The group targeted on Wednesday certainly seemed to be serious about its aims. According to investigators, its members were made to sign a non-disclosure agreement: anyone thinking of breaking it was threatened with punishment by death. In order to communicate with each other, they acquired Iridium satellite telephones valued at €20,000 that would have worked even if the electricity network had collapsed – which was, apparently, also part of the plan, in order to spread chaos.
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In one wire-tapped conversation last summer, the alleged ringleader, Prince Heinrich, was heard saying: “We’re going to wipe them out now, the time for fun is over!” According to investigators the group had even called on the services of clairvoyants to check the veracity of their plan, as well as the trustworthiness of the members. In messages they talked about a “system change” and “exterminating” their enemies.
Reichsbürger: the German conspiracy theorists at heart of alleged coup plot | Germany | The Guardian
A couple of years ago I saw an article about a resident of Elbow Lake, Minnesota. He was annoying his neighbors in a number of ways and defiant with town authorities. His position was that of individual sovereignty. He, his dogs, and his goats were entitled to roam free. The appearance of his property was nobody's business. He flew the flag of the confederacy. And, no, he didn't want to talk about it.
He’s reported to attend bible study at the Elbow Lake Lutheran church although he prefers to do so anonymously. He is, according to one neighbor, "well read biblically". This is no surprise. The text, whether sacred, constitutional, or in the form of cryptic prophecy will often stand in for the idea which precedes the real.
Politics occurs where individuals bump into those around them, their neighborhood, city, nation, class. Each bear ideas which go to ground and reappear altered in a new, political, form. But what of the sovereign citizens, the reichsbürger, the ones whose only attachment is to the idea? If they are content to argue about masking at bible study and milk their goats they can only annoy a few. But not everyone will accept those limits. Many will want to carry their idea into the public realm.
Some of these will celebrate their banding together in the media where they have cultivated their private allegiances in the first place. But others, aware of the risks of taking the law into their own hands, will conspire secretly. And for this they can, or so it seems, borrow a tool of private enterprise, the non-disclosure agreement.
Over time techniques of production, along with patterns of distribution, administration, etc, are spread level across the world. Over time. But within time it's the competitive imperative of the capitalist enterprise to retain everything within itself, to guard its intellectual capital against rivals and against the law. Nothing is to be disclosed without the approval of ownership. In business the non-disclosure agreement is enforced by specified monetary penalties. In the criminal enterprise the threat must be physical.
A fascist conspiracy, like organized crime, must rely on just such threats to keep its proceedings, its existence itself, secret. But the NDA, outside its business habitat, has weaknesses. In the first place, when outside the law, it becomes legally unenforceable. And that is with the assumption that the conspiracy does not already include informants. Prince Heinrich's plot, like that to kidnap the governor of Michigan, was flawed in that way. Indeed, one wonders that they didn’t assume that was the case.
Beyond this technical issue there is an essential problem with non-disclosure, it is the nature of politics to seek to spread. Enclosing it in an idealist container prevents this. Instead, the opposite is attempted with the targeting of electrical grids and cell networks to propagate chaos in the outside world while the idealists within the conspiracy maintain their formation with the use of celestial comms, their iridium satellite phones. Surely part of the attraction here is the price, €20,000. Elite communications for the new world elite.
Some political ideas are harbingers, come early to the party and dressed for the fight. They will fall to the ground, reassemble themselves, and then do it again. These are not such ideas. These are reactions to a world in motion, chimeras of a world that promised to be unmovable. The conspirators and the conspiracy audience feed themselves on a rich diet of verities from long ago. Underneath it all is the assurance that, however unhappy and constrained their circumstances may be, they are untouched by socialism. They are champions of private supremacy, the last bastion of idealism.
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