Latest news with #anti-government
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Germany Arrests King Peter I, the Son of Man, the Messiah
Last week, Germany arrested Peter Fitzek, 59, an anti-government figure also known as King Peter I, the Son of Man, the Messiah. Historically, attempts to arrest messiahs have met with mixed results, so to stay on the safe side, the Interior Ministry not only rolled up Fitzek and three conspirators but also shut down his whole operation, known as the Kingdom of Germany. Subjects of King Peter deny the legitimacy of the Federal Republic of Germany and, over the past 13 years, have built up a counter-state with its own institutions. 'In Germany, just like in the rest of the world, we have a lot of problems,' Peter told me in 2023. 'These problems could not be solved in the old system, so we needed a completely new one.' A healer, a martial artist, and practitioner of dark arts, Peter has no royal lineage and instead takes his authority from the spiritual plane. The German government alleges that he ran unregulated financial systems, and they banned his group outright. Peter was born in East Germany in 1965. East Germany was poorer than the West then and remains so decades after unification, in 1989. Its failure to catch up economically has led to resentment by many easterners, who consider themselves neglected and forgotten. The far-right Alternative for Germany party, which now controls a quarter of the seats in the German Parliament, campaigned in the East on promises to increase the region's political power. The AfD lost and was officially accused of extremism. The center-left coalition that won is now cracking down on the broader movement of eccentric political discontents. Peter, it seems, was a familiar type of East German from that generation—too old to learn the ways of the new Germany, and too ambitious to be satisfied watching others succeed where he failed. According to a profile in Bloomberg Businessweek, Peter spent his early adulthood getting outwitted in business by West Germans, originally as the bilked investor in a slot-machine racket. [Read: Is the AfD too extreme for democracy?] When I met Peter two years ago, he had recently acquired a castle and invited me to join him there, in an annoyingly remote Saxon village called Eibenstock, near the Czech border. The journey took four hours from Berlin, and upon leaving the Autobahn and skidding around mountain roads, I began to appreciate the significance of the remoteness. Eibenstock is far from Germany's equivalent of coastal elites. It is like Montana or Idaho: You can do what you please, safe in the knowledge that few witnesses will see you doing it. It was quiet and empty with many private areas secluded by spruce and firs. I noticed a few tourists on a winter hike, and at the foot of the castle I had coffee at a tiny restaurant with the unimprovable name Goulash Cannon. Peter came into his castle's echoing, wood-paneled entryway, sporting a ponytail, pulled back tight and short, and wearing a monogrammed shirt with the words Kingdom of Germany in gold cursive on the breast. In this respect and others, he resembled Steven Seagal, another aging martial artist with delusions of divinity and grandeur. Peter then guided me to a sparsely furnished sitting room for my royal audience. He began, unbidden, by laying out proof that his kingship had been recognized internationally. This proof took the form of boarding passes that various airlines had honored, listing his name as 'Peter of Germany.' He had a 'Kingdom of Germany' passport that looked official enough, and had passed inspection, he said, at various borders. All of the airline documents I saw were from within the Schengen area, which means he could travel freely anyway. An airline agent had probably rolled his eyes and let him board his flight to Majorca. When I think of entities capable of conferring royal status, I do not think of Ryanair. His education, he said, began under the tutelage of a contract killer he met in 1989. The man understood spirituality, Peter said, and knew how to hypnotize people and take their money. Peter read up on magic, philosophy, religion, history, and finally law, before he concluded that there was an 'order to creation,' something beautiful and true, an existence freed of the corruption and disappointment of the Federal Republic of Germany. 'I slowly became aware that there is a Creator,' he told me, and that this Creator had endowed him with spiritual powers that proved his divine right to rule. 'I have sat as near to God as you sit to me right now,' he said. He determined that 'true Christianity has never existed,' and that he had been sent to establish it. He fell in love with a woman who could move objects with her mind and set them on fire; he spent time with holy men in India; he discovered cold fusion; Satanists detected his growing powers and sent assassins after him. 'I am lord of the spirits. I have an invisible army. I cannot be harmed.' At first, he said, he tried to improve German democracy by working within the system. 'Before I founded the Kingdom of Germany, I ran as a candidate for the Bundestag. I had previously talked to a lot of members of the Bundestag as well as members of the state parliament for many, many hours,' Peter told me. He said he saw how decisions were made—and how fruitless was any hope of changing a system that had grown beyond the ability of even the most patient citizen to affect. 'The system interlocks in others,' he said. 'It is a nested system, where you can't change individual segments because then they don't fit with the rest.' Foremost among his frustrations were the modern bureaucracies that seemed designed not to serve citizens and help them prosper but to frustrate and enslave them. 'The health system, the pension system, the monetary system, and the banks all have problems,' he told me. 'They cannot be solved in the system. So a new one has to be started.' He said he examined the law and found that the position of Kaiser, supposedly abolished, remained vacant. All it needed was a suitable claimant—and having been anointed by the Creator, he claimed legal succession in 2009. 'We had to claim this legal succession if we wanted to establish a new system throughout Germany and not do what the Allies, the Americans, imposed on us,' Peter said. Photos of his official coronation in 2012 show him in faux-ermine robes. 'We in the Kingdom of Germany take the view that there is a divine order of creation,' Peter said. 'The state should be a reflection of this order of creation, and should be a completely just society or community, like nothing hitherto seen on this planet.' He conducted seminars for his followers, to show off his and his fire-starter girlfriend's ability to leave their bodies, perform feats of physiological impossibility like slowing their heartbeats, and commune with the archangels Uriel and Metatron. To see this is to believe, he said. 'The Creator sent me here to be able to establish the Kingdom, and people can choose freely whether to join.' In 2016, the state imprisoned him for taking supporters' money in what appeared to be a totally unregulated banking scheme. An appeals court freed him after two years, and he insisted to me that his willingness to go to prison proved his divinity. 'Only someone who has been called by God does that.' Under Peter's watch, the Kingdom practiced a kind of primitive democracy, with—crucially—a banking and insurance system totally disconnected from that of the rest of the world. But the details of how Peter ran his kingdom are irrelevant, if colorful. He said the Kingdom will choose his successor by election. 'My son, for example, will not succeed me,' he told me, unless the young man exhibits supernatural powers like his father's and convinces other citizens of his eligibility. Peter had identified sources of frustration and indignity that might bother virtually any German: how one navigates banking, taxation, health care, law. People of much greater education and sophistication than Peter have found themselves at the mercy of these systems, and treated most heartlessly by them. Germans have a slang term, Überzwerg, which means 'head dwarf,' and refers to the petty tyrants in modern bureaucracies who ruin your day by demanding forms in triplicate and inflict other minor hassles that keep you from getting something as simple as a credit card issued or a cavity filled. Navigating modern, complex bureaucratic states is difficult but comes easier if you had an elite education in a big city—the Überzwergs' natural environment. To people without this background, and who fail in business or politics in consequence, others' success may look like the result of magic, fraud, or conspiracy. Peter resorted to at least the first of these and probably all three. In his castle, he described spiritual warfare with ghosts and devils. Who is an Überzwerg but a devil sent to torment you—and in the cruelest way, by taking human form and swearing up and down that he is no devil at all, only the most mundane creature, with a nameplate on his desk and a time clock on his wall? And if you discover that you are living in a premodern, enchanted world, why not go all the way and declare yourself king by divine right? The direction our conversation took next was as predictable as it was repulsive. Peter's ultimate prescription to treat the diseased system of money and power was to get rid of the cabal of Satanic Jews that has taken over the world outside his Kingdom. He said he did not mind Jews per se but objected to the usurers and tricksters who start and encourage all the world's great wars, including Russia's invasion of Ukraine; who deny his status as their redeemer; and who are conspiring to steer us all to the apocalypse. Peter had my attention when he talked about pyrokinesis, and he had my sympathies when grousing about bureaucracy. But Jews run the world through a network of banks and Chabad houses is the most tired claim an extremist (especially a German one) can make. It was then that I lost interest and started thinking about whether the Goulash Cannon would still be loaded and ready to fire a late lunch into my face. On the way out the door, Peter stamped my passport with a Kingdom of Germany royal seal and signed it with a scribble: Peter I, Son of Man, Imperator. Article originally published at The Atlantic
ABC News
18-05-2025
- Politics
- ABC News
Refugee who feared execution in communist Poland says 'suffering is optional'
It's midnight on a cold evening in communist Poland in 1981. Elizabeth Szczepanska, then 30, is at her home in Sosnowiec when government authorities burst in. She has been part of the anti-government movement, and police arrest her and take her to an oval. "It was one of the scariest moments in my life and I believed that I was going to die," Ms Szczepanska said. "It was freezing cold … we had Polish soldiers with German shepherds and machine guns targeted at us. "I was thinking, 'They are just digging up a mass grave. We all will be executed.' "I was thinking … if this is my last moment of my life but, if I survive this, I'm going to change my life." She lived to see the morning and followed through on her promise. Poland was under communist rule from the end of World War II until 1989. Throughout that period there was open social unrest and the regime introduced martial law. When Ms Szczepanska was 13, she was told to stand along a wall in the school gym. It was part of a test to see who would make the best athletes for a sports program. She passed, and it started a sporting passion that would last more than six decades. Shot-put, discus and javelin became Ms Szczepanska's speciality. As she trained, being part of the sports program brought in extra food, clothing and money. "I had an academic scholarship and sports scholarship, and I earned more money than my mum working 56 hours a week," she said. "I felt like a billionaire. I had money, I supported my family. It was very important." Ms Szczepanska continued competing as she went to university and became a clinical psychologist. But her discontent with the government was growing. "It was really challenging to live in a country that you don't have a freedom of movement, choice and thinking," she said. She joined the anti-government movement and became a "rebel". "We met each other in these gatherings and started plotting and scheming how to overturn this government," she said. Her actions did not go unnoticed. Ms Szczepanska was charged with organising anti-Soviet demonstrations and arrested more than a dozen times, including that terrifying night at the oval. Even when she was not detained, she was still followed. "For five years I had two secret police officers standing in front of my door and I had to report myself at the local police station at 7am, 1pm and 7pm," she said. "Even [when] I'd be standing in a long queue to buy toilet paper … they would be standing behind my back. "They make this visible. They didn't even pretend that they were not following." Eventually, the government came to her with a proposition. "The secret police said, 'We have enough on you to keep you in prison for another 10 years, or you can choose leaving [the] country,'" Ms Szczepanska said. "I'm thinking I'm leaving everything behind, my whole life, and I'm going to a country that I cannot speak the language, I don't have any experiences here. "I've been so hurt by what happened in my political and personal life that I want to run, I want to simply escape this. "It wasn't easy." When she was 36, Ms Szczepanska chose to come to Australia — a country she had never been to and had no connections with. When she and her three-year-old daughter arrived in Melbourne in December 1987, she hid her tears so her daughter couldn't see her crying. Four years later, she was handed a flyer for the Masters Games — an international sporting event for people aged 30 and over. That same day, Ms Szczepanska bought two discuses and started throwing again for the first time since she had left Poland. She has not stopped throwing since. "If I'm going on an athletics track or oval and doing my throwing, my brain is 18. "You have this feeling, 'I belong here, this is part of me.'" Ms Szczepanska, now 74, recently retired after working as a psychologist for 50 years. She won many medals throughout her sporting career — 191, to be exact. She still has most of them, but not all. "I've been giving my medals to my clients, the people I've been working with, as a sign of achievement when they change behaviour and habits." She has another two medals that she will not be giving away. In 2010, Ms Szczepanska was awarded the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland, given to those who have contributed greatly to Poland, and the Cross of Freedom and Solidarity, which honours those who were punished by the communist government and fought against it. Ms Szczepanskahas only returned to Poland once, when her mother passed away, but she will not go there again. "I put Poland and my past behind me … and I'm done," she said. "I still cannot be fully accepted, and I cannot be honest with them, so this is the reason I am deciding not to go." However, she is thankful for that day in the school gym. "I think that someone looked after me and sent me there, gave me this opportunity to equip me with skills so I can cope better with challenges in life," she said. Ms Szczepanska now lives in Geraldton, a sunny town on the Midwest coast of Western Australia. Even with everything that has happened to her, she said she had no regrets. "I don't have any. Not at all," she said. "I think that I did everything that I could according to the resources that I had to create a good life for myself and for my daughter. "I am still the same open-minded, compassionate and kind human." Her experiences have also given her a truly unique perspective on life. "I'm not giving up. I can be defeated, but I won't surrender. I will do everything I could 100 per cent so I won't have regrets," she said.
