A Place to Stand

  My favourite wrong movie line.

Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. 

Harry Lime in the 3rd Man

  There may indeed be an argument that warfare stimulates progress (looking at the progress of aircraft between 1914 & 1945 compared with the rather more than 31 years since America beat Russia to the Moon would do) Switzerland and Renaissance Italy isn't it.

    Because the wars of the era in Italy were not fought by Italians but by foreign mercenaries, the most effective of whom were Swiss. The Italians had the military reputation they still enjoy and the Swiss had peace because nobody, not even Hitler, was stupid enough to take them on. There was even a rumour that during the cold war the Swiss quietly made it known they had at least 1 particularly dirty nuke which they would have used had anybody tried to come through their territory. More

   And incidentally the Swiss invented rather more than the cuckoo clock.

   This has been a public information and get it off my chest statement following some stuff I have and will be publishing about this admirably boring nation.