Resistance

GERMAR RUDOLF, RESISTANCE IS OBLIGATORYas can be found elsewhere, which would legitimize almost any trip intothe blue. It would be just as ineffective to strive again for a definition ofa conventional good in need of legal protection. It’s all over parliamentarytown that it was the panic-stricken fear of pictures and reports –especially those of 8 May 2005, in Berlin (“appalling, unbearable,harmful, disgraceful, nasty…!”) – and a worldwide outrage whichcaused this blitz action. Can the legislature control the flow of images ina mass society? – This is obviously impossible! Can harmful, unbearableopinions be outlawed for legal reasons? The Federal ConstitutionalHigh Court recently denied this 22 with great determination with referenceto article 5, paragraph I, sentence 1 of the German Basic Law(freedom of opinion): Even he who contests Hitler’s guilt for the outbreakof World War II in publications is protected by the constitution. 23That is the powerful old pathos of the Lüth verdict, not the sallow, politicallycorrect manner of speaking of the zeitgeist which lacks any understandingfor the adventure of a liberal open – and thus also risky –political order. 24V. ProspectThe German Auschwitz taboo is deeply justified and legitimated bythe Shoah. 25 Art. 130, para. III, Penal Code, however, belongs to thequestionable consequences taken here; and its transfer to “satellite taboos”(Isensee) poisons the political and intellectual climate: [this concerns]almost any other topic, which is brought into connection with theNational Socialist time in order to gain superiority in a public dialog.The new paragraph 4 constitutes such a doubtful new expansion as well,whose basic deficiency could hardly be remedied even in case of a restrictiveinterpretation. Brugger characterized art. 130, para. III, PenalCode as a German law for special cases (Sonderfall-Gesetz), 26 whoseexorbitantly unique cause alone could permit in this case to push asideconstitutional law. If one agrees to that, one has to consider at the sametime that at least today, more than 60 years after the end of the NationalSocialist rule, a time has come to cautiously leave this Sonderweg, thisspecial path. Only this but not an – almost unlimited! – new extensionof the norm can seriously be open to debate. The attempt, however –quite to the contrary – to even obligate other European or extra-European countries to assume the special perceptions developed by us[Germans] and to, for instance, outlaw the swastika in the entireworld, 27 appears eerie…309