When we heard about this work in Spain, it was clear to us that war tax resistance is economic disobedience, the refusal to cooperate in an economic system that is built on war, militarism, and the perpetuation of human suffering.
It was also clear to us that a variety of movements that also practice economic disobedience are allied with us in this struggle.
When people refuse to pay debts to ruthless debt collectors, resist foreclosure, set up bartering networks that don’t report bartering as income, set up gift economies that avoid the IRS bartering regulations, organize lending circles for low-income borrowers, counsel high school students on alternatives to military service, squat abandoned houses, organize tent cities for the homeless regardless of bureaucratic and inhumane regulations, and struggle against corrupt landlords and employers, we are engaging in economic disobedience.
The economic system we live under is not set up to support us, so we should withdraw our support from the system whenever feasible.
And here’s some more information about the Spanish movement that is the inspiration for this work: an interview with Enric Duran on the Shareable site and the video Come Back: A Story We Wrote Together (subtitled in English) which tells the story of Duran’s bank heists and how a coalition of pioneers used the funds to build a parallel solidarity economy.
The following comes from the issue of the Cambrian:
A second daring and destructive attack was, about , made on the Prendergast toll-gate, near Haverfordwest, by a party of about twenty-four men, some of whom were dressed in smock frocks; they came down in a body from the Fishguard road, headed by a large-sized man in a white mackintosh greatcoat.
The first movement on arriving at the toll-gate was to appoint a part of the mob as guards at the doors of the cottages near the gate, to prevent anybody from coming out to interrupt their operations.
They advised Phillips, the toll-taker, “to keep in the house if he was not quite tired of his life, because they intended no harm to him.”
The Captain then gave orders to commence the assault, and to work the mob went in good earnest; they did not desist till they had demolished the gate-posts and signboard to splinters.
They then told Phillips that they had fixed on that night for doing the job, because it was bright moonlight, which would prevent them injuring their hatchets!
On leaving they gave a hearty cheer, and carried away with them a portion of one of the posts, in token of their triumph.
This article is included almost verbatim in chapter three of Henry Tobit Evans’s Rebecca and Her Daughters.
That book was cobbled together after Evans’s death by his daughter, and evidently for some of the book she chose to just paste in his source material directly to patch over the places where he had not yet written his own summaries.
Frustratingly, was not a full moon, which makes that part of the anecdote (“they had fixed on that night for doing the job, because it was bright moonlight, which would prevent them injuring their hatchets”) less-convincing, or, perhaps, pushes it back to which was a Thursday and a full moon.
In Evans’s chronology, he uses the date, but he probably got it directly from this newspaper article, and it’s possible that the Cambrian pasted it in from another paper’s earlier reporting without bothering to change the date.
There’s yet another possibility: in the Cambrian of , there was an article that began: “This town was , thrown into no small excitement, by the discovery of the loss of the toll gate erected at the top of Prendergast…” If this refers to the same attack, this would put it some time during the night of , but this would have been at the time of a new moon.
(Evans doesn’t mention this attack in his chronology.)
I’m not sure how accurate or complete Evans’s chronology is, but I thought it might be a good exercise to see if there were much of a correlation between the phases of the moon and the Rebeccaite attacks in :
