Switzerland Today

Hello from sunny Bern, where the crowds are floating down the river again, and the first wafts of barbecue smoke are rising on its banks. But is that a meat or a plant-based sausage?! And what would Greenpeace have to say about it?

Keystone / Pablo Gianinazzi

In the news: two court cases linked to jihadism, and a prize for a rich Swiss.

• The Office of the Attorney General of Switzerland (OAG) has filed charges against a Swiss woman who attacked two people with a knife in a Lugano shopping centre in 2020. The 29-year-old, with suspected jihadist links, has been charged with attempted murder and violation of the Al-Qaeda/IS Act, the OAG said on Wednesday. The woman has been held in custody since the attack on November 24, 2020.
• A Paris appeals court has upheld charges of complicity in crimes against humanity over the dealings of the Lafarge company in Syria. The firm, which is now part of the Swiss Holcim cement group, is accused of keeping a factory running in the country after conflict broke out in 2011, and paying armed groups to help protect staff at the plant. Holcim says it will appeal the decision.
• Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss has been awarded the 2022 Gallatin Award by the Swiss-American Chamber of Commerce. Wyss was honoured for his philanthropy, particularly the CHF500 million ($502 million) pledged to research projects in Switzerland over the past 10 years. US-based Wyss has also been in the news recently for his involvement in a consortium bid to buy the English Premier League football club Chelsea.

© Keystone / Salvatore Di Nolfi

Meat, methane, manipulation: Greenpeace targets the advertising industry.

Environmental group Greenpeace Switzerland launched a new campaign today. Its target: insidious advertisers who try to make witless consumers eat more meat! After studying over 600 Swiss animal product ads between 2018 and 2021, and analysing them for their “semiological” content, the NGO came to a shocking conclusion: meat companies and supermarkets periodically use classic advertising tricks like “diverting attention from the real issue”, “building an informal relationship [with consumers]”, and “resorting to humour” or “stereotypes” to make people eat more chicken breasts and rumpsteaks!

Some of the ads they studies were based on childish superhero fantasies, like when the preparation of a barbecue is portrayed as a mammoth task – “a battle on which life depends”. Some were based on clichés of the virile male, who controls the fire and feeds those around him with his masterful strength. Others again, according to the Greenpeace press release, were guilty of a rather baffling logical practice called “enthymeme”: “a form of reasoning in which the syllogism is reduced to two terms, the premise and the conclusion.” (In this case, Greenpeace explains, this means omitting the important premise that an animal first has to be slaughtered in order to later land on your plate.)

Should any of this shock us? Or has Greenpeace, to promote its admittedly worthwhile goal of saving the planet from meltdown, overstepped the mark by attacking the very basis of the advertising industry as it exists in the western world? If cheerful meat ads shouldn’t be allowed to bypass the horrors of animal slaughter, should cheap clothing ads also include footage from the nice sweatshops where they were made? Should 50% of all ads for dating apps include the tear-stained faces of those who have just been dumped by their soulmate? Is this rather a problem of the “manipulative” ad industry in general, rather than of the animal industry specifically?

You can make up your own mind by reading Greenpeace’s report (in French, German, Italian) hereExternal link; you might even want to sign the petition it launched today as part of its campaign. Or you can join the debate below, with SWI swissinfo colleague Sara Ibrahim, on modern eating habits.

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Tax dodging: Switzerland still far from see-through, but not the most opaque of all.

When it comes to financial sector transparency, Switzerland is more of a wall than a window. The latest annual ranking by the Tax Justice Network NGO reflects this: the Alpine Nation is second-worst, with a high score for both “secrecy” and when it comes to global impact (i.e. how much cash in its banks belongs to offshore clients). But things are getting better: thanks to tax information exchange agreements, amongst other changes in recent years, Swiss opacity is clearing – only the big improvement of the Cayman Islands meant the Alpine Nation rose to second this year. On top of the list meanwhile is the US, which has recently been busy complaining about other tax havens; it has a score almost double that of everybody else on the planet.