I lived, worked, had a house, car, etc. there as well had a relationship with a Swiss for 3 years. The worst years of my life.
Here are the reasons:
- it is a Police state: even the public is encouraged to report anyone not obeying their rules to police, court, etc. When asking my landlord why my house did not have an alarm system he answered: “you have neighbours…”
- the difference to North Korea is that CH has a “democratically elected government”
- believe me: you are continuously controlled, watched and observed. even when you are sure you are not!
- there are fines for everything(!) and they are draconic!
- cost of living is hell high – but the service is worse than in the deepest development country
- they close restaurants at 09.30pm because they wanna go home
- everything is tiny, narrow and fenced
- I have not met one Swiss in 3 years who was open hearted and not distant
- there is nothing like an “easy living”
- the entire country is ruled exclusively by money and profit
Kinda.
Switzerland is extremely clean, orderly, and wealthy. There are tons of beautiful and spectacular sites to see and visit. The problem with Switzerland is that it’s a bit like living in a giant HOA full of the nosiest and most passive aggressive neighbors you can imagine. In Switzerland, someone is always watching, and nobody there likes direct confrontation.
In any kind of disagreement, expect the cops to be called. Your neighbors get annoyed because you have a lot of people over? Cops. Making too much noise on the patio? Cops. A gum wrapper falls out of your pocket when you’re pulling your phone out? Cops. It’s that ridiculous, and fines are the Swiss solution for practically everything.
I lived in Austria for a little while, and had Austrian friends, German friends, Slovenian friends, Italian friends, Hungarian friends, etc. I can’t say that I had any Swiss friends. There were a few Swiss who pretty consistently hung out with my group of friends, but I don’t feel like I ever really knew any of them.
I had no warm feelings about any of them, and I never had the impression that any of them felt that way about me. They were detached, distant, and not particularly friendly.
About the best way I know how to describe the Swiss is that they seem like the sort of people who would wear a suit and tie to bed. They’re so painfully stuffy and vanilla. They make Upper Austrians (a people often remarked to be cold and standoffish) seem warm and whimsical.
Switzerland is the last country in Europe I’d want to visit or live in, and believe me, I’ve been shit-faced in almost all of em. If you want to have a fun few days in Europe, go to Prague, Amsterdam, Vienna, or Florence. Those are my favorite European destinations (unless I’m fly fishing, in which case I go to Norway). If you want to see the Alps, go to the French, German, or Austrian Alps. Switzerland sucks.
I have friends who moved to Switzerland, and I have Swizz friends who moved to Norway.
People who are billionaires in Norway, can be more happy with lower tax in Switzerland, that’s “all”.
It’s extremely difficult to get close friends the first years. It’s kind of lack of acceptance and trust. Difficult to explain. I call it “light police state”. The reason for this: If you park your car wrong, it’s a police matter. If you missed to pay the ticket for the tram, it’s a police matter.
This is copy and paste from the net
“Switzerland is a fantastic place to be a tourist. Beautiful, safe, solid economy, great food, endless nature, the best public transportation system ever, clean environment, and on and on.
It is a difficult place to live in all the time. Minds are narrow. It’s hard to make friends (people are very friendly if you just a tourist who leaves money and then leaves the country). If you don’t fit the mold, you will have a hard time (this includes all foreigners, who make up 1/7 of the country). Discrimination is completely legal. Everything is so expensive that it’s pretty impossible to ever have your own house.
An Italian friend of mine summed it up: In Italy, nothing works, but everything is possible. In Switzerland, everything works, but nothing is possible. One more saying: Everything here is forbidden, except that which is mandatory.
So: visit, and enjoy. Then go home and be happy.”
I’ve been discussing this with many Swiss friends, and most of them don’t want to talk about how Switzerland cooperated with Hitler’s Reich, how they hided values stolen from the Jews and never delivered back to the families that were killed in concentration camps by the Nazis.
We are talking about billions. This is how Switzerland started playing with Hitler and the Nazis, this is how the country’s economy started to increase. Switzerland played “neutral” during WW II, and this happened while the rest of Europe almost collapsed because of the war.
Very soon after Swiss banks found a “smart” way of getting rich fast: We hide money for criminals, drug cartels, people behind trafficking, mafia and other criminals. The banks and authorities were criticized for the lack of transparency world wide. But they kept on with this financial crime until FBI agents looked into the banks while an employee in a bank sold data about tax fraudsters to Germany. A scandal in Swiss history.
When it was revealed that inside IOC there was crime and corruption. Swiss police and authorities did nothing to investigate.
Two planes with FBI agents arrived in Lausanne, and we all know the rest of the history.
Rearming Germany, keeping people satisfied, and going to war required a tremendous amount of money for the Third Reich. A significant share of the funds Hitler needed, he got by stealing assets, beginning with pilfering the possessions of hundreds of thousands of Jewish Germans.
Jews were forced to sell their interest in businesses they owned as part of the Aryanization process, as well as their homes, art, and household goods, all at fire-sale prices. That which was not sold was later confiscated, as documented in the 2015 film, The Woman in Gold. The Nazis took much of this stolen cash and put it into Swiss bank accounts.
At the same time, many Jews sent money to numbered accounts at Swiss banks in an effort to hide some of their property from the Nazis who were determined to steal it. Many died without reclaiming their money. The Swiss banks never attempted to find family members to return the money to after the war—they kept it and became rich.
Swiss banks also profited from doing business with the Nazis (Credit Suisse enjoyed doing business with individuals like the head of the SS Heinrich Himmler and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini). Looking at the scandals surrounding Swiss banks’ dealings with the Nazis, Hitler’s “crimes against humanity… deprive the banks from [sic] using the common assertion of just being neutral.
There’s no neutrality when you’re dealing with crimes against humanity. You can’t be the rock of Gibraltar for democracy when in fact you’re feeding the very antithesis that is swallowing every other country around you” according to Jane Schapiro.
In other words, “the Swiss were the principal bankers [primarily Credit Suisse and UBS (Union Bank of Switzerland)] and financial brokers for the Nazis. Neutrality had collided with morality, and trade with Germany had the clear effect of supporting and prolonging Nazi Germany’s capacity to wage war.”
Michael Hausfeld, one of the lawyers on the case against the Swiss banks, said, “If, as it is said, that money is the root of all evil, then Hitler was the world’s evil and the private banks of Switzerland were his root.”
The Swiss helped prolong Hitler’s war by laundering money he stole from other countries and people, and thereby helped him with his evil activities, like murdering the Jews, while claiming neutrality—the money he stole amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars in today’s money.
By some estimates, the stolen funds helped extend Hitler’s war effort by over a year—Hitler’s war machine was able to continue throughout 1944 and 1945 and kill millions in the Nazi camps and on the Russian front and at Normandy, just to name two combat theatres, because of the Swiss banks’ support.
The Swiss banks have been absolutely disgraceful in admitting their crimes against the Jews and only have paid a small percentage back to its victims ($1.25 billion in reparations when they reputedly had stolen hundreds of billions from the Jews and the Nazis). And they only paid these reparations after having fought it in court for years during the 1990s, ultimately failing to defend their cases.
The only reason why we also know about the Swiss banks’ crimes is that a bank employee, who was tasked with destroying incriminating evidence about the stolen Jewish accounts, had a conscience and handed over some of the documents earmarked for destruction to the Jewish community in Switzerland.
One person made a difference and allowed the world to see that Switzerland’s economy is built, in part, on the wealth of tens of thousands of murdered Jews who trusted it to protect their assets and, if they did not survive Hitler’s slaughter, be good fiduciaries of their estates.
Instead of being moral, kind and ethical, the Swiss banking community decided to take advantage of the situation and commit one of the largest financial crimes in the history of banking. Sadly, the Swiss today still refuse to admit responsibility and seem to regret not doing a better job of destroying the evidence of how they stole from murdered Jews.
