Rightwing thinking is mental illness. They always wanna start coups and civil wars. Over here, I want people to have healthcare and education and a stable living environment. Yet somehow we’re the bad guys to them.
The defendants, four men, aged 46 to 58, and a 77-year-old woman, who belonged to the self-styled “United Patriots” group, were sentenced to between five years and nine months and eight years’ jail by the Koblenz higher regional court on Thursday.
Look, I am not usually one to demand more draconic sentencing, but this seems inappropriately short. IMO, the main part of the sentence should have been to strip them of assets that could ever be again used in any revolutionary attempts.
It's a pretty normal sentence in Germany. If you consider this was only an attempt, it may make more sense to you. Also we don't do these 2 lifetime plus 50 year sentences like in the US here...
True, I'm actually German myself, and I have to admit - it was a bit of an intuitive, emotional reaction. Really: My worry is about their wealth. Even as old people, where not giving them harsh prison sentences is understandable, what's keeping them from further supporting fascists in the future? Even if they are monitored, I don't have a lot of faith in our police and the Verfassungsschutz to properly monitor flow of finances, especially when it comes to hidden gold transfers at meetups, or Monero or similar loopholes.
Ah yes, our national flavor of sovereign citizens, but with a "king".
Always very long faces when their actions meet consequences, and waving that "document" that states that they aren't subject to our system anymore does exactly nothing.
The defendants, four men, aged 46 to 58, and a 77-year-old woman, who belonged to the self-styled “United Patriots” group, were sentenced to between five years and nine months and eight years’ jail by the Koblenz higher regional court on Thursday.
A fifth defendant received a sentence of two years and 10 months, the German news agency dpa reported.
The guy who convinced the plotters to blow up a big bridge, led them to the arms merchant, and drove the team to the bomb site was an FBI informant. The merchant was an FBI agent. The bomb, of course, was a dud. And the arrest was part of a pattern of entrapment by federal law enforcement since September 11, 2001, not of terrorist suspects, but of young men federal agents have had to talk into embracing violence in the first place. One of the Cleveland arrestees, Connor Stevens, complained to his sister of feeling “very pressured” by the guy who turned out to be an informant and was recorded in 2011 rejecting property destruction: “We’re in it for the long haul and those kind of tactics just don’t cut it,” he said. “And it’s actually harder to be non-violent than it is to do stuff like that.”
Great for making headlines and patting yourselves on the back, but piss poor for averting the far-right takeover of the central government through more traditional channels of business corruption, blackmail, and media slander. The AfD and its even-more-extremist peers aren't going to consider this sort of sting operation so much as a speedbump on the way to the Reichstag.
This fifth defendant business irks me, too: four men and a woman are already five, any further defendants with different sentences should be at least sixth. But that's more on the journalist/editor, not you.
German law protects minors in such a way that the press can't describe any distinguishing features in the news. So "Five well-defined people and a sixth vague person" typically means the sixth person is a child.