The tongue cut out still quivered, and with noiseless movement beat the vacant air”: Two thousand years ago, Rome was torn apart by a savage civil war, which ended with the transformation of the republic into a tyranny. To the poet Lucan, the civil war seemed a kind of gladiatorial spectacle, the body of the republic being maimed to the cheers of the public. “This one cuts off the ears”, Lucan wrote. “That one gouges out the eyeballs from their hollow sockets, and, his mangled limbs viewed by himself, put out his eyes.”
Forced to commit suicide in 65CE after a failed coup against emperor Nero, Lucan raged against the destiny of his republic. “Fortune,” he wrote, “if you planned to impose a master on those born after the battle, you should have granted them a battle too.”
Last week, police in Germany arrested dozens of members of the far-Right Reichsbürger movement for planning a putsch to overthrow the German republic. The plotters—including a serving member of the armed forces, a pilot, a lawyer, and a gourmet chef—hoped to storm Germany’s parliament, putting legislators under arrest, and then install the minor aristocrat Heinrich Ruess as monarch.
The Reichsbürger putsch might seem like burlesque. The mainly elderly plotters consulted clairvoyants, perhaps unsurprising in a party founded by a man since declared legally insane. They were inspired, among other things, by the bizarre fantasies of American QAnon networks, which hold the belief that President Donald Trump is waging a secret war against an international cabal of satanic paedophiles. But the questions it has raised are deadly serious.
Even the most affluent and sophisticated societies, Lucan teaches us, can tear themselves apart.
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Germany’s not-so-new Nazis
Looking out from his apartment, journalist Raimund Pretzel observed the grim scenes on Berlin’s streets, devastated by post-First World War hyperinflation. “The atmosphere had become apocalyptic,” he noted. Everywhere, there were “people with long hair and hair shirts, declaring that they had been sent by God to save the world.” Former wine dealer Ludwig Hauser had successfully turned his advertising skills to evangelism. Friedrich Muck-Lamberty preached salvation through folk song and dance.
The messiah of Munich, Pretzel recorded, went by the name of Adolf Hitler “who, however, differed from his Berlin rivals by the exciting coarseness of his speeches.” To most contemporaries, his promise of a Thousand-Year-Reich seemed no more real than the Second Coming.
Late in 1923, Hitler ended up in prison, after a failed—sometimes comical—coup. Ten years later he was in power—without, historian Ulrich Volker reminds us, ever winning a democratic majority.
Even though it is improbable that fringe armed groups will seize control of the modern German State, signs of danger are evident. Two years ago, the German government was forced to disband an entire élite special forces unit because of its ideological infiltration by the far-Right. The conservative politician Walter Lübcke was assassinated for supporting more immigration. Earlier this year, authorities uncovered a plot to provoke a coup, by kidnapping health minister Karl Lauterbach.
Founded by Wolfgang Ebel—a sacked railway worker who declared himself chancellor of the Provincial Imperial Reich—the Reichsbürger movement believes the German State is an illegitimate artefact of foreign occupation. Arguing modern Germany is in fact a corporate conspiracy, Reichsbürger members have refused to pay taxes, and even set up faux-nations of their own.
Estimated by Germany’s intelligence services to have more than 21,000 supporters—more than a thousand of them potentially violent—the group’s members are alleged to have stockpiled guns and held weapons training camps. The organisation was named in a 2019 investigation by Germany’s military counterintelligence service into Right-wing infiltration of the armed forces.
Like Reischsbürger, there are several groups committed to violence: Combat18, which calls for lone-wolf attacks, the anti-Islam Pegida, anti-immigrant Freital group and Wolfsbrigade 44, which seeks to reestablish the Nazi regime. Last year, interior minister Horst Seehofer said that a record 23,064 crimes with political motives had been committed by the far-Right—the highest since data began to be collected ten years earlier.
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The shadow of the Third Reich
Lucan lived in a time of profound social reordering, not dissimilar to our own. Elites had been stripped of their powers, classicist Shadi Barth has written, while social mobility upended established hierarchies. Ethnic identities had changed as the empire extended citizenship—if not equality, historian Douglas Boin reminds us—to immigrants from distant regions. The poet Juvenal complained bitterly about foreign languages, customs and even festive processions. Lucan lamented the rise of leaders he saw as foreigners.
Emerging from the ashes of the Third Reich, Germany’s far-Right nestled for a time in the new order—but soon began to assert itself, often violently, in debates over race, identity and political power.
Leading Nazis, like Hans Globke—the minister responsible for Nazi race laws—were rehabilitated under Konrad Adenauer, Germany’s chancellor from 1949 to 1963. Former Nazi Kurt-George Keisinger became chancellor in 1966, scholar Thomas Klikauer reminds us, while Hans Filbinger and Carl Carstens rose to high office.
Key Nazi bureaucrats—many implicated in war crimes—were reintegrated into government. “The threat of permanent exclusion was temporary, even momentary, and soon forgotten,” scholar John Gimbel observed in 1960.
The murder of collective memory, journalist Harald Jähner has argued, enabled the reconstruction of the State—and also allowed Germans to ignore their complicity in Nazi crimes. “They saw themselves as the victims,” he writes, “and thus had the dubious good fortune of not having to think about the real ones.”
Elements of the Nazi hard-core—who continued to stage terrorist attacks against allied occupation forces until the end of 1948—also regrouped outside of the establishment. The neo-Nazi National Democratic Party fought hard to secure representation in Parliament but failed to pass the electoral threshold in 1969. Two camps emerged on the far-Right, one committed to the violent overthrow of democracy, and a second to develop a new intellectual foundation for the movement.
From 1980, former intelligence officer Bruce Hoffman recorded, Right-wing terrorism surged across Europe. Eighty-four people were killed that year when neo-Fascists bombed Bologna railway station, followed by terrorist strikes in Munich and Paris. Earlier, three bombings had targeted facilities linked to immigrants in Germany.
Even though this eruption of violence was contained, the far-Right was not. Through the coming decades, a new generation of intellectuals argued that post-war Germany failed to address questions of identity—key among them, the reinterpretation of history to create a sense of nationhood, and the very biological survival of the race in the face of immigration.
The Neo-Nazi movement, political scientist Hans-Georg Betz argues, also tapped a “politics of resentment.” Former chancellor Helmut Kohl, who ruled from 1982 to 1996, instituted economic policies which ensured prosperity for two-thirds of the population, low-skills workers, the elderly, farmers and youth were left behind, however.
Flows of recruits from the relatively-impoverished East enabled far-Right groups to stage lethal attacks against immigrants through this time. In some cases, police are alleged to have been complicit, and in others incompetent.
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The siege of democracies
Lucan saw the plague as the ultimate metaphor for the illness in the body of Rome: Born of rotting corpses, it killed both sides in the civil war without distinction. From the mid-fourteenth century, as the Black Death swept Europe, scholar Nachman Ben Yehuda writes, frightened populations massacred Jews, witches and heretics, imagining they were exorcising evil from the polity. Zealots overran entire cities, historian Norman Cohn has recorded, imposing religious fundamentalism.
Fear has powered the growth of conspiracy theories and fringe movements through the course of the still-unfolding pandemic, too. Across the Western world, counter-terrorism expert Teun van Dongen writes, far-Right groups have mobilised around the idea that they are fighting a war against an élite conspiracy to impose totalitarian social control.
The war in Ukraine, many European counter-terrorism experts also fear, could lead to easier access to weapons and military training for far-Right networks. Nazi groups, with links across Europe, are reported to be fighting alongside Russia in Ukraine. “I’m a nationalist, a patriot, an imperialist,” one Right-wing fighter proclaimed online, “I’ll say it outright: I’m a Nazi.”
Europe’s democracies aren’t new to these threats. Frustrated by General Charles de Gaulle’s Algeria policies, hawkish generals attempted to depose his government in 1961. Fascists in Italy sought to overthrow the regime in 1970. Former military ruler Francisco Franco’s supporters sought to seize control of Spain’s parliament in 1981. Europe proved resilient—but with polities more divided ideologically than ever before, the same outcome isn’t guaranteed.
From 9/11 on, western scholars have examined the dangers posed to the global system by failed States — countries imploding under the weight of doddering leaders and decrepit economies. Flailing post-colonial dystopias, the putsch makes clear, aren’t the only polities at risk. Armed white-nationalist groups in the United States are gaining strength. Former French military commanders are warning of race wars involving “the hordes of the banlieue,” the immigrant-dominated suburbs.
Across the West, democracies are finding themselves besieged—from within.
The author is National Security Editor, ThePrint. He tweets @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Anurag Chabuey)