Tiny Monsters

Herr Reichsburger and His Friends

Politically-speaking, the 21st century is a weird, unstable and frequently disturbing era. After the last few years, I probably don’t need to tell anyone that. But whenever you think you’re beginning to get used to how weird it is, something will inevitably come along to surprise you. Take the so-called ‘Reichsburger Plot’ which made headlines last week, when the German Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) announced that it had arrested more than two dozen members of a right-wing extremist terror cell in raids across the country.

The news that far-right extremists were apparently plotting to bring down the German government wasn’t especially surprising in itself. Violent far-right extremism is not a new phenomenon in the Federal Republic, but the scale of the 3,000 personnel police operation made this particular plot instantly newsworthy, and so did the high-profile arrests.

The ‘cell’ included a 71-year-old minor member of the German nobility named Heinrich XIII of Reuss or ‘Heinrich the Race Driver’ as he is known to his family because of his fondness for fast cars, with a hunting lodge in Thuringia where the plotters plotted whatever they were plotting.

According to Der Spiegel, Prince Reuss was at the centre of a ‘motley crew of politically radicalized Germans who have a weakness for conspiracy theories and reject the legitimacy of postwar Germany’ and planned to overthrow the German government.

It’s not clear how far advanced this plot was, but it included special forces soldiers and police officers, a former MP from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, a pilot, a lawyer, a gourmet chef, a tenor singer, an entrepreneur and a doctor.

All these men and women were members of the ‘Reichsburger’ or ‘Citizens of the Empire’ movement - a German variant on the US ‘Sovereign Citizens’ movement - which believes that the Federal Republic is not a state but a corporation, called the ‘BRD GmbH’ (Federal Republic of Germany Limited Liability Company) that was illegally imposed on Germany after WW2

Curiously, the ‘empire’ that the movement wants to restore is not the Third Reich, but the German second empire that laasted from 1871-1918. These good reichsburgers believe that the Third Reich was never formally dissolved in 1945, and that ipso facto, the German state is still a foreign occupation government.

At first sight, Prince Heinrich and his pals would make excellent material for a Netflix comedy series or a fascistic opera bouffe, with their ridiculous plan to ‘crush’ the German government. Even by 21st century standards, the Kaiserreich is an outlandish and unlikely political project. Whatever role the gourmet chef and the tenor singer were expected to play, it’s not clear why the movement planned to establish a department for ‘spirituality and healing’ in its putative revolutionary government, or why it recruited an astrologer to oversee ‘transcommunication.’

This is political Wacky Races material, with the Prince as Dick Dastardly or Toad of Toad Hall-turned-putschist, but the cell was well-armed, and even if its madcap scheme to assault the German parliament was doomed to fail, people could have been killed.

The Reichsburger movement is much larger than Racing Heinrich’s madcap plotters, with some 19,000 estimated members, one of whom killed a policeman and wounded three others in 2016.

And the Fourth Reich is only one goal in a heterogeneous movement that overlaps with other movements and ideologies, including QAnon, the German anti-lockdown and anti-vaxx Querdenker (‘lateral thinker’) movement which sprung up during the pandemic, the anti-Muslim Pegida organisation, white nationalism, neo-Nazism, ‘Identitarianism’, antisemitism, and even Green politics.

Many of these ideologies were represented at the anti-lockdown 29 August 2020 ‘Sturm auf Berlin’ (storming Berlin) rally outside the Reichstag, in protest at ‘Angela Merkel’s reign of terror’ where more than 300 people were arrested.

There was a time, in the late sixties and early seventies, when sections of the left regarded the (West) German state as an illegitimate occupation government, and the successive iterations of the Red Army Faction carried out violent attacks on representatives of the state and American military power.

In the 1990s Horst Mahler, one of the leading members of the RAF, surprised his country by popping up as a neo-Nazi. Now, in Germany as in so many other countries, it is the extreme-right that has turned towards pseudo-revolutionary politics, and we should bear this global picture in mind as we shake our heads in wonder at the amusing antics of Racing Heinrich and his highflying insurrectionists.

According to the German security services, the prince and his pals had spent more than a year planning a ‘Day X’ assault on the federal parliament building, modelled on the Trump insurrection of 6 Jan, 2020. Many members of the Republican Party still refuse to accept that Trump bore any responsibility for those events and even deny that an insurrection even took place.

Only last week the psychotically nationalist congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene addressed a meeting called by the New York Young Republican Club (NYYRC), in which she denied any involvement in the events of 6 January, telling the gathering ‘ If Steve Bannon and I had organized that, we would have won. Not to mention, it would have been armed. Yeah. See, that’s the whole joke isn’t it?’

Many people will not find this message as reassuring as Steve Bannon and a number of other leading white nationalist figures who attended that meeting did. Not to mention the speech from the NYYRC president Gavin Wax, who baldly proclaimed:

‘We want to cross the Rubicon. We want total war. We must be prepared to do battle in every arena. In the media. In the courtroom. At the ballot box. And in the streets.’

Some members of this global insurrectionary movement have already begun to wage their own ‘wars’, from the white supremacists who have murdered Muslims, Jews, Hispanics and people of colour to prevent ‘racial extinction’ to the Bolsonaro supporters who staged their own 6 January in Brasilia on Monday.

That same day six people, including two police officers, were shot dead at a rural property in Queensland owned by a conspiracy theorist named Gareth Train, who had taken to ‘ark homesteading’ in order to ‘survive tomorrow.’ A former headteacher, Train was a regular visitor to conspiracy websites and once posted

When it becomes clear that we are in a time like no other and you head into the wilderness to escape persecution, know that my wife and I will offer refuge to all brothers and sisters.

Train was one of those killed, after executing two police officers in cold blood who had come to carry out a weapons search. Once again, this combination of conspiracy thinking and armed ‘resistance’ is not new in itself. Precedents can be found in the Posse Comitatus and militia movements of the 1990s who engaged in acts of ‘leaderless resistance’ against the ‘Zionist Occupation Government’ and the ‘New World Order’.

But ideas like this are now part of a global movement, whose messages have been magnified and empowered in the age of the Internet and Social Media, to the point when the most insane ideas and conspiracies are now readily available to a ‘borderless’ global audience. In technologically advanced societies supposedly undergoing the ‘Fourth Industrial revolution’, it is startling and unnerving to see how many people appear to be entirely impervious to the benefits of mass education, and cling fervently to the most grotesque and ridiculous conspiracy theories that seem to explain everything and yet generally fail to prove anything.

Hundreds of thousands of people now believe that world governments are secretly murdering children in order to harvest life-expanding adrenochrome from their innocent organs; that the sleazy sexual predator Donald Trump is engaged in a secret battle to save the children of America from a paedophile network that includes Hilary Clinton; that the UN is engaged in a secret plan to flood the world with refugees and migrants; that vaccines, masks and quarantines are sinister plots by which the ‘global elite’ aims to ‘control’ and ‘dominate’.

Some of them want to hang public health officials, like Anthony Fauci; others, like the billionaire troll Elon Musk, merely want to ‘prosecute’ him. Across the world you can find protesters blockading urban spaces in protest at vaccine mandates. Or worshipping homicidal ‘influencers’ like Romana Didulo, the self-styled ‘Queen of Canada’ whose name is an anagram for ‘I Am Our Donald’, and who has called for the execution of government officials involved in vaccine rollouts.

Expert cryptographers of the 21st century’s chaotic and disintegrating world, these truthseekers find sinister order in chaos, and detect the hidden hands of devilish conspiracies everywhere. They might be QAnon ‘bakers’ assembling the hidden truth from the ‘crumbs’ that Q throws them. Or ‘sovereign citizens’ who believe that the US government has given every American citizen a ‘strawman’ corporate identity at birth that overrides their ‘real, sovereign identity’.

Eagerly scanning our dismal horizons for evidence, they join the dots that connect China and the Wuhan Lab to the ‘scamdemic’; the ‘Great Reset’ and the World Economic Forum; George Soros and refugees; the IPCC and the coming ‘climate change lockdowns.’

In his Theses Against Occultism, Theodor Adorno once excoriated the American occultists and spiritualists of the late forties, and the ‘regression to magic’ that he saw as a product of late capitalism. In words that continue to resonate in our own era, Adorno observed how

The asocial twilight phenomena in the margins of the system, the pathetic attempts to squint through the chinks in its walls, while revealing nothing of what is outside, illuminate all the more clearly the forces of decay within. the bent little fortune-tellers terrorizing their clients with crystal balls are toy models of the great ones who hold the fate of mankind in their hands.

Today our digital and our ‘real’ worlds are awash with ‘little fortune-tellers’ who believe they have discovered the secret forces behind the seemingly endless succession of traumatic and bewildering events that have marked the history of this century. And these grifters and zealots are no longer lurking in the fringes.

Some of them have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of followers. Some of them are presidents and billionaires. Some have become rich by crowd-sourcing conspiratorial snake oil to a credulous and often bewildered and confused audiences who crave all-encompassing theories of everything, preferably with a heroic narrative of freedom against tyranny, good versus evil, attached to them.

Adorno once mocked the ‘ill-mannered hobgoblins’ and the ‘worthless magic’ offered by spiritualists and mediums who ‘take speculation to the point of fraudulent bankruptcy.’

Substitute ‘occultism’ with ‘conspiracy theory,’ and many of these observations apply to our own collective regression to a new technological dark age. Perhaps some member of the German security services had read Adorno when they called their operation against the Reischburger cell Operation Klabautermann - Hobgoblin.

Or perhaps they simply had a sense of humour. But before we get too carried away laughing at Prince Heinrich and his pals, remember that there are many people who also see hobgoblins everywhere and anywhere.

And it remains one of the greatest challenges of our time to find ways to put an end to this vicious toxic nonsense that is spreading across the world, and find our way back to a politics founded in rationality, the restoration of the social fabric and the common good, before more people are killed and more damage is done by foolish men and women who went out into the world chasing monsters, without realising that they had become monsters themselves.