Topic: Nationalism and conflicts
Among German conspiracy theorists, ultranationalist and Neo-Nazis, the American president is surfacing as a rallying cry, or even as a potential "liberator".
Two weeks ago, hundreds of far-right activists tried to storm the German Parliament. Interesting was that next to flags of imperial Germany or the German Reich, there were American flags and even one with Trump's picture on it. This is the latest example that Trump's message of disruption - his unvarnished nationalism and tolerance of white supremacists coupled with his skepticism of the pandemic's danger - is spilling well beyond American shores. Mr. Trump's appeal to the political fringe has now added a new and unpredictable element to German politics at a time when the domestic intelligence agency has identified far-right extremism and far-right terrorism as the biggest risk to German democracy. The authorities have only recently woken up to a problem of far-right infiltration in the police and military; on Monday (9/14), 29 police officers have been suspended after sending each other photos of Hitler and doctored images of refugees in gas chambers.
Matthias Quent, an expert on Germany's far right, calls it the "Trumpification of the German right." According to Quent, Trump has managed to attract different milieus, and that's what we are experiencing in Germany as well. The common denominator is that it is people who are quitting the mainstream, who are raging against the establishment. Another development is that the QAnon conspiracy has taken off in Germany which is most likely due to its good fit with local conspiracy theories and fantasies popular on the far right. One of these theories is the belief that Germany is not a sovereign country but an occupied territory controlled by globalists. This belief is held among a faction known as "Reichsbürger" who orchestrated the brief storming on Parliament. they do not recognize Germany's post-World War II Federal Republic and are counting on Mr. Trump and Putin to sign a "peace treaty" to liberate Germans from their own government so that the German Reich is reactivated.
We have already seen that these conspiracies have the potential to radicalize people. Therefore, at a time when some people are determined to destroy democratic discourse with all means possible, I agree with Konstantin von Notz, "we have to take such a phenomenon very seriously."
Article: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/07/world/europe/germany-trump-far-right.html
Jan Mueller
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