31 October 2020

QAnon - right wing conspiracies in the USA and in Germany

  
The Reichsberger Movement in Germany
DW     Since I know little about the topic, I've totally relied on quality newspaper reports from neutral countries. The BBC reported that in U.S, QAnon had already evolved in Nov 2017 from a fringe internet sub­culture into a mass main­stream move­ment. The QAnon consp­ir­­acy theory emerged when an online poster began dropping cryptic messages on the message board 4Chan.

These messages were often written in cryptic language peppered with slog­ans and pro-Trump them­es. They said that glob­al elites were kidnap­ping children and keeping them in und­er­ground pris­ons, extracting a life-prolonging subs­tance from their blood. Soon supporters created videos, a Reddit comm­un­ity, a busin­ess and a mythology based off the 4chan posts of “Q”. The theory they espoused became QAnon, and it ev­ent­ually made its way from mes­sage boards to national media stories and to Pres Trump’s rallies.

QAnon's wide conspiracy theory that said that Pres Trump was waging a secret war against elite Satan-worshipping paed­ophiles in government, business and media. QAnon believers specul­at­ed that this fight would lead to a day of reckoning where prominent people like Hillary Clinton would be arrested and executed. 

The list of QAnon claims became huge & even contradictory. Adherents drew in news events, historical facts and numerology to develop their own far-fetched conclusions. The amount of traffic to mainstream social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and YouTube exploded since 2017, even more during the Covid pand­em­ic. There were hundreds of thousands of people who believed in at least some of QAnon's theories.

QAnon’s popularity wasn't even diminished by events which normally would have debunked conspiracies eg early Q drops focused on the in­ves­tigation by special prosecutor Robert Mueller into the 2016 US election. When it concluded with no bombshell revel­ation, the att­ent­ion of the conspiracy theorists simply drifted elsewhere.

QAnon supporters co-ordinated abuse of perceived enemies, pol­iticians, celebrities & journalists who they be­lieved were cov­er­ing up for paedophiles. In addition to threat­ening messages online, the theory has been in­creasingly linked to real-world violence. Recently QAnon fol­lowers were involved in a pres­id­en­tial assassin­at­ion plot, shocking Calif­ornian wildfires and an armed standoff with law enforcement officers in Arizona. 

The movement was facing a crackdown from Facebook and Twitter, and some QAnon believers were in fact arrested after making threats or taking offline action.

How influential is a pro-Trump conspiracy theory? And could it have impact on the US election? Studies indicated that most Americans had not heard of QAnon but for true believers, it formed the foun­d­­at­ion of their support for President Trump. In fact Trump told journ­alists that these people were very patriotic. 

Demonstrations against the the German government's coronavirus measures 
Berlin, 2020 
NBC

Groups have sprung up from the Netherlands to the Balkans. But, the New York Times reported, it was in Germany that QAnon made the deepest in­roads. c200,000 people quickly built audiences on YouTube, Facebook and the Telegram messenger service

German officials were baffled that a bizarre conspiracy theory, about Mr Trump taking on a Deep State of Satanists and paed­ophiles, had resonated in Germany. Polls showed that trust in Ms Merkel’s government was high, while the far-right Alternative for Germany party/AfD, had been strugg­ling. So QAnon Germany had to get going. 

QAnon spread in Germany with Defender-Europe 2020 early in 2020, a large-scale NATO exercise where thous­ands of Am­er­ic­an troops were in Germany. But, the believers said, this was no NATO ex­er­cise; rat­her it was a covert operation by Pres. Trump to lib­erate Germany from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government. Merk­el had used a Fake Pandemic to scupper a secret liberation plan. So far-right activ­ists had to make an unexpected, new political element.

For historians and far-right extremism experts, QAnon was both a very new and a very old practice. QAnon’s mythology and language, from claims of ritual child murder to revenge fantasies against lib­eral elites, conjured ancient anti-Semitic tropes and putsch dreams that had long animated Germany’s far-right. Now those groups were seeking to harness the theory’s viral popul­arity to reach a wider audience. QAnon drew an ideol­ogically incoherent mixture of vaccine opponents, anti-Semites and citizens who believed the pandemic was fake.

With 80,000 Telegram followers, Attila Hildmann became one of QAnon’s most important voices in Germany. He was at all coronavirus protests, which drew 40,000+ people in Ber­lin, against the fake pandemic concocted by the Deep State to deny liberties. People waved Q flags during those protests! Hildmann called Merkel a Zionist Jew, venting about the New World Order and the Rothschilds bankers. 

Note that many followers were people who in the early days of the pandemic had nothing in common with the far right. In fact QAnon didn’t openly fly the colours of Fascism; rather it sold it as sec­ret code. This gave it an access point to broader German soc­­iety where everyone thought of themselves as immune to Nazism, given Germany’s history.

Then one far-right movement, the Reichsbürger/citizens of the Reich, jumped onto the QAnon traffic online to increase visib­ility for its own conspiracies. With c19,000 followers, Reichsbürger be­lieved that Germany’s post-war republic was not a sovereign count­ry but a corporation set up by the allies after WW2. The government, parliament, judic­iary and security were puppets installed and cont­rol­led by foreigners. QAnon conspir­acies offered the prospect of a Trump-led army restoring the German Reich. [Isn't Trump a foreigner?]

The extremist magazine Compact dedicated its last 3 issues to QAnon, paedophile scandals and the Reichsbürger movement. In Aug editor Jürgen Elsässer put a giant Q on the cover! Q was a brand new attempt to str­uct­ure political opposition via social media.

After the Holocaust, promoting Nazi propaganda or inciting hat­red was punishable by 5 years in gaol, and recently the govern­ment passed strict legislation designed to also enforce its laws online. But conspiracy theories were not illegal unless they moved into hate speech. Clearly QAnon was/is hard to police.





14 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good research and thanks for the historical background to the movement. I did not know it had become so significant in Germany. I suppose it is only coincidence that Attila Hildmann has the initials AH.

LMK said...

What about Australia and New Zealand?

Hels said...

Andrew (or should I call you Brian, to change the initials?)

there are nasty right wing populations in a number of countries, so we have to ask why the USA and Germany were the two nations to take on QAnon so passionately. Running major conspiracies against Satan-worshipping paed­ophiles seems absurd. But the other issues seem very attractive to right wingers - racism, anti-Semitism, anti foreign powers, anti vaccines, revenge for WW1 losses etc etc.

Covid19 made life miserable everywhere :( Perhaps Hungary and Belarus will be next to jump on board.

Hels said...

LMK

Id not heard of QAnon in this part of the world. So I'll quote you what I found in the ABC:

The conspiracy here is astonishingly malleable. All kinds of local networks, including anti-vaccination and sovereign citizen groups, have been quickly folded into its hierarchy. Some of the most active Australian supporters of conspiracy theories, once ignored by all but a committed few, have opportunistically jumped on the QAnon trend, becoming stars off the back of Facebook Live broadcasts in which they assert COVID-19 is a hoax and pronounce their faith in a coming intervention by Mr Trump. A whole lot of the various conspiracy spot fires have all joined up into one massive fire front, said Kaz Ross, a lecturer in humanities at the University of Tasmania, who monitors online extremism. In Australia, for example, the QAnon conspiracy theory has melded with an existing anti-vaccination movement. It is all very dangerous.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2020-08-24/how-the-qanon-conspiracy-theory-is-affecting-australian-families/12564566

Hilary Melton-Butcher said...

Thanks Hels ... I've read ... but won't comment ... all the best - Hilary

Hels said...

Hilary

nod.. It is always so difficult to disentangle conspiracy theories! So that is exactly why I relied totally on reputable news services in uninvolved countries - the BBC on the USA, and the New York Times on Germany.

Parnassus said...

Hello Hels, I wrote several outraged responses to this and erased them all. What it comes down to is that I cannot believe the incredible plain stupidity of huge masses of people (if we are kind enough not to accuse them of the basest level of inhumanity). And the situation is not likely to improve. People are getting dumber, and young people are refusing to learn anything or impose any kinds of intellectual standards on themselves. They think instead that they can just look up everything on the internet. Yikes!
--Jim

Hels said...

Parnassus

everyone has causes they are excited about, but I think QAnon attracts/creates obsessions rather than causes. The 3 examples here are educated, famous and professional, not dumb at all: Dr Andrew Wakefield, superchef Peter Evans and author David Icke. Yet all three have dedicated their lives to banning fluoride from water supplies, proving that mumps&measles injections cause autism in children and denying potential Covid-19 vaccines.

Their films and documentaries have taken off with a wide cross-section of QAnon followers and right-wing extremists who may not be as educated as their heroes.

mem said...

It is a fact that our emotional and psychological development as a species hasn't kept up with Technology . We are not so far from the fear and hysteria of witch burnings. I am fascinated by why this is and have done some reading on the subject which would suggest that these conspiracy theories are held by people in preference to believing and accepting that life and life events can be and often are very random and happen for no discernable reason. Hence we find reasons for random scary events and this , even if the "reasons" are themselves terrifying, is preferable than the thought that we are tiny insignificant creatures who can be affected every minute of our lives by random events over which we have no control what so ever. We live in times of great anxiety in that Climate change is aa growing menace as is the virus . Thee Q Anon conspiracies are a manifestation of high anxiety and poor ability to reason and look at evidence . Teaching people to think is incredibly important but also a threat to those who wish to impose their values on all of us . Hence the doubling of cost for arts degrees in Australia . Hang on could that be a conspiracy theory ????? !

Hels said...

mem

I would agree about seemingly random events, yes... and events over which we have no control at all. Very scary in general, but even scarier in times of health, political or economic crises. My question remains as to why QAnon got going in 2017, 3 years before this current pandemic produced the perfect climate for conspiracy theories to spread.

QAnon casts President Donald Trump in an imagined battle against a sinister cabal of Democrats and celebrities who abuse children. This week U.S Senate candidate Marjorie Greene said in her advertising “There’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshipping paedophiles out, and I think we have the President to do it". Beyond believable ...by anyone :(

CherryPie said...

It worries me that people blindly follow such cults and uprisings without doing their own research.

Some people follow like sheep without thinking for themselves.

Hels said...

CherryPie

oh agreed! I cannot imagine anyone I know soooo sheep-like as to be seduced by cults and conspiracies. Yet we know it has happened in the past, and we can see it is happening in this current crisis.

MIT says it is already too late to stop QAnon with the normal rational responses i.e fact checks and account bans. Twitter and Facebook won’t be able to deal with the omni-conspiracy without rethinking the entire information ecosystem.

Ava Miller said...

Hi there,

Seeing you mention QAnon on your site, I would like to bring your attention as well as hear your feedback on this extremely well-written and in-depth article I came across explaining this massive conspiracy.

You will be able to find the article here: https://www.mysticmag.com/psychic-reading/what-is-qanon/.

You are welcome to add this to your website since I believe it is terribly intriguing to share with your readers. I look forward to hearing from you! Best regards,
Ava

Hels said...

Ava

thank you for your response. I hadn't thought about QAnon for a few years, then something shocking happened in Australia today. Two police officers died after they were fired upon while attending a property c3 hours west of Brisbane. As you know, guns are outlawed in Australia (excluding the army etc) so where did the killers get the guns???? Did QAnon have anything to do with it?