Germar Rudolf, Resistance Is Obligatory (2012; PDF-Datei

GERMAR RUDOLF, RESISTANCE IS OBLIGATORY
By thinking that it has to protect itself from peaceful citizens, the
state has lost sight of its most important right to exist, as Karl Popper
has correctly emphasized: 205
“But I demand that the fundamental purpose of the state should
not be lost sight of; I mean, the protection of that freedom which
does not harm other citizens.”
How shockingly easy it is to bring people to commit atrocities, if only
they believe in the authority of those giving them orders, was demonstrated
by the sociologist Stanley Milgram in the mid-1960s by way of
an experiment. In it, students were asked by a professor to give a test
person painful electric shocks as punishments for errors made. Needless
to say that the test person was only an actor and that his reactions to the
feigned electric shocks were only pretended, but the students did not
know that. Only 37.5 % of the test students refused to obey the order to
inflict harmful electric shocks to the “test person.” 206 Milgram commented
this shockingly subservient behavior as follows: 207
“If it was possible in this study for an anonymous experimenter
to order an adult to force a fifty year old man into a yoke and to give
him painful electro shocks despite his protests, then one can only
wonder what a government – which has far more authority and a
higher prestige – may be able to order its subjects.”
Today this experiment is a classic, and one does not have to search
long to find the answer to the question what a government servant is
prepared to do, if an order comes from higher up. Just look around here:
how many government servants are obeying when asked to lock up obviously
innocent, peaceful dissidents? So far the rate of disobedience is
at 0%.
Let me now quote from the classic text par excellence in which disobedience
against an unjust state has been expressed, namely from the
essay “Civil Disobedience” by the U.S. American Henry David Thoreau.
This essay was written in the mid-1850s in view of the war of aggression
of the United States against Mexico aiming at conquering Texas
as well as in protest against slavery. I quote: 208
205 Karl Popper, The Open…, op. cit. (note 70), vol. 1, p. 110.
206 Stanley Milgram, “Behavioral study of obedience,” Journal of abnormal and social psychology,
Lancaster, PA, vol. 67 (1963) pp. 371-378.; see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment (the German version has a link to the complete
article: www.de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgramexperiment).
207 Ibid., p. 460, quoted acc. to Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeld, op. cit. (note 63), p. 103, retranslated.
208 Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Other Writings, Bantam, Toronto 1981, pp. 92, 94.
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