What I read
The BBC News report
"German rappers anti-Semitism lyrics probe dropped" (2018) says that although the outrage from groups throughout Germany in response to the German music industry giving it to two rap singers led to a music award being abolished, German justice officials have decided not to prosecute the two singers for offensive lyrics about Jews. The prosecutor's office explains that although the words of rap songs might often be rude, sexist, and anti-gay as well as offensive for other reasons, the German constitution's protection of free speech means that those hated ideas must also be protected by the rule of law, even though Holocaust denial is a criminal offence under German law.
Before I could write this 111 word summary, I had to read my chosen source three times, thinking carefully about what was important enough to include. Then I had to spend more time working out how to combine those main ideas into my two summary sentences. This took me about 30 minutes, or perhaps a little longer (I didn't time it exactly). I then reread the source again to make sure that every idea in the summary was in the source.
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My response
Although I don't think it goes far enough, I agree with German rule of law that protects free speech, even when that speech is disgusting to many people. I think that the words to the the songs by the two singers, known as Echo, are offensive. They compare their muscular bodies to the starved bodies of Jews who were killed by the authoritarian, rule loving Nazis, and they seem to say that another Holocaust would be a good thing. The Nazis, who were democratically elected before becoming dictators, were popular with the German people because they said that the rule of law must be followed, and they were very strict as they used the rule of law they made up to murder millions of Jews, gays, black people and gypsies before and during World War 2. The Nazis show us very clearly that the rule of law is often morally corrupt: all such dictatorships, however popular, are morally bad.
Getting back to my point, I also think that democratic law should protect opinions that are certainly false. This is what I disagree with in current German rule of law. It does protect the right to express opinions that are deeply offensive, such as homophobic, anti-woman, and religious prejudice, which I also think are false opinions, but it does not allow people who truly believe that the Nazis did not murder millions of people following their evil laws and popular policies to say that. In fact, on a couple of occasions, German and Austrian academics have been imprisoned or forced into exile for making such statements. I think that a better response, the democratic response that respects good morals, is to allow such false and ugly statements to be made, and then to prove them to be wrong.
Unlike the idea that democracy means majority rule, I think the correct understanding of democracy is that all citizens have an equal right to a voice in deciding the form or their society, its institutions and its government, and this means that even the sickest, most disgusting ideas have to be allowed, pornography for example, but we don't have to agree with or listen to the filth that some people vomit out into our society.
I timed this response as I wrote. It took me exactly 13:09 minutes to write, although I had spent a few minutes thinking about it before I started writing. In fact, after writing the short summary paragraph, which took me a lot longer, I then saved this blog post and thought about my response here while I had my morning shower. I usually like to do this. I think my response is better when I leave myself a bit of time for my brain to work on it.
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My question
Do you agree with German law? Should ideas that are offensive to a majority of people in a culture be protected by the rule of law?
Note that this is two sentences, but it's only one question.
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Reference
In "DR Congo: Oil drilling allowed in wildlife parks" (2018) says that the government have allow to explore for oil in the two protected wildlife parks in Congo which obviously have no good points for the endangered animal such as the apes, bonobo and mountain gorillas. Moreover, the environmental activists make a move to defended these two parks and claim that the oil exploration will cause more problems in global warming.
