Poisoned Bürger

The Reich of the Reichsbürger is the Second Reich, so that when they had sought to proclaim Heinrich XIII as the Bürger King, then half the hilarity would have been their Wilhelmine costumes. Heinrich comes off a very long line of the rulers of tiny territories, which explains an awful lot. Yearning as he does for the Old Order, he ought to be pleased that the Federal Republic of Germany intentionally contained too many centres of power for a putsch to be possible.

Still, it would be wrong to laugh. Between 27th July and 1st August 1990, there was an attempted coup in Port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad and Tobago, by Jamaat al Muslimeen, which was not even part of the Muslim minority among Indo-Trinidadians, but a tiny movement of converts from Christianity within the almost exactly equally large Afro-Trinidadian population. It saw political Islam as the only means to the liberation of Afro-Trinidadians, a recurring theme in the world in general, and in the African world in particular.

Although the security forces had had to deal with it from time to time, almost no one had ever heard of it, and even fewer took it seriously. Until it stormed the Parliament building, taking hostage the Prime Minister, most of his Cabinet and most of his staff, while its leader, Yasin Abu Bakr, appeared on the captured state television station and announced that the Government had been overthrown. The hostage situation lasted six days until its inevitable outcome. The whole thing would make an entertaining film.

But 24 people died. And if the Reichsbürger really had stormed the Bundestag, however farcical that would have been, then they would have killed someone. A guard, or someone like that. A human being. It used to be said that European and American Rightism had very little to say to each other. That, though, was before QAnon, and the wilder theories around Covid-19. Even this fruit of that would have been lethal to someone. The next one might be fatally toxic far and wide.