Thursday, March 4, 2021

Germany's Crazy Monarchists

 At Bloomberg, the sad and crazy story of Germany's self-proclaimed king:

Presented with a recorder, Peter talks and talks. He talks about how he healed an ex-girlfriend who was abused as a child by Satanists, using only his hands. About how a cabal of shadowy elites, including Rockefellers and Orthodox Jews, spread Covid-19 to boost drug profits and compel Germans to accept implanted biosensor chips. How a sniper once shot his car on the autobahn, but divine intervention caused the bullet to only nick the windshield. (He knows what you’re thinking, but a policeman friend told him there’s no way it was a rock.)

King Peter’s subjects are adherents of the Reichsbürger movement, whose members believe Germany doesn’t exist. The republic, they contend, is a limited liability company controlled by the Allied victors of World War II—and, according to the more anti-Semitic, the Rothschild family. Reichsbürgers print their own passports, often refuse to pay taxes, and clog courts with paperwork, along the same lines as the U.S. “sovereign citizen” movement.

And like their other American kin, QAnon, the far-right conspiracy theory alleging a “deep state” plot against Donald Trump—they’re products of the digital age of unreason. Reichsbürgers are indoctrinated by low-budget YouTube talk shows hosted by the likes of Jo Conrad, who says Freemasons, lizard people, and child-murdering cults have overrun Germany. Converts protest outside the Reichstag, which some say is guarded by a laser cannon. For fun, they stream Reichsbürger hip-hop. In 2018, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency identified about 19,000 Reichsbürgers, nearly double its estimate of two years earlier. The true number, officials say, is likely far greater.

So the weird notion that the government is actually a corporation has crossed the Atlantic; do you suppose they copied that from American crazies, or is it somehow just an obvious notion in our world?

7 comments:

David said...

FWIW, I've never heard of American crazies who think that the USG is a corporation. Many say it has been taken over by a conspiracy, or was a conspiracy all along, and some may say the conspiracy is run for economically exploitative purposes. But I imagine many of those would contrast evil government-based economic exploitation through taxes and fiat money with "good" American-style private business. In contrast, saying an evil government is a "limited liability company" sounds to me very German. There, to a certain kind of reactionary, der Staat is a holy and beautiful and most German thing, but business as such is a low Jewish/Anglo-Saxon import.

David said...

I would add I'm sure there was conspiracy thinking back in the day that said the USG was a corporation. That sounds both very IWW and very 1920s KKK, for example. But, based on what little I know, that's not the bent of the pre-Trump Turner Diaries/One World Government crew, nor of the current crop of Trumpist conspiracy theorizing. For them, government itself is bad, and corporations (especially the resource-extraction kind) are good.

karlG said...

David:
Have you not been keeping up on our home-grown conspiracies?
https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-56260345

David said...

@karlG

I've heard of the Mar 4 claim, but I hadn't seen anything that explained the reasons for the date. Interesting.

However, I don't see anything in there about the USG being a corporation. The basic claim is that Trump is fighting "the Deep State," not that the USG is really a business.

John said...

I have seen that claim several times. Here are a couple:

https://mynorthwest.com/2521073/mckenna-qanon-1871-act-constitution/

https://www.newsreview.com/sacramento/content/the-conspiracy-issue-the-constitution-is-a-fake/26507124/

I have seen others not related to the 1871 law, but that's what Google gave me.

John said...

Here's a better one:

https://www.facebook.com/votefiore/posts/the-united-states-isnt-a-country-according-to-us-congress-act-1871-treason-its-a/310355856002700/

David said...

Huh. That's a new one on me. It's like the lunatic fringe has grown a lunatic fringe! I like the obsession with capital letters.