THE SWISS WAY: Most Heavily Armed and Most Free

The Château de Tourbillon and Basilique de Valère sit high above Sion, Switzerland. By haidamac @ Adobe Stock

At LewRockwell.com, Eric Margolis explains that, “The tough Swiss will be ready for whatever happens.” Margolis does not believe a Russian invasion of Europe is imminent, or even possible as its military is quite diminished from the days of the Soviet Union. But Margolis also notes that if anyone did invade Switzerland, that would be a mistake. He notes:

During the Renaissance, the thinker Niccolo Machiavelli said of the Swiss, ‘most heavily armed and most free.’  The Vatican’s Swiss Guards are a dramatic reminder of what was called ‘the Furia Helvetica’ when Swiss pikemen terrorized Europe’s battlefields.  Today, Swiss citizen soldiers keep their weapons at home and are renowned as sharpshooters.  I have been in the field with the Swiss Army and can attest to their military skills and professionalism.  Swiss mountain forts cover most entry points to the country.

At the Online Library of Liberty, Stephen P. Halbrook expands on Machiavelli’s thoughts on the Swiss, writing:

Machiavelli’s construct of the Florentine military force may well have been, as David Wootton suggests, composed not of free men, but of subjects.  But Machiavelli’s embrace of the Swiss militia, which is consistent with David Womersley’s traditional reading, would reverberate in the English and American opponents of the standing army.

Machiavelli tells us in The Prince that “the Swiss are well armed and enjoy great freedom.”[72]  The wise ruler permits his subjects to be armed, for disarming them shows mistrust of and offends them.[73]

In The Discourses, Machiavelli wrote: “For either I have my country well equipped with arms, as the Romans had and as the Swiss have; or I have a country ill equipped with arms, as the Carthaginians had, and as have the king of France and the Italians today.”[74]  A militia is superior for defense but not for aggression: “But when states are strongly armed, as Rome was and as the Swiss are, the more difficult it is to overcome them the nearer they are to their homes: for such bodies can bring more forces together to resist attack than they can to attack others.”[75]