Hung out to dry by Switzerland

“You are at the mercy of these faceless bureaucrats.”

This hits a little too close to home. How long before someone finds this blog and puts me on a list? Will my bank in Switzerland freeze my account as well? Granted, I’m not a black woman like poor Nathalie, so I have more rights.

This is just a public-service announcement that the reason they want you to do everything on your phone, on-line, and in the cloud is so that they can then track every last little thing you do.

And then they will draw conclusions from it.

Will they draw the correct conclusions?

It doesn’t matter!

Whichever conclusions they draw will ex-post-facto be the right conclusions because technology is never wrong.

Then they’ll cut you off. No more phone contract. No more online accounts. No more online banking. No more banking. Funds frozen. Have fun fighting back now.

There is more discussion below, after the interview.

Sanctioned by EU. Abandoned by Switzerland | Nathalie Yamb by Neutrality Studies and Nathalie Yamb (YouTube)

00:00:00 Intro & Reasons for Sanctions
00:03:04 Financial De-platforming & Frozen Assets
00:12:46 Travel Bans & Notification of Sanctions
00:17:51 Refusal of Consular Assistance & Surveillance
00:27:12 Legal Recourse & The Judicial Trap
00:36:20 Politically Exposed Persons (PEP) & Banking
00:41:49 Psychological Impact & Support Systems
00:43:40 Advice for Survival & Digital Sovereignty

“Pascal: So, and just ladies and gentlemen, just to make this very clear, the Europeans have been using this way of doing things for decades towards people outside of Europe and they’re now turning it into Europe. They’re turning it on them, on their own populations just to know. I mean, other people have been for decades victims of this kind of bullshitery, which is not a judicial process. It’s absolutely not and it’s very difficult because it’s difficult to see an end of it.

“Nathalie: And it will also affect your next stop of kin. For example, I have a son who is living in Switzerland. He has nothing to do with what I’m doing actually but, because he bears the same name then sometimes when he makes payment it gets declined.”

“What you have to do is to build a new ecosystem around you that is outside of occupied Europe, because I think Europe is not free anymore. So you have now to start looking for banks outside of Europe. You have to look for platforms outside of Europe. You have to you have to reconfigure everything in your immediate day to day.”

“We are now at 59 people. We are at two Swiss. There will be more. There will be more. It will be hundreds. It will be thousands maybe 10 thousands. This tool, they will not let go of it. There’s a very good argument that the European Union will keep this thing indefinitely—the Russian sanctions list—even if the war comes to an end, because they can now link it to Russia paying reparations or not. They will keep this tool and they will put more and more people on it.”

I’m glad to have discovered Pascal Lottaz, who’s a great interviewer and seems like a good, moral person. He’s deeply disappointed by the ineffectiveness and uselessness of the Swiss bureaucracy, who aren’t willing to “lean out of the window” on any, single thing. They just keep their heads down and don’t help when that help might be misconstrued by the sanctioning bodies, for which they have much more respect than their own citizens.

Nathalie YambPoor Nathalie got no help from her own embassy, nor from any of the organizations in the Swiss government specifically charged with assisting citizens in these situations. They all acted as if she’d deserved what she’d gotten, considered the charges of being a Putinversteher to be not only beyond reproach, but also justification for completely blocking her from Swiss life. From all life.

She’s cash-only. Her Amazon account no longer works. Deezer doesn’t work. Her Netflix is blocked. Payments probably continue, with all of these providers probably having access to an account—through automated payments—to which the owner herself no longer has access.

She has lawyers. They are being stymied all the way.

This has been my experience as well, as a U.S./Swiss citizen living in Switzerland. The U.S. passport makes you a second-class citizen, subject to rules and regulations that other Swiss don’t have to deal with, imposed by the Swiss banks, not the state. But the state looks away.

“We need we need to connect. The only solution for me, it’s solidarity. Because it goes across the borders. It goes across the continent. It’s a matter of humanity, of human rights in a proper sense. […] So we really need to put all our energy, our our ideas, our resilience together because the enemy that we are fighting is a monster and alone you can just hit them a bit but you can’t you can’t break it. We need to to build a strong system all together in order to resist this dystopian reality that they want to to impose on us worldwide.”