – for example, you learn there that you should not write sentences with more than five commas for easy reading. But these young journalists often have no idea about history – world history! – and are often completely wrong in their statements and analyses of how a political event came about.

2. for reasons of financial dependence, they are nowadays prepared to follow even terrible instructions from their bosses without contradiction.

3. many of them have definitely abandoned the inherent humanity of advocating and striving for a ceasefire first in the event of a war to avoid further war victims. Many have actually become warmongers.

On the lack of knowledge of history

I will give an example here that is easy to understand and concerns not just a simple, normal journalist, but the editor-in-chief of the largest Swiss media group in the area of regional newspapers and regional private radio stations, the CH-Media Group – Aargauer Zeitung, Luzerner Zeitung, St. Galler Tagblatt and several other papers: CH-Media editor-in-chief Patrik Müller. The latter wrote literally on 5 June 2019: „Today and tomorrow we will again hear beautiful speeches, because the landing of the Allied troops in Normandy 75 years ago is being celebrated – the turning point in the Second World War that led to the liberation of Europe from Hitler’s Nazi terror.” And the next day, on 6 June, the same newspaper, for which Patrik Müller was responsible, devoted an entire double page to the same event, the so-called D-Day. Headline: “75 years ago today began (sic!) the liberation of Europe from the Nazis.”

These two statements are historically simply wrong. The troops of the German Wehrmacht and its allies were first truly defeated in the Second World War in the Battle of Stalingrad from July 1942 to February 1943, where both sides – Wehrmacht and Red Army – suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties. And the Germans and their allies were crushingly defeated in July 1943 in the gigantic battle of Kursk, known as “Operation Citadel”, where there were again hundreds of thousands of casualties on both sides – on the Russian side in both cases also endless civilian war victims. Since these two battles, the German troops were in retreat.

The Allied landing in Normandy one year later at the beginning of June 1944 – the so-called D-Day – was also a significant military event in the Second World War, but anything but the turning point! Even in January 1945, only four months before Hitler's surrender, the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill asked the Soviet Union’s ruler Stalin in writing – the documents for this have been preserved – not to stop the advance of the Red Army towards Berlin under any circumstances, since a shift of German troops from the Eastern Front to the Western Front that would become possible as a result would jeopardise a successful invasion of the Allied troops in Western Germany.

Whether editor-in-chief Patrik Müller simply has no idea about military history and blindly follows Western political propaganda, or whether he even deliberately twists history to glorify the Western powers, remains to be seen. A deliberate glorification of the Western military powers, however, is much more likely: In Birmenstorf in the canton of Aargau, the large-scale event “Convoy to Remember” took place again this August, at which a few hundred historic tanks and other military vehicles are displayed in a parade to commemorate D-Day. And this major event – with the participation of the “Patrouille Suisse” [Swiss Airforce Aerobatic team, ed.] – also took place under the motto “In memory of the liberation of Europe” and, according to its own website, it commemorated “the Allied invasion in June 1944” in Normandy. For the editor-in-chief of the “Aargauer Zeitung” Patrik Müller it would have been the opportunity to point out that this portrayal of the history of the Second World War is wrong. He did not do so.

This is just one – albeit prominent – example of how history is forgotten or even deliberately distorted by the media.

“His Masters Voice”

It has become common practice for the owners and bosses of the big corporate media, the publishers, in Germany as well as in Switzerland, to pick up the keys themselves – and thus publicly dictate to their writing slaves what policies they have to represent and what they have to write. For example, the boss and major shareholder of the German Axel Springer media group – which owns, among other things, the daily newspaper “Die Welt” for the German intelligentsia and the “Bild” newspaper for the masses – Mathias Döpfner, has himself written an appeal to his readers.1 Of the two remaining options, either to become dependent on China (together with Russia and Iran), or to clearly and unambiguously follow the guidelines of the USA, according to Döpfner, only this second variant comes into question: closest cooperation in the transatlantic alliance with the USA.Since then, which editor or journalist in a medium belonging to the Axel Springer Group has had the courage to question or even criticise transatlantic cooperation?

There is also a prominent example in Switzerland. The majority owner and thus top boss of the CH-Media Group, publisher Peter Wanner, placed his own editorial on the front pages of his many market-dominating regional newspapers on 19 March 2022, barely a month after the war in Ukraine began. Headline: “The West must take a clear stance”.2 Because in Peter Wanner’s media empire, too, the journalistic staff is being cut back continuously due to declining advertising revenues and the journalists naturally have to fear that they will be among those affected by the next staff cuts, no one dares to represent a more differentiated or even dissenting opinion any more. The adoption of the guidelines of one’s own highest boss extends to the linguistic formulations. Peter Wanner needed the rather unusual formulation in Switzerland of “showing a clear edge”. Remo Hess, the CH media man in Brussels, wrote about Ursula von der Leyen on 15 September – also in the headline: “Always showing a clear edge: For once, praise for Ursula von der Leyen”. Even the cultural editors of the CH media newspapers no longer dare to say anything critical. Even when the opera “The Maid of Orleans” by Peter Tchaikovsky is cancelled3 at a music festival in St. Gallen and replaced by Giuseppe Verdi’s “Giovanna d’Arco” because the refugees from Ukraine could not be expected to listen to a piece by a Russian composer – born in 1840 and died in 1893 – no journalist dares to criticise such downright racist nonsense. (The FAZ in Germany did so,4 after all).

Peter Wanner wrote in his editorial on the front page of his newspapers: “Putin has already lost the war in various respects: he has lost it politically because he is isolated worldwide, he has lost it morally because he is perceived as an aggressor and war criminal, he has lost it communicatively because Zelensky is vastly superior to him here, and he has lost it economically because the sanctions imposed by the West are taking effect and dragging the Russian economy into the abyss. Add to that the fact that by invading Ukraine he has not only strengthened the Ukrainian people’s will to defend themselves and united the Ukrainian nation, he has also united NATO, put the USA on the map as the leader of the free world and made the Germans rearm with 100 billion – as well as turn away from their naïve east policy.”

The fact check on Wanner’s claims:

Putin isolated worldwide? This is nonsense. At the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Samarkand in mid-September alone, the heads of government of many countries were present, which together account for a good 40 per cent of the world’s population. And they all tend to be on the Russian side rather than the US side. Practically all of Latin America and practically all of Africa are not at all interested in the war in Ukraine. The population of Ukraine is (still) barely 0.7 per cent of the world’s population, so why should a "worldwide" isolation of Putin come about?

Lost the war morally? Yes, you could say that, precisely because of the Western media – CH-Media included! The anti-Russia policy of the USA, Great Britain and the other NATO states with their massive provocations against Russia (NATO’s eastward expansion, missile bases in Poland and Romania, gigantic NATO manoeuvres on the Russian border and the refusal of security guarantees for Russia in December 2021, to mention just a few of the facts) is simply kept quiet in most of the media. The media’s aim is precisely to position Putin as the “moral” sole culprit.

Lost the war communicatively? Yes, because the Western media have declared Volodymyr Zelensky a modern saint and simply concealed his own misdeeds – for example, his refusal to comply with the Minsk II agreements, the closure of all opposition media in Ukraine, and above all the shelling of the Donbass that has continued for eight years.

Economically lost? That is complete nonsense. The Russia sanctions are hurting the EU economy much more than Russia. The whole of Western Europe is already suffering from the EU’s almost suicidal anti-Russia economic policy.

The Ukrainian nation united? And what about the Donbass in south-eastern Ukraine, which has been repeatedly shelled and bombed by Ukrainian troops since 2014, with at least 15,000 dead already? This, too, is consistently concealed in the Western media.

NATO united? Turkey still refuses to agree to the admission of Sweden and Finland to NATO – but for its part threatens NATO member Greece more clearly than ever before with war and the occupation of the Aegean Islands. A united NATO?

The USA as leader of the free world put on the spot? The reality is just the opposite: the US intervened massively on the Kiev Maidan back in 2014, with a lot of money and even with a personal appearance by Republican US Senator John McCain5 who urged the protesters from the Maidan rostrum to persevere. And who have since done everything to militarily arm Ukraine and train military personnel in the use of modern weapons. The USA did not only come on the scene because of the war in Ukraine, it is itself a contributor to this war.

Rhetorical question: In the 30 weeks since publisher Peter Wanner’s front-page editorial with these claims, has anyone been able to read an article in the newspapers for which he is responsible in which these claims of his were differentiated, relativised or even presented as false? The bitter reality of today’s media is that when the boss has spoken, everything is communicated in the way he has specified – facts or no facts.

But why am I only talking about the CH media newspapers so far? I could point out the same thing in the NZZ. NZZ editor-in-chief Eric Guyer wrote on 27 August, also on the front page of the newspaper, already in the headline: “Putin has lost”. And he too claims that NATO is now stronger than ever. “The West is united within its means. NATO, already declared brain-dead because of Trump’s muzzling, is more robust than ever. In a conventional exchange of blows, Russia poses no threat to the alliance.” Again, not a word about the problems within NATO.

The call for War

But what is particularly frightening are the comments of the journalists in which they explicitly oppose Ukraine’s negotiations with Russia and clearly say that this war must be fought and won on the battlefield – with the aim of weakening Russia militarily and politically. Normal human behaviour would be a call for a ceasefire to avoid further war casualties – on both sides, nota bene.

I have heard a good comparison from various private parties: two boys, a 16-year-old and an 8-year-old, are arguing and hitting each other. Then the mother of the two comes in – and what does she do? She walks up to the two, tries to separate them and shouts “stop hitting each other!” No mother, nor any other human being, would put a knife or even a hatchet in the hand of the smaller boy to be able to beat or even kill the bigger and stronger one more effectively. But what the Western countries are doing now is exactly that: they are supplying the weaker one, Ukraine, with weapons and ammunition – and what weapons! – in order to be able to better beat and damage the stronger one! They are calling for war, with tens or even hundreds of thousands of victims, military and also civilian. This is absolutely inhuman behaviour!

But these calls for war are real! When the EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, calls for this war in Ukraine to be ended on the battlefield, then – this is my clear opinion – that too is a war crime. But when even journalists call for ending this war not with negotiations but on the battlefield, what is it? And such calls are bitter reality. When Austria’s Chancellor Karl Nehammer travelled to Moscow in mid-April to be able to talk to Putin, Fabian Hock, the head of foreign affairs in charge of the CH-Media newspapers, sharply criticised Nehammer on 11 April: “This visit is not only pointless, but dangerous. And it is an absurd example of Western misjudgement towards the warmonger in the Kremlin.” Fabian Hock’s conclusion verbatim6 "There is only one way Putin can be tied back: Russia must be defeated militarily.”

In the same chapter belongs the call to stop not only Putin, but the Russians par excellence. The same Fabian Hock, foreign chief of all CH media newspapers and particularly loyal follower of the publisher’s call to show “hard edge”, elsewhere in the discussion on the granting of visas to Russian tourists, literally: “It is not only Putin’s war. It is Russia’s war. A part of the population that is at least indifferent spends its holidays in Europe as a matter of course thanks to tourist visas. That is simply unacceptable.” This quote by Fabian Hock is, by the way, also a typical example of massive European hubris. There are truly beautiful places to go on holiday outside the EU!

On this point, too, numerous examples can also be mentioned from the NZZ. On 30 August, to mention one example, the NZZ published a full-page article by a German author named Jörg Himmelreich with the telling headline: “Russia’s Asian legacy of violence”. And already in the preface was the sentence: “After 1989, people believed that Moscow could find a place in the European house.” And then come the explanations why Russia is not and cannot be a representative of “European values”. The whole long article is full of racial and Russian hatred. There is also a long article in the NZZ of 25 October: “The Russians remain passive”. Here too: the Russians …

The inconceivable could also be read on the front page of the NZZ of Saturday, 15 October, written by editor-in-chief Eric Guyer himself7 “A credible deterrent is therefore also today the best means to prevent the use of nuclear weapons.” And elsewhere: “Those who reject arms deliveries and justify this with the growing risk of nuclear war are mistaken. The opposite is the case. Steadfastness in the conventional sphere is the best protection against nuclear escalation.” And the concluding paragraph of Eric Guyer’s editorial on the NZZ front page: “Those who have not understood this are once again many Europeans and especially the Germans. The four Merkel cabinets refused to buy new aircraft, which are Germany’s contribution to the NATO deterrent. Before the Ukraine war, the three parties of the traffic light coalition also spoke out against this ‘nuclear sharing’. They also flirted with the idea of a ban on nuclear weapons. Russia and North Korea would certainly abide by it. This fantasy was also chased by the Swiss parliament, which feels responsible for the true, beautiful and good in the world in foreign policy. – Europe has been a dangerous place since Putin’s war of aggression. To prevent it from becoming even more dangerous, more realism is needed – also in dealing with nuclear weapons.”

So all these Swiss newspapers are not only calling for no negotiations with Russia, but for winning this war on the battlefield and therefore supplying weapons and still more weapons and still better weapons to Ukraine. And the same newspapers are also calling for racial hatred, hatred of all Russians, comparable to the hatred of the Jews that the Nazis of the time called for. Such journalists should also be able to be brought to justice as war criminals. Unfortunately, such war-mongering is not yet justiciable – but it is material for future historians.

You here, esteemed guests, most of you members of an organisation committed to peace, are absolutely right: wherever war is waged by force of arms, by whom and with whomsoever: it is not only the absolutely most important thing to prevent a nuclear war that could lead to the annihilation of all mankind. We must also fight against every smaller war – not with weapons, but with our voices and with our writing. And we must go so far that not only the military warlords can be brought to justice as war criminals, but also the owners and bosses of those private media corporations that call for war – especially war in another country. And also those journalists who follow their war-mongering bosses without resistance!

Twenty years after the end of the Second World War, in 1965, the then best-known German journalist Paul Sethe wrote: “Freedom of the press is the freedom of two hundred rich people to spread their opinion.” This saying of his is as valid today as it was then, only today in the German-speaking world there are probably only 20 and no longer 200 rich people as then who “have the freedom to spread their opinion”. Our neoliberal economic order not only leads to the middle class becoming smaller and smaller, to more and more people becoming impoverished and to money flowing upwards – upwards to the rich. Freedom of expression is also being lost more and more in the middle and lower classes and is becoming more and more the privilege of those who have full coffers. The US neocons are currently showing us again how the neoliberal economic order and the manipulation of opinion in favour of the global hegemony of the USA are closely interwoven.

Thank you for your attention.

* Christian Müller, born in 1944, studied history and constitutional law at the University of Zurich and graduated with a Dr. phil. He studied business administration at the (then) Handelshochschule St. Gallen. This was followed by 28 years of active journalism at various Swiss daily and weekly newspapers in various positions (editorial office and editor-in-chief) as well as 20 years of publishing management (management, CEO, board of directors in various media). For many years he has been running his consulting company Commwork AG on a full-time or part-time basis and has been editor of the online platform https://globalbridge.ch since March 2022. Christian Müller has a son and a daughter and lives in his second marriage between Switzerland, Italy and the Czech Republic.

Source: https://globalbridge.ch/so-rufen-schweizer-medien-zu-noch-mehr-krieg-auf/, 25 October 2022

(Translation cm)

1 https://www.infosperber.ch/politik/europa/axel-springer-medien-doepfner-ruft-zu-neuem-kalten-krieg-auf/

2 https://www.aargauerzeitung.ch/meinung/kommentare/leitartikel-des-verlegers-der-westen-muss-seine-feigheit-ueberwinden-und-putin-endlich-in-die-schranken-weisen-ld.2265259

3 https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/st-gallen-sagt-
tschaikowskys-jungfrau-von-orleans-ab-17975658.html

4 https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/st-gallen-sagt-
tschaikowskys-jungfrau-von-orleans-ab-17975658.html

5 https://www.infosperber.ch/politik/welt/senator-john-
mccains-aufruf-in-kiev-bleibt-unvergessen/

6 https://www.tagblatt.ch/international/ukraine-krieg-ein-
irrweg-nach-moskau-der-besuch-von-kanzler-nehammer-nutzt-nur-kriegstreiber-putin-ld.2275301

7 https://www.nzz.ch/meinung/ein-atomkrieg-putins-in-der-ukraine-waere-fuer-russland-ein-debakel-ld.1706905?reduced=true