Resistance

GERMAR RUDOLF, RESISTANCE IS OBLIGATORYright-wing opposition. The German government’s reasons for thischange of law explain basically that statements on the Third Reich canalready be prosecutable if it can be implied from the context of the deedor from the perpetrator that he intended to glorify or belittle the humanrights violations committed by the Third Reich, even if those violationswere not a topic of the objected statements. 143 This means in plain English:This offense can be committed only by (alleged) right-wingers,because in Germany it is automatically insinuated that they intend toglorify the Third Reich. Hence article 130 has been converted into anarticle for the illegal suppression of the legal right-wing political opposition.Parallel to this erosion of civil rights, the position of the defendantand his defense lawyer has been deteriorating steadily, for instance as aresult of the abrogation of verbatim protocols for trials at District Courtsin the 1970s, by the abolition of jury courts, which means that in GermanCourts of Law the verdicts are precisely not handed down in thename of the people, and – particularly drastically in the area of jurisdictionof interest in this context – by the misuse of the so-called “selfevidence,”which is instrumentalized to categorically suppress evidence,and by the prosecution of defense lawyers for filing motion to introduceevidence regarding the historical issues at hand.Even the German Federal Assessment Agency for Media Endangeringthe Youth has followed this tendency of increasing restrictions ofcivil rights. Originally, this censorship agency had been established tokeep pornography and depictions of violence away from minors, andthere is nothing to be objected against this, although a look into anynewsagent shop and into the Internet shows that this censorship is notefficient at all. During the left-wing social-liberal German governmentof the 1970s, however, a portentous development commenced to deploythis censorship agency against unwanted political or historical material.At that time both left-wing literature suspected to be close to the RAFas well as right-wing literature got into the crosshairs of the censors.143 Bundestags-Drucksache 15/5051, p. 5;http://dip21.bundestag.de/dip21/btd/15/050/1505051.pdf. The respective passage has sincebeen quoted almost verbally by German courts of law; cf. Bavarian Administrative Court (BayerischerVerwaltungsgerichtshof), verdict of 10 Aug. 2005, ref. 24 CS 05.2053: “For an approvalof the violent and tyrannical rule of National Socialism it suffices, if the perpetrator implicitelygives a positive assessment of the human rights violations committed under the rule ofNational Socialism – for instance by way of value judgments about responsible personalities.”Confirmed and more thoroughly justified by the German Federal Administrative Court (Bundesverwaltungsgericht),verdict of 25 June 2008, ref. 6 C 21.07.119