Posters Reading “Do not pay Taxes!” Plastered Around Venice

Non Pagare! Liberati Dalle Catene

Posters have begun appearing around Venice reading “Do not pay! Throw off the chains” in support of the Venetian Republic’s tax resistance campaign

And now some other international tax resistance news, these from Spain:

  • The Farewell to Arms blog of the Delàs Center of Peace Studies covers “Taxes: Responsibility and war tax resistance.” Excerpt (my translation):

    …if we pay taxes that maintain the military structure, we are collaborators with the acts and effects of this structure. We either admit this responsibility or exercise civil disobedience against the laws that are against our conscience, as in our era the Movement of Conscientious Objection to military service has done. Some conscientious objectors to military service thought that in order to be consistent, beyond personal military refusal, they must continue in the same vein in their economic behavior with their taxes and they declared themselves war tax resisters, an action that they continue today in their struggle against the tax agency and therefore against the state, redirecting “military taxes” to social projects.

  • San Borondon Digital Magazine interviewed Canary Islands war tax resister Koldovi Velasco.

The Monmouthshire Merlin of published a letter sent from Swansea on from the pseudonymous “Lycurgus” to “the dissenting ministers of the gospel in Wales,” urging those ministers to implore their flocks to turn their backs on the Rebeccaite movement.

The letter does not contain much of anything in terms of information about the Rebecca movement, so I won’t reproduce it here, but it’s worthy of note as some additional evidence about the support the Rebeccaites had from the population at large, or at least from the non-establishmentarian section of it. Joseph Downes, in his histrionic “tour of the disturbed districts in Wales” also wagged his finger at dissenting ministers, accusing them of countenancing the Rebecca movement by refusing to condemn it.

Lycurgus returned with another letter dated (as found in the Merlin), addressed in the same way and with a similar theme. He pointed out an example of a minister easing labor tensions by telling workers who were having their wages cut to stay loyal to their bosses rather than raising a fuss, and suggested that ministers calm their Rebecca-sympathizing flocks in a similar way.