More Tax Resistance.
A militant section of women suffragists in France, under the presidency of
Mme. [Suzanne]
Noel, a well-known doctor in Paris, are organising a campaign of tax
resistance, as a protest against their continued votelessness, and they are
going to put on their banners and posters the familiar device: “No taxation
without representation.”
I have just been made aware that Jeff Knaebel, the American entrepreneur and war veteran who turned into a pacifist, voluntaryist, Gandhian renunciate and expatriated to India, is dead.
In he destroyed his U.S. passport and applied for political asylum, saying that “I have been coerced to pay taxes which are then employed in bloody wars of aggression and coercive international economic practices which exploit weaker peoples whose lives, cultures, and ecologies are destroyed in the process,” and “I was not permitted to withdraw from citizenship and the concomitant complicity in mass murder which USG citizenship entailed.”
He found the Government of India to be unsympathetic to his hopes for political asylum and to his wish to live in a condition of “Statelessness.” He concluded, hopelessly, that “a person striving for nonviolence at even the most rudimentary levels of non-support of killing is denied by law the right to exist” and took his own life by self-immolation.
I did not stay put and apply for Indian citizenship as the Court ordered. The authorities have begun looking to arrest me because I did not follow their orders. If apprehended and interrogated, my truthful answers will land me in jail. I have chosen death under the open sky rather than the living death of imprisonment or any other form of enslavement by Power.
He leaves behind his writings at JeffKnaebel.org.
