Resistance

GERMAR RUDOLF, RESISTANCE IS OBLIGATORYis already questionable whether any person has the right to expect certainemotions from others while reading historical material. It has to beascertained under any circumstance, however, that such emotional questions,which the expert witness wants to be understood as a moral litmustest, have no place at all in an expert report about the question of thenature of science.The expert witness’s transgressions of competence into non-historicalfields are quantitatively limited, but they underscore the expert witness’stendency to confuse the issue of the nature of science with mattersof content.3. Professionalism of the Assessment3.1. Freedom of initial hypothesisIn an earlier publication the expert witness has recognized the “fundamentalimportance of the maxim ‘de omnibus dubitandum est’” (everythingmust be doubted) and has rejected demands for prohibitions as“an assault against the principle of freedom of science. 300 The expertwitness repeats these assertions in his expert report tendentially (p. 11),yet brings at once “two possible restricting circumstances” (ibid.). Theexpert witness argues that it could be questionable whether the radicalchallenge of a thesis could be legitimate. (“[…] one could thus state:‘Contra existentiam negantem non est disputatio’ – one cannot arguewith someone negating the existence), p. 11; “whether […] a systematiceffort […] to draw a divergent overall picture […] were acceptable inprinciple, had to set its own limits, or could be forced to stay withinlimits.” p. 13; “But it is not at all a given fact that general statementslike this [of tolerance toward radical revisionisms] can also be appliedto that revisionism which totally or at least in parts ‘denies Auschwitz’,”p. 15.)Later the expert witness poses the question whether the contributionsin the book at issue “can all be classified as such a [radical] revisionism”(p. 20, similar p. 21). On p. 29 the expert witness writes that it“seems impossible to also grant Faurisson’s and Rudolf’s contributionsa scientific character,” yet later decides contrary to that appearance, thatis to say for the scientific nature of these contributions as well (p. 32).Whereas the expert witness proffers formal objections regarding Faurisson’scontributions (political rhetoric and “obvious polemics,” p. 29,300 Ernst Nolte, Streitpunkte, Ullstein, Frankfurt/Berlin 1993, p. 308.296