Any excuse will do

Interesting piece in the Guardian over the weekend on the far-right coup effort in Germany in 2022. This was a bizarre, implausible but very real effort, so far as can be seen, to try to overthrow the German state. There’s 27 people on trial, to be broken into groups in order to expedite the proceedings.

On Monday a group of nine, identified as the “military wing” behind the group ringleader, the self-proclaimed Heinrich XIII, Prince Reuss, 72, will be the first to go on trial in the southern city of Stuttgart on terrorism charges. Nine others, including Reuss and other prominent members, go on trial in Frankfurt on 21 May.

Prince Reuss, an antisemitic businessman, descended from a formerly aristocratic family, founded the group with the express wish to violently eliminate the state order. In the event of the coup’s success, he was due to be declared provisional head of a new German state, which would have redrawn the country according to its 1937 borders.

However unlikely the path they chose, they appear to have been well resourced:

According to federal prosecutors, the group planned to enter the Reichstag in Berlin with armed support to arrest members of the Bundestag or parliament with the intention of “overthrowing the system”.

The plotters aimed to forcibly eliminate the existing state order and replace it with their own government. They had been forging the plans from August 2021, until they were uncovered in December 2022 in a series of large scale anti-terror raids involving thousands of officers searching 150 properties across 11 German states, as well as abroad.

Members, many connected to the German far-right extremist Reichsbürger movement, had access “to a massive arsenal of weapons”, prosecutors said, including 380 firearms, 350 cutting and stabbing weapons, almost 500 other weapons and 148,000 pieces of ammunition, which they referred to by the codename “bonbons”.

“These are people who do not recognise the federal republic and its democratic structures,” the prosecutors said.

But what struck me most forcibly was the following:

The would-be putchists paid a Swiss criminal gang around €140,000 (£120,000) for weapons, and had plans to search for “subterranean children’s prisons” in which they believed a secret “world government” was carrying out experiments on children.

Doesn’t this seem to be of a piece with the current far-right playbook. A revolting self-serving approach where children are used as an excuse for their actions. The dynamic being that using that excuse near enough any extremity can be waved through. The end of democracy, the murder of political opponents – they’re doing it to save the children. That the idea of underground prisons, or a world government involved in experiment on children is an absurdity.

The reality of a historical record of conservative and reactionary social and religious structures which placed children in contexts of appalling abuse – both on this island and elsewhere – is seemingly ignored entirely. That historical record needs to be pointed to time and again in all this.