Twenty-five people have been arrested in raids across Germany on suspicion of plotting to overthrow the government.

German reports say the group of far-right and ex-military figures planned to storm the parliament building, the Reichstag, and seize power.

A minor aristocrat described as Prince Heinrich XIII, 71, is alleged to have been central to their plans. According to federal prosecutors, he is one of two alleged ringleaders among those arrested across 11 German states.

The plotters are said to include members of the extremist Reichsbürger [Citizens of the Reich] movement, which has long been in the sights of German police over violent attacks and racist conspiracy theories. They also refuse to recognise the modern German state.

An estimated 50 men and women are alleged to have been part of the group, said to have plotted to overthrow the republic and replace it with a new state modelled on the Germany of 1871 - an empire called the Second Reich.

"We don't yet have a name for this group," said a spokeswoman for the federal prosecutor's office.

Three thousand officers took part in 130 raids across much of the country, with two people arrested in Austria and Italy. Those detained were due to be questioned later in the day.

Justice Minister Marco Buschmann tweeted that a major anti-terror operation was taking place and a suspected "armed attack on constitutional bodies was planned".

The federal prosecutor's office said the group had been plotting a violent coup since November 2021 and members of its central "Rat" (council) had since held regular meetings.

They had already established plans to rule Germany with departments covering health, justice and foreign affairs, the prosecutor said. Members understood they could only realise their goals by "military means and violence against state representatives" which included carrying out killings.

Investigators are thought to have got wind of the group when they uncovered a kidnap plot last April involving a gang who called themselves United Patriots.

They too were part of the Reichsbürger scene and had allegedly planned to abduct Health Minister Karl Lauterbach while also creating "civil war conditions" to bring about an end to Germany's democracy.

The latest plot is also said to have involved a former far-right AfD member of the lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, who was lined up to be installed as the group's justice minister, with Prince Heinrich as leader.

Heinrich XIII comes from an old noble family known as the House of Reuss, which ruled over parts of the modern eastern state of Thuringia until 1918. All the male members of the family were given the name Heinrich as well as a number.

As well as a shadow government, the plotters allegedly had plans for a military arm, with active and former members of the military a significant part of the coup plot, according to reports. They included ex-elite soldiers from special units. The aim of military arm was to eliminate democratic bodies at local level, prosecutors said.

One of those under investigation is a member of the Special Commando Forces, and police searched his home and his room at the Graf-Zeppelin military base in Calw, south-west of Stuttgart.

German prosecutors have charged 27 suspected far-right extremists with planning a violent coup.

The suspects are accused of membership of the fringe Reichsbürger - or Citizens of the Reich - movement.

"The members of the group strongly rejected state institutions and the free democratic constitutional order," according to the indictment.

They are mostly associates of Heinrich XIII Prince Reuss, a Reichsbürger figurehead from an aristocratic family.

Prosecutors have charged the 27 people with planning to overthrow Germany's democratic political system.

Concrete preparations were made for a coup beginning in summer 2021.

The plan was to seize power by invading the Bundestag, Germany's parliament, with a small group of armed personnel. The assault would be launched after receiving a signal, such as the death of Queen Elizabeth II.

The alleged plotters had already determined how their new state would function after the coup.

Prince Reuss was planned to be head of state. On taking office, he would negotiate a peace treaty with the Allied powers which won World War II. Prince Reuss tried to meet representatives of the Russian government to gain support for the coup, according to prosecutors.

Birgit Malsack-Winkemann, then a member of the Bundestag for the far-right Alternative for Germany party, would have been made justice minister. Prosecutors said she granted access to parliamentary buildings to other co-conspirators.

The would-be rebels are alleged to have attempted to recruit soldiers and police officers.

The group had drawn up lists of enemies. Members were aware that their plans would result in people being killed, according to the indictment.

Members were made to sign a declaration of secrecy. Violators would have been executed for high treason.

The suspected plotters had access to about 380 firearms and 148,000 rounds of ammunition.

Some of the accused were arrested in federal police raids last December.

According to the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany's domestic intelligence agency, there are about 23,000 followers of the Reichsbürger movement in the country.

When 25 people meet regularly, fantasize about a better Germany, imagine a new government and hoard a few swords and rifles, yes, then of course that's an incredible threat for the state where 3000 police officers have to be mobilized!

Incidentally, only 19 of the 25 people were arrested. One can therefore assume that the other 6 are paid informants from the "constitutional protection" whose task was to heat up the group and construct a "threat". This is a common method used by the state security service in Germany to manipulate public opinion that we have a "right-wing threat" that must be "fought with all legal means"; while arab clans control entire districts and antifa terrorizes political opponents, also paid for by the state.

The group was observed by the Verfassungsschutz from the beginning. It was no coincidence that the state intervened now of all times, because just a few days ago, refugees killed a little schoolgirl; and climate terrorists have been desecrating cultural assets for months. Fighting a "right-wing coup" is the perfect antidote to distracting the public by shifting the issues onto something else; since there is also the fear of blackouts, unaffordable prices, waves of bankruptcies and and and… enough reasons to demonstrate some political power and patch the "we are a democracy" lie. But despite the huge police presence and international fluff, the effect fizzled out after just one day.

However, the fact that the next day nothing was reported anymore about it in the media, and instead fucking Ukraine, Putin and Corona topics dominated the daily news afresh, shows how ridiculous and artificially exaggerated the whole thing was. There was simply never this threat that justifies the "largest police operation in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany". Corona had already promoted a lot of pointless symbolic politics; but this police presence because of 25 dreamers of high age just tops everything. It's another desperate act of a corrupt system nearing its expiration date.

To the Background

Heinrich XIII. Prince Reuß belongs to half of Thuringia, most castles there. He has been fighting for compensation with the Federal Republic of Germany since reunification. Furthermore, Heinrich XIII. Prinz Reuß also gave international lectures, where he finally called for a peace treaty with Germany, since the UN lists Germany as an enemy state to this day. I wouldn't be surprised if all this was also a reason to take him out of circulation.

Calling him the head of a terrorist organization is pretty ridiculous. Apart from any fantasies, there are no concrete plans of a "seizure of power" at all. What we are experiencing here in the media is a huge pile of bullshit and lies. I hope Heinrich XIII. Prinz Reuß has good lawyers who will get him out with impunity. That would be such an embarrassment for this pathetic "colorful state".

In fact, the responsible public prosecutor's office had not yet formulated a statement of claim even after the arrest, since nothing concrete could be accused, apart from a vague suspicion of the "formation of a terrorist organization". If you applied this logic to the US, pretty much most Republicans who own guns and dream of a better America with a new government would have to be arrested.

This whole thing is totally constructed, a desperate act by a broken system to demonstrate and maintain its power. That has nothing to do with democracy.

On Dec. 7, authorities across Germany arrested at least 25 people in connection to a conspiracy to storm the Bundestag, attack the German power grid, and overthrow the German government. At least 25 others have been accused of involvement in the plot.

The conspirators modeled this attack, which they had been planning since November 2021, on the aborted attack by far-right supporters of former President Donald Trump on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 of that year. But this isn’t a local imitation of an American original, although it combines German ideas with U.S. influence. It’s an intensely German group, rooted in a bizarre interpretation of German history.

This confluence of the local and the global is characteristic of German right-wing extremism, and it can produce unexpected results, as I’ve written before for Foreign Policy. Within these global linkages, many conspiracy theories—on the far left as well as the far right—have been incorporated into the QAnon intellectual space, and German conspiracy theories are no exception.

In this case, the conspirators are members of a disparate movement known as Reichsbürger, or “citizens of the Reich.” (This word can be plural or singular.) The Reich in this case is the Second Reich, the German empire that stood from 1871 to 1918.The ideology behind this movement has been promoted since the 1970s, when the jurist—and Holocaust denier—Manfred Roeder spread it in an attempt to revive both National Socialism and pre-Nazi imperial Germany.

The group’s basic idea is that the Federal Republic of Germany, the modern German government, does not exist. It maintains that the Third Reich, the Wilhelmine government’s successor—this complex of ideas seems to elide the Weimar Republic–was never formally dissolved in 1945, and that the modern German government is a tool of the Allied occupation, which is still ongoing. This belief system thereby combines hidden nostalgia for the Third Reich with overt nostalgia for the Second; for instance, many Reichsbürger followers want Germany to return to its 1937 borders. There is a powerful strain of antisemitism in it. These people have been compared to American and Canadian sovereign citizens; like sovereign citizens, many do not pay taxes. And like sovereign citizens, they can be violent: Reichsbürger were responsible for one murder in 2016 and nine in 2020.

In a dark reflection of German society in general, this conspiracy theory is profoundly legalistic. Reichsbürger believe that the republic is not a state but a private company founded in 1949 by the Allies, while the German Reich exists legally but without institutions—so the movement’s followers have taken it upon themselves to form “provisional” institutions. This pathological legalism appeals to people involved with Germany’s ordinary legalism: many members are former police officers, military officers, and civil servants. The people arrested on Dec. 7 include a former member of the Bundestag from the far-right AfD party, former East German state security, and former members of the German special forces.

They also included several German nobles, including one of the ringleaders, Heinrich XIII Prinz Reuss zu Köstritz. He is a minor noble—a very minor one. He is a prince, but the German states were once almost as thick with princes as Saudi Arabia—although for very different reasons. His princely status does not mean that he is related to the monarchy of the former empire, the family of the former Kaiser; it means that his family used to head principalities. (The Kaiser’s family is the Hohenzollerns. This Heinrich is a Reuss-Köstritz, although U.S. papers have mistaken him for a Reuss-Greiz, a branch of this multipartite family that ended legally in  1918 when its last head abdicated.) As with the vast majority of German nobles, even the word “aristocratic” is pushing it.

What has been keeping former East German state security, members of the far-right AfD party, monarchists without a monarch, fascists inside the German special forces, anti-vaccine activists, and believers in the QAnon conspiracy theory together?

One element is the unique politics of East Germany. The house of Reuss, in all eight of its parts, is Thuringian, and East German aristocrats felt betrayed after the reunification of Germany in 1990. They had hoped that reunification would mean a restoration of their status and their property, much of which was seized by East Germany’s communist government. That this did not happen radicalized many of them, just as East Germans more generally felt betrayed by the reunification.

But the East German radical fringe has also been shifting as it incorporates concepts from the global far right. In a rapid move away from 70 years of East German history, AfD adopted an anti-vaccine stance in late 2021 under the influence of the Querdenker movement and far-right groups in the United States. The worldwide far right may claim that it is for those left behind by globalism, that it is anti-United States, that it is anti-European Union, but right-wing extremists also “imagine themselves as participants in a global struggle against a global enemy.”

And yet the Reichsbürger movement remains intensely German. Linda Schlegel, writing for European Eye on Radicalization, describes the movement’s fixation on the fin de siècle German Empire as a form of displacement: “It is based on the wish to display patriotism overtly,” which many Germans still feel is taboo. Patriotism for the 19th century is safe, since National Socialism remains harmlessly in the future, as long as you ignore what Manfred Roeder believed. In this interpretation, Reichsbürger are yet another expression of the German attempt to come to grips with the historical trauma not only of having suffered evil, which can be expressed, but of having done it—which cannot.

In this context, the Dec. 7 conspirators’ beliefs as expressed in the official government statement made on their arrest are fascinating.

Like their QAnon cousins, this group believes that Germany is currently governed by members of a so-called deep state, which is their responsibility to fight against as part of a network of American-inflected domestic defense cells—in German, they were described with the same word that is used to translate “Homeland Security.”

But in another tortuous circle in Germany’s agonizing attempt to put its past finally behind it, this group also believes that the deep state is opposed by the “Alliance,” “a technically superior secret society of governments, intelligence services and militaries of different states, including the Russian Federation and the United States of America.” The intervention of this Alliance is imminent, since it is already in Germany.

This conspiratorial group therefore has awaited liberation by the United States and Russia, which it believes is their responsibility to aid. The group was supposed to form “a (military) transitional government” that “should negotiate the new state order in Germany with the victorious Allied powers of World War II.” In addition to having a Russian lover, Heinrich XIII had already made contact with a Russian individual for this purpose. That is to say, this little group has been roleplaying the formation of a nondemocratic German social order, to capitulate at its head.

Is this not Freud’s return of the repressed? These people sought to destroy the German constitutional democratic order in the name of an ideology developed originally by former Nazis, but also to negotiate a surrender agreement once again with the United States and Russia—and this time get it right. Even German visions of victory turn into compulsive repetitions of defeat.

The far-right coup plotters had mapped out their own government, with people chosen for cabinet-like roles if they succeeded in overthrowing Germany's elected leaders. That's among the revelations shared by German officials on Wednesday in an update on what they say was a conspiracy foiled by a massive anti-terrorism operation.

At least 25 people are under arrest, including 22 suspected members of a "terrorist organization," Public Prosecutor General Peter Frank said in a brief news conference.

The conspiracy's goal, Frank said, was to overturn "the existing state order in Germany based on democracy, using violence, and to replace it with their own state," according to a translation by Deutsche Welle.

Officials say the suspects include members of several far-right extremist groups and QAnon followers, and people who adhere to the Reichsbürger or "Reich citizens" movement, which holds that Germany's current constitution is invalid.

The group of conspiracists coalesced as early as November 2021, Frank said, uniting over their support for "Prince Heinrich XIII" — a 71-year-old man who has gained followers through his controversial political views. He is a minor aristocrat and member of the former German royal house of Reuss — which once included an actual Prince Heinrich XIII. But the monarchy was abolished when the Weimar Republic was founded in 1918.

Heinrich is among those who have been detained, Frank said. Others arrested include a Russian national, identified as "Vitalia B.," who is accused of supporting the plan, according to a news release from the federal prosecutor's office.

The eligible princesses of the 1920s

It was the headline in The New York Times that caught my attention. "Princess Spinsters Worry Sovereigns: Royal Daughters, coming of age all at once, exceed princely suitors in Europe...."European royalty is facing a crisis in family life which is giving no end of worry to the households of various sovereigns.  The trouble is due to too many princesses coming of age simultaneously without enough royal princes to go around." As we approach the 21st century, we may scoff at such headlines.  But in the 1920s, marriage was largely the only option for royal princesses.  The one exception was Crown Princess Juliana of the Netherlands, the only child of Queen Wilhelmina and Prince Hendrik of the Netherlands  Prince Heinrich of Mecklenburg-Schwerin). Juliana was an eligible princess who was also the heir to her country's throne.

The dispatch acknowledged that there was a "growing popularity of marriages between royalty and the nobility." In 1923, Princess Jolanda of Italy married Italian count Giorgio Calvi di Bergolo, a member of the Italian aristocracy.

 Virginia Pope, writing in 1929 in The New York Times, noted: "Husband hunting is no easy task for royal princesses nowadays. There are far fewer prospective crowned heads to choose from, and the uncertain future of thrones has caused princesses to look outside the charmed circle of royalty for their mates."

In other words, there were not enough princes to go around. The Great War was responsible not only for the deaths of millions of young men but was also the catalyst that brought down three of the most powerful thrones in Europe: Russia, Germany, and Austria.

Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and Emperor Karl I of Austria spent their final years in exile.

 The Bolsheviks murdered the Russian Emperor and his family. Had they survived, the four daughters of Nicholas II,Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia, would certainly have topped most lists as the most eligible young royal women.

despite his hemophilia, Alexis' position as heir to the Russian imperial throne, would have meant a brilliant dynastic marriage.

The surviving Romanovs, as well as the Archduchesses of Austria and the princesses and duchesses of the former German ruling families, were no longer considered on the A-List for marital consideration. The Greek princesses largely lost their allure when King George II was deposed in 1924.Seven years later, the former highly touted Infantas Beatriz and Maria Cristina of Spain experienced the same situation when their father, King Alfonso XIII, went into exile when Spain was declared a republic.As the New York Times article pointed out, marriages with the nobility were popular. In Britain, such marriages were becoming the norm as the first three royal weddings since the end of World War I was with members of the British aristocracy. On July 17, 1917, the day when the British Royal Family renounced their German titles and adopted Windsor as the name of the House, King George V wrote in his diary: "I've also informed the [Privy] Council that May and I decided some time ago that our children would be allowed to marry into British families. It was quite a historic occasion."

(It should be noted that before the accession of George I, it was not uncommon for a member of the English or Scottish royal families to marry into the noble families. Queen Victoria encouraged such marriages, as well. Her daughter, Louise, was married to the Duke of Argyll, and her granddaughter, Princess Louise of Wales, was the wife of the Duke of Fife).In February 1919, George V's cousin, Princess Patricia of Connaught married the Hon. Alexander Ramsay of Mar, the younger son of Earl of Dalhousie. The Princess, who preferred painting and country life to royal panoply, renounced her royal title, and following her marriage, she was known as The Lady Patricia Ramsay. It was also unlikely that George V's only daughter, Princess Mary, would marry a foreign prince, although some assumed she might marry her first cousin, Crown Prince Olav of Norway. In 1922, Mary married Viscount Lascelles, heir to Harewood earldom. Her parents supported the marriage, and her countrymen were delighted that the princess would remain in Britain. Crown Prince Olav aside, the majority of her suitors were British aristocrats, including Lord Lascelles, the Earl of Dalkeith, and Viscount Althorp, whose fathers were the Duke of Buccleuch and Earl Spencer, respectively. A generation earlier, however, Mary probably would have wed a German prince. But in 1922, it was untenable that a British princess would consider marriage with a German prince. The Great War was still fresh in Britain's memory.

One of Princess Mary's adult bridesmaids was Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the youngest daughter of the Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne. Lady Elizabeth had been briefly courted by Prince Paul of Yugoslavia, but she accepted the proposal from Mary's second brother, Prince Albert "Bertie," the Duke of York. They were married at Westminster Abbey in April 1923. "Duke of York Weds Simple Scots Maid; Throngs Hail Them," headlined The New York Times.

The princesses who emerged as the marital front runners in the 1920s included Jolanda, Mafalda, and Giovanna of Italy, the elder daughters of King Vittorio Emanuele III and his Montenegrin wife, Elena

Princess Ingrid of Sweden, only daughter of Crown Prince Gustav Adolf of Sweden

and her cousins, Martha and Astrid, the younger daughters of Prince Carl and Princess Ingeborg

Crown Princess Juliana of the Netherlands

Princess Marie-José of Belgium

Infanta Beatriz of Spain

Princesses Elisabeth of romania

Princesses maria of romania

Princesses Ileana of romania

Germany launches trial of far-right coup plotters | News

Nine suspects will take the stand in Stuttgart for attempting to install minor aristocrat and businessman Heinrich XIII Prince Reuss. Nine suspected members of a German far-right group accused of plotting to overthrow the government are set to go on trial. German prosecutors will open the hearing in the southwest city of Stuttgart on Monday. The nine suspects are accused of plotting a violent…

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Germany today is firmly republican. While Germany does not officially recognise any royal and noble titles, all of which were abolished at the beginning of the Weimar Republic (1919–1933), descendants of some of these aristocratic families still wield some influence, most of it benign.

71-year-old Heinrich XIII, Prince of Reuß, whose family ruled parts of eastern Germany for 800 years was involved.

China’s centuries-old monarchy was formally abolished on February 12, 1912, with the abdication of China’s last emperor, Aisin-Gioro Puyi (1906–1967), also known as the Xuantong Emperor. Five years later, however, Puyi was restored to the throne in a 12-day coup that was an early harbinger of the greater chaos that would afflict China in the next few decades.

Germany detains 3 more suspects linked to far-right coup plot

AP, Tuesday 23 May 2023 Germany’s federal prosecutor’s office said Tuesday that criminal police have detained three more suspected far-right extremists who are linked to an alleged plot bt the Reichsbuerger, or Reich Citizens, movement to topple the country’s government. Masked police officers lead the arrested suspect Heinrich XIII Prince Reuss, left, to a police vehicle during a raid against…

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Dickheads of the Month: December 2022

As it seems that there are people who say or do things that are remarkably dickheaded yet somehow people try to make excuses for them or pretend it never happened, here is a collection of some of the dickheaded actions we saw in the month of December 2022 to make sure that they are never forgotten.    

The ongoing meltdown of Kanye West has peaked far sooner than anybody could have expected, as he appeared on InforWars where he praised Hitler and regurgitated one antisemitic conspiracy theory after another to the point where Alex Jones started to pushback against him

...although billionaire manchild Elon Musk thought it was only worth twelve hours on limited features while claiming that it was a suspension, meaning that actual Nazism isn't against Twitter's ToS these days but suggesting Tesla's cars are utter shite is

Nothing says “Getting into the Christmas spirit” like Greg Abbott rounding up fifty migrants off the streets so they could be driven to be dumped on Kamala Harris’ doorstep for a PR op, especially as said PR op took place in freezing temperatures because the weather bomb affecting large swatches of the USofA wasn't enough reason to commit a little human trafficking to own the libs

German history isn't the forte of  Prince Heinrich XIII Reuss of Greiz  judging by him deciding to make himself the face of an attempted far-right coup to overthrow the German government, only to immediately be shut down by the German police in a wide- reaching batch of arrests. Hmm, can't think why the German authorities in particular would want a far-right group taking over the country by force...

Billionaire manchild Elon Musk once again lied to his investors, this time rallying the alt-right fanbase with a promise of revealing what Twitter “SUPPRESSED” about Hunter Biden and how it proves that Biden was suppressing “FREEZE PEACH”...and his “ evidence” was people who worked for Biden and for Trump asking Twitter to remove dick pics of Hunter Biden prior to the 2020 election, which also happened to be a violation of Twitter's ToS. Trump White House looking to suppress freeze peach on social media...

...and then billionaire manchild Elon Musk showed just how well he can take getting bodied by Tim Cook by setting the charge for Twitter's paid verification to $11.99 for iPhone users instead of the $7.99 his army of sycophants and far-right trolls are paying

...before billionaire manchild Elon Musk started to really go off the rails by wittering on and on (and I do mean on ) about prosecuting Anthony Fauci with the most MAGA of “My pronounces are...” quote-unquote jokes, just to remind people that he was an anti-lockdown grifter back in 2020 who proudly stated that the whole thing would blow over by April (that's April 2020 , not April 2023) which made a mockery of the New York Times headline from only a handful of days earlier which stated they were unsure of his political alignment - and then he tweeted some meme of Fauci advising Biden to hold another lockdown like he was Grima Wormtongue, apparently not realising who was POTUS in 2020

...soon followed by billionaire manchild Elon Musk banning the Twitter account which tracked his private jet using publicly available information on various plane trackers, which only served to have Twitter’s factchecking quote back at him how he said he would not ban that user when he took over and, because Musk can only double down, quoted the First Amendment back at him

...which led to billionaire manchild Elon Musk having a complete meltdown where he started banning journalists left and right and removing Twitter Spaces in a fit of pique after he was called a lying liar who lies on a call using Spaces all because they pointed out his double standards of using what he accused Twitter of doing during his Twitter Files bullshit.  The end result?  Musk’s meltdown has a name and its own Wikipedia article

...and after billionaire manchild Elon Musk had thrown several fits of pique about what he thinks doxxing is (hint: what he thinks doxxing is is not what doxxing is, no matter how much he paid somebody to pose as somebody threatening him as he was looking for an excuse to ban the ElonJet guy) then he went and posted his exact location at the World Cup final, meaning he should ban his own account from his own platform

...followed by billionaire manchild Elon Musk posting what was, essentially, a “Do you like me?” poll on his Twitter account asking if he should continue as Twitter CEO - and losing.  Of course, this has nothing to do with Tesla stock plummeting past critical levels the previous evening...

...and because billionaire manchild Elon Musk is a deeply insecure pissbaby incapable of accepting criticism, he then tried to make excuses for losing that poll claiming it’s bots who want him to fuck off and in future only Twitter users dumb enough to pay him $8 for a free site could vote in future polls

Of course Matt Hancock would try to use his raised profile as an excuse to rewrite history, specifically trying to claim that it was care home staff who were the reason Covid got into care homes in the first half of 2020 and nothing to do with him allowing patients to be discharged directly from hospital into care homes. And this is why Matt Hancock's mouth shall only be used as a receptacle for boiled camel penis until the day he dies

...and soon afterwards Matt Hancock announced, via TikTok of all things, that he had decided that he would not be standing as an MP at the next election...which turned out to be a complete lie, as what actually happened was his local party had told him to bugger off

I’m sure it's a complete coincidence that every time Chaya Raichik tweets yet another doctored video about some location with her LibsofTikTok account in order to further the “drag shows are groomers” narrative the alt-right are doubling down on with increasing insanity these days, that exact same location soon receives bomb threats

So much alternative offered by Wes Streeting where he boldly thundered that a Labor government would wage war on “hostile” health unions, putting them on the exact same standing as Jeremy Kyle thundering “bloody nurses” to the TalkTV braintrust

It took a while for people to notice Michelle Mone had been profiting during lockdown from dodgy contracts, although by “people” I mainly mean the BBC given they cottoned onto the story a good eighteen months after it first broke, so what did Mone do when the net finally started to close in?  Bugger off to Honduras and post photos of her on her yacht to her Instagram as if she wasn't being investigated for massive amounts of fraud

Of course Jonathan Gullis would table a bill to override human rights laws about deporting migrants on the same day where four migrants died while crossing the English Channel - which was soundly defeated at the first hurdle

At this point we really need to check if George Santos is actually alive, because he's lied about pretty much everything else that it's worth checking if he has a pulse or if he lied about that too - and, of course, the GOP Republicans are praising him to the rafters, as lying liars keep appearing the front of their party

Bloody hell did Jeremy Clarkson not realise he was proving Harry & Meghan’s point with his completely unhinged rant about Meghan in his weekly column for The Sun - just as The Sun didn't realise that, by waving it through without seeing how deranged said rant was, they also proved Harry & Meghan’s point about the tabloid press

...and yet when Laura Kuenssberg interviewed Sun editor Victoria Newton as a guest on her Sunday morning show the day after the column was printed, somehow the subject was never broached.  Good journalism, that...

...soon followed by Jeremy Clarkson doing the quite remarkable: posting a nonpology where he didn't even try the “I’m sorry you were offended” line, instead he said that people might have been offended by his column but that is because those people are stupid

Would the LGB Alliance like to tell the class why a letter to them from Ofcom was addressed to 55 Tufton Street?

Unifying force Keir Starmer proved just how in tune he is with Jewish Labour voters by booting Heather Mendick and Stephen Marks out of the party for spurious reasons during Hanukah

For those wondering, no, it still hasn’t occurred to Kari Lake that she lost...

At some point it might occur to Nadim Zahiwi that saying “Labour strikes” for every rail, postal worker or NHS worker strike doesn't make him sound clever at all, it merely makes him sound like a cretin who doesn't realise who has been in power for twelve years - and given him several government posts in that period 

Informed, educated and entertaining take from Richard Sharp where he took Emily Maitlis (who left the BBC in February) to task for her comments made on Newsnight ( in the summer of 2020) where she took aim at Dominic Cummings' trip to Barnard Castle in spite having Covid, while saying the BBC has a liberal bias. Because attacking somebody who left the corporation several months ago for not toeing the government line two years ago is definitely an example of liberal bias now...

At this point John Cleese has started to make Basil Fawlty look positively restrained, because when he isn't telling a Muslim he can't spell his name right for not using the most English spelling of Mohammed, he's claiming the BBC have “cancelled” Monty Python as they aren't showing it on TV - even though Cleese knows full well that Netflix currently has the rights to it

Smirking bully Priti Patel probably should have thought out her Christmas card a little more, partly as she makes herself look like a De Pfeffel cultist, but mainly because it hasn’t occurred to her just how many people might actually like to see a Christmas tree shoved up her backside

It needs pointing out to Jenna Ortega that saying she filmed her dance scene in Wednesday while she had Covid is not a sign of professionalism. No, it's actually a sign of callous disregard for everybody else on set

Not exactly self-aware from Paul Burrell to try and get on the Royalists' side by kvetching about how Harry & Meghan's Netflix doc is exploiting Diana, given Burrell has made a packet out of doing that for the past quarter century

...while Nicolas Witchell once again demonstrated his determination to become an honorary member of the Royal family with the usual mistaking his opinion for fact and then blurting it out on the BBC

Ultra-relatable nice guy Rishi Sunak showed his human touch during his photo op serving the homeless a Christmas dinner where he asked one if they worked in business and, when told they were homeless, continued with that line of questioning by asking if banking or finance was something they wished to get into, sort of like an alien’s answering machine would say when the bailiffs said they were coming around for their money or Sunak's kneecaps

It turns out that Andrew Tate ran out of material pretty damn fast, as since returning to Twitter (thanks, Elon!) all he's been posting is one piece of evidence after another that he probably hasn't ever had sex with anything other than a particularly crusty sock he keeps in his bedside cabinet - and, to clarify, I typed this up a few days before his spectacular meltdown brought on  by getting so utterly bodied by Greta Thunberg that started crying like a deeply insecure pissbaby who cannot handle criticism

...which would be the same Andrew Tate who, in his deeply insecure need to try and flex his way out of getting bodied by Greta Thunberg, unintentionally tipped off Romanian authorities that he was in the country and was arrested for people trafficking, which all could have been avoided if he took the L

...yet somehow Jess Phillips decided to give the shittiest take of all takes on the situation, beating out various alt-right and manosphere dickheads who were pumping out misinformation about what Tate was arrested for or even which side of the prison wall he was on, with a remarkably smug tweet where she claimed she had no idea who he was (which is a damning indictment of the Shadow Minister of Safeguarding Women...) while also snickering that if a woman was running PR for him she'd do a better job.  For somebody who had just been arrested for human trafficking and rape, may I remind you

At some point it might occur to shoe0nhead that amplifying far-right conspiracy theories about Balenciaga and then whining about how left-leaning people have called her out for amplifying far-right conspiracy theories proves who is truly intolerant is only going to make her a useful idiot to the far-right

At which point is anyone allowed to suggest Kate Middleton going out with Zara Tindall in matching burgundy outfits, a few days after she and Wills went out with George and Charlotte dressed as clones of their parents, looks uncannily like a petty and vindictive response to Meghan Markle offhandedly mentioning the Royals were expected to wear different colours to one another when in public which the British press twisted into yet more gammon bait?  |Especially petty and vindictive when she's using her own children as pawns

At last Laurence Fox found a way to make a desperate, flailing bid for relevance, which was by responding to England's World Cup exit with a completely unhinged rant that can be boiled down to “me no like taking knee man, make my racism feel bad ”

...and then Lawrence Fox decided to go one further by sharing a remarkably shitty take about abortion

Of course Richard Tice is the sort of idiot who would see the temperature in Braemar to be -13 degrees overnight during the cold snap and crow about how this proves there is no such thing as global warming, yet was strangely quiet just five days later when it was 12 degrees in London in mid-December

In the mind of Lee Anderson the best thing to do while literally watching Les Dawson on TV is to tweet how Les Dawson would not be allowed on TV these days, which mainly served to have Dawson’s biographer put 30p lee in his place

Contrary to what Sean Spicer believes, there is a reason why December 7th is called a day that will live in infamy, and that reason has absolutely nothing to do with D-Day

Based on the review that Ben Shapiro gave Glass Onion, it's safe to presume that he is unaware the idea of a Whodunnit is not to tell people in the first act who did it

It would be nice if Tumblr got their shit together and did something about the army of pornbots that are swarming onto this platform these days, really it would

And finally, definitely not having money issues, is Donald Trump and his “major announcement” that turned out to him selling trading cards (read: NFTs) of him as Evel Knievel and Superman among other things for $99 a pop, a move which even had the MAGA louts criticising him - before it turned out that most of the art used on the cards was stolen without the original artists’ permission

One of Germany's top officials said Sunday that the country's gun laws needed to be strengthened in the aftermath of a suspected coup d'etat attempt by far-right insurrectionists.

In an interview with German newspaper Bild am Sonntag, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said the plotters were "not harmless crazy people but suspected terrorists who are now sitting in pre-trial detention." She added that German authorities needed to "exert maximum pressure" to take their firearms away, and said that the government would "shortly further tighten gun laws."

Faeser's comments come following a nationwide raid across Germany last week to stop a suspected violent overthrow of the government. Police arrested 25 people last week in relation to the plot, which reportedly aimed to install a far-right real estate broker who goes by Prince Heinrich XIII as the new head of state.

Most of those thought to be involved with the coup were members of the Reichsbürger movement, which Politico described as a far-right group "which refuses to recognize the modern German state and aims to replace it with an authoritarian new system."

Faeser said the Reichsbürger movement represented a growing threat to Germany, and had expanded by 2,000 to 23,000 people in the last year. While authorities have confiscated weapons from at least 1,000 members, another 500 are suspected to hold firearms licenses, per Reuters. 

Germany already has some of the strictest gun laws in Europe. Private ownership of guns is rare in the country, and firearms licenses take a notoriously long time to obtain.

Germany’s Conspiracists Borrow American Ideas to Plot Against the State! The Reichsbürger Movement is a Motley Array of Nostalgic Failures.

— By Lucian Staiano-Daniels | Argument: An expert's point of view on a current event | Foreign Policy | December 12, 2022

A general view of the Waidmannsheil hunting lodge near Bad Lobenstein, Germany, on Dec. 8, where a group is accused of plotting a coup against the German state. Jens Schlueter/Getty Images

On Dec. 7, authorities across Germany arrested at least 25 people in connection to a conspiracy to storm the Bundestag, attack the German power grid, and overthrow the German government. At least 25 others have been accused of involvement in the plot.

The conspirators modeled this attack, which they had been planning since November 2021, on the aborted attack by far-right supporters of former President Donald Trump on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 of that year. But this isn’t a local imitation of an American original, although it combines German ideas with U.S. influence. It’s an intensely German group, rooted in a bizarre interpretation of German history.

This confluence of the local and the global is characteristic of German right-wing extremism, and it can produce unexpected results, as I’ve written before for Foreign Policy. Within these global linkages, many conspiracy theories—on the far left as well as the far right—have been incorporated into the QAnon intellectual space, and German conspiracy theories are no exception.

In this case, the conspirators are members of a disparate movement known as Reichsbürger, or “citizens of the Reich.” (This word can be plural or singular.) The Reich in this case is the Second Reich, the German empire that stood from 1871 to 1918.The ideology behind this movement has been promoted since the 1970s, when the jurist—and Holocaust denier—Manfred Roeder spread it in an attempt to revive both National Socialism and pre-Nazi imperial Germany.

The group’s basic idea is that the Federal Republic of Germany, the modern German government, does not exist. It maintains that the Third Reich, the Wilhelmine government’s successor—this complex of ideas seems to elide the Weimar Republic–was never formally dissolved in 1945, and that the modern German government is a tool of the Allied occupation, which is still ongoing. This belief system thereby combines hidden nostalgia for the Third Reich with overt nostalgia for the Second; for instance, many Reichsbürger followers want Germany to return to its 1937 borders. There is a powerful strain of antisemitism in it. These people have been compared to American and Canadian sovereign citizens; like sovereign citizens, many do not pay taxes. And like sovereign citizens, they can be violent: Reichsbürger were responsible for one murder in 2016 and nine in 2020.

In a dark reflection of German society in general, this conspiracy theory is profoundly legalistic. Reichsbürger believe that the republic is not a state but a private company founded in 1949 by the Allies, while the German Reich exists legally but without institutions—so the movement’s followers have taken it upon themselves to form “provisional” institutions. This pathological legalism appeals to people involved with Germany’s ordinary legalism: many members are former police officers, military officers, and civil servants. The people arrested on Dec. 7 include a former member of the Bundestag from the far-right AfD party, former East German state security, and former members of the German special forces.

They also included several German nobles, including one of the ringleaders, Heinrich XIII Prinz Reuss zu Köstritz. He is a minor noble—a very minor one. He is a prince, but the German states were once almost as thick with princes as Saudi Arabia—although for very different reasons. His princely status does not mean that he is related to the monarchy of the former empire, the family of the former Kaiser; it means that his family used to head principalities. (The Kaiser’s family is the Hohenzollerns. This Heinrich is a Reuss-Köstritz, although U.S. papers have mistaken him for a Reuss-Greiz, a branch of this multipartite family that ended legally in 1918 when its last head abdicated.) As with the vast majority of German nobles, even the word “aristocratic” is pushing it.

What has been keeping former East German state security, members of the far-right AfD party, monarchists without a monarch, fascists inside the German special forces, anti-vaccine activists, and believers in the QAnon conspiracy theory together?

One element is the unique politics of East Germany. The house of Reuss, in all eight of its parts, is Thuringian, and East German aristocrats felt betrayed after the reunification of Germany in 1990. They had hoped that reunification would mean a restoration of their status and their property, much of which was seized by East Germany’s communist government. That this did not happen radicalized many of them, just as East Germans more generally felt betrayed by the reunification.

But the East German radical fringe has also been shifting as it incorporates concepts from the global far right. In a rapid move away from 70 years of East German history, AfD adopted an anti-vaccine stance in late 2021 under the influence of the Querdenker movement and far-right groups in the United States. The worldwide far right may claim that it is for those left behind by globalism, that it is anti-United States, that it is anti-European Union, but right-wing extremists also “imagine themselves as participants in a global struggle against a global enemy.”

And yet the Reichsbürger movement remains intensely German. Linda Schlegel, writing for European Eye on Radicalization, describes the movement’s fixation on the fin de siècle German Empire as a form of displacement: “It is based on the wish to display patriotism overtly,” which many Germans still feel is taboo. Patriotism for the 19th century is safe, since National Socialism remains harmlessly in the future, as long as you ignore what Manfred Roeder believed. In this interpretation, Reichsbürger are yet another expression of the German attempt to come to grips with the historical trauma not only of having suffered evil, which can be expressed, but of having done it—which cannot.

In this context, the Dec. 7 conspirators’ beliefs as expressed in the official government statement made on their arrest are fascinating.

Like their QAnon cousins, this group believes that Germany is currently governed by members of a so-called deep state, which is their responsibility to fight against as part of a network of American-inflected domestic defense cells—in German, they were described with the same word that is used to translate “Homeland Security.”

But in another tortuous circle in Germany’s agonizing attempt to put its past finally behind it, this group also believes that the deep state is opposed by the “Alliance,” “a technically superior secret society of governments, intelligence services and militaries of different states, including the Russian Federation and the United States of America.” The intervention of this Alliance is imminent, since it is already in Germany.

This conspiratorial group therefore has awaited liberation by the United States and Russia, which it believes is their responsibility to aid. The group was supposed to form “a (military) transitional government” that “should negotiate the new state order in Germany with the victorious Allied powers of World War II.” In addition to having a Russian lover, Heinrich XIII had already made contact with a Russian individual for this purpose. That is to say, this little group has been roleplaying the formation of a nondemocratic German social order, to capitulate at its head.

Is this not Freud’s return of the repressed? These people sought to destroy the German constitutional democratic order in the name of an ideology developed originally by former Nazis, but also to negotiate a surrender agreement once again with the United States and Russia—and this time get it right. Even German visions of victory turn into compulsive repetitions of defeat.

— Lucian Staiano-Daniels is a scholar of 17th century military history, who was most recently a Dan David Prize Fellow at Tel Aviv University. He is finishing a book on the historical social anthropology of early seventeenth century common soldiers. His most recent academic article was "Masters in the Things of War: Rethinking Military Justice during the Thirty Years War."

Last week, German Special Forces and police arrested twenty-five people across the country for plotting what authorities have called a coup against the German state. The scheme, by turns sinister and farcical, called for executing or exiling current political leaders, and for sabotaging the electricity grid; many of the plotters were storing weapons. The group envisioned placing at the head of the country Prince Heinrich XIII of Reuss, a descendant of one of the royal families of the former German Empire. Among those arrested was a member of the right-wing Alternative for Germany party (AfD), which has seen some modest political success during the past decade.

To talk about the plot, and how the German far right views the country’s past, I recently spoke by phone with Richard Evans, the Regius Professor Emeritus of history at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of many books on Germany, including a three-volume history of the rise and fall of the Third Reich. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how imperial nostalgia manifests in modern Germany, how German monarchists view the Nazi era, and why—this recent plot notwithstanding—contemporary Germany has maintained a stronger immunity to right-wing extremism than many other Western countries.

What was your first thought when you heard about this plot?

I was quite surprised. Of course, I knew about the tiny right-wing group—the Reichsbürger, or Citizens of the Reich. It’s very difficult to take them seriously because their aims are so unrealistic. I suppose that they were organized enough to prepare a kind of coup attempt. I don’t think it had any chance of success whatsoever, but clearly they were prepared to use violence. And, in fact, there has been violence associated with these Reich citizens in the past couple of years. They have killed a policeman, for example. So, my thought was, well, how absurd, but also how horrible, really—that kind of violence in the service of fantasy is a dangerous thing.

What is this group harking back to?

The self-styled Reich citizens are a number of different groups with somewhat varying aims. But they have in common a belief that the present-day state of Germany, the Federal Republic of Germany, which was founded in the West in 1949 and then extended farther east with the collapse of Communism in 1989 and 1990, is illegitimate. Some of them believe that the Bismarckian Reich, created in 1871, is still the only legally legitimate all-German state, since it was illegally overthrown in a revolution at the end of the First World War. Some of them accept the Weimar Republic, which came into being through the revolution in 1918 and was destroyed by Hitler. But, as a consequence of all that, there are about twenty thousand members of the Reichsbürger movement, although it has half a dozen different and sometimes quarrelling subgroups.

Some of them refuse to pay taxes because they don’t believe the state is legitimate, and some of them actually print their own money, for example. They’ve even tried to issue their own driving licenses. Most of them are antisemitic. There are constant references to the role of the Rothschilds, for example, a classic antisemitic conspiracy theory. Many people haven’t noticed that they accept the Reich in its borders of, well, it varies, but the borders selected by Bismarck, the borders of 1871 and 1918, which includes quite a large chunk of northern Poland along the Baltic coast. They don’t accept the current borders, which are much truncated since the Second World War. So, these are the Reichsbürger. These are the self-styled Reich citizens.

Can you explain the importance of 1871 in German history, and what the period from 1871 to 1918 represents in the imperial mind?

Before 1871, Germany was not a united country. It was split up into thirty-nine separate states, varying from Prussia, which was a kingdom that covered most of north Germany, down to tiny little statelets, as it were, one of which was Reuss, whose hereditary prince, even though he didn’t have any power, is the leading figure in the Reichsbürger movement. So you had all these different states. And Bismarck, the nineteenth-century statesman, managed to unify Germany, but without Austria, by fighting three short, limited wars: one against Austria to chuck them out, one against Denmark over a part of north Germany, and one against France, which saw this new power arising on its flank and tried to stop it.

In 1871, with those three wars done, the German Reich, the German Empire, was founded. And that lasted up until 1918, when it was overthrown in revolution, after having lost the First World War, of course, just before. The First World War ended in a peace settlement—the Treaty of Versailles and associated treaties—which detached about thirteen per cent of this area and population from the German Empire and founded its successor state, the Weimar Republic, a genuine democracy, but one that was bogged down by failures of one sort and another, especially economic.

But what is the connection between Heinrich XIII, the so-called prince who tried to launch this coup, and the Kaiser, the head of the royal family that fell in 1918?

The German Reich was a federation of states of varying size, including Prussia. Three of them were city-republics; the rest of them were monarchies. And each of them had a hereditary prince or king. So the king of Prussia, a king of Bavaria, hereditary princes in an area of east-central Germany. And there were lots of kinds of principalities, including Reuss. The family that ruled this confederation of different states with a growing central power during the decades before the First World War was the Hohenzollern family. They had nothing to do with this at all.

One issue that may have prompted the prince of Reuss is the German unification in 1990, when East Germany was absorbed into West Germany with institutional continuity. The Federal Republic extended to the southeast, basically. And that opened up the whole issue of restitution of properties seized by the Soviet Union in its occupation of East Germany after the Second World War. Right now, the Hohenzollern family is trying to get back a lot of property that was nationalized, that was sequestered by the Soviet Union. And the prince of Reuss has also been trying to get back property, and he’s not really gotten anywhere.

How does the right wing in Germany today view the Weimar years?

Well, it’s kind of splintered. Only one part of the Reichsbürger movement accepts the Weimar Republic. Others don’t, including those who are behind the attempted coup. They really only accept the Bismarckian Reich, created in 1871. But the Weimar Republic’s technical name was, of course, the German Reich. I mean, it had a legal continuity in most ways with the Bismarckian Empire. The only thing is that the revolution of 1918 threw out all the princes, every single monarch, starting with the King of Prussia and the German Emperor. It went all the way down to the Reuss family and other families. There was a long debate in the Weimar Republic about whether their properties had to be sequestered or not. So, the Weimar Republic is seen by most of the Reichsbürger as illegitimate. In fact, in legal terms, of course, the institutions largely continued.

And that’s also true of the Federal Republic. There was a court ruling in 1973 that declared that the Federal Republic had legal continuity with the German Reich. The revolution in 1918 was not like the Communist Revolution the previous year in Russia. As somebody famously said, “The Kaiser went, the generals remained.” All the élites continued through the Weimar Republic. And, by the way, these are not conservatives; these are reactionaries. They’re far right, ultra right. One of the most peculiar things about them is that they are conspiracy theorists. They take on board a whole range of conspiracy theories, including QAnon and anti-vax movements.

In 2021, they made an attempt to storm the Reichstag. It’s a kind of parallel that not many people remember to the attempt on January 6th in Washington, D.C., to storm the Capitol. The Reichstag is now the seat of the German Parliament. That was a miserable failure. They broke through a police cordon, but couldn’t get any further, couldn’t enter the building. And, if you look at photographs and film of it, you can see flags being waved in the old imperial colors, or with the old imperial eagle, next to flags of the QAnon conspiracy theory and banners from anti-vaxxers. You can even see a flag with the old imperial colors—black, white, and red—with a picture of Donald Trump. It is worth looking at them to see the kind of very confused conglomeration of different conspiracy theories, including, of course, antisemitic conspiracy theories.

How do these reactionaries feel about the Nazis? At one level, it would seem that they have plenty in common with far-right, Nazi-like views: the antisemitism, the distaste for democracy. But, at another level, Hitler was so revolutionary that you wonder how monarchists feel about his reign.

Yeah, that’s right. I mean, Hitler was not a conservative, whatever else he was. He managed to get support from people who wanted to bring back the old monarchy. Remember, that’s in 1918, so it’s quite recent in historical terms. And when he came to power, in 1933, he made it quite clear that he did not want to restore the monarchy. He was the leader. He was the great dictator. He wasn’t going to have anybody else get in the way.

In Italy, Mussolini came to power by threatening violence, but was appointed Prime Minister by the king, who continued in power, or at least in office, through Mussolini’s Fascist regime and was always capable, theoretically, of dismissing him. That’s what happened at the end of 1943. Hitler did not want to restore the old monarchy, and, of course, the monarchists became quite disillusioned with the Third Reich for that reason, though they supported many of its policies.

And how do these guys today think about the Hitler years?

They want to restore Germany as it was before Hitler, most of them before 1918, some of them before 1933. They do not want the Third Reich back. But, I think, in common with the rest of the far, ultra right in Germany, they think that there’s been too much criticism of Nazi Germany, and too many negative memories of the Third Reich. I mean, you can see in every major German town those memories of Nazi Germany. They think it’s damaging Germany, it’s unpatriotic, and so on. If you go around German towns now, everywhere apart from Munich, they have these so-called stumbling stones. You go along the street, and there’s a little brass plaque made into the sidewalk with the names and dates of birth and death, usually deaths in Auschwitz, of Jewish families that once owned the houses next to that place in the sidewalk, which were robbed from them by the Nazis.

So, the memories of Nazi Germany are everywhere in Germany. Concentration camps have now become museums. There’s a lot of memorialization, quite rightly I think. The sense of responsibility for the Holocaust has become a central part of German identity. And that is something I think that the far right wanted to abolish. There is what you might call a mainstream far-right party called the Alternative for Germany.

Yeah, that was going to be my next question, about the connection between them and this plot that was just uncovered.

Well, the Alternative for Germany has had good election results in the former East Germany, where you might say democratic political culture is very shallow. Well over twenty per cent in some states there. It’s much less strong in former West German states. And there is a fringe—all political parties have a kind of fringe—and one or two of its members have been involved in it. But certainly the Alternative for Germany is a constitutional party. It’s officially recognized. It does not support the coup attempt or indeed the Reichsbürger. In fact, the Reichsbürger has been an embarrassment for the far right. And the far right in Germany is built on other issues, above all immigration.

How does the AfD look back on the history we are discussing?

Well, it was much more positive. That’s when Germany was united. But it was not quite seen as a model for the future because it was not a democratic state: voting rights were very limited, and the power of the legislature was extremely limited, too. Their focus really is on trying to overcome the negative memories of Nazi Germany. And what they want is a greater sense of continuity in German history through the Bismarckian Reich and even before that.

And what would that mean? Just forgetting the Nazi years, and pretending like they didn’t exist?

Yeah, as far as possible. Again, attitudes vary. There’s a wide spectrum of views in the Alternative for Germany, but they certainly agree that there’s been far too much emphasis on these negative aspects of German history. There’s a kind of right-wing populism you find across Europe and indeed in the United States. The Republican Party wants to forget about slavery. And, similarly, in France, the far right there under Marine Le Pen, her father, and her successors, they want to look at French history in an entirely positive way. And you can find that even in the U.K., with the right wing of the Conservative Party arguing that the British Empire was a great force for good.

Despite all of these strains in German history and in contemporary Germany, it still feels like Germany has been less menaced by far-right movements during the past ten years than almost any other country in Europe, or certainly than the United States.

Yeah, I think that’s broadly true. International opinion is much more sensitive to what happens in Germany because of the whole Nazi experience and the Holocaust. So any kind of far-right movement in modern Germany gets more attention than it would in other countries. Some European states, Hungary in particular, and Poland, have actually succumbed and become authoritarian right-wing-populist states. But not Germany.

I suppose that the experiences they had before 1945—two world wars, which they lost; the deepest depression anywhere in Europe and for any modern economy; millions killed, cities destroyed by bombing and by warfare; countries split up. They had their experience with the right, the far right, with authoritarian fascist movements, and it was a disaster economically and politically. They do not want that to happen again. The secret of the Federal Republic was that it gave Germany prosperity along with democracy. The Weimar Republic failed because it had democracy but did not deliver prosperity.

If you think of a young German born around 1910, or just before, they would’ve experienced the First World War, which had mass starvation. Half a million Germans died of malnutrition. They’d have had the hyperinflation of the early twenties, when money completely lost its value. They’d have had mass unemployment, destitution, business failures, and bank collapses in the Depression from 1929 up to the mid-thirties. They’d have had Nazism, dictatorship, and war. If they had been men, they would have been drafted into the army in 1935. And they had the Second World War ending in the total collapse of the German economy, the total defeat of the German armed forces, and the destruction of major cities and occupation by foreign powers. It would’ve been the fifties before, say, a young man born in 1910 would actually have the chance of a stable life, just even the conditions to make it possible to form a family.

Economic and political stability were not there for a good forty years, basically. It’s no wonder that Germans, by and large, are very keen on stability and an ordered, settled, normal life. That’s, I think, one of the great bulwarks. You can see this in the way in which, in order to succeed in politics in Germany, you have to be boring. You have to be dull. You can’t be an exciting speaker. They had enough exciting politicians before 1945, and they don’t want them again. ♦

The rareness of the German coup plot is a triumph of democracy

The rareness of the German coup plot is a triumph of democracy

Yes, he is called Heinrich XIII Prince Reuss. Yes, he wears a jaunty cravat. But don’t infer from the alleged figurehead of the foiled German coup that it was a harmless and baroque caper. The federal republic tends not to send thousands of officers on more than 100 raids to arrest mere eccentrics. It tends not to involve Austrian and Italian authorities on a whim. What we are allowed, if not a…

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Německý Puč: Kdo za nim skutečně stál a čeho chtěli dosáhnout

Schloss Waldmannsheil - údajné velitelství pučistů Hlavní maindstreamová média tvrdí, že v Německu připravovali státní převrat pravicoví extrémisté a nacisté. Vzhledem k pošramocené historii Německa je to velmi pohodlné označení. Pravda je však mnohem širší. Dozvídáme se, že za pučem stáli především lidé věřící v konspirační teorie, Qanon a lidé, kteří věří, že Německo není suverenním státem, ale je ovládáno Deep Statem. Co se stalo Nejméně 25 lidí bylo zatčeno, včetně 22 podezřelých členů "teroristické organizace", uvedl na krátké tiskové konferenci generální prokurátor Peter Frank. Zpravodajští důstojníci řekli, abychom v nadcházejících týdnech a měsících očekávali další zadržování, protože vyšetřování pokračuje. A německá média vysílají balonky řečmi o zvýšení bezpečnosti ve federálních a regionálních parlamentech země a jejích okolí. Podle Franka, cílem spiknutí bylo převrátit „stávající státní řád v Německu založený na demokracii, za použití násilí, a nahradit ho vlastním státem“, uvádí překlad Deutsche Welle. Novogotický lovecký zámeček Schloss Waldmannsheil se stal velitelstvím, odkud pučisté organizovali státní převrat s cílem převést zemi zpátky na monarchii a to už do Vánoc! Organizace se zformovala kolem „knížete Heindricha XIII

Foto: Německá policie zatkla „Prince Heinricha XIII“ v rámci operace proti podezřelým spiklencům z převratu. Jedná se o 71letého muže, který si díky svým kontroverzním politickým názorům získal stoupence. „Zatčení lidé přijali fantazii založenou na konspiračních teoriích a spojovala je nenávist k demokracii“, uvedla ministryně vnitra Nancy Fraeserová. Úředníci tvrdí, že mezi podezřelými jsou členové několika krajně pravicových extremistických skupin a stoupenci QAnon a lidé, kteří se hlásí k hnutí Reichsbürger neboli „říšští občané“, podle kterého je současná německá ústava neplatná. Pučisté ve svých řadách zahrnovali velké množství takzvaných Reichsbürgerů. Tito takzvaní říšští občané jsou jednotlivci - čítající přes 21 000 členů - kteří neuznávají legitimitu Spolkové republiky Německa, a proto odmítají platit daně, přijímat rozhodnutí německých soudců nebo používat německé poznávací značky pro svá auta. Reichsbürgeři věří, že legitimní země Německo přestala existovat poté, co se Německá říše zhroutila po první světové válce. V roce 2016, když policie provedla razii v domě jednoho Reichsbürgera, aby zabavila nelegálně držené střelné zbraně, majitel domu na ně střílel a zabil jednoho z důstojníků. Představitelé zpravodajských služeb nám řekli, že Reichsbürgeři se v posledních letech stále více radikalizovali, ačkoli si myslí, že jen malé procento je připraveno uchýlit se k násilí. "Skupina spiklenců se sjednotila již v listopadu 2021", řekl Frank a spojila se kvůli podpoře „prince Heinricha XIII“ – 71letého muže, který si díky svým kontroverzním politickým názorům získal následovníky. Je menším aristokratem a členem bývalého německého královského rodu Reussů, který kdysi zahrnoval současného prince Heinricha XIII. Ale monarchie byla zrušena, když byla v roce 1918 založena Výmarská republika. Letos v létě kníže Reuss, Heinrich XIII., zorganizoval vhazování letáků do poštovních schránek obyvatel v lázeňském městě Bad Lobenstein - jehož součástí je i jeho lovecký zámeček - a informoval je, že nejsou správnými Němci, pokud jsou držiteli průkazů od Spolkové republiky Německo. Spiklenci údajně plánovali vyměnit německou vládu Skupina podle prokuratury odmítla stávající německou vládu jako poskvrněnou agenty „deep state“ s odkazem na konspirační názor, který našel své přívržence v několika zemích, včetně USA. Organizátoři začali vytvářet radu vedení a přijali strukturu, která chtěla svrhnout federální vládu, řekl Frank. Členové si rozdělili role, aby si naplánovali, kdo bude nový ministr spravedlnosti a kdo bude v dalších rolích, přičemž podle prokuratury byl Heinrich označen za budoucí hlavu státu. Skupina má také vojenské křídlo, řekl Frank s tím, že jejich plán zahrnuje vytvoření nové armády. Prokuratura při popisu nedávné činnosti skupiny tvrdí, že v říjnu zástupci spiklenecké vojenské složky prozkoumali současné vojenské kasárny ve státech Hesensko, Bádensko-Württembersko a Bavorsko jako možná místa pro ubytování vlastních vojáků. A v listopadu se podle úřadu členové snažili naverbovat pro svou věc policisty v severním Německu. "V minulosti byli někteří z příslušníků této vojenské složky aktivními příslušníky německých ozbrojených sil," řekl. Po celém Německu byly prováděny zatýkání a razie Federální, státní a další policisté provedli 130 prohlídek v rámci koordinované akce zahrnující 11 států, řekl Frank. Potvrdil, že do razie bylo zapojeno asi 3000 důstojníků. Kromě konspiračním teoriím věřícího 71letého německého prince, policie také zatkla jeho daleko mladší ruskou přítelkyni, která se pokusila získat podporu pro plánovaný převrat z Kremlu, gurmánského kuchaře, sloužícího člena elitních německých speciálních jednotek, bývalého policejního superintendenta, berlínského soudce a bývalého německého poslance za tvrdě pravicovou stranu Alternativa pro Německo. Mezi dalšími zatčenými je i ruský státní příslušník, identifikovaný jako „Vitalia B.“, který je podle tiskové zprávy federální prokuratury obviněn z podpory plánu. Prokuratura tvrdí, že ke dvěma zatčením došlo na cizí půdě: jedno v italské Perugii a jedno v rakouském Kitzbühelu. Co na to říkají lidé v Německu Lidé, kteří dostali letáky od Reichsbürgerů na pokyn prince mají rozličné názory. Důchodkyně Isabel, která leták dostala řekla: "Myslela jsem si, že je blázen. Jeho leták měl odkaz na webovou stránku, kde jsme si mohli objednat říšský pas a řidičský průkaz se starou červenou, černo-bílou vlajkou Německého císařství místo moderní německé vlajky. Byli jsme také pozváni k účasti ve volbách, abychom vytvořili tady místní mini království. Pravděpodobně s ním v čele. Zmačkala jsem papír a hodila ho do koše." Foto: Vlajka Německé říše, která se přestala používat po první světové válce. Podle spiklenců po této době přestalo existovat Německo jako stát. Ale ne všichni v Bad Lobensteinu jsou tak odmítaví. Muž jménem Sebastian řekl, že má členy rodiny a přátele, kteří sympatizují s princem. "Je mi smutno, že to říkám, ale ano. Je spousta lidí, kteří nejsou spokojeni s touto zemí, jaká je teď. Jsou podezřívaví k německé vládě a přáli by si jiný druh Německa." Síla konspirací Výzkum dezinformací z berlínského CEMAS - Josefa Holnburgera - říká, že studie naznačují, že neuvěřitelných 20 % Němců je náchylných ke konspiračním teoriím. Včetně online ruské propagandy. Němci jsou v tuto chvíli obzvláště zranitelní: po pandemii Covid-19 čelí ekonomickému poklesu s obavami z nákladů za energie souvisejícími s válkou na Ukrajině. Mnozí viní úřady.

Foto: Stephan Kramer, regionální šéf zpravodajské služby Stephen Kramer, regionální šéf zpravodajské služby pro Durynsko, kde je východoněmecké sídlo princova loveckého zámečku, označuje pandemii Covid-19 za zlomový bod – nejen v Německu, ale ve velké části Evropy. Říká, že extremistické skupiny zasahují v době krize a snaží se využít situace ve svůj prospěch.

Foto: Němečtí demonstranti se v srpnu 2020 pokusili zaútočit na německý parlament. Všimněte si vlajek. Právě na jedné z těchto demonstrací kde bylo kolem 40 000 lidí se odtržená skupina pokusila zaútočit na parlament v Berlíně v době vrcholu Covid pandemie. To byla ochutnávka toho, co mělo následovat o pět měsíců později ve Washingtonu, když příznivci tehdejšího amerického prezidenta Donalda Trumpa a konspirační teoretici vtrhli do Kapitolu. Donald Trump se odvolal na berlínskou událost a řekl, že slyšel, že ho tam demonstranti mají rádi. Demonstranti prohlašovali, že vzhlíží k bývalému americkému prezidentovi Donaldu Trumpovi a ruskému prezidentovi Vladimiru Putinovi, jako k silným obráncům svobody a konzervativní křesťanské společnosti. Německo má druhou největší sledovanost na světě – hned po anglicky mluvících zemích – v oblasti konspiračních teorií QAnon pocházejících z USA a oslavujících Trumpa. Zaměřují nenávist k údajnému „deep state“. V jejím srdci si představují zkorumpovanou, po moci prahnoucí, děti vraždící a vykořisťují elitu. Jejich nepřítelem jsou globalistické židovské elity. Kramer řekl: „Počet těch, kteří chtějí svrhnout naši vládu a způsob života, se rozšířil jako rakovina uprostřed společnosti - a v rostoucích částech, i když je to stále menšina - uvnitř i samotného establishmentu.“ Překlad: Martin Kirschner (www.vipnoviny.cz), Zdroje: opb.org, finance.yaho.com, npr.org, bbc.com Read the full article