There has been no shortage of big news stories coming out of Europe this year, but one of the least expected came last week when, in Germany, 25 conspirators were arrested and accused of plotting to overthrow the government. The eclectic grouping, known as the Reichsbürger plotters, espoused a far-right ideology but hailed largely from the centre of respectable German society, headed up by an elderly minor aristocrat and including in their ranks family doctors, judges, a celebrity chef and an opera singer.
For the Guardian Weekly’s big story this week, Berlin bureau chief Philip Oltermann takes a look what it all means for Germany, while columnist Jonathan Freedland sees more evidence that the greatest terror threat facing the world no longer comes from radical Islam, but the white far-right.
Are the conspirators just a bunch of eccentrics, or could they have posed a serious threat to the country’s democratic order? “I don’t believe … [they] would have succeeded,” says Peter Neumann, a terrorism expert at King’s College London, in our big story. “The important question is how much damage they could have caused trying to do so.”
Three months have passed since fervent anti-regime demonstrations began in Iran. As more grim details emerged of public executions of protesters and the grotesque targeting of women by security forces, Christopher de Bellaigue takes a deep look at the movement, in particular the role played by women and young people, and asks what it might take for a popular revolution to succeed.
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta (formerly Facebook) has spent $100bn building a virtual reality world known as the metaverse, which he believes will replace the conventional internet. The problem is, hardly anyone seems to prefer its clunky headsets and empty landscapes to the real world. With poor financial results and redundancies at Meta, has it all been a hugely expensive mistake? Steve Rose ventures into the metaverse, so you don’t have to.
If, like us, you’ve been scratching your head for good gift ideas this festive season, our entire Culture section this week is taken up with the best books of 2022, from fiction to science and everything in between.
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