The now published ruling of the Federal Administrative Court dated 14 August 2024 (BVerwG 6VR 1.24) shows that it is no point in talking of a “victory for freedom of the press” having been achieved here. On the contrary: the court ruling is paving the way to abolishing freedom of the press:

As we have already said, the court has expressly signed off on the legal trick of the Ministry of Internal Affairs which mendaciously turns the press company COMPACT into an "association" and then, in breach of Article 5 of the German Basic Law – freedom of the press! – ­banning it in accordance with association law. This means that the door is open to the censorship and destruction of any oppositional publication. The groundbreaking, and in reality extremely evil, importance of the ruling lies in this main idea, which is why the court has exclusively put precisely this fundamental point at the forefront of its decision as an "official guiding principle": "The banning of an association ...  can also be decreed as an instrument of ´preventative constitutional protection´(!) ... against media organisations." – this is a blatant instruction manual for future censorship!

In accordance with the court ruling, in the ongoing procedure to ban COMPACT the (secret) police may, expressly before returning the "secured and confiscated evidence and property” (i.e. secured on their raids), “create hard copies of documents (files, bank statements etc.) and electronic storage media (including computers and laptops with internal drives, notebooks, tablets and external drives, memory sticks, memory cards, NAS storage, SD cards, DVDs, CDs) and analyse mobile telephones and SIM cards."

Because the procedure to ban COMPACT is, of course, ongoing!

Finally, only for the application of COMPACT-Magazin GmbH as the editor of COMPACT – as legalese would have it – was the delaying effect of the appeal against the ban provisionally restored. All further applications were rejected! Those of the film production company and those of Jürgen Elsässer, his wife and all his other colleagues who had also all been attacked in their private apartments! For this reason the court has obscenely decided that these victims of raid and censorship will have to pay most of the considerable court costs and even the costs of the Ministry of Law Enforcement themselves!

Our demands remain unchanged: 

The complete restoration of freedom of the press and freedom of information!

The reversal of the Compact ban in regards to both the magazine and the YouTube channel COMPACT-TV!

The immediate return of the confiscated production equipment and other assets (accounts, cash and private property)!

The deletion of all the stolen data and information in the possession of the secret police!

The complete rehabilitation of and compensation for the COMPACT team!

The German Federal Administrative Court partially suspended the immediate enforcement of the COMPACT ban today, which means that the magazine (the YouTube channel, COMPACT-TV, is not mentioned in the court’s press release) can be published again temporarily.

We would like to congratulate Jürgen Elsässer and his colleagues on this partial victory in the fight for freedom of the press and freedom of information!

However, we must not overlook the fact that according to its press release (the decision itself has not yet been announced), the German Federal Administrative Court has no qualms about the truly scandalous legal trick of simply redefining a press company or a publishing house as an “association” and then banning it in accordance with association law, which means that there will allegedly have been no breach of the constitution, i.e. the blatant violation of Art 5 German Basic Law ("Freedom of the press and freedom of reporting by means of broadcasts and films shall be guaranteed. There shall be no censorship.").

If this unconstitutional tort is not rejected in no uncertain terms, the doors to the censorship and destruction of any “undesirable” publication will be thrown wide open.

For this reason our demand remains:

 The complete restoration of freedom of the press and freedom of information!

The reversal of the Compact ban in regards to both the magazine and the YouTube channel COMPACT-TV!

The immediate return of the confiscated production equipment and other assets (accounts, cash and private property)!

The complete rehabilitation of and compensation for the COMPACT team!

We wish to protest in the strongest possible terms against the monstrous ban on COMPACT Magazine, COMPACT-TV and the police raids on Jürgen Elsässer and his colleagues, who made use of their right to freedom of speech that is guaranteed in our constitution:

German Basic Law, Art 5 Para 1:
Every person shall have the right freely to express and disseminate his opinions in speech, writing and pictures, and to inform himself without hindrance from generally accessible sources. Freedom of the press and freedom of reporting by means of broadcasts and films shall be guaranteed. There shall be no censorship.

Compare the following official statements for yourself:

1) Press release from the Federal Ministry of the Interior on 16/07/2024:
Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser: "Today I have banned the right-wing extremist "COMPACT-Magazin". It is a central mouthpiece of the right-wing extremist scene. This magazine hounds Jews, people of migrant descent and our parliamentary democracy in an unspeakable way.
Our ban is a heavy blow to the right-wing extremist scene. The ban shows that we are also prepared to go after the ‘intellectual arsonists’ who promote hate and violence against refugees and migrants and aim to overcome our democratic state. Our signal is quite clear: We will not allow the definition of who belongs to Germany and who does not to be defined in ethnic terms. Our constitutional state will protect all those who are exposed to hostility because of their faith, their origin, their colour or their democratic stance.
I would like to thank the security authorities both on a national and federal level for their closely coordinated, consistent measures. I would especially like to thank the emergency forces who have been searching various properties since the early hours of this morning."

2) The German Federal Agency for Civic Education (Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung/bpb) on the Nazis’ Editors’ Law of 4 October 1933:
“The Editors’ Law, which had already been passed by the cabinet on 4 October 1933 and come into effect on 1 January 1934, changed the work of Germany’s journalists fundamentally. It was the crucial instrument of National Socialist media control - but not the first step.
Soon after the government led by newly appointed Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler came to office on 30 January 1933, the National Socialists began their policy of the enforced conformity of societies, associations and institutions. The aim was to take control of societal life as a whole. This also applied to the media.
In terms of National Socialist policies, one had to "either say a clear yes or a clear no, and this yes or no would not tolerate any ifs or buts", propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels had already said in a speech to foreign press representatives on 6 April 1933. "The intellectual forces of German journalism that commit themselves to a ‘Yes’ can be certain to receive the most cordial of material and non-material support from the government."
The social democratic and hard left-orientated party press of the SPD and KPD had already been banned by the Nazi regime after the Reichstag fire in February 1933. What the National Socialists were still missing was a legal means of dealing with the bourgeois press. This function was fulfilled by the Editors’ Law.” (German Federal Agency for Civic Education on the purpose of historical clarification, 29/12/2018)

“... by their fruits ye shall know them.” (Matthew 7:15-20)

Since our foundation we have always taken inspiration from Voltaire:
“I don't share your point of view, but I will certainly defend to the death your right to express it.”

»Look how close they put their country to our military bases«
Ever since the US had accomplished the downfall of the Soviet Union (by driving the Soviet Union to completely exhaust its economic resources in the arms race) and then, consequently, the breakup of its defence alliance with the Eastern European states, the US government has been relentlessly, though contrary to its promises (but what do they care about what they promised yesterday?) pushing its own military bloc into Eastern Europe with the aim of destroying Russia, the last sovereign state on the globe apart from China, and of chopping it up into vassal states – in short, of completing the first unrestricted world domination in human history.

For this purpose only, NATO has gone through an excessive military buildup since 1990 instead of disappearing together with the Warsaw Pact, in order to form the largest war machine of all times, now consisting of 30 states, with a military budget about twenty times that of Russia: After pocketing the GDR, the »North Atlantic« Pact received the green light from the Biden-led US Senate in 1998 to incorporate Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary, then in 2003 to swallow the three Baltic states on Russia’s northern flank, Romania and Bulgaria on its southern flank and Slovakia and Slovenia in the middle section. NATO’s declaration in Bucharest in 2008, enforced by Bush Jr., that it would also incorporate Ukraine and Georgia as member states was already the barely veiled ultimatum that Russia should hand over the Black Sea and tolerate US nuclear missiles and missile interceptors even in its historic heartland (»Little Russia«), which would mean capitulation – the final solution of the Russian question after 13 union republics with 137 million inhabitants had been broken out of the Soviet Union and 14 states had been integrated into NATO.

When it was reported a few weeks ago that Hamas had once again fired rockets at Israel from the Gaza Strip, and this time nastily enough at a major civilian event, the majority of recipients of this news probably assumed that this was yet one more of the countless episodes from the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian permanent war, and thus did not pay any major attention to the incident.

On August 13th 2022, the British author Salman Rushdie fell victim to the “fatwa” issued against him 33 years ago, when holding a lecture publicly on stage– a call for murder by the Iranian Ayatollah and then head of state, Khomeini, appeasingly and at the same time mendaciously translated as “legal opinion” by the unisono media (which is not false, taken the strict meaning of the word, but have such “expert opinions” not also been written in the service of the Inquisition and the Nazis concerning Jews and heretics, after all?). The reason given at that time was Rushdie’s novel ‘Satanic Verses’. The assassinator severly injured Rushdie by multiple knife wounds and, most probably, he will lose one of his eyes![1]

The governments of the Western Bloc are responsible for this crime, as they did not send resolute protests against the call for murder and the ban against the ‘Satanic Verses’at that time, as they did not impose sanctions against Iran, which they were so ready to do against Iraq then and against Russia today, as Rushdie was not given the opportunity to defend himself in public, but was smuggled from one hiding place to the other instead for years in a sort of protective custody; as they did not ensure that the‘Satanic Verses’ were translated into as many languages and as quickly as possible and thus made known to a wide public at low cost. Peter Priskil’s work ‘Salman Rushdie – Portrait of a Poet’ published in 1989, remained for many years the only German publication on this issue.

Consequently, since the initial call for murder, there have been and still are numerous more victims of religious fanatics and enemies of the freedom of speech , belly-brushed by a ‘fair’-minded press. We remind of Alaa Hamed, Aziz Nesin and the victims of the Sivas massacre, Taslima Nasrin, Nagib Machfus, Theo van Gogh, Hatun Sürücü, the staff of ‘Charlie Hebdo’ and Mila, to name just a few of them. And what is the reason for this trail of blood, of which we just gave some few examples? The West pampered and continues to pamper Islam, as it is not affected by Enlightenment and thus could and still can be excellently used as a battering ram against the authentic Basic and Human rights, namely those of 1789 (also its enmity against sexuality and its misogyny, stinking as they are, can be exploited to the full after Schwarzer’s and the feminists’ triumph – sex instead of reason –). Back then, the Basic rights were utterly weakened, today they are leveled out in the course of the Corona dictatorship.

Without being able to foresee any details – we are no prophets – we did predict this development.

[1] In an interview in February 2023 he said, he is blind on one eye and severly handicapped in typing due to injury to the left ulnar nerve. He also still is seriously traumatized and has difficulties in writing new texts.

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(There is also a translation available in Hindi)

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Dr. Mirjam Stolz at the »Dni Ateizmu« in Warsaw 2016

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