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

GERMAR RUDOLF, RESISTANCE IS OBLIGATORY
one’s intelligence without being guided by another. Sapere Aude!
[dare to know] Have the courage to use your own intelligence! is
therefore the motto of the enlightenment.”
Like Kant, Karl Popper characterized using one’s reason as the
counterpart to docile submission, in deference to authority, as central
for modern open societies when he explained: 70
“the closed society is characterized by the belief in magical taboos,
while the open society is one in which men have learned to be
to some extent critical of taboos, and to base decisions on the authority
of their own intelligence (after discussion).”
The question before us is whether the Federal Republic of Germany
is an open or closed, that is an authoritarian society. Are we allowed to
critically discuss taboos and proclaim our opinions based on our own
decisions? And does the German society have taboos, or not? As a matter
of fact, the subject of this trial is exactly about this, namely about the
Great Taboo of German society. Dr. Robert Hepp, professor of sociology,
has the following to say about this: 71
“Occasional experiments that I have conducted in my seminars
convince me that ‘Auschwitz’ is ethnologically speaking one of the
few taboo topics that our ‘taboo free society’ still preserves. […]
While they did not react at all to other stimulants, ‘enlightened’ central
European students who refused to accept any taboos at all, reacted
to a confrontation with ‘revisionist’ texts about the gas chambers
at Auschwitz in just as ‘elementary’ a way (including the comparable
physiological symptoms) as members of primitive Polynesian
tribes reacted to an infringement on one of their taboos. The
students were literally beside themselves and were neither prepared
nor capable of soberly discussing the presented theses. For the sociologist
this is a very important experience, because a society’s taboos
reveal what it holds sacred. Taboos also reveal what the community
fears. […] A ‘modern’ society does not in any way react differently
to breeches of taboos than does a ‘primitive’ society. The
breaking of taboos is generally perceived as ‘outrageous’ and
‘abominations’ and produce spontaneous ‘revulsion’ and ‘disgust.’
In the end the perpetrator is isolated, excluded from society, and his
name and memory ‘tabooed.’”
70
Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Routledge & Paul, London 1962, vol. 1, p.
202.
71
In: Rolf-Josef Eibich (ed.), Hellmut Diwald, Grabert, Tübingen 1995, footnote 46, p. 140.
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