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Jim O’Callaghan is a senior council and Fianna Fáil TD for Dublin Bay South.
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I want to talk about a coup. A coup attempt. A failed coup attempt. It was a ridiculous affair, viewed by some people as little short of comical, despite the fact that several people were killed. The coup attempt was carried out by a barely-credible bunch of thugs who had a habit of dressing up in quasi-military uniforms and showing off their weapons in the streets.
The intent was for them to storm government buildings to make sure that people who were theoretically their allies did what they wanted. The coup quickly fell apart when it became apparent that there was almost no plan for what to actually do once they had taken over the buildings, and many of the people involve were picked up by the authorities in the following days.
The coup attempt attracted as much ridicule as anything else, but it did bring a crackpot fringe conspiratorial group to much wider attention in the country as a whole, but by that I’m not referring to Qanon, and I’m not referring to the riot in the US Capitol at all.
I’m referring to what is contemptuously referred to as the Beerhall Putsch, by the then-hardly known nazi party led by Hitler in Munich in 1928; but the parallels are striking. The most striking parallel thing was how far short of credible the nazis were viewed. They were literally a laughing stock, and viewed by wealthy interests as useful idiots to keep left-wing forces at bay.
They did manage to briefly hold hostage Gustav Ritter von Kahr, effectively the appointed governor of Bavaria, and his military and police chiefs, who were all far-right figures with leadership ambitions of their own, and the idea was to force them to endorse the coup, and allow the nazis take over Bavaria, but without planning the entire thing fell apart within 24 hours.
It’s worth comparing that to the attack on the US Capitol. I think that the seriousness of that attack, and how close it came to being vastly more serious, is being understated. Mike Pence was literally seconds away from being captured by the mob.
The CNN reporter there says makeshift gallows, other sources have said mock gallows. I’m not sure there’s any difference at all between those and real gallows. And if Pence had been captured by them, I don’t think that there is much doubt at all as to what would have been his fate.
But that’s a what-if. In the end both the attack on the US Capitol and the Beerhall Putsch were ignominious failures. What’s interesting is what happened next. Hitler was arrested, tried and sentenced to five years in prison. He wrote Mein Kampf in the eight months that he actually spent in a comfortable prison. Five years later, again trusted by wealthy right-wing establishment interests to be useful in resisting the left, Hitler was in power.
