Resistance

GERMAR RUDOLF, RESISTANCE IS OBLIGATORYnot only forbidden to sell an indexed medium publicly, but also to promoteit publicly. Hence the indexing of politically unwanted materialgets very close to a total censorship, because if you do not already knowin advance what you are looking for and where to look, you will hardlymake a find.This already unacceptable state of affairs was exacerbated evenmore in 2002 with the tightening of the German Law for the Protectionof the Youth. This reform not only extended the authority of the AssessmentAgency, but in addition it mandated that the list of indexedand confiscated media is no longer publicly accessible. Whereas beforeevery citizen could find out which media are indexed or even completelyprohibited in Germany by obtaining the respective list from the AssessmentAgency or by consulting it in public libraries, this list is nowonly made accessible for libraries and book dealers for their internaluse. To top it off, this list no longer contains those media which havebeen confiscated and are thus subjected to book burning. Since 2002these media are kept in secret lists. This secrecy is meant to prevent theuse of these lists as advertisement material for forbidden media. Hencethe citizens are kept intentionally ignorant by their government aboutwhat is and isn’t prohibited in this country. Yet when a citizen commitsan offense due to his inevitable ignorance, because he has produced,imported, stored, disseminated, or offered a prohibited medium, theprinciple of “ignorance doesn’t protect from punishment” still hits himor her with full force, even though it is exactly the government whichhas, with premeditation, prevented him to remedy his ignorance. Andsuch a state is then called a state under the rule of law.I have partly based my presentation about the increasing deteriorationof civil rights in Germany on a lecture which Prof. Eike Mußmannheld in the premise of my then Catholic student fraternity in Stuttgartback on 19 January 1993. At that time Prof. Mußmann was teachingpolice law at the Academy for Public Administration in Ludwigsburg.At the end of his lecture about the deterioration of civil rights in GermanyProf. Mußmann stated that he wouldn’t want to live in Germanyanymore in 40 years, if the restriction of civil rights were to continue asduring the first 40 years of the Federal Republic of Germany, becausethen Germany would be a police state. 146 The development of the sub-146 Cf. Lectures, op. cit. (note 55), p. 509.121