Germany coup plot: Police raid far-right terror suspects behind bid 'to overthrow government'

[steve_bank]

Boris!!! No!!! That is not the off button, that is the shoot button!!!!

 

[bilby]

These are the parochial populations like the folks in Donbas who accidentally shot down a transcontinental airliner. They had no clue that the airspace over Ukraine had become a major air corridor; They probably had a vague idea that air travel existed, but no reason at all to imagine that it was happening above their towns and villages. They didn't worry about the risk, because they simply didn't have the experience to grasp its existence.

Disagree. Anyone capable of shooting down that airliner is no small town hick. Those systems take a lot of training to operate, the sort of idiot you picture wouldn't have hit their target.

Rather, it was probably a Russian army idiot who was itching to shoot down a Ukrainian plane and didn't worry too much about target identification. The same sort of thing that lead Iran to shoot down that civilian plane--itching to shoot down an American raid (not that any such raid actually happened, we just popped one of their people outside Iran) and not making sure of what they were shooting at.

Disagree.

They were trained to shoot down planes.

They were oblivious to the possibility that anyone would fly over their territory, other than someone local to, and interested in, their territory.

They're hicks. They're not unintelligent, just ignorant and narrow-minded.

If a plane is on their radar, approaching from the direction of Ukraine, and it's not one of their own planes, it must be a Ukrainian plane. Why would they even have heard of Malaysia, much less imagine a Malaysian aircraft flying over Donbas?

 

[Patooka]

These are the parochial populations like the folks in Donbas who accidentally shot down a transcontinental airliner. They had no clue that the airspace over Ukraine had become a major air corridor; They probably had a vague idea that air travel existed, but no reason at all to imagine that it was happening above their towns and villages. They didn't worry about the risk, because they simply didn't have the experience to grasp its existence.

Disagree. Anyone capable of shooting down that airliner is no small town hick. Those systems take a lot of training to operate, the sort of idiot you picture wouldn't have hit their target.

Rather, it was probably a Russian army idiot who was itching to shoot down a Ukrainian plane and didn't worry too much about target identification. The same sort of thing that lead Iran to shoot down that civilian plane--itching to shoot down an American raid (not that any such raid actually happened, we just popped one of their people outside Iran) and not making sure of what they were shooting at.

Disagree.

They were trained to shoot down planes.

They were oblivious to the possibility that anyone would fly over their territory, other than someone local to, and interested in, their territory.

They're hicks. They're not unintelligent, just ignorant and narrow-minded.

If a plane is on their radar, approaching from the direction of Ukraine, and it's not one of their own planes, it must be a Ukrainian plane. Why would they even have heard of Malaysia, much less imagine a Malaysian aircraft flying over Donbas?

Quoted for truth. Anyone who thinks enlisted personnel are skilled technicians are fucking stupid themselves. Every D.I in every military in every country agrees with me.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

These are the parochial populations like the folks in Donbas who accidentally shot down a transcontinental airliner. They had no clue that the airspace over Ukraine had become a major air corridor; They probably had a vague idea that air travel existed, but no reason at all to imagine that it was happening above their towns and villages. They didn't worry about the risk, because they simply didn't have the experience to grasp its existence.

Disagree. Anyone capable of shooting down that airliner is no small town hick. Those systems take a lot of training to operate, the sort of idiot you picture wouldn't have hit their target.

Rather, it was probably a Russian army idiot who was itching to shoot down a Ukrainian plane and didn't worry too much about target identification. The same sort of thing that lead Iran to shoot down that civilian plane--itching to shoot down an American raid (not that any such raid actually happened, we just popped one of their people outside Iran) and not making sure of what they were shooting at.

Disagree.

They were trained to shoot down planes.

They were oblivious to the possibility that anyone would fly over their territory, other than someone local to, and interested in, their territory.

They're hicks. They're not unintelligent, just ignorant and narrow-minded.

If a plane is on their radar, approaching from the direction of Ukraine, and it's not one of their own planes, it must be a Ukrainian plane. Why would they even have heard of Malaysia, much less imagine a Malaysian aircraft flying over Donbas?

I'm sure they had seen other passenger planes flying over.

 

[bilby]

These are the parochial populations like the folks in Donbas who accidentally shot down a transcontinental airliner. They had no clue that the airspace over Ukraine had become a major air corridor; They probably had a vague idea that air travel existed, but no reason at all to imagine that it was happening above their towns and villages. They didn't worry about the risk, because they simply didn't have the experience to grasp its existence.

Disagree. Anyone capable of shooting down that airliner is no small town hick. Those systems take a lot of training to operate, the sort of idiot you picture wouldn't have hit their target.

Rather, it was probably a Russian army idiot who was itching to shoot down a Ukrainian plane and didn't worry too much about target identification. The same sort of thing that lead Iran to shoot down that civilian plane--itching to shoot down an American raid (not that any such raid actually happened, we just popped one of their people outside Iran) and not making sure of what they were shooting at.

Disagree.

They were trained to shoot down planes.

They were oblivious to the possibility that anyone would fly over their territory, other than someone local to, and interested in, their territory.

They're hicks. They're not unintelligent, just ignorant and narrow-minded.

If a plane is on their radar, approaching from the direction of Ukraine, and it's not one of their own planes, it must be a Ukrainian plane. Why would they even have heard of Malaysia, much less imagine a Malaysian aircraft flying over Donbas?

I'm sure they had seen other passenger planes flying over.

On their radar? They're just blips. Could be anything.

By naked eye? They're just dots in front of a contrail. Could be anything.

These Donbas farm boys aren't in the habit of taking intercontinental flights; Why would you expect them to know what they we're looking at?

 

[barbos]

After Merkel (of all germans) admitted to be a liar there is no reason to believe any claims coming from their government, especially the current one.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I'm sure they had seen other passenger planes flying over.

On their radar? They're just blips. Could be anything.

By naked eye? They're just dots in front of a contrail. Could be anything.

These Donbas farm boys aren't in the habit of taking intercontinental flights; Why would you expect them to know what they we're looking at?

Passenger plane: High up, goes straight. They just had buck fever.

 

[bilby]

I'm sure they had seen other passenger planes flying over.

On their radar? They're just blips. Could be anything.

By naked eye? They're just dots in front of a contrail. Could be anything.

These Donbas farm boys aren't in the habit of taking intercontinental flights; Why would you expect them to know what they we're looking at?

Passenger plane: High up, goes straight. They just had buck fever.

I think you're giving them too much credit for knowing stuff they have zero reason to know or care about.

"This is Donbas. It's our place. Nobody flies over it except our enemies and our friends."

Ukrainian military transport planes would be high up and flying straight too - if they were working on the assumption that the Russians weren't going to lend their top grade AAA systems to a bunch of hicks, and that being high enough to out-range MANPADs therefore ensured their safety. Which is the same assumption the ICAO used when they decided not to close the airspace to commercial flights.

 

[DrZoidberg]

It is peculiar how CT'ers gravitate to authoritarians.

And love suporting Putin in his quest to rid the world of Nazis by expanding Russian lebensraum

Look behind any movement that seeks to undermine the west and you'll generally find some Russian fingers. I'm not saying that they're Russian puppets, but rather that Russia will aid those who seek to harm the west. And that includes the Republican party.

Whoever is currently in power will continually have attempts to undermine that power by other (lesser powerful) power players. The people who aren't are players who who are in too weak a position to grab power.

The most powerful player (USA) will take every opportunity to stack the deck in their favour. We just take it as a given. We don't even react when they do it.

Ideology comes on top of that. We are cool with American abuses of power because abuses of power from a democratic country tends to hurt less for others.

Putin isn't wrong that NATO is an impregnable anti-Russian wall hellbent on promoting American and European trade over Russian trade. The way we justify the spread of NATO is by arguing that Europe needs protection from an aggressive Russia. Also not wrong.

The biggest power players now are USA, EU, Russia and China. EU is a mess and can't agree on any coherent strategy. That leaves USA, Russia and China. What a surprise that these are the countries most in conflict around the world.

I do think the Ukraine war will end badly for Russia. When Russias allies stop seeing Russia as a dependable partner they will stab him in the back Russia will disintegrate into fiefdoms. While removing a power player the mess of that won't be pretty

 

[lpetrich]

While serious in nature, the Gerrmn conspiracy seems a little goofy. The head would have been an old aristocrat who calls humself prince. The traditional pre WWII way Europeans formed governments. Find somebody with an articatic blood line and back him with the militray.

That's more like before World War I. The Great War was a watershed in type of leadership. Before that, European nation builders wanted monarchs for their new nations, while after that, for the most part, they did not, though existing monarchs stayed in power.

I'll look at from Napoleon's wars to WWI.

• 1813: Netherlands
• 1815 (autonomy), 1882 (independence): Serbia
• 1831: Belgium
• 1832: Greece
• 1861: Italy
• 1878 (autonomy), 1908 (independence): Bulgaria
• 1881: Romania
• 1905: Norway
• 1914: Albania

When Finland become independent during WWI, it almost got a monarch. But the German nobleman who accepted the position could not make it to Finland before the Central Powers were defeated, and he withdrew his acceptance.  Prince Frederick Charles of Hesse

After WWI, all these European nations started or restarted their independent existence as republics with one partial exception:

• Austria (German rump state of the Austrian Empire)
• Poland
• Czechoslovakia
• Hungary - the partial exception: Regent  Miklós Horthy - they couldn't agree on which monarch
• Lithuania
• Latvia
• Estonia

Since WWI, monarchies have fallen and lost territory with only two restorations: Spain and Cambodia. Barbados and Nepal are only the most recent ones, with Barbados rejecting the British monarch and Nepal rejecting that country's native monarch.  Abolition of monarchy

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

After the fall of Nazi Germany, East Europe was taken over by the USSR. By force. With the fall of the USSR, these colonies of Russia declared their freedom from the USSR. Putinism is a case of a land grab by Russia. More colonization starting wirh Ukraine. Parts of Georgia, Chechnya, and claims made for Moldavia and establishing hegemony over the Baltics. Nobody wants a return of the corrupt and vicious Russians in any guise. That is it in a nutshell.

 

[lpetrich]

What I find very weird about this is the coup plotters' desire to establish a monarchy. Not just strongman rule, but rule by someone with someone with some hereditary claim to leadership. It is so unusual - most far-right movements don't seem to have aspirations like that.

 2022 German coup d'état plot - "The group aims to re-establish a monarchist government in Germany in the tradition of the German Reich, with the government being similar to the German Empire. The group allegedly wanted to provoke chaos and a civil war in Germany for it to take power."

Something like Adolf Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. AH and his friends wanted to provoke a rebellion against the Weimar Republic.

"Prosecutors reported that approximately more than 50 organisers were Reichsbürger movement members, a cluster of far-right groups which reject the current liberal democratic basic order of Germany and are associated with violence and antisemitism. The plotters reportedly included QAnon followers and COVID-19 deniers."

 

[lpetrich]

Germany foiled a far-right coup attempt. It still has a right-wing problem. | The Washington Post - "The German government hasn’t taken its increasing right-wing extremism as seriously as left-wing extremism. That’s been true for decades, our research finds."

The Reichsbürger (“citizens of the Reich”) is a loosely organized group consisting of far-right extremists and conspiracy theorists who do not accept that the German Reich ended in 1945 and therefore do not consider the Federal Republic of Germany legitimate.

The idea that a band of conspiracy theorists and far-right revisionists might overthrow the government and restore the German monarchy may seem preposterous. But although a successful coup was unlikely, the episode nevertheless reveals the threats that far-right extremists pose in Germany today.

Reichsbürger followers are heavily armed, with ties to the military and law enforcement. They are also linked to the far-right Alternative für Deutschland, a party with seats in the federal parliament and in nearly all state parliaments. Given this, the group could have attacked the Bundestag, much as the U.S. Capitol was attacked on Jan. 6, 2021.

Reichsbürger reports by domestic intelligence agencies have increased by a factor of 7 over 2015 - 2019. Germany has done more to fight its far right than the US, even if what it's done is inadequate.

Critics see this as long overdue. In 2019, Germany recorded more than 15 times as many far-right attacks as it had in 1990 (21,290 vs 1,380), according to intelligence agency figures. And they continue to increase. These attacks are as varied as “propaganda crimes” — such as the display of swastikas and raising the Hitler salute — and physical assaults and murders motivated by racism, antisemitism and antagonism toward Muslims.

 

[lpetrich]

Why has Germany missed this increase? One reason is historical. In the postwar years, the German government did not remove former Nazis from its institutions, including from intelligence and law enforcement agencies. During the first decades of the Cold War, the government focused on the battle against communism and on high-profile attacks by left-wing militants such as the Baader-Meinhof group and the 2 June Movement. That focus on left-wing extremism lingered, even as far-right terrorist movements grew and became radicalized.

This seems like the Weimar Republic, with a much stronger response to the Bavarian Soviet Republic than to the Kapp Putsch or the Beer Hall Putsch.

But in the 2000s, a number of far-right attacks revealed egregious intelligence failures, suggesting that Germany wasn’t doing enough to combat right-wing extremism. For instance, a murderous gang of three calling itself the “Nationalist Socialist Underground” assassinated nine immigrants and a police officer from 2000 to 2007.

...
A German saying, “The state is blind in the right eye,” suggests some doubt about whether Germany takes far-right extremism seriously.

The authors then described their research.

We find that even though right-wing-extremist crimes have far exceeded left-wing ones for decades, most political parties consistently minimize threats from the right — especially among center-right parties. Center-left parties are more varied and sometimes discount left-wing extremism.

In other words, political parties behave in partisan ways, even when it comes to threats to public safety and the democratic order.

But we also found that government institutions that are supposed to be politically neutral, such as the intelligence services, downplay far-right extremism. When intelligence agencies operate under center-right rather than center-left interior ministers, their public reports devote less attention to right-wing extremists and are more likely to treat their actions as less threatening.