Colonel Gaddafi, the Swiss and the U.N. goes cuckoo in a week's time

(Above: more Nicholson here, showing an abiding fascination with the Swiss banking system matched only by Australian business folk).

The news that Colonel Gaddafi wants to abolish Switzerland is a heartening development for connoisseurs of fruitloopery.

'Switzerland is a world mafia and not a state,' he said.

'It is formed of an Italian community that should return to Italy, another German community that should return to Germany, and a third French community that should return to France.'

What makes his proposal even richer is that from September 15th, Libya will take over the presidency of the U.N. General Assembly for a year.

There are others who take a jaundiced view of Switzerland, as did Harry Lime, played by Orson Welles in Carol Reed's 1949 film The Third Man, in what's perhaps the most damning and well-known quote about the Swiss and their cheesiness:

Harry Lime: Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. 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.

Then there's the Reverend Sydney Smith's damning summary:

I look upon Switzerland as an inferior sort of Scotland.

Apart from cuckoo clocks and chocolates, Swiss culture doesn't seem to produce much that's distinctive, so it's natural for a superior Scot like Billy Connolly to wonder about a product that' s usually the provenance of poseurs who inhabit urban centres yet pretend they have a vital need for the technology:

I've always wanted to go to Switzerland to see what the army does with those wee red knives.

Well who knows, because removing stones from horses' hooves and corks from wine bottles are becoming lost arts.

There's a bleakness about the place, compounded by the country sitting out World War II and developing a banking system which for generations has been the last refuge of the scoundrel. The Swiss have made a fortune by trading on the corruption of others, while putting a peg over their nose. No wonder Martin Luther saw it as the home of Satan:

In Switzerland, on a high mountain, not far from Lucerne, there is a lake they call Pilate's Pond, which the Devil has fixed upon as one of the chief residences of his evil spirits.

While F. Scott Fitzgerald had an equally bleak vision:

Switzerland is a country where very few things begin, but many things end.

Even a late-breaking Larry David got into the act:

Switzerland is a place where they don't like to fight, so they get people to do their fighting for them while they ski and eat chocolate.

While Ernest Hemingway took a dim view:

Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture.

Mark Twain was equally jaundiced:

Switzerland is simply a large, lumpy, solid rock with a thin skin of grass stretched over it.

Ernesto Sábato also took a view:

The first time I passed through the country (Switzerland) I had the impression it was swept down with a broom from one end to the other every morning by housewives who dumped all the dirt in Italy.

Of course there's envy, as Jay Leno noted:

Senator John Kerry released his plan today to eliminate the deficit. He said all we have to do is find a really rich country like Switzerland and marry it.

But even the attempts to defend the place founder on a giant rock, or reveal the hidden ugly truth. Cue Samuel Schmid:

There was the joke about Switzerland being an island surrounded by land. This was never true.

What else have the Swiss got? Well there's the right, no the obligation of adult men to carry a rifle, and then never actually get involved in a war, and the device of the referendum, which has sent California broke. While the Swiss and their sordid banks maintain a comfortable richness, broken only by the occasional set piece in a Hollywood blockbuster where a bevy of action stars attempt to rob a Swiss bank.

So it seems by consensus, Colonel Gaddafi's plan will receive universal approval, and it's great he's already filed a motion with the U. N. to get the cuckoo clock cuckooing.

But there's a downside. Sadly it seems it's not just a visionary matter of state on the part of the colonel, there's a slightly vindictive element involved:

Relations between Switzerland and Libya crumbled after Gaddafi's son Hannibal, 33, and his pregnant wife were arrested in Geneva a year ago accused of assaulting a hotel chamber maid.

Now Colonel Gaddafi wants to 'abolish' Switzerland: Dictator files bizarre motion with the U.N. (here's the Daily Mail story).

Even so, Gaddafi, who has ruled Libya as a dictator for the past 40 years, was furious, particularly when he heard an account of what had happened from Aisha, his favourite daughter. According to a witness close to the Gaddafi clan, she told him Hannibal and Aline had been treated "like terrorists" and were held in a prison "worse than Abu Ghraib".

"Honour must be saved," Gaddafi told his daughter.

It is just as well that Libya has renounced its bid to acquire nuclear weapons. "If I had an atomic bomb I would wipe Switzerland off the map," Hannibal is reported to have remarked afterwards. (The Australian, here).

Well the Daily Terror's got into the spirit by mounting a gallery showing how Hollywood stars do Colonel Gaddafi (here).

Jokes aside, in the past year, Libya has cut back oil supplies, and withdrawn more than $8.5 billion from the banks, severed air links, forced several Swiss companies in Libya to close shop, while Gaddafi's refused to meet the new Swiss charge d'affaires in Tripoli, and kept two Swiss businessmen as virtual hostages.

Is this enough punishment for The Sound of Music? Or a sign as peak oil approaches how loons with oil can get away with anything?

Well to be fair, the Swiss didn't have anything to do with mounting that epic celebration of stereotypes, so perhaps Gaddafi has gone too far.

But one thing's certain. The black helicopter brigade are going to be having great fun about the U.N., with Libya holding the reins, and we're only a week away from the circus rolling into town. Hapless Swiss, despairing U.N., cuckoos everywhere rejoicing ...

(Below: the Daily Telegraph treats Gaddafi with the dignity he's earned).