The hypocrisy of such claims of non-violence is clear. True, violent confrontations with counter-demonstrators, people of colour or journalists are rare at Pegida’s protests. Yet (as Manès Weisskircher and I show in the 2021 ‘Routledge Handbook of Non-violent Extremism’), Pegida oscillates between radical and extremist ideology.
A mock gallows “reserved for” German Chancellor Angela Merkel, prominently displayed at an anti-Islam demonstration in 2015, revealed Pegida’s extremist tendency to symbolically exercise violence from the outset.
Over the years, speakers at Pegida’s rallies have been repeatedly accused – and occasionally convicted – of abusive speech and rabble-rousing, both on social media and on the squares of Dresden.
In 2019, several people pressed charges against Pegida’s leader, Lutz Bachmann, for a speech in which he verbally abused Green Party members and trade unionists as “vermin of the people”, “asocial maggots” and “parasites”. He said Pegida supporters should “throw [them] into a ditch” and then “fill up the ditch”.
Anti-lockdown protests and the Reichsbürger
Far-Right claims about non-violence seem particularly absurd when it comes to the wave of anti-lockdown protests held across the country during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The notion of peace is common at these often ideologically ambiguous demonstrations. Protesters frequently call for the adoption of a peace treaty between Germany and the victors of the Second World War (namely, the United States, Great Britain, France and Russia as the successor state of the former Soviet Union).
A popular political myth holds that – because no formal peace treaty was signed at the end of the war – the contemporary Federal Republic of Germany is still occupied by the victorious Allies and is not a sovereign state.
For years, this myth has been propagated by the far-Right Reichsbürger movement, an umbrella term for individuals and loosely organised groups who deny or question the existence of the Federal Republic and claim to be citizens of the pre-war German Reich. They reject the German democratic system and the civic duties that come with it, such as paying taxes and fines.
These so-called ‘sovereign citizens’ tend to own arms and can be physically violent. Most importantly, a member of the Reichsbürger movement assassinated leading politician Walter Lübcke in 2019.
Such individuals and groups have become increasingly visible in anti-lockdown mobilisation. Notably, on 29 August 2020, after a large-scale protest in the centre of Berlin, several hundred demonstrators, including Reichsbürger, broke through the security barriers at the Reichstag. In an action similar to that at the US Capitol in January 2021, they staged a symbolic ‘storming’ of the parliament building. An anti-lockdown demonstration in Leipzig was also followed by violent rioting by the far Right in November 2020.
Claims of non-violent resistance by the far Right are mere rhetoric or means to an end. Germany must be more alert to prevent actual physical violence and to protect the safety of parliamentarians, the representatives of democracy, but must also recognise the dangers of symbolic violence.
This research is part of a project that has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 765224.
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Sabine Volk | Radio Free (2021-03-24T23:00:00+00:00) How the German far Right appropriates ideals of non-violent resistance. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2021/03/24/how-the-german-far-right-appropriates-ideals-of-non-violent-resistance/
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