Inchoate reactionary coup attempt

Does anyone else find the news today that there was an attempted coup in Germany remarkable? Or are the times just so strange, so event-filled, so seemingly uncontrolled, that it is yet another oddity in a world filled with oddities? But the details are striking.

Twenty-five people including a 71-year-old German aristocrat, a retired military commander and former MP for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) have been detained in Germany on suspicion of a terrorist plan to overthrow the state and renegotiate the country’s post-second world war settlement.

Thousands of police carried out a series of raids across Germany on Wednesday morning in connection with the far-right ring.

 

Federal prosecutors said 3,000 officers conducted searches at 130 sites in 11 of Germany’s 16 states against the group, whose members it said adhered to a “conglomerate of conspiracy theories” including the QAnon cult and the so-called Reich Citizens movement.

One could posit that this is the second effort linked to QAnon and similar in recent years (including the attack on the US Capitol on January 6th two year back) and that in and of itself is striking. Because whatever else the brew of beliefs that this ‘conglomerate of conspiracy theories’ are so irrational and in some instances contradictory that the fact they have any motive power is, frankly, alarming. 

 

And note too some of those pulled into the net:

 

Prosecutors said 22 German citizens were detained on suspicion of “membership in a terrorist organisation”. Three other detainees, including a female Russian citizen, were suspected of supporting the organisation, they said.

Der Spiegel reported that locations searched included the barracks of Germany’s special forces unit KSK, in the south-western town of Calw. The unit has in the past been scrutinised over alleged far-right involvement by some soldiers. Federal prosecutors declined to confirm or deny that the barracks was searched.

It gets even more bizarre. 

German media have identified as the group’s ringleaders Heinrich XIII, 71, a descendant of the noble Reuß family that used to rule over parts of eastern Germany in the 12th century, and a former senior field officer at the German army’s paratrooper battalion named only as Rüdiger von P.

Last year, the pair founded a “terrorist organisation with the goal of overturning the existing state order in Germany and replacing it with their own form of state, which was already in the course of being founded”, with Rüdiger von P in charge of planning the military coup and Heinrich XIII mapping out Germany’s future political order.

The group had even started to nominate ministers for a transitional post-coup government, reported the newspaper Die Zeit, in which one of the suspects, the former AfD MP Birgit Malsack-Winkemann, 58, was to be federal minister for justice.

Note that their motivating belief was that Germany was ‘run by a deep-state conspiracy’ and that ‘was about to be exposed by an alliance of German intelligence agencies and the militaries of foreign states including Russia and the US.’

Note too the language used:

“Everything will be turned upside down: the current public prosecutors and judges, as well as the heads of the health departments and their superiors will find themselves in the dock at Nuremberg 2.0”, one of the suspect said in a message posted on Telegram minutes before the start of Wednesday’s raids, Die Zeit reported.

That’s imported wholesale from Covid denialism.

And then there’s this:

After their takeover, the group had envisioned renegotiating the treaties Germany signed after the end of the second world war with the allies. “For now, the Russian Federation was exclusively to be the central contact for these negotiations,” prosecutors said.

Meanwhile, what to make of the following dispiriting news? From a similar point on the political compass, but one that is also alarmingly, pulling together previously disparate strands.

It is a Monday and for several years, Monday night protests – drawing attention to everything from the “over-Islamification” of Germany to “dictatorial” Covid prevention measures – have become a mainstay on the calendar of many German towns and cities in the former GDR or communist east…

In recent months, it is the cost-of-living crisis that has driven the agenda, with Germans in the east having been hit disproportionately hard by rising prices, owing to having lower wages, smaller pensions and less long-term accumulated wealth – whether property, inheritance or investments – than those in western Germany.

 

Observers have watched with varying degrees of fascination and horror to see in some cases the far-right and far-left in effect join forces for the first time to voice their anger, as a “heiße Herbst” (hot autumn) has turned into what organisers and media refer to as a “Wut Winter” (angry winter).

And:

To what extent the collaboration was planned or not it is hard to say. But what has emerged is a growing sense of cooperation due to an overlap of issues, elegantly compared to a “horse shoe” shape (the ends of which curve towards each other). There are suggestions that there might even be the possibility of both camps – the far-right AfD and the far-left Die Linke, or breakaway elements of that party, Sahra Wagenknecht and her husband Oskar Lafontaine, the erstwhile Social Democrat finance minister – entering government together.

Everyone is invited into the fold. “Have courage and join us, even if it’s just for a brief while,” a woman in an orange anorak says to onlookers through a microphone, speaking in time to the drum beat.

And:

Demonstrators’ demands to the government include dropping sanctions against Russia so that it is persuaded to resume its gas flows, doing away with coronavirus restrictions, a rent cap, “and an end to all the insanity”, the protest leader shouts shrilly, to cheers.