20 November 2002, 1.00 pm: after both the unemployment office and the court have spent almost three quarters of a year palming off Dr. Peter Nittmann, a publishing editor who had become unemployed after 17 years, with either platitudes or presumptuous phrases, because he, as a non-church member, does not want to pay church tax on his meagre unemployment benefit, the court is now, all of a sudden, in a hurry – now that it has become known that international interest has been aroused in its routine activity of countless parallel cases, which had previously been shrouded in darkness and had exploited the defencelessness of the weak victims.
   What is considerably more rapid than in any of the parallel cases, which had been successfully ground down by a combination of keeping silent and employing delaying tactics, is, now that protest letters from all over the world have revealed the wiring under the board of secrecy, that the trial appointment, which had so often been put on ice before, has been set faster than you can say "church tax", and the state prosecutor and plaintiffs are waiting outside Room 233 of the Freiburg "Sozialgericht", which is worth seeing for its shabbiness and secrecy alone. This is the place, then, where serious decisions are made for the poorest of the poor: this is the place where they can defend themselves against wrongs committed by the state or other powers – or not, as the case may be.
   But Dr. Nittmann, the one who has been robbed in this case, and his lawyer, Gottfried Niemietz – who, by dint of ten years' tenacity, succeeded in enforcing the Bavarian Crucifix Act – are not alone. Other victims from all over the Church State of Germany are in attendance to observe the trial. They have been attracted by the information that we have spread, which has incurred so much sacrifice and financial cost in fighting the news ban. An unknown, middle-aged woman embraces the brave plaintiff and gives him a rose. The court keeps everyone waiting – nothing happens – this is their way of letting everyone know who's boss. The little room is opened at last, chairs have to be fetched, and a lay judge mumbles – "So many? Sounds like work!". Funny how a public audience means work! Not because they're going to say anything – they aren't allowed to – it's just that those in charge will have to pull themselves together a bit more.
   The judge – a stickler for the rules, an illogical housewife type with the power behind her, and therefore inconspicuous for the apparatus she represents – complains first of all that the plaintiff had "misinformed the public". This isn't true, of course, but , in any case, the public, of which the Basic Law and its loud-mouthed "champions" (who are, of course, the exact opposite) are so very proud but which are so unpopular with the cloak-and-dagger, Kafka-esque bureaucrats, are present in considerable numbers. And she doesn't keep quiet about what is really annoying her about this case either: the masses of protest letters, and from abroad as well! So this is the real bone of contention… she'd normally be more than willing to talk, but not under these circumstances!

SO OUR TACTICS WERE SPOT-ON: THE WOUNDED DOG IS BARKING. IF YOUR ENEMIES PRAISE YOU, YOU'VE JUST BEEN AN IDIOT, BUT IF THEY SHOUT AND RAGE, YOU KNOW YOU'VE DONE THE RIGHT THING.

So, there's no way of turning this down in a secret trial any more. But our representative of the state doesn't want anything to do with the basic law: laws will suffice for the job in hand.

This is where the people have to be informed: the people are getting their just deserts for their collective refusal to keep in mind the difference between law and constitution. A law that is in breach of the constitution is invalid – and that's all there is to it (because the only sense in a constitution is to determine which laws can be valid and which can't – see the first article of the German Constitution and its third and final paragraphs. A judge that has doubts about the constitutionality of a law (or has been made aware of such with good reason) is obliged to report the matter to the German Federal Constitutional Court (BVG) – this is called "Normenkontrollverfahren" or judicial review process, but under no circumstances is he to make any further decisions on the basis of this law – this is the rule, and only in a cynical, unjust state can following such a rule have consequences for your career.)

Nonetheless, the judge did manage to weave the constitution into her perverse argumentation. Her train of thought was, mutatis mutandis, as follows:
   "If we, i.e. the state, told the truth when we pinched church tax from the unemployed independently of what religion they may or may not belong to, then that would, indeed, be in breach of the constitution. However, since we are lying, the constitution remains inviolate. Because, you see, we don't pass this money on to the church at all, either when we take it from church members or from anyone else, but simply keep it for ourselves and pay judges or phone-tappers, MPs or soldiers or even, of course, should the mood take us, throw tons of it at the church. But because of the aforementioned lie we don't have to: it isn't church tax at all, you see, we just call it that to confuse people. It's what you might call a fictitious church tax. This does not, however, mean that we only levy it fictitiously – oh no, it's real enough in that sense. What it also means is that we can also take it from non-church members just as we could take a dog tax from people who don't have a dog – we would just call it a fictitious dog tax. Because, you see, it's such terribly hard work for us to find out who belongs to a privileged religion or who has a dog that it's just easier to take money from everybody – we can always use money, and in any case there's no reason to complain because we are all the state, every single one of us, and there's no such thing anyway (this idiotically apologetic garbage is more or less verbatim). So, everything's OK, because as the BVG said in its judgement of 23.03.1994, as long as a clear majority of the working population pay church tax, then it is all right to take it from the unemployed as well, because this is the normal state of affairs. It would be the same thing with a dog tax, too, but we don't want to do this yet because we don't want people to own dogs. We do, however, want them to be members of the church – so they should not be at an advantage if they choose not to be."
   The BVG did not, of course, say the final sentence – that really would have let the cat out of the bag – but the rest does reproduce their statement true to content and in a neutral manner. Then another thing: since the BVG, in order to save the church tax that is being imposed on unemployed non-church members, had already decided a long time ago and certainly in breach of the constitution that it was certainly acceptable to impose the church tax on unemployed non-church members as long as a clear majority of those in employment were members of the church, a fact that it was sure would last in saecula saeculorum, our judge, and also a whole bunch of high-ranking apparatus people of the Federal Court for Social Security and Related Matters (BSG), has now that this fact no longer exists (the figure of 57%, which was kept secret until we intervened, is first of all not a "clear majority", and has secondly, in the meantime, sunk still further since that time), distorted the BVG judgement to say that a church tax, whether called "fictitious" or not, to be imposed on unemployed non-church members would no longer be acceptable only in case there was a clear majority of employed non-church members.
   The plaintiff's lawyer, Niemietz, rubbed this distortion under the judge's nose at least four times, and at least four times she pretended she hadn't heard a word. Finally, she said stupidly: "I don't believe that, read it out!". It's not all that likely that you'll just happen to have a BVG judgement at hand. Niemietz, however, was prepared and did, and so he read it out – the BVG required a clear majority of church members for the equitableness of imposing such a church tax, and not a majority of non-church members for it to be inequitable as the BSG did. The judge's impudently cynical reaction: "I don't find that in my copy!" This level of logic is only known to us historically, from the Inquisition trials, where the Inquisition monks simply denied the existence of places in the Bible that did not suit their wishes – we don't even know any real parallels from the Third Reich. Now the plaintiff, Dr. Nittmann, whose telephone was cut off in best Gestapo style on the evening before the trial (and only then!), which meant a considerable restriction of communication possibilities (to his lawyer, for example!), not to mention the psychological terror, detailed clearly how absurd the judge's "argumentation" is: the church tax he has to pay is by no means "fictitious", since it really is taken from him, and not just in tokens – but in particular, it is justified using the church membership of others – those in work, and secondarily the unemployed. This membership must not, as is clearly laid out in the constitution, be used to disadvantage someone who does not belong to a church – why should a non-smoker have tobacco tax deducted from his wages just because other people smoke, and why should someone who is not a dog-owner have to suffer financial disadvantages by the state just because other people, who have nothing to do with him and whom he cannot influence, allow themselves the luxury of owning a dog? The existence of religious people must not, as stated as clearly as crystal in the constitution that no-one must suffer any disadvantage due to his religion or weltanschauung, be used to justify disadvantages to people who have freed themselves from religion. If religious people or members of any other associations collect membership fees among themselves – or by way of a gift from Hitler to his first supporter from abroad, Pius XI, have them collected by the state –, then it is their right to do so – they have something to gain from this for their own purposes; but it is as unconstitutional as it is immoral to take the same money from others for their own private pleasure for any purpose whatever or even purposes that go against, or even serve to besmirch, such people. For the imposition of the church tax on people who reject this organisation and do not find the existence of this organisation desirable in the slightest is the same act of immorality as the mediaeval taxing of Jews to finance the building of churches, monasteries and Inquisition prisons.
   Of course, in a state of injustice, that is a church state on top of that, any argumentation at all, let alone that which is absolutely convincing, has no chance in the first place; because judgement has been passed long before the first word of the trial has even been spoken. Our judge accidentally let this slip when she said that, shortly before our trial, all the "Sozialrichter" in Germany who were "involved" in this matter had held a meeting with the purpose of passing unified "judgements" (because there had been, you see, a few judgements passed that were in accordance with the constitution and appropriate for a state of law and order, and not just in Chemnitz); this is called, officially and in Orwellian German, "berufliche Fortbildung" (further professional education). There were things similar to this in the Third Reich, and this is the name that was used years ago in the Church State of Great Western Germany to describe the teaching systematically and universally meted out to the legal apparatus that demanded that the basic right of religious freedom always be ignored in the case of religious groups that had been discriminated against. So under no circumstances should our judge have let loose with her initial piqué noisings about "the independence of a German court!" with a cat in the courtroom, because that would have been enough to bring the poor creature to death from uncontrollable fits of laughter.
   The verdict: the money is to remain stolen and may continue to be called church tax – no surprises there, then. So – does this mean our engagement in this matter was simply pointless and quixotic, would all-consuming fatalism have been wiser in its stead?
   There is an argument against this point. The press, of course, immediately leapt to the help of the Church State of Germany – for the primary purpose of the levying of church tax on unemployed non-church members, no matter whether it is to be used for killing Serbs, paying off judges or sponsoring confessional schools and church meetings or even directly paying priests, has, despite its running into billions over the years, is not to pump even more money into the church – they're already swimming in it and have been for a long time. They can also get everything else they want from the collaborating state – they could, without having a single member, already pay their entire staff, including their less expensive secretaries and servers, from the returns on their giant, illegally obtained possessions, and that in the accustomed, luxurious full amounts. No, the main purpose is that no-one should draw any practical advantage from having the strength of character that has enabled him to free himself from the psychological terror that has been exercised on him either directly by the church or indirectly through the use of emotional dependencies. As long as this functioned universally, the church was more than happy with Hitler's church tax gift; because apart from money, what really is the world's biggest company is aiming particularly at percentages of membership in the population – only this will enable psycho-terror and brainwashing that really works – "why should YOU get an advantage out of not being religious"? etc. – but recently, with the emergence of loopholes and sanctuaries (the students' movement, and also the GDR), it has not been working nearly as well. For this reason, the church was really unhappy about the fact that 43% of the employed population had escaped – its psychologically decisive "argument", the killer argument of the huge percentage, was in danger, and this is why the press maintained absolute silence in the matter. The people found out nothing, absolutely nothing, about the 43%, the immoral tax theft being carried out on unemployed non-church members or the hundreds of trials involving those affected by it.

UNTIL WE CAME.

Only after we had been fortuitously made aware of these undisclosed facts did it become clear to us what an immense wrong we had stumbled upon; it was, as only readers of the KETZERBRIEFE [HERETICS' LETTERS, our periodical] know (issues 108 and 109), extremely difficult even to track down the verdicts of the higher courts, which had actively been kept secret, in which – as the only source! – the ominous figures of 43 or rather 57 (percent of those in employment) occur once. We drew attention to these facts, which had been kept silent for decades, by means of mass flyers distributed nationwide at great cost and with great sacrifice – THEN, AND ONLY THEN, DID THE FIRST REPORTS ABOUT THE MATTER SUDDENLY START TO APPEAR IN THE PRESS – everywhere except in Freiburg, of course, because that's the place where we're best-known – and these reports appeared on the front pages, too. For the people's belief in the press is more important to those in power – and quite understandably so – than their belief in any god, no matter which one.
   In the Middle Ages, the church was the most important instrument of rule – it had its own role in the feudalisation of Europe and the maintenance thereof to thank for its power: today, the most important instrument of rule is the press and television. If, in the Middle Ages, religious belief was threatened, then the wrongs of the Middle Ages were in danger; if today the belief in the press and television were threatened, then today's wrongs would be in danger. This does not, however, mean that the church has suddenly become unimportant and useless for those in power: first of all it is still, now as then, indispensable for the basic neuroticisation of the children and later subjects and for brain-softening in general; secondly, it represents the weighty ideological reserve, which can break out again at any time like a cancer that is being suppressed by chemotherapy (who, for example, would have thought of the violent return of a real Islamic state before Khomeini?), for the future, a future in which the original human rights and freedoms borne of the French Revolution and that still have a lasting effect have died out completely. What European would, thirty years ago, have even thought possible the shame that a secular society would persecute sects in a continent that, 250 years previously, had given rise to religious tolerance? This is the kind of outrage, which serves a number of those who seek to benefit from wrongs, for which the church has to be kept in reserve, nurtured, pampered and fed.
   In this light, it was a massive success for us to make the press break their silence about the many, 43% to be precise, employed people in Germany who are not members of a church and the trials taking place against the unconstitutional and immoral tax theft, hitherto buried behind news bans, and that due to our activity alone. Because the "greater evil" for the "beneficiaries", which would otherwise have been unavoidable, would have been that the man on the street would have started getting interested in us, i.e. an incorruptible, tough and unregulated left-wing opposition, as a source of news instead of sleepily sucking in the news from the press and the box (or concentrating attentions on the internet, which is so extremely easy to censor, instead of the flyers, which are so much more difficult to control!)
   That was before the trial; it explains why the local press, otherwise so rigidly silent (Badische Zeitung, BZ for short), ran a three-column report about our trial in contrast to those "previous hundreds" with which it was equally familiar. Its absolute priority, of course, was to get the church off the hook, by diverting attention to the less easily graspable state and finally to increase resignation and fatalism. This is the article in question:

It really is not easy to recognise the course of the trial here! (The judge's letting slip about the central "berufliche Fortbildung" meeting of all the "Sozialrichter" involved for the purpose of "standardising" the verdicts falls under a mantle of benevolent silence, and also, of course, her ridiculous babblings about the state, which we all are and which, one breath later, suddenly doesn't exist). The decisive factor is the reduction of the whole matter, which had, after all, only come into being due to Hitler's church tax gift, to the following statement: the state always gets what it is not entitled to, and if it can no longer do this under the mantle of a certain misleading description, then it will do so with a new arbitrary act – "a question of calculation", and not of the real issue at hand.
   There is, of course, an array of misleading suggestion: "a" Bund gegen Anpassung, as if there were several of them to choose from – just one week previously, when the BZ propagated vicious agitation against us due to our anti-colonialist refunctioning of one of the "anti"-war demonstrations planned in a pro-colonialist fashion by one of the ringleaders, this same newspaper assumed that the existence of the Bund gegen Anpassung was known to everyone, which is absolutely correct in the case of Freiburg; this is no schizophrenia, this is tactics. Furthermore, Chemnitz was by no means the only "Sozialgericht" to take on an analogous case and pass a verdict in accordance with the constitution – this is quite possibly why it had become necessary to arrange the standardising "berufliche Fortbildung" meeting in the first place. However, the real journalistic outrage is contained in a non-referential pronoun – whether it be in marital disputes or conflict of world views, the threat of dismissal or the most abstract philosophy – non-referential pronouns always conceal an outrage, always announce something outrageous and always serve the outrageous. In this case, the non-referential pronoun is the "that" in the second sentence of the final paragraph: WHO is supposed to finance WHAT?!? If this is supposed to imply that the poor German state will go bankrupt if it is not allowed to wrench another few sous from the holey pockets of the poorest of the poor using lies and misappropriation tactics, then we have a very good piece of advice for our bankruptcy-fearing Chancellor:

SCHRÖDER, GET YOUR MONEY FROM THE CHURCHES, NOT THE UNEMPLOYED!
DON'T DISPENSE WITH THEIR REAL PROPERTY TAX AND PROPERTY ACQUISITION TAX –
YOU'RE NOT USUALLY SO FUSSY ABOUT TAKING IT!

If it only takes a stroke of the pen to decrease unemployment benefit even further, then it will only take a stroke of the pen to remove the disgraceful exemption of the church, as compared to all other charitable organisations, from real property tax, property acquisition tax and property sales tax. The church is not only the biggest landowner in Germany, even without taking churches themselves into consideration, but also the biggest property speculator. If a normal citizen speculates with the fruits of his – possibly very exhausting – labours in order to obtain security for his old age "from his own responsibility", then he is fleeced mercilessly; the church, fat and stinking with money, gets away with it completely. Even if the church only had to pay regular property acquisition tax, there would probably be more money coming in to finance "that" than there would from the additional plundering of the unemployed that is being propagandistically promoted by the BZ. This is why any decent and self-respecting person must say:

SCHRÖDER, GET YOUR MONEY FROM THE CHURCH,
DON'T THROW OUR MONEY AT PRIESTS AND VICARS!


And the following remains valid:

GET RID OF THE HITLER CONCORDAT!
NO STATE MONEY FOR THE CHURCH!
NO COLLECTING OF CHURCH MEMBERSHIP FEES BY THE STATE!

If you hate wrong and don't want to be a serf, you'll find your way to us.