Rhetorically championing national sovereignty movements around the world allowed young reactionary nationalists to insinuate themselves into an anti-colonial discourse that was considered predominantly left-wing terrain without giving up their own patriotic chauvinism.
Although redolent of Wilsonian ideas of national self-determination and post-World War II thinking about multiculturalism, ethnopluralism assumes that each discrete ethnicity (however defined) should be kept separate from all others in order to preserve its unique identity. In 1973, for instance, self-styled “national revolutionary” Henning Eichberg worked out a concept he called “ethnopluralism,” which asserted that every group with a distinct ethnic identity should have its own unified, bounded territory to call its own. One way they attempted to do that without taking up the baggage of their parents’ generation was by inserting themselves into ongoing global discussions about anti-colonialism and national liberation. In the 1960s-70s, West Germany’s postwar generation of young far-right activists saw a need to reestablish radical nationalism as a viable political standpoint after it had been discredited by the failure of the National Socialist regime. It also explores the ways in which German activists’ complicated relationship with the United States contributes to their capacity to foment a cohesive transatlantic far-right. This essay seeks to articulate the historical and ideological background that made the events of August 29 in Berlin possible. The internal logic that binds these symbols together is obscure, but the fact that right wing activists have been able to blend them almost seamlessly together is an indication of both the malleability of vague hostility toward “the elites” and an international authoritarian zeitgeist that denies, to varying degrees, the legitimacy of existing democratic state authorities. Kennedy assassination, the Berlin rally prominently featured flags, banners, and T-shirts linking QAnon references such as the letter Q or the acronym WWG1WGA (“where we go one, we go all”) with symbols of German nationalism-most notably the black, white, and red flag of the pre-1918 German Empire, or Kaiserreich-and demands for a peace treaty with both Russia and the United States. In particular, while elements of the QAnon belief system give it the appearance of an all-American phenomenon in its evocation of a “satanic panic” reminiscent of crusading 1980s televangelists, its prurient, obsessive loathing for Hollywood, and its ceaseless fascination with the John F. The events in Berlin in August and Washington in January are linked not only by the fact that both culminated in substantive threats to the institutions of representative democracy, but also by specific conspiracy theories-adapted to the historical and political contexts in the respective countries-that motivated many of the participants. Parliamentarians and much of the general public were outraged, but it was only after the Janubreach of the United States Capitol four months later that security at the German parliament was significantly increased. More than 300 people were arrested over the course of the day, although few of those arrests took place at the Reichstag. They could have forced their way inside, but were pushed back by police. Nonetheless, the turnout was at least large enough for some 400-500 of them to sweep past police barricades that evening and swarm the steps of the Reichstag building, the seat of Germany’s parliament.
On August 27, 2020, two days before a planned rally in Berlin against public health measures instituted in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, German conspiracy theorist Oliver Janich posted a YouTube video appealing directly to Donald Trump and Fox News in English asking them to pay attention to “the biggest protest on the face of the Earth.” He also announced that the rally would include members of “the movement with the seventeenth letter of the alphabet” and recited the QAnon slogan “where we go one, we go all.” Contrary to Janich’s prediction, Berlin Police estimated that the assortment of COVID-19 denialists, radical nationalists, and other fringe ideologues who attended the August 29 rally only amounted to ca.
Xavier naidoo brandenburger tor series#
This is part of a series on the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.
0 kommentar(er)
