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.