On September 18th, 2021, a hot pre-Indian Summer day, around 50 000 people swarmed the little town of Winterthur near Zurich to protest the current Covid regime in Switzerland. Winterthur, a dreamy town with 109 000 inhabitants that calls the local College of Applied Sciences its pride, was nearly crushed by the influx of people from all over Switzerland, carrying posters, banners, and flags, holding signs, shoving prams or wheelchairs, holding childrens’ hands, some chanting “Liberté! Liberté!”, ringing small cow bells and blowing whistles, already in the bottleneck of the train station that spat out tens of thousands of arriving protesters over hours in the early afternoon.
I have at some point lost count of how many protests I’ve been to in my life: from union-organised protests for the “38-hour week” in Germany, to assembling in front of the US embassy in Hamburg to protest the first Gulf War, booing down Helmut Kohl at a CDU rally, annual peace marches and 1st of May parades, to the continuous protest against the 1999 NATO-bombing of then Yugoslavia, I have not been an over-enthusiastic protester - but let’s say I’ve been involved in my fair share of left-wing, and, more often than not, radical left activism. But never, at least not in the past 12 years that I’ve called Zurich my home, have I seen anything like the Winterthurian protests against the Covid regime: take a random sample of the people present, and they would have beaten any diversity competition hands down, in terms of class membership, age, ethnicity, gender, social background, and political orientation. After arriving at Neumarkt, the little town square surrounded by picturesque cafeterias and shops advertising handmade soaps, I could indulge in my impression of the “social composition of the average anti-Covid response” protestor, and come to the conclusion that such a thing didn’t exist: pensioners with sun visors and flower print khakis, young men in base caps and mirrored sunglasses, migrant service sector parents with their kids (I saw one pulling a handcart with their 2-year old inside, sleeping like an angel despite the hellish noise from the cowbell swinging traditionalists or “Trychler”), teenage girls with sundresses and DMs, women in their fifties wearing yogi malas, with their younger boyfriends sporting fashionable beards and haircuts, Anarchists, conservatively dressed bank accountants and secretaries, medical doctors who deliberately came in their profession’s attire, a Rastafarian playing congas to the enthusiastic bagpipe playing of a dreadlocked hippie, hairdressers, nurses, kindergarten teachers, farmers, interns, shop assistants, students, old rockers with Harley Davidson- and ZZ Top-admiration indicating outfits, and possibly one or the other university professor, although academics was the profession I notably found most underrepresented, were all among the protestors. The atmosphere was that of a bigger public fair or music festival. I heard Brazilian Portuguese spoken among the protestors, Serbo-Croatian, Albanian, Russian, Spanish, not to mention two of the other three official Swiss languages, French and Italian. The young civil rights activists of Massvoll with their signature purple flags, the left-wing group “Freie Linke”, an anti-authoritarian left group sporting an image of Rosa Luxemburg, the cowbell-swinging traditionalists, and several civil rights groups, like Stiller Protest (Quiet Protest) and Freunde der Verfassung (Friends of the Constitution) have all called for this expression of civil disobedience, exceeding the expectations of the most hopeful estimation of the number of attendees.
What mattered to everyone despite their diverse backgrounds was a shared disdain and indignation at the current introduction of a totalitarian biopolitical two-tier society. I saw the black mother of a toddler holding up a sign saying “Wir machen da nicht mit!” (“We’re not going along with that!”), a long-haired old hippie’s sticker saying “Steckt euch eure Impfung in den Arsch!” (untranslatable), and a big man whose T-Shirt said: “This is not about your health. This is about control”. I saw some women dressed in PPEs whose sign said: “Gen-therapy: whether you like it or not”, and many of those quickly drawn cardboard signs announcing, “We don’t want a vaccine mandate!”, “Hands off our Children!”, or, simply, “We will not be divided!”. Many accusations went directly toward Alain Berset, the Bundesrat (Federal Council member) whose dictates over vaccine certificates and the exclusion of a great part of the populace from society drew the ire of the protestors. On September 13th, 2021, Switzerland officially introduced a medical Apartheid system by excluding everyone not able or willing to be injected with a genetic drug, including recovered people whose medically irrational “6-months certificate” has expired, from hospitality services, entertainment, sports clubs - most notably, from attending the university, and therefore from acquiring higher education. Berset and the Bundesrat have therefore made themselves liable under Swiss Law. Consequently, many protestors held up with their little red booklets - the Swiss Federal Constitution - and insisted the return to a politics in conformity with the Law. The anger was palpable.
It seems that Switzerland is now practicing just what The Great Reset has involuntarily invited: the Great Reject. And with this biggest grassroots democratic protest in the history of the Swiss Confederation in the last decades, people seem to be just short of toppling the government.
Needless to say, the media were reluctant to report on this event. The official news channel of the Swiss government, the SRF, enthusiastically covered a protest against new retirement regulations with (allegedly) 10 000 people in Bern, they informed the public about an anti-abortion assembly in an industrial quarter of Zurich. But this spontaneous, and massive rise of the Swiss population against a regime considered by many as unjust unfolding over the last weeks was a shock to many who see the “keep your head down”, rule-following Swiss as incapable of social unrest. And in the first weeks of protests in the summer of 2021, the broad spectrum of protestors put yet another challenge to the official media: with many “secondos” (second generation immigrants), foreigners, and left-wing activists forming a great bulk of the protestors alongside traditionalists and patriots, the media was still grappling with an effective way to denounce the protest movement against the Covid regime in order to legitimate its own anti-democratic agenda.
Just how convenient for journalists and state authorities that the Antifa exists. It has been widely known that since the first protests against the Covid regime came into being, Antifa has perfected its only raison d’être: snitching on the protestors, reporting them to the police, getting individuals persecuted. All of this is conducted under the irrational, and yet, in their logic perfectly effective, accusation of “Nazism” and “Far-right activism” against the protest movement. In Winterthur, some 30 Antifa and dumbed down self-described leftists arranged a pathetic side show, holding up banners saying “Winti stays Nazi-free” and the excruciatingly stupid “Maske auf, Nazis raus!” (“Wear a mask, Nazis out!”), which was remarkable in its reproduction of the government’s official line to blackmail everyone into the pathological belief that the peaceful protests against the fascist Covid response were “fascist”. A few Antifas wearing hygienic masks stood at windows, all dressed in black, with shades, hoodies pulled firmly over their heads, watching and recording the procession of the colourful protest leading through their headquarters. There was shrill whistling when the protestors passed the sad little counterprotest. Antifas were visible from afar, standing on the roof and taking photos with wide-angle lens cameras that the East German Stasi would have been jealous of. I looked around while walking with a group of mothers pushing prams, some Hare Krishnas dancing and singing of “love for one another”, kids the age of 10 or 11 with their Skateboards clasped under their arms, a group of nurses, and a few students, and I thought: “WHO ARE YOU CALLING A NAZI?”
The fact is that Heinrich Müller, the chief of the Gestapo (short for Geheime Staatspolizei, secret State Police) from 1939 to 1945, would have been particularly proud of the Antifa today. The Antifa has found a new area of legitimacy after years of “underground agitation” - the role of the executioner of state policy. By systematically reporting on and denouncing the protestors as “anti-Semites” and “Nazis” - just for a second, imagine the grotesqueness of taking offence at a portrait celebrating Rosa Luxemburg for “antisemitism” - the Antifa has been of invaluable service to the state, and not just in Switzerland. It is an open secret that the Antifa has received generous funds from state institutions and acted as “unofficial collaborators” of the police and criminal task forces.
The official day-to-day denunciation of Covid response-protestors as “right-wingers” in the media - and when was the last time you heard that a 4-year old girl with a Paw Patrol-T-Shirt was a “right winger”? - and the insane reporting on “violent” protestors that draws on the imagery of 6/1 and deliberately invokes the Storm-on-The-Capitol aesthetics, would not be possible without the generous collaboration of Antifa and its irrational drive to not only keep the powers that be intact, but support human and civil rights-violations, segregation, and the consolidation of a dictatorship that pushes an illegal, anti-democratic, and discriminatory agenda. True, I would have never thought I would live to see the day that Antifa, an organization that once earned my respect, would function as the main collaborator in establishing a biopolitical fascist regime - but it is 2021, the second year of the “pandemic”: and here we are. Even if the sight of “tough guys” and “radicals” wearing hygienic masks to protect them from a virus that has a 99.98% survival rate in their age group, quickly reminds me of the fact that these “iron-clad” and black wearing “radicals” are only terribly fragile middle-class mummy’s boys and girls.
And no less will the reality of the protests cease to give me hope and confidence that, in fact, we can make it happen - we can push back against the biggest violation of human and civil rights in the history of mankind since 1945. Because, at the end of the day, we are many, many, many more.
Cover photo: The Housemartins, Caravan of Love
I loved this because it could be describing the diversity of the London marches though we have a lot more working class South Londoners here. As a nurse from a left wing family (though not politically active myself as an adult) I found 2020 the most disorientating year of my life. The left (in the main)have been repulsive in their calls for harder lockdowns and the medical professions (the majority)seemed to have dumped prior knowledge from March 2020 in the bin. I felt very isolated from friends and family with my opinions on the whole COVID narrative in 2020 but at the beginning of 2021 decided to go alone to a March in London I remember feeling huge trepidation that I might end up in a crowd of fascists then feeling embarrassed that I’d believed the media nonsense as soon as I saw the crowd was just a real reflection of Londoners weighted perhaps with hippies. I have been on every March since and I think everyone is aware of the diversity and finds it funny and energising . It has a genuinely authentic ground up feel to it which is so different from the heavily curated marches organised by the left in recent years and those people the educated woke professionals are so obviously missing and yet not missed.
Meant to say we don’t seem to have the antifa problem it’s more the attacks and smears from the woke “new” left and MSM.