Totalitarian encroachment on freedom of opinion and press

On 16 July 2024, the German Federal Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser (SPD) banned the companies “Compact-Magazin GmbH” and “CONSPECT FILM GmbH”, with immediate effect. In consequence, all “products” of these two companies were also banned with immediate effect. The best known of these are the political magazine Compact (circulation around 40,000) and the political internet channel Compact-TV (around 345,000 subscribers).
  A press release issued by the ministry on the same day stated that the banned companies were “right-wing extremist” (a political fighting term, but not a term in the German constitution) and that the Compact magazine was a “central mouthpiece of the right-wing extremist scene”.
  Jürgen Elsässer, the editor-in-chief and publisher of Compact magazine, is also labelled a “right-wing extremist”. He says of himself that he used to be politically left-wing but was now a German patriot.
  Early in the morning, more than 300 police and intelligence officers searched the premises of the banned companies and private flats in Brandenburg, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Hesse, confiscating various items.
  However, the ministry’s press release does not substantiate any of the politically highly charged but also colourful accusations. Instead, the ministry’s website points out that “Compact-Magazin GmbH” has been “in the focus of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution for a long time” and was “classified and observed as a verified right-wing extremist organisation in late 2021”. If you look at the Federal Office’s current report on the protection of the constitution for the year 2023¹, Compact magazine is mentioned several times, but here too you will find mostly the same claims and terms as in the Federal Ministry of the Interior’s press release. Here, too, there is largely no evidence – which is hardly surprising if you take a critical look at the mostly unobjective vocabulary.
  Of course, the ministry’s website emphasises: “Freedom of the press and freedom of opinion are fundamental prerequisites for a functioning democracy.” And then immediately adds: “Nevertheless, these freedoms also have limits.” In fact, Article 5 of the Basic Law formulates limits to freedom of expression and freedom of the press: the general laws, the protection of minors and the protection of personal honour. There is no mention of “imminent threats to the state, its existence and its constitutional order”, as the Federal Ministry of the Interior has accused the banned companies of doing. Why should there be? After all, how can the expression of opinions and freedom of the press pose such a threat?
  The German Federal Constitutional Court has rightly seen even the harshest, unobjective and polemical criticism of the prevailing political conditions as covered by the right to freedom of expression and freedom of the press. This interpretation of the mentioned freedoms was seen as constitutive of a free and democratic basic order. Fundamental rights such as freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom of thought and religion, freedom of association and freedom of assembly have been very deliberately constituted as rights of protection and defence of the individual against the state, against the abuse and escalation of state power. The state does have a duty to protect against violent behaviour and incitements to violence – if they exist, i.e., if they are a concrete and proven violation of applicable law. State judgements and assumptions about other opinions and political demands, on the other hand, have no justification in a constitutional democracy. In a functioning democracy, the press in particular, often referred to as the fourth power, has the task of critically scrutinising government action and putting it up for discussion.
  I was also personally affected by the actions of the Federal Ministry of the Interior, having known Jürgen Elsässer for more than 20 years. I particularly appreciated and continue to appreciate his publications on the wars in former Yugoslavia. He has unflinchingly criticised Western policy towards Yugoslavia since the mid-1980s and has clearly named and characterised NATO’s crimes. For some time, he wrote a series of articles for Current Concerns. To this day, I remember his humanly touching title article about a 15-year-old girl, Sanja, who was murdered by NATO bombs in Varvarin, Serbia. We published the text in our special edition on the 10^th anniversary of the NATO attack on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in spring 2009, which violated international law. Today I say: Jürgen Elsässer is still an important voice against war and war policy – even if I can very much understand the criticism of other content and the form of presentation in the Compact magazine. But a government agency like the Federal Ministry of the Interior must stay out of this intellectual debate within society!
  Above all, the actions of the Federal Ministry of the Interior do in no way serve to protect the free and democratic basic order. On the contrary, the ban on the two Compact companies is in line with the erosion of the free and democratic basic order, and particularly the rights under Article 5 of the Basic Law, which is being forced by the EU and pursued by German government policy. Karl Jaspers already felt this in the 1960s, not least after the Spiegel affair, and therefore wrote his book “Wohin treibt die Bundesrepublik?” [Where is the Federal Republic heading?].² At that time, the disenfranchisement of citizens could still be averted halfway successfully. And today?
  At the end of 2023, a relative majority of respondents in a survey in Germany thought that it was dangerous to express one’s opinion freely and publicly. In consequence, people no longer do so.³ Such survey results should be taken very seriously. Germany is to become “ready for war”, its citizens’ desire for peace is to be weakened, the German economy is to be turned upside down – ideologically motivated – and the welfare state is to be undermined. And the Christian-humanist values of the Basic Law are to give way to dystopias such as those that the global public had to endure at the opening of the Olympic Games in Paris – free speech is no longer welcome there.  •

¹ https://www.verfassungsschutz.de/SharedDocs/publikationen/DE/verfassungsschutzberichte/2024-06-18-verfassungsschutzbericht-2023.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=17
² cf. recently: https://www.zeit-fragen.ch/archiv/2024/nr-11-28-mai-2024/wohin-treibt-die-bundesrepublik
³ cf. https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2023-12/meinungsfreiheit-zensur-studie-freiheitsindex-deutschland-2023