Crans-Montana: When Official Narratives Begin to Obscure the Facts
In the Korean film New World, the story begins in a familiar moral landscape. There is a criminal organization, and there is the police. One man works undercover for the state inside the gang. At first, the roles are clear. The police represent order. The gang represents crime. The viewer knows where legitimacy is supposed to reside.
As the film unfolds, this clarity begins to dissolve. The police grow afraid of losing control. They have invested too much time, too much prestige, too many careers in the operation. Admitting failure would mean admitting that the strategy itself was wrong. So they do not stop. They double down. They lie to the undercover officer, manipulate him, apply pressure, and treat his well-being as expendable. Step by step, the police begin to resemble the organization they were meant to dismantle.
By the end of the film, something unsettling becomes visible. The gang behaves like a gang, openly, without moral pretense. The police, however, behave like a closed system that protects itself at all costs. Loyalty outweighs truth. Individuals become disposable. Responsibility is never assumed, only redirected.
This is why the recent developments surrounding the fire in Crans-Montana have struck many observers as deeply disturbing.
After such a tragedy, there was a straightforward and honest path available. The authorities could have said: we made mistakes, our controls failed, and we take responsibility. This would have been painful. It would have carried consequences. But it would also have created clarity, and with it, trust, even in the middle of grief.
Instead, weeks later, under growing national and international pressure, a different story emerged. Attention first shifted to the mayor of the municipality, then to a security official. That official, in turn, redirected responsibility toward an external IT specialist. This individual was then described as unstable, as a conspiracy theorist, as someone who exerted inappropriate pressure, as so difficult that extraordinary measures were allegedly required, including psychiatric intervention. What followed was a continued search for further scapegoats to place between the institution and the failure itself.
The personal details are not the point. The function of the narrative is.
It relocates responsibility away from the institution and onto an external individual. It replaces questions of governance, oversight, and accountability with a dramatic psychological storyline. Structural failure is transformed into a human problem.
One detail makes this especially problematic. The IT specialist was not part of the municipality. He was an external contractor, a one-person company. He did not belong to the administrative hierarchy and did not carry institutional responsibility. In any functioning public system, responsibility rests with the authority that issues the orders, not with an external service provider. If critical infrastructure depends on a single outside individual, that is not an excuse. It is evidence of a structural weakness.
Rather than clarifying what failed, the narrative muddies the waters. Technical issues, personal conflicts, mental health, pressure, confusion, everything is mixed together. The picture becomes opaque. And when facts lose their contours, accountability evaporates.
This is where the comparison with the Korean movie New World becomes relevant. No claim of criminal intent is required. No allegation of illegality is necessary. The parallel lies in behavior. When an institution stops saying “we failed” and starts producing stories explaining why failure was unavoidable, it has crossed a threshold. It shifts from serving the public to defending itself.
In the film, this is the moment when the police lose their moral ground. In reality, when public institutions behave this way, the damage runs deeper. Trust erodes. Citizens no longer know what to believe. The roles that once appeared clear begin to blur.
The tragedy is not only the fire itself. The tragedy is also what follows, when clarity is replaced by narrative management and responsibility disappears into fog.