Word: neutral
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Israel Singer it started with a book. In 1994 he chanced to read a Paul Erdman novel, The Swiss Account, that alluded to Allen Dulles' wartime role as America's top spy in neutral Switzerland. The hints of unsavory Swiss behavior enticed the ordained rabbi and former political science professor from New York City into reading a biography of Dulles, which made reference to a U.S. intelligence operation code-named Project Safehaven. Its mission: to track down Nazi gold and loot being smuggled out of the Third Reich...
...Holocaust-era bank accounts; Swiss gold purchases and commerce with the Nazis; and the country's less than hospitable treatment of Jewish and other refugees. The poking and prodding are forcing the Swiss into an uncomfortable bout of national soul searching in which their image as a proud neutral country--founder of the Red Cross, defender of democratic values, oasis of peace and multiethnic harmony--is being challenged by a more sinister image: that of a self-centered mercantile nation that prospered from its dealings with Hitler, showed little sympathy for his victims and emerged unscathed from a conflict that...
Inevitably the historical debate will lead to a questioning of Switzerland's most quintessential institution: neutrality. One lesson of the wartime experience is that, in a conflict between good and evil, neutrality is morally indefensible. In the post-cold war era neutrality seems both an anachronism and a source of isolation. "The world doesn't need a neutral Switzerland anymore," says Frank Meyer, publisher of the Ringier Press Group. Remembering Switzerland's dark past may have served the unintended purpose of preparing the nation for the future...
...does one make of the constantly returning memory of the Holocaust, of the refrain "Never forget! Never again!"? Specifically, what does one make now of the Jewish initiative to reopen the Swiss banks' World War II books in order to recover Jewish money deposited there, in the snug, smug, neutral Alps, as Hitler's apocalypse descended...
National surveys conducted in 1989-1990 confirm the perception that the public has not reached a definitive conclusion about abortion. When asked to consider all the arguments pro and con, 51 percent identified themselves as opposed to abortion, 41 percent in favor, and 8 percent claimed to be neutral or unsure. An even greater proportion held abortion to be morally wrong--61 percent, compared to 22 percent who judged it morally permissible...