 Thank you to all of you, to Gülsino Hans especially for the invitation, and for all of you, and to allow me to share with you some thoughts about Switzerland as usually when I'm talking about that tiny, not so important country over there in the Alps, you know. Sometimes people are interested in that country because one says it's a sort of example of good democracy. And maybe this is not that true. The title of my presentation is this, Swiss Confederation 2023. This year is an anniversary year, and what about the last 25 years ahead? Again, this is what they celebrate. This year in Switzerland, this beautiful picture, isn't it nice? I mean, these allegorical figures, you know, that's the new constitution. In the middle, you see that lady on the throne, so to speak, that is Helvetia. And beside her, this is something like Mr. Switzerland or so with the flag. And then you have the economy on the one side, the civil part of the population on the right side. You have the military part. You see that nice angel or something like that in the heaven. This is the one who pronounces peace. They have made a peace. They had some differences. In the meantime, they have peace. They have found together and adopted their new constitution. The paper this lady has in the hand is the new constitution. And if you look at it closer, the date that is written there, that's September 12th, 1848. So this means that now we celebrate, let's say, they celebrate in Switzerland the 175th anniversary of the birth of modern liberal democratic Switzerland. This is what the mainstream says. This is what is in the history school books, you know. We heard about this is the official celebration this year. A couple of days ago, on the 12th of 2023, there was the official celebration in the parliament building, things like that. So that's what I'm now talking about. How did it come to this beautiful event of that new constitution? In 1815, they entered these 22 cantones, entered in a looser confederation. So that was not a tight state constitution or something like that. It was a confederation, a relatively loose confederation. I put everything in blue, what has to do with freedom, with libertarianism, with anarchy, things like that. And I put in red what is the opposite of it. And while they had this loose confederation, I think that was a quite decentralized, useful treaty. Within this group, the so-called liberals developed a quite extreme aggressiveness against the conservatives. They even attacked, sort of militarily, some small warlords out of the liberal cantones, went, for instance, to Lucerne, which was a conservative Catholic canton, in order to remove their government. That was not successful, things like that. But these attacked cantones, the conservative Catholic cantones attacked. They made what one does in such a situation, they made a treaty among them in order to defend themselves against their aggressive colleagues in this confederation. That is the famous Sonderbund, this special treaty, this defense treaty. And Sonderbund, something like a separate, separate treaty, means Sonderbund. And of course the liberals are outraged, that's against our rule we have, you are not allowed to form your own Sonderbund. They started the Sonderbund war and they won the war, the liberals against the conservatives. So these aggressive liberals started the war and won the war. And of course they used that as a pretext, not only to dissolve the Sonderbund, which would have been the logical consequence, but to implement a new constitution, to enforce a new constitution. And now you see the figures how this constitution became into force. There were 15 and a half cantones that adopted this constitution. Of course that were the winning part of the Sonderbund Creek. So the winner out of their strength position they implemented this constitution. This half, 15 and a half, this is because some cantones had been divided earlier. That's why not just 15 cantones, but 15 and a half. And for this constitution, while the loser of course, approximately there were some neutral cantones as well, but in principle the loser of this war were against 6.5. Now unanimity would have been necessary in order to form a new state out of a group of principally independent small states. It's not possible to form them together just by majority. And this was generally accepted by international law, by state law so to speak, what that kind of state was concerned, it was quite clear unanimity is necessary in order to form a new state. But they were the winners and that's why they enforced it. In other words, this beautiful event here, you should write it not in blue letters, but in red letters according to my, you know, color principle. That was not, I would say, the birth of modern liberal democratic Switzerland, but it was illegal coup d'etat. That's what we are celebrating this year, strangely, but I think these are the facts. Of course, they call it differently now, the mainstream from the left to the right. Everybody says, no, no, no, that was not illegal, that was revolutionary. They put it in blue, you know, and say that was liberation, a revolutionary revelation from the ancien régime that was against the conservative cantones, you know, and that's why this looks a bit like King of France or so, and they resisted against that and that's why it's not quite illegal, it's revolutionary. And they have an argument, so these official historians, they say around Switzerland and other countries, too, there were revolutionary movements really against ancien régime authorities, mainly not quite successful at that time, maybe later when these national states were created, and that was just, you know, such a revolution in Switzerland, but that's not true. In Switzerland, they did not stand up against, you know, some higher ancien régime structures. What we have here is something different. Again, in red, I would say an aggressive subjection of defensive, peaceful, conservative cantones. So that was not revolutionary, that was just simple, illegal. So I would say that constitution is an illegal constitution, and this is what they celebrate this year. Now, one could think, okay, that was a stigma of that situation, maybe in the meantime, this was healed, the stain was wiped out, but this, too, is not the case. There has been several partial amendments of the constitution, but there have been two total revisions. They call it total revision, and here again, first we have again this new constitution of 1848 with this continental majority, I already mentioned, 15.5 against 6.5. And by the way, it's not only a confederation of the cantones, but also of the people. They did not only count the cantones, but also the people. And if you look at it closer, of course, there were more yes than no, but there were very few only people that were allowed to vote. And that's why if you compare it with the whole Swiss population at that time of 2.4 million people, those who approved it, explicitly approved it, wrote yes on the slip, these were 6% of the population. Of course, one can say those who did take part, these were a sort of representation of the whole population, but I think 6% is a little bit small to be able to represent the country. So these were the figures 1848, and now what these two further total revisions are concerned, unfortunately, that was not different. We see that here there was a revision in 1874. The very same cantones, almost the very same cantones were for this revision, and again the same parties, you know, winner of Sonderbund and loser of Sonderbund, there were even two more cantones against that. So it was even far away from this unanimity that would have been necessary. And then relatively a recent revision we had in 1999, which was purely a formal one, not very much content related. Again, that's really, it seems, a stable relationship. 13 cantones pro and ten no. If you count precisely, there is one canton more in the meantime. Canton Yura came to university, one canton was divided into two, and that's why the sum is one more. And what the population is concerned, you see this is a bit higher than in 1848, but it's 12% in 74 and 13% about the same ratio in 1999. And one can ask, is this representative, where do they take their right to, you know, give a constitution to the other 87%? I do not know, but so this means that this stain, this mistake, this illegality in the original constitution is still there. So that's what I wanted to share with you about the celebration in Switzerland, but now it's only a quarter of an hour, and that's why I add something else. So how shall we deal with this? I mean, is this the situation? Okay. Or shall we try to put it in a broader context? And in order to do that, I would like to go back to this gentleman. Maybe you recall him from my speech two years ago in 2021. This is the famous, at least in Switzerland, the famous William Tell. Blue, I take him in blue of course, because he is the anarchist. William Tell is a mythological person, of course, in 12,191 he killed the tyrant, and it's typical for him. He doesn't speak very much, he acts. He doesn't go to assemblies in order to discuss political issues, he acts. That's why this famous sentence of him, everybody in Switzerland knows it, the axe at home often saves the carpenter. So he builds his house and repairs his house with the axe. He doesn't need anybody else. He shoots the tyrant not with the axe, for that he has the crossbow. That's William Tell, the anarchist. And on the other side we have this gentleman. He is called Hermann Gessler also out of this drama by Frieder Schiller. And he says, I'm the empress servant. He is the embodiment of the top-down approach. He is the representative of power, or one can say he is the anarchist. You see, the anarchy is not as, as you know, something like un-order or so. Anarchy means without archer, without predominance, without monopolized power. This is what anarchy means. And the opposite, I mean, without this negative part is archism. And that, in my understanding, is an archist structure. And Hermann Gessler is the, you know, personification of archism. And then, now we are trying to put that in a broader context. What I developed then two years ago was this, that I said here on the arrow of the history and the starting over there in that mythological story of 1291 with, on the bottom side I put the archist part in blue, on the top side comes the anarchist in blue and on the top side the archist in red. That's why Gessler is there and Tell is on the bottom side. Now we have this tradition I showed last time. This anarchist tradition, one could say, of Switzerland. They never had a center in the sense of a capital or a common government or something like that. That was always a treaty, something loose, with a lot of conflict, spirit between Catholics and Protestants or conservatives and liberals, as I showed you before. That was typical. That was not paradise at all, but that was anarchism. In a way, until this happened, when Napoleon came a couple of centuries later and introduced this Hilfetic Republic that was a unified, Napoleon-minded, liberal country, but not for a long time after Napoleon, they had this treaty I mentioned before, this confederation. And then, as we know, in the meantime, we had the Civil War, we had the illegal Constitution of 1848 and then we have this, one could say, the archist development. One could say, until mid of 19th century, they have more or less this anarchist tradition and then it changed to the archist development. By this event, they celebrate this year. Of course, and during that time, ongoing concentration of power. So we have this broader context, what the Swiss history a bit more back is concerned. And now, if you're still alive and awake, yes, it's fine. I would even broaden more of the context. Also, recalling what I showed you two years ago, the even bigger picture. Maybe you recall this. Again, we have on the bottom side this anarchist cultural, behavioral development, going back to the Neolithic Revolution, agriculture, sedentaryness, and a big part, at least, of humanity that was still in decentralized, not monopolized structures. For instance, Switzerland, you see here, with the timetable then, what we saw before, but that was the prolongation of a much longer anarchist tradition of humanity. But, as then I showed you two years ago, some when in the past, not as close as this Swiss history, but some thousands of years earlier, around 3000 before Christ, this new phenomenon of states all together came up. Namely with these big city-states in Mesopotamia as a new phenomenon. And then one could say that from that time on, there was still developing and concentrating history of power with the Roman Empire, with absolutist states, with the national states, then we come to our closer story. So this is the even bigger context with the state all together to put our Swiss story into that story. And of course, like always in these red parts where these anarchist structures are at work, it's accompanied by battles, by wars, such as, for instance, world wars. This is typical for the red part. That was the broader context. Now let's go back to our tiny Switzerland, to our celebration. We have that other context now in mind and are going to this. As I told you, on the 12th of September, they celebrated Happy Birthday. Actually, now to put it more precisely, what do we celebrate? In the meantime, we know it a little bit, but just to summarize, what we celebrate is that civil war, the illegal constitution. What we further celebrate is, for a long time, the Catholics, those conservative cantons, were excluded almost out of the political discussions in the parliament, in the government, on federal level, they did not get a noticeable representation. In war times, of course, Switzerland, like all countries, made their martial law with mandatory draft, mandatory constriction, that's not untypical for states, things like that. Then, for instance, these are just examples. The permanent war tax. This is a nice story in Switzerland. During the Second World War, they introduced by martial law a tax. Versteuer. Ver means defend. It almost sounds like war tax. Versteuer. They introduced it not in an official statute, in a legislated statute, but in an ordinance from the government. Beschluss, außerordentlich Beschluss, exceptional decisions, something like that. After the war, they did not stop with that. They said, we need a little bit more. We have provisionally to extend this decision for some years. After some years, they said, I think in the meantime we really do need it, and they extended it even more. Sometime, that was not a decision, an ordinance anymore by the government, but an official statute with the same content, but still called war tax. Then came the moment where they said, now we call it direct federal tax. Since then, the federal taxation plays a considerable role. This is what we celebrate, too. Then, all these typical wars states make, such as war on drugs, total prohibition of many drugs, war on climate change, which is very like in other countries, maybe with little nuances, but in principle the same as in other countries in Switzerland as well, and very prominent, the war on pandemics, also perhaps a little bit less intrusive than in other countries, but not really with difference, so this war on pandemic. I think that was a very crucial thing in this history. I'll come to that right afterwards. And so it goes on, all these fashionable wars. Besides that, the ongoing centralization of power, the cantonese loose power and the center attracts power. That's a natural law, so to speak. So this is what we celebrate. It's not to celebrate, it's to deplore, I think, or it's to complain about, but that's what they celebrate about. It seems that this is a pattern. Of course, this is not only in Switzerland, of course not in other countries. To compare it with a very prominent country, we have approximately the same picture. I cannot say much about that. That's not the point now today, but a lot of you know much more about this. But in America, with a sort of comparable constitution to the Swiss one, we also have such things. By the way, there is an interesting difference. They had the constitution. If we take the constitution of 1787, that was adopted by all colonies. That's a crucial difference to Switzerland. So that was not a majority, but those 13 colonies, they had to adopt in a certain process, over a certain period of time, and then they get into force. That was their basis. But then the Civil War didn't come before, it came after. The Civil War took place, of course, and that was quite comparable with the Unionists that correspond a little bit to these liberal cantones and the Confederates that correspond to the Sonderbund. With a lot of differences, of course, but there is some interesting parallel between these. And then a lot of wars, which is typical for states and also the United States. I do not precisely know when they celebrate what. Once they had this bicentennial, but that was not from this constitution, but that was from the Declaration of Independence. However, maybe they also think one should celebrate something. Now, we have still more time, a quarter of an hour. Is it still okay with dropping in, maybe, or so? Now the future. I have to say something about the remaining, about the next 25 years. This is what I thought about, 175. What about the bicentennial? The Swiss bicentennial, what's about that? Now, again, to keep that in mind, we have come to 2023. We have this war on climate change, the war on pandemics, the war on generity, the war on whatever. There are always reasons for the states to make war. And now I think maybe this is a consequence of this COVID nightmare, that certain tendencies come up that were not articulated in earlier times, but now because people realize the danger of such a structure, such a monopolized structure, they begin to think about it. And that's why some blue elements maybe are coming up more strong than in earlier times. There are grassroots organizations. I always now speak about Switzerland, maybe in other countries there are similar things. And these are sometimes a little bit crazy organizations, but it's the sign that people think, what is this all about? We do not need the state, we can do it ourselves. And grassroots, they use this word, grassroots is quite good. All these grass pieces and they belong together somewhere on the ground. And these are interesting movements. And they are very critical through the state. Other new movements maybe, especially again, that had resisted, that had organized demonstrations against this COVID hysteria. And they are still existing, these movements, and they participate in the election. Now there is an election term of the national level, and some of them do do candidate, do present candidates for this. Of course, they have the risk that once they are elected, they become part of the system. That's often the case, but maybe some manage to, you know, change things. But in any way, it's a sign that it's not that clear and accepted anymore that there is a state. Now it starts, you know, tipping over. They discuss, I think among you also some, about alternatives to the fiat money. Or this is a sign, perhaps, that doubts about the faith in the states are coming up. And I think the faith in the state is probably the most important basis of this structure. I mean, it's ultimately perhaps a very unstable structure. I can imagine the state because it's fully artificial. You have to have huge organizations and intruding procedures and surveillance and all these things just to maintain the system. And maybe all this won't be sufficient unless the people believe in this structure. So the faith, I think, is a very important thing. And things like that, maybe these are not yet very important things, but they could be signs that this faith is fading, you know, with tax avoidance. I do not mean just tax evasion and tax fraud. That, of course, takes place always more or less today, more or less than more. But the attitude of people that say we behave in other ways, we go back more to, you know, exchange economy. We do not pay in the official money way, but in other ways among our group, things like that. And they sort of evade state-based influence. There are tendencies in that direction. And now one can speculate when, in some years, 2030 perhaps, so this goes on, this phase, maybe they say the state. Is that just a firm? Is that a player, an actor? Today already there are some movements that articulate that very much. The state is just a firm, that's just a player. He also is filed in some business indexes as an actor. This means this is not the state anymore, things like that. So all this and thinking about statelessness could come up. Maybe due or thanks to corona. And once this is going on, let's say I thought, now I'm starting to dream, you know, but why not? I thought that, can you read it? Tax resistance, then exit declarations, that happens already today. That people say I do not want to be a member of that club there. And here is my declaration, I withdraw my membership without being forced to leave the country, of course. Of course these letters will not be answered, but people think about things like that. Or then I thought, I dreamed that once these declarations are there, once a certain broader tax resistance, that rating agencies think about the rates of these government bonds. Are they really still AAA or are they already junk bonds? Why not? Some ratings have already been reduced. And the more such discussions come up, the more this could take place, even more with more weight. And then they start about thinking why not winding up some parts, at least the most negative parts are necessary part of a state. Why not liquidate this part? Why not privatize? Now this is really within this dream, but why not to think about that? Why not to see signs for a certain development that could go in such a direction? It's not more than a dream, but nevertheless it's that. So that there is a general decline of this power, that it's not just continuing, that it goes even in a fall movement. And why not on the 12th September of 2048, we get the final report about the Swiss Confederation being winded up. All debts paid back, not all of course. A small dividend perhaps only, but the file is closed. That was what I dreamed recently. And in this case, one could say these balance there to celebrate the birthday this year can be, you know, flow away. And we can, instead of that, this happy ending. Now just one more slide to broaden even more, or again to broaden our view to come back to this. We have now the whole state-based context. We have these 200 years. I just presented what tiny Switzerland is concerned. We have this rising phenomenon from the blue to the red part that goes back again after 200 years. We have bigger players like the one I showed you before. For instance, the United States of America where a similar phenomenon could take place. That lasts longer of course. That's a torsion polite. This is what we talked about, this accounting principle. Last in, first out. So Switzerland, last in, first out. United States, earlier in, later out. And first in and last out will be the overall phenomenon of state structure. It will last even longer of course, but why not be within the same context, within the same tendency. Maybe that in tiny Switzerland because of this bloody COVID issue, people think about state-based structures. Switzerland's state is liquidated, other states as well and so on. And maybe, I'm still dreaming of course, maybe on the global level we have the same tendency. And then one could say, we resume so to speak these decentralized anarchist structures that were interrupted somewhere by this state-based time. And once this is made, then really we can say we have a beginning. Thank you.