Is it just me or are the newspaper articles about war tax resistance coming
earlier and more often ? We’re a long
way from , which is our traditional fifteen
minutes of fame, and yet we’re getting a lot of ink lately.
Alas, the article hits my pet peeve which is to overstate the difficulty of
living under the tax line: “Others dodge the Internal Revenue Service entirely
or reconfigure their lives to live below the taxable level — $7,950 in income
for a single person under 65, according to the
IRS.”
“Of course there are legal repercussions and risks with refusing to pay
taxes,” said Ruth Benn, spokeswoman for
NWTRCC, who has not paid her taxes
. “Those of us who really refuse
to pay are looking at what
U.S. tax dollars
are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that far outweighs anything that the
IRS
could do to me.”
I have no regrets about not paying my taxes. (Well, only that I didn’t stop
paying them sooner than I did). But I do miss paying directly for things I do
like and I think that if I ever get to live abroad in a country I can respect
that’s one thing I want to be able to do again. Pay taxes. Be a participant of
a truly democratic society, instead of a conscientious objector to an
oppressive one.
Joey King reports from the Cumberland Greens Bioregional Council Winter
Gathering about his efforts “to network with groups outside the Libertarian
Party in an effort to build coalitions.”
Karl Meyer, a nationally known war tax resister with the War Resisters League,
spoke on the need to deny the government one of the things it needs most to
conduct war… income tax dollars. He also wanted to publicize the fact that
5000 National Guardsmen and Reservists have failed to report for duty. Again,
his words mirrored many Libertarians. He is speaking at the Libertarian Party
of Tennessee’s state convention this year.
You may have heard that there’s a bit of a kerfluffle about a professor by the
name of Ward Churchill and an
article he wrote about
the attacks being an example of
chickens coming home to roost. I think I remember seeing Churchill’s article
floating around the web months and months ago, but recently the right-wing
anger battalion discovered it and went nuclear over sections like this one:
The most that can honestly be said of those involved on
is that they finally responded
in kind to some of what this country has dispensed to their people as a matter
of course.… ¶ They did not license themselves to “target innocent civilians.”
There is simply no argument to be made that the Pentagon personnel killed on
fill that bill. The building
and those inside comprised military targets, pure and simple. As to those in
the World Trade Center…
Well, really. Let’s get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were
civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic
corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire — the “mighty
engine of profit” to which the military dimension of
U.S. policy has
always been enslaved — and they did so both willingly and knowingly… To the
extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others
of what they were involved in — and in many cases excelling at — it was
because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they
were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell
phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which
translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the
starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective,
or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their
participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of
the twin towers, I’d really be interested in hearing about it.
I suspect that Churchill was probably disappointed to have dropped a bomb like
that without much of an explosion. Turns out the fuse was longer than
expected. Now he’s catching hell from the political corrections vigilantes who
want him run out of town.
And not only that, but
war tax
resister Carol Moore gave him a good talking to as well. Churchill is the
author of Pacifism as Pathology: Reflections on the Role of
Armed Struggle in North America, while Moore is skeptical about the
value of violent revolutionary struggle and, while not a doctrinaire pacifist,
thinks non-violent direct action is a better place to start.
In Churchill spoke at the
National Conference on Organized Resistance
at American University.… Churchill stressed that the only thing that is moral
is what works for the revolution, that a wide variety of types of violence is
justified, that “winning” attracts people and losing does not, and that
activists should prepare for the inevitable government crackdown by buying
lots [of] guns.…
[I] commented that anyone who has the guts to stone cops and get into armed
revolution, sure as heck better have the guts to stop paying taxes and thereby
stop supporting the war machine and the militarization of law enforcement. He
replied with an obvious lie, asserting that Jews in Nazi Germany did do tax
resistance, as well as a great deal of other nonviolent civil disobedience,
and it was all useless.…
Later that morning Churchill quickly walked by me, obviously eager to avoid
more confrontational conversation. As he fled, I called out, “Hey, Ward,
you’ve got to stop paying those taxes!!”
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