Objektiiv.ee is a news platform that, like many other ideological mouthpieces that tend toward the totalitarian, supposedly tells the truth about things.

Right now it is trying to do something which, for good reason, hardly ever happens — it’s trying to bring a supposed matter of Swiss politics to the attention of the Estonian public.

The event in question is the commander in chief of the Swiss military offering his opinion on security threats in Europe.

Korpskommandant (Lieutenant General) André Blattmann, according to Objektiiv.ee, has stated that Europe is on the verge of public unrest and chaos, that dangers like terrorism, hybrid war, recession and uncontrolled immigration have made the situation critical, and that people should arm themselves in order to defend themselves.

This is utter tosh, of course. The man never said that.

The portal has a single reference to show for itself, namely a right-wing blog of a dilettante radio show host in Staten Island and Queens in New York.

The reference, as you might have guessed, is a complete joke. The American blog, which by and large says what Objektiiv.ee made of it in its Estonian version, already misquotes Blattmann.

Blattmann stated that in his view the ways issues were being discussed in public and the language different political sides were using was getting increasingly unappetising. The American maniacs’ blog turned this into Blattmann commenting on the situation of new threats as he perceives them, including mass migration.

Which Blattmann never brought up once.

The Americans’ reference is a supposed German business paper called the Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten (German Business News). The Americans also say that Blattmann made these statements in an end-of-the-year interview with this paper.

Only there’s no interview. And as any self-respecting German would tell you, the messed-up hyphenation or spelling as one word of this supposed paper’s name already gives away the wanting intellectual prowess of its publisher —

So on to the Germans. And indeed, it turns out that the Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten is a site that makes money by running banner adverts, the clicks for the exposure of which it gets by publishing any random doomsday scenario it can get hold of.

The article the Americans refer to was published on 28 December last year, referring to the Swiss paper Schweiz am Sonntag (Switzerland on Sunday).

They’re not offering us a link, so we’ll google. We find said interview with the Schweiz am Sonntag, which is an almost entirely decent paper, by the way. Date of publication of the interview: Saturday, 12 April 2014.

Now that rings a bell.

At around that time, the whole country was laughing its backside off about the army chief saying in an interview that he kept a pile of firewood and 300 litres of bottled “still mineral water” at home just in case Europe should descend into chaos.

The reactions to this were very diverse — politicians and public officials expressed disbelief and amusement at the Korpskommandant’s confession.

Some people called him paranoid. I remember finding the old man rather endearing, because what he said reminded me of a friend’s dad’s chalet high above Lake Geneva, where its proprietor — probably because he got a good deal on all three — kept ridiculous amounts of chainsaw petrol, coal cakes and tinned tuna.

Which again is a nod to the time before the Cold War ended, when the Swiss army was a thing people respected (an entirely absurd notion today), and a conservative breeding ground for the worst excesses of a misguided sense of duty, including declaring stocking up on instant mash potatoes and tinned ravioli everybody’s patriotic duty.

So, let’s sum up. The commander in chief of the Swiss army was being somewhat careless and granted a Swiss paper a glimpse of his personal paranoia back in April 2014. And though he may have been clumsy, he was both accurate and decent when he spoke of his professional field. He has said none of the things Objektiiv.ee is putting in his mouth.

Blattmann still runs the Swiss military. He hasn’t been replaced yet, least of all by Guy Parmelin, as the American blog says. Parmelin never made it past the rank of Corporal, but is the new Defence Minister of Switzerland, and there’s been speculation that the new man might replace the military’s chief of staff. But that’s it. The still waters are still in charge.

This all fits in very neatly with the usual, consistent incompetence of the far right. There’s hardly anything they don’t get wrong, and as usual, what they very confidently publish gives away quite a bit of their attitude —

They don’t care for the truth. Just don’t.

They can’t be asked to check their facts. Because who cares, right? What’s an absolute statement worth if you give a damn what reality’s actually like.

They trust each other implicitly, demonstrated by churning out blogpost after blogpost quoting each other. This alone will ensure they never really get anywhere, because it fosters incompetence by giving preference to twisted notions of loyalty and brotherhood instead of looking at facts.

And so they fail. Time and again.