Conspiracy theories and radical meaning-making

The terrorist attacks of 2019 and 2020, studied here, are embedded in linguistic framings supercharged with conspiratorial readings of world affairs. These readings assume the existence of a conscious plan for the ultimate destruction of German, European, and Western civilisation by means of mass migration, premeditated by unholy and secret alliances of domestic traitors and foreign foes guided by evil intentions. The rhetorical strategies with which the narrative of conspiracy is substantiated shift the cause of mass migration to Europe from external factors (e.g., warfare, famine, systematic human rights violations and asylum) to the purported fight for internal survival, inverting the identity of colonial perpetrators and victims and scapegoating those originally in need of protection. Moreover, the situation is blamed on sinister elites in politics and the media who are collaborators in the looming destruction of the West and the white race. Racial superiority is constructed with reference to intelligence and culture, and to unalterable elements of given identities that create an insurmountable incompatibility with the foreign, essentialized and dehumanised ‘other’. Such a conspiratorial ‘rhetoric of fear’ (Wodak, 2015) entails the construction of images of enemies, lowering the inhibition threshold of direct and indirect violence against the targeted groups (i.e., migrants and socio-political elites) and having the potential for radicalisation to violent extremism and terrorism.

As Crawford and Keen (2020: 5) have suggested, conspiracy theories have emerged as a ‘lingua franca’ of radical-right actors across the globe. The transnational right is united by a shared conspiracy imagination in which the ‘Eurabia’ theory has been succeeded by the ‘Great Replacement’ as a new master narrative, explaining the threat against the aboriginal white race of European extraction on a global level (see Bergmann in this volume and Önnerfors, 2019b). This resonates well with the constitutive elements of conspiracy beliefs as outlined in the introduction to this volume: detecting non-random patterns in order to determine intentional agency and malicious coalitions as well as life-threatening hostility, orchestrated in the darkness of secret organizations and behind the blinding smokescreen of deliberate lies. In a truly Manichean black-and-white worldview and against the backdrop of an apocalyptic end-time scenario, ‘red-pilled’ truth-seekers and truth-tellers must unite, not only by cognitively exposing the conspiracy, but also by engaging in violent actions (Crawford & Keen, 2020: 6).

The ‘Great Replacement’ as a meta-political concept has - as pointed out by the Identitarian Martin Sellner - massive potential for attitudinal and behavioural mobilisation since it immediately confers meaning on all messages related to it, from flyers to terrorist attacks. A ‘monological belief system’ is created in which meaning unfolds in a hermetic system that rejects knowledge contradicting the expressed worldview, a process fuelled and reinforced by virtual echo chambers and filter bubbles (Crawford & Keen, 2020: 5). The conspiratorial frames of contemporary terrorist meaning-making rely on the ‘fundamental distrust of dominant explanations’ and thus the epistemic insecurity of the ‘post-truth’ era (Crawford & Keen, 2020: 6; Molder in this volume). Whereas it would be possible to argue that previous terrorist manifestos and statements, for example, of the ‘Red Army Faction’ in the Federal Republic of Germany during the 1970s, attempted to realise arguably utopian but still implementable claims solidly based on the doctrines of political ideology, the manifestos of Balliet and Rathjen display a belief in radically different ontologies of manipulation, beyond the logic of previous political theory (Laqueur, 2004: 469-477 cites a 2002 manifesto of the Italian ‘Red Brigades’, illustrating my point). Their underlying analysis of world affairs assumes the existence and reality of a global conspiracy in which key events are deliberately orchestrated by malevolent elites to bring about the fall of the indigenous people, the nation state, traditional gender roles, European civilisation and ultimately the white race.

Situated within my idea-action model of radicalisation (Onnerfors & Steiner, 2018: 27), the ‘Great Replacement’ can be interpreted as follows: the message is constituted by the grand narrative of replacement as outlined by Camus and popularised/vulgarised by Pirin^ci. These ideas are consciously launched on the macro-level of meta-politics with the aim of penetrating and dominating the cognitive understanding and interpretation of ongoing political affairs in Germany and Europe. A host of people addressed on the meso-level of potentially sympathising communities and already susceptible to similar concepts pick up the idea of the ‘Great Replacement’ and start circulating and transmitting it on social media, thus propelling the news cycle of traditional media. Additionally, various actors are taking the concept to the streets, for instance, during PEGIDA’s rallies or diverse Identitarian activism, again reinforcing the dynamics of online and offline mobilization and transmission. The meso-level, however, also represents the community of adversaries or enemies, in the case of the ‘Great Replacement’, both the alleged colonial conquerors and the malevolent elites who have conspired to bring about the replacement. Almost all blame is shifted to these two groups, which constitute internal and external enemies. The idea was ultimately taken to the level of individual radical action in connection with the Christchurch terrorist attack in March 2019. The Christchurch attacker’s manifesto immediately turned the key ideas of the ‘Great Replacement’ into world news, illustrating how the basic elements of European decline and ‘white genocide’ can be assembled to justify terrorist violence, the medium by which the message is strategically communicated. Now the format (already harking back to Breivik in 2011) is established and ready to be copied, as happened in the autumn of 2019 in Halle. Despite widespread discussion of the radicalisation of political discourse in Germany after the attack, the concept proved strong enough to fuel yet another attack, when Tobias Rathjen in February 2020 gunned down representatives of his imagined enemy group. Whereas migration to Europe fuelled conspiratorial imagination and terrorist violence in Germany in 2019 and 2020, we are currently witnessing a host of conspiracy theories expressed in connection with mass protests against governmental COVID-19 measures. The German radical right has managed to capitalize on feelings of unrest and unease triggered by the pandemic and official responses to it. Time will tell whether terrorist violence will emerge out of this toxic mix of distorted political trust, denial of scientific facts and accumulated frustrations.

According to this model, what makes conspiracy theories so powerful for radicalised meaning-making is that they offer easy explanations and solutions to complex problems on the cognitive level, are directed to a clear collective of addressees (‘we’, ‘the people’) and against a clear collective of culprits (‘the foreign other’, ‘the traitorous elites’), fuelled by emotional appeals to loss, nostalgia, and existential fears blended with cultural and civilisational anxieties. Once this frame narrative is established, it facilitates mobilisation to individual action that instantly creates meaning with reference to the strong narrative logic of the conspiracy theory itself.