Premium Episode 195: International Militant Conspiracism feat Miro Dittrich & Cam Wilson (Sample)
Germany. Australia. Two stories of conspiracy theorists that paint an evolving picture of a now international dissociative movement. German law enforcement say they uncovered a plot by local sovereign citizens to overthrow the government and install as head of state a descendant of German nobility. To help us make sense of the plot, we are joined by German extremism expert Miro Dittrich. The second story is from Australia, where a 47-year-old prepper named Gareth Train shot and killed three people. Investigations revealed that Train was active on conspiracist sites prior to the killings. Journalist Cameron Wilson from the Australian publication Crikey will join us to discuss the details of the killings, as he discovered a Youtube channel operated by the perpetrators.
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Miro Dittrich: https://twitter.com/DittrichMiro / https://cemas.io
Cam Wilson: https://twitter.com/cameronwilson / https://www.crikey.com.au/author/cwilsoncrikey-com-au/
Music by Pontus Berghe. Editing by Corey Klotz.
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Welcome, listener, to Premium Chapter 195 of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, the international militant conspiracism episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rogatansky, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
Today, we bring you two wonderful stories of crime and death by conspiracists.
The first is from Germany, where law enforcement say they uncovered a plot by German sovereign citizens to overthrow the government and install, as head of state, a descendant of German nobility.
To help us make sense of the plot, we are joined by German extremism expert Miro Dietrich.
The second story is from Australia, where a 47-year-old prepper named Gareth Train shot and killed three people.
Investigations revealed that Train was active on conspiracist sites prior to the killings.
Journalist Cameron Wilson from the Australian publication Crikey will join us to discuss the details of the killings as he discovered a YouTube channel operated by the perpetrators.
Now, are these topics a little morbid for the holiday seasons?
Yes, but as always we count on our fellow pain pigs to enjoy their spiked eggnog with True Tales of the Tragic Pilling.
In Germany, there is a small rustic town called Bad Lobenstein.
A three-hour drive south of Berlin.
It is a holiday spa town with about 7,500 residents.
There, atop a steep hill, is a small neo-gothic style castle with a turreted tower and battlements.
But according to German authorities, it was far more than a quaint hunting lodge.
It was in fact the main meeting place for extremists who plotted the violent overthrow of the state to install as national leader a 71-year-old aristocrat named Prince Heinrich VIII.
In the basement of this hunting lodge, the group stored weapons and explosives.
In the forest that sloped beneath the lodge, they sometimes held target practice.
The plotters belonged to a movement called Reichsbürger or Citizens of the Reich.
They hold to sovereign citizen-like beliefs and don't recognize the legitimacy of the German state.
Authorities say that before this plot could be carried out, 3,000 police officers searched more than 130 homes throughout Germany and made 25 arrests.
Prosecutors said that the group allegedly believes in a conglomerate of conspiracy theories consisting of narratives from the so-called Reichsburger as well as QAnon ideology.
They also think that Germany is ruled by an apparent deep state.
To help us make sense of these events, we are again joined by Miro Dietrich.
He is a senior researcher at the German Center for Monitoring, Analysis, and Strategy, or CIMAS, and he previously helped us understand German QAnon on episode 176 of the podcast.
Miro, thanks again so much for joining us to help us try to figure out what happened here.
It's a pleasure to be back.
So before we get to the plot in the raid, I was hoping you could sort of refresh us on the Reichsburger movement, which the plotters are affiliated with.
So what exactly do they believe?
Yeah, the term was coined in the 80s.
It's the German speciality of what you would know as sovereign citizenship.
They're under the label of conspiracy ideological sovereignism.
They're a real heterogeneous movement, but basically they believe that Germany is still occupied by the Allied forces, because they don't think Germany had a peace treaty after the Second World War, so Germany, the German Reich, is still active.
So their core point is that Germany is not a sovereign nation.
Gotcha.
So they just believe in totally alternate history, it sounds like, essentially.
Yeah, because there's so many interesting possible takes about what happened to Germany after World War II, the separation during the Cold War, and the formation of a kind of international order and a Europe in which Germany is very dominant.
And, you know, I guess I'm being very quaint to hope for analysis that might actually shed light on power structures instead of a 71-year-old syphilitic aristocrat being thrust to power by people who are completely fucking deluded.
I guess I'm just fucking hoping for an alternate universe.
Especially because it's quite embarrassing for them.
They don't think Germany has a peace treaty, but we have a peace treaty.
It's just not peace treaty written at the top.
It's the two plus four contract.
They're stickler sovereign citizens.
They want the exact language they like.
Yeah, they're sticklers in misunderstanding things.
They somehow are like, they're detail oriented in their delusions, which is maybe one of the most frustrating aspects of it.
Certainly frustrating to the courts.
So what exactly is the role of QAnon in the ideology of the plotters?
So QAnon and the Reichsbürger movement exploded during the pandemic in Germany together.
They share a lot of the same narratives and they sort of started in the same group.
It was definitely helped because the biggest anti-lockdown movement in Germany, Querdenken, translated lateral thinking, promoted QAnon and Reichsbürger narratives from their stages and from their demonstrations.
So they reached quite a big new audience.
In Germany we even have a mix of Reichsbürger and QAnon.
They call themselves S.H.E.F., which stands for Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Forces.
That was the headquarters of the Allied Forces during the Second World War.
So this is a movie in the waiting.
This is a dark comedy, and no one wants to make it.
They think that this headquarter is still active, and we even have some role-playing
commanders who think they're still in charge. One of them was arrested in Germany because he kept
issuing death warrants to his political enemies, which sort of was too much at some point.
>>STEVE So this is a movie in the waiting. This is a dark comedy, and no one wants to make it.
But I think that we have maybe a better version of Downfall here.
And so of this Shaft belief, several of the members that got arrested were in Telegram groups who had this Shaft belief and other QAnon groups.
And it sort of works out quite well.
If you believe in QAnon and you believe in Reichsbürger, then you think the Allied forces are still in control of Germany.
So at the time of the pandemic, Donald Trump would be the leader of Germany.
So it quite works out in their worldview together.
And I think also that the Reichsbürger movement and QAnon sort of draws in the same people because both of these narratives offer something to do against the lack of agency that they feel in their life.
In QAnon you can become a digital soldier and with the Reichsbürger you can do your own country, you can stop paying taxes or you can plot to overthrow the German government.
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