Some historical and global examples of tax resistance →
Palestine (see also Israel) →
Beit Sahour & intifada, 1988–92
I couldn’t help but do some googling around to try and find out if tax resistance has been tried as a tactic in the Israel/Palestine conflict.
In fact, yes: the Palestinians tried it at the beginning of the intifada and it was taken very seriously by Israel.
In , leaders of the Palestinian town of Beit Sahour decided to protest the Israeli occupation by withholding taxes.
They borrowed the “no taxation without representation” slogan from the American Revolution.
Israel responded with draconian reprisals, arrests, curfews, blockades and with military force.
The fury of Israel’s response might have encouraged Palestinians to acknowledge the strength of nonviolent activism, but seems to have had the opposite effect.
The nonviolent resistance movement still exists, but has been overshadowed by the armed intifada.
, I mentioned the tax resistance movement that started in in the West Bank town of Beit Sahour.
Recently, someone forwarded me links to more information on that protest:
Here’s the transcript of a talk by Elias Rishmawi, one of the tax resistance movement’s leaders, that gives a good overview of the tactics behind the movement and the response of Israel’s occupation to its threat.
Another article (Palestinians Debate “Polite” Resistance to Occupation) discusses some of the reasons why there is less support among Palestinians for tax resistance, boycotts and other forms of strategic nonviolent conflict now than there was .
The American Friends Service Committee, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in , nominated Jeff Halper and Ghassan Andoni for the prize this year.
Ghassan Andoni was active in the tax resistance campaign in Beit Sahour.
Google is starting to do for newspaper archives what it has been doing for books: putting scanned images on-line and making them text-searchable.
Hooray for Google, says I.
Here are a few articles I found while browsing around today:
A couple of pieces regarding a reconstruction-era dispute over the legitimacy of the Louisiana state government (in which tax resistance played a role):
The Nixon Administration asked the Supreme Court today to rule out draft exemptions for men who are conscientiously opposed to the Vietnam war but not to all wars.
…
Besides, the Administration argued, if selective exemptions are approved people could refuse to pay their taxes on religious grounds or could defy other laws.
Washington [D.C.] Official Urges Tax Refusal to Push Statehood The New York Times (“Walter E. Fauntroy, the District of Columbia’s Delegate to Congress, has urged residents here not to pay their Federal taxes until Congress makes Washington the 51st state.”
[C]ollection will be a formidable challenge after years in which taxes
were identified by Palestinians with foreign occupation.
Tax resistance is strong in the territories. It spread during a seven-year
uprising against Israeli rule, when Palestinians working in the tax
department resigned. According to Israeli estimates, only 20 percent of
Palestinians taxed in the West Bank met their payments in 1993, when tax
revenues totalled some $90 million.
The Palestinian Authority has already run into difficulties collecting
taxes in Gaza and Jericho, and it has published appeals in recent weeks
urging tax payment as a national duty. Outside of Jericho, it has no
police powers in the West Bank, and the legal system there remains under
Israeli control.
“Taxes are the dowry of independence and the key to democracy,” said Atef
Alawneh, director general of the Palestinian finance department, at the
ceremony today in Ramallah.
“Nonpayment of taxes under occupation was a national struggle worthy of
praise,” he added. “Now it is 180 degrees different. Now delay in paying
means a delay in building the Palestinian state.”
Zuhdi Nashashibi, the finance minister in the Palestinian Authority, said
he was confident Palestinians would now “hurry to pay” their taxes.
Mr. Alawneh argued that collection by Palestinians would be more effective
because it would lack the coercion of military occupation, would extend to
places the Israelis were unable to reach because of security concerns, and
would create new revenue sources. The tax authorities will not use force,
he said, but will rely instead on friendly persuasion and public goodwill.
Remember what this sort of thing used to be like? You’d get yourself down to
the library, and then you’d look through each volume of the
Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature or whatever,
one at a time, hoping that what you were looking for was among the things the
editors of that guide felt was worth indexing. Then with luck, some of what
you were looking for was available in bound volumes, microfilm, or microfiche
on-site (elsewise you could always try for inter-library loan, but that might
take a couple of weeks). In the case of the first, you could find it on the
shelves or ask the reference librarian, and then thumb through the pages, but
in the case of the latter two, you’d have to haul your film over to a reader
(one that wasn’t broken or occupied) and then spend five minutes or so just
trying to locate the pages you were interested in. Then, if it turned out to
be good, you’d have to scribble things down or drop in some coin for a
barely-legible photocopy.
It has been the merchants who have borne the brunt of the struggle over taxes that has been an enduring feature of the Uprising.
Early in the leadership of the Uprising called upon Palestinians to refuse to meet the Israeli tax demands, as part of the overall strategy of disengagement from the occupying power and its “civil administration.”
At the same time an alternative taxation system was being developed, with popular committees collecting money and supplies from those that could afford to give for distribution amongst the needy.
It has been estimated that Israel collected some $160 million in tax revenue from the West Bank in .
One can thus understand the vigour with which they sought to break the tax strike — both for financial reasons and in order to assert their power over the occupied population.
Various tactics and measures were adopted in pursuance of this goal.
Stores were raided, identity cards and business documents of merchants confiscated, reclaimable only after the merchant had reported to the tax office and paid the amount of tax the authorities claimed was owed.
Tax officials accompanied by the military have commandeered merchandise from shops in lieu of unpaid taxes.
Other businesses were closed and their owners jailed because of the refusal to pay taxes.
In East Jerusalem hotels had their bank accounts frozen for failure to pay the municipal tax.
The hotel and tourist trade was particularly badly hit by the Intifada.
There was a 15 per cent drop in the number of visitors to Israel during , although numbers picked up again during , earning Israel a reported $1.8 billion.
In East Jerusalem a number of hotels closed down due to lack of business.
In , at the time when their bank accounts were frozen, the occupancy rate in East Jerusalem hotels was around 18 per cent, compared with 32 per cent in .
The Israelis took advantage of curfews to collect taxes, raiding the houses of merchants and workshop owners to seize property.
In Tulkarm, where a 29 day curfew was imposed during , the curfew was lifted on for six hours to allow the residents to purchase basic items. Road blocks were set up throughout the town, and local residents were stopped for tax and vehicle licence checks.
Apparently some 400 residents had to pay sums ranging from $300 to $3,000.
Road blocks were set up on the outskirts of towns and villages, each passing vehicle being stopped to allow tax officials to check whether the occupants had paid their taxes.
The cars and the drivers’ licences of those deemed to owe money would then be confiscated until the sums demanded of them were paid.
On over 300 cars were seized in this manner in Ramallah.
A few weeks before, in , the Israelis seized 40 taxis operating between Jerusalem and Ramallah in lieu of taxes they claimed had not been paid.
Driving school instructors have had their identity documents seized when accompanying students for their driving test.
In Ramallah vehicles belonging to driving schools were seized by the authorities, and it took an interim order from the Israeli High Court to prevent the tax officials auctioning off the vehicles to raise money to pay the taxes.
Another method adopted by the Israeli authorities has been to insist upon Palestinians producing a document of clearance proving that they have paid their taxes before they are issued with any kind of official document such as travel or export permit, birth certificate, driver’s licence, or renewed identity card.
In 400,000 Gazans were ordered to renew their identity cards.
In order to obtain the new cards they were required to prove that they had paid their taxes.
a new measure was adopted in the Gaza Strip, later to be imposed on West Bank residents — the changing of the licence plates of cars.
To obtain the new plates, which were of a different colour than the old ones and therefore instantly recognisable at any road block, the owners had to obtain clearance from the Israeli tax and customs officials and pay the “special tax” levied on vehicles.
How did Palestinians respond to such punitive measures?
Many had no choice but to meet the tax demands of the Israelis.
Gazan taxi drivers, for instance, had to comply with the new regulations if they wished to continue in business.
Others have been prepared to suffer the confiscation of their property rather than cooperate with the tax demands of the occupier.
One of my hosts in Gaza was defiantly driving round Gaza City with the old licence plate attached to his car, some months after the new measure had been announced.
However, for those who have their identity cards confiscated for any reason, there often appears to be little alternative but to obtain the certificate of tax clearance necessary to regain their ID, which is so essential in order to pursue anything resembling a normal life under occupation.
In one notable case, however, over 300 villagers of Beit Sahour, near Bethlehem, turned in their identity cards to the municipality in a collective act of defiance and solidarity with those of their number whose houses and shops had been raided by tax officials.
The Israeli response was to impose a two-week curfew on the village and to place 16 residents in administrative detention.
A year later the inhabitants of Beit Sahour were to suffer a further penalty for their continued commitment to the principle of “no taxation without representation”, when the Israelis embarked upon a draconian attempt to collect taxes from this defiant community.
For six weeks, starting in , Israeli troops kept the village under siege whilst soldiers escorted tax collectors round the village, accompanied by removal vans, confiscating property in lieu of unpaid taxes.
Road blocks were set up around the village, a strict curfew was imposed, and all telephone communication with the outside world was cut.
Machinery and workshop equipment was seized, leaving craftsmen deprived of their means of livelihood.
Shops and stores were left empty of goods.
People’s homes were stripped bare of household items. According to Israeli army figures property worth £1 million was expropriated, although residents later claimed that the actual figure was up to three times that amount.
Members of the Israeli Knesset, foreign diplomats, church leaders and others protested against the sanctions imposed on the village.
The UNC called for an unprecedented five day in six general strike, in response to the Israeli actions.
Storekeepers in the town launched a commercial strike that lasted three months in protest against the confiscation of property, and al-Haq, the Ramallah-based human rights organisation, accused the troops of intimidation, pillage, non-registration of property seized, the destruction of property, the tearing up of identity cards, theft and assault.
Jerusalem, —
Four Israeli tax collectors were wounded
when a gasoline bomb smashed through
the windshield of their car as they drove through the West Bank city of
Ramallah, the army said.
Two firebombs were thrown at the Israelis, who collect taxes from
Palestinians for the military government in the occupied territories, as they
drove to work early this morning, income tax officials said.
Palestinians have resisted paying taxes to Israel because the taxes are a
potent symbol of occupation. The underground leadership of the Arab uprising
has repeatedly called on Palestinians to boycott the Israeli military
government by refusing to pay taxes.
The new military commander of the West Bank,
Maj.
Gen. Yitzhak Mordechai,
ordered a curfew placed on the street where the attack occurred and the nearby
Kadura refugee camp. Soldiers later arrested 40 people, the army said.
In the Gaza Strip, Palestinians are required to prove they have paid their
taxes before they can obtain a new military pass to go to Israel. The army has
said is the deadline after which
only pass holders will be allowed to travel from Gaza to Israel.
The army announced today that Gaza Arabs who still do not have a pass by
will be able to apply for one,
though Israel had said previously that no new passes would be issued after
that day.
West Bank Town Elated but Poorer As Israel Ends Six-Week Tax Siege
By Joel Brinkley, Special to The New York Times
Beit Sahur, Israeli-Occupied West Bank, —
Israeli soldiers cleared roadblocks
, ending a six-week state of siege
here, and the residents of this Palestinian town cheered.
“We won — we beat them,” said Khalil Hana Rishmawi, even though Israeli
officials had seized the machinery in his sewing factory in lieu of the taxes
he and most residents in this small, moderately affluent town had refused to
pay.
“The campaign failed,” he said. “No one paid the taxes.”
$1.5 Million in Goods Seized
But the Israeli authorities were declaring victory too. Tax collectors have
seized cars, refrigerators, clothing, washing machines and other belongings
valued at $1.5 million. And this afternoon,
Brig.
Gen. Sheikhe Erez said, “We
decided to end the operation since
we did what we wanted to do.”
In truth, the Beit Sahur tax revolt was fought to a draw, and it came to be a
symbol for the Palestinian uprising as a whole. Almost to a person, Beit
Sahur’s residents refused to pay their taxes. But many of them had to stand
by and watch as their belongings were seized instead.
And when Israel auctions off the goods next week, it will finally collect
some of the back taxes that Beit Sahur owes, but at a price. The Beit Sahur
seige brought a new array of international criticism. And the town’s tax
debtors, most of them middle-aged businessmen who had no involvement in the
uprising, are anything but chastened.
Earlier this month Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin vowed, “We will teach them
a lesson.” But tonight Tawfik Abu Aita, a 51-year-old clothing manufacturer,
said: “They used a cannon against a bird and blew away the whole tree. That’s
why they failed.”
And several liberal Israeli legislators said this afternoon that if the army
was willing to deal with a nonviolent civil protest so harshly, it would only
encourage Palestinians to use violence instead. The army and the residents of
Beit Sahur are likely to find themselves in a similar position a year from
now, both sides stubbornly refusing to move, but neither side is saying what
it will do.
In mid-, the army singled out Beit
Sahur, a largely Christian town of 10,000 near Bethlehem. Military officials
found that 320 businessmen had not paid taxes, even though most of them were
regular taxpayers before the uprising began 23 months ago.
“I paid the taxes before, but now all of us go by the rules of our
leadership,” Mr. Rishmawi said, referring to the underground leaders of the
uprising. In leaflets for many months, they have urged Palestinians not to
pay taxes. “The taxes should be spent on services, health, roads and other
things we need here,” said his son-in-law, Majed Rishmawi. “But do you see
any services being offered here? No.”
After sending tax collectors door to door and getting unanimous refusal, the
army sealed off Beit Sahur. No visitors or journalists were allowed in, and
only people who paid taxes were let out. Still, hardly anyone paid. Then 40
debtors were arrested and 35 were indicted. Some have been given stiff fines
or sentenced to time in jail.
Still almost no one paid. So tax collectors escorted by troops showed up with
trucks and started confiscating belongings left and right. “They took 1,500
blouses, 700 kilograms of wool and a 1986 Opel Cadet,” Mr. Abu Aita said.
They didn’t get the 1989 Audi 80 parked in front of his house. “I had that
registered under a different name,” he said. And when the soldiers tried to
seize the knitting machines in his factory, “they found it very difficult to
dismantle them and put them in the car,” he added with a chuckle. The
soldiers gave up and left the machines behind.
Mr. Rishmawi said each man was given a Hebrew-language inventory of items
seized — “9 umbrellas, 20 small cartons of socks, 4 baby suits” — and told
that the goods would be sold at auction if the back taxes were not paid.
Auctions a Few Days Away
Now that the tax siege is over and the auctions are only five days away, Mr.
Rishmawi and Mr. Abu Aita, like most everyone in town, say they will stand by
and watch as their belongings are sold. They still have no intention of
paying their taxes, even though without the sewing machines Mr. Rishmawi’s
factory has had to close down.
“We will just have to help each other now,” he said. “This is not tax
collection. It’s Mafia work. And I think the Israeli learned. We will not
pay.”
But in a statement released , the
army said, “Some of the taxpayers paid their debts willingly.” And as a
result of the Beit Sahur siege, the army added, dozens of reluctant taxpayers
in other parts of the West Bank came forward to pay their taxes, too.
The military government “places great importance on this,” the statement
said, “because the taxes collected finance government services for Arab
inhabitants in the territories, such as health, education and welfare.”
But Mr. Abu Aita said that what “they’ve really done with this kind of
collective punishment of an entire city is draw people into the intifada who
have never been in it before.”
Israeli Army Ends Long Campaign Against Tax-Revolt Christian Town
By William B. Ries
Beit Sahur, Israeli-occupied West Bank
(UPI) — The army
ended a six-week campaign of
intimidation and repression to crush a tax revolt in a West Bank town that
defied Israeli authority.
Israel had come under sharp international criticism for its measures and was
accused of using collective punishment against the predominantly Christian
town of 10,000 people adjacent to Bethlehem.
On ,
the army cut telephones, closed off the town to outsiders and began almost
daily raids to confiscate from businesses and individuals property that
eventually totalled $1.5 million.
The closure order was lifted
afternoon, and afterward residents demonstrated, declaring they had won the
confrontation with the army and their revolt was a symbol of the 22-month-old
uprising against Israeli occupation.
With the end of the military campaign,
Brig.
Gen. Shaike Erez, head of the
military’s West Bank Civil Administration, said the tax rebellion was crushed
and the army achieved its goal of imposing law and order.
Erez acknowledged that Israel’s international image had suffered but insisted
the measures were necessary. He said tax collection would continue in the
occupied territories.
“It is not nice to confiscate household equipment,” he said. “But when people
rebel and refuse to pay their taxes and still continue to demand all the
necessary services, such as education, health, telephones and social aid, we
had no choice but to do what we did.”
In mid-, Defense Minister Yitzhak
Rabin said the army would teach the residents of Beit Sahur that they could
not defy the army.
In , Beit Sahur residents declared
they would not pay taxes because they did not receive adequate services and
they did not recognize the authority of the Civil Administration.
The army said it confiscated $1.5 million worth of property, including 33
vehicles, which would be returned if the owners paid their delinquent taxes.
When the army declared the town a closed military zone, about 320 residents
had not paid taxes. A few paid them willingly or after clarifications,
military officials said.
Of those who still refused to pay, 35 were charged and four have been fined
$3,000 or sentenced to six months in jail, in addition to having their
property confiscated.
Israeli authorities became increasingly sensitive about publicity on such
measures.
In an unprecedent[ed] move, the army declared an Arab East Jerusalem hotel
and the surrounding area a closed military zone to prevent Palestinians from
holding a news conference about Beit Sahur. Several European consul generals
from Jerusalem were forbidden to visit the West Bank town.
Seven left-wing Parliament members who visited the town
told a news conference
that the army’s campaign was a
failure and had tarnished Israel’s name worldwide.
Citizens’s Rights Movement member Dedi Zucker said the confrontation was “a
struggle over who is sovereign in Beit Sahur. But it hasn’t been proved
Israel is the real sovereign.”
Beit Sahour, West Bank — Kamal Abu Saada lost his supermarket, his car and most of his money because he refused to pay taxes to Israeli authorities occupying the West Bank.
Taxmen flanked by soldiers seized his property, forcing his eldest son to drop out of school to help feed the family.
But Abu Saada and 90 Palestinian businessmen like him have had enough of what they call the militarized tax system Israel applies to people in the occupied territories.
In a rare move, they have petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court to find out why they pay more than Israelis and where the money goes.
The Palestinians also are protesting at the use of force in tax collection.
“They ask us to pay heavy taxes, even more than the Israelis pay, yet we do not see anything in return,” said Elias Rishmawi, a Beit Sahour pharmacist who is the main petitioner in the suit.
“We want to know what do they do with our money,” he added.
The lawsuit is the first legal challenge to the Israeli tax system in the occupied territories since Palestinians in Beit Sahour openly defied the authorities in .
Israel cracked down hard on the tax revolt.
Soldiers besieged the town for 40 days and confiscated millions of dollars worth of property.
Today, even Palestinians who keep records and pay taxes complain of harassment.
Taxmen with army escorts regularly raid stores, seize property at gunpoint and threaten those who refuse to pay with military trials or imprisonment.
Palestinians say the taxmen pull assessment figures out of the air, forcing people to try to bargain their taxes down.
The army-run Civil Administration says West Bank taxation is based on Jordanian laws.
Israel captured the territory from Jordan in .
Voluntary Pauperism is Vicki Robison’s term for leaving the rat race, reprioritizing, and staying under the tax line.
“I decided that the only way to avoid contributing to the corruption of government as I saw it, was to not pay into the system.”
She says there’s a respectable and a disrespectable way to go about it, and gives some examples.
The IRS sends out an enormous number of “refund” checks (something like 122 million of them last year, for instance), and all you have to do to get one is to fill out a form with the right numbers on it.
To some folks, this is like setting out a huge trough of money with a little sign next to it saying “honor system.”
For instance, according to “authorities” some fraudsters in Tampa, Florida, hauled in hundreds of millions of dollars this way (which is still, “just the tip of the iceberg,” say they).
The fraud — known in street vernacular as “drops” or “Turbo Tax” after the online filing system — is so pervasive that local police say it even had an effect on street crime, temporarily reducing the numbers of street-corner drug dealers, who found it easier to make money in front of laptop computers in their homes.
Beit Sahur Journal; In a Tax War, Even the Olivewood Dove Is Seized
To press the Palestinian uprising, the people of this town have refused for months to pay their taxes.
In response, Israel has begun to confiscate their goods.
The raids, Aysa Hanna Khier says, have produced some incongruities.
The Christian crosses carved of olivewood and the statuettes of the Good Shepherd and the Madonna may have seemed improbable commodities, but Mr. Khier said the tax collectors and soldiers seized them when they raided his woodcarving workshop here on .
Even the small fretwork wall-plaques showing a dove on the wing over the Hebrew word Shalom were taken in lieu of the withheld taxes, he said.
Mr. Khier is among some 60 Palestinians from this prosperous and predominantly Christian Arab town near Bethlehem to have felt Israel’s response to what Palestinians depict as a new tactic of the uprising in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, now 22 months old.
Campaign of Disobedience
Beit Sahur has been elevated by the militants to a symbol of what they hope will be a new phase of civil disobedience to confound 22 years of Israeli occupation, bring scorn on Israel’s tactics and persuade the Israelis that, even in a middle-class and cozy town like this, loyalty lies elsewhere.
Israel’s response is designed to negate those arguments in the near-constant test of wills that has underpinned the uprising from its beginnings in .
And so the battle, accompanied by curfews and roadblocks and armed patrols through the streets, has spawned a litany of losses in this town of 13,000 whose pale stone walls cling to the bleached hills of Biblical lands.
[Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin said that Israel would teach a lesson to Palestinians who refused to pay taxes in Beit Sahur, Reuters reported.
Participants at a closed-door parliamentary committee meeting said Mr. Rabin told them: “There will not be any attempt to boycott taxes.
If it takes a month, it will take a month but they will break.
We are going to teach them a lesson.”]
Michel Kokaly, an auto mechanic, said he had forfeited hoists from his workshop and the sofas, chairs, tables and television from his spacious apartment above the shop when the soldiers and tax-collectors arrived a week ago.
What pained most, said his wife, Ibtisam, was that the children, 6 and 9 years old, did not recognize their empty home when they came home from school at noon.
A third child, who is 3, threw a pebble at the soldiers and called them names, she said with some pride, as if that tempered the loss.
In the office of Mayor Hanna Atrash in Beit Sahur, other men have their stories, too.
Issam Sheheibet, a wealthy merchant, says the collectors took flour, sugar, barley and refrigerators from his stores.
Counting the Losses
Selim Qassis, a carpenter, estimates he has lost machinery worth $35,000. Yassa Abu Zelef says he lost his television set, VCR and hi-fi, even though he closed his shop six months after the uprising began.
“I have no money to pay,” he said.
“Nobody is paying now,” said Mayor Atrash, alluding to the ending of a previous exemption of some big factories from the tax protest.
“This is going to mean that all factories, all workshops, all shops are heading for a shutdown,” Mr. Atrash said.
“It is beyond my imagination what will happen next.”
In interviews, many men said they would not pay taxes because they did not wish to finance their own occupation and, anyway, saw no benefit from the money they had already paid.
Before the uprising, Mr. Khier, the woodcarver, said, he had been paying around $4,000 a year in taxes.
Mr. Kokaly, the mechanic, said his taxes had been around $2,700 a year, counting income tax and value-added tax.
Auction Is Coming
Both men said they would not attend the auction the Israeli authorities plan next week in Tel Aviv to dispose of goods seized in Beit Sahur.
The confiscations mean that even if they wanted to pay taxes, some are no longer able to earn money to do so.
According to Israeli officials, the taxes Palestinians pay in the occupied territories are used for the maintenance of health services, schools and transportation.
The military body that oversees the occupation, called the Civil Administration, employs 13,000 salaried Palestinians, the officials said.
“We have nothing against Beit Sahur,” one official said, asking not to be identified by name, “but it is the only town where people are not paying taxes.”
He said the number of those refusing to pay was between 250 and 300. About $1 million worth of property has been seized so far, the official said, and the tax collection effort will continue.
Won’t Bankroll the Occupation
“I paid before the intifada,” Mr. Kokaly said, using the Arabic term for the uprising.
“But because of the intifada I am not paying.
I will not finance occupation.”
Some people here say that because Beit Sahur is home to so many educated and professional people, those whose property has been seized will still be able to lean for support on family members, defying the Israeli effort to subdue them.
Mr. Kokaly, thus, walked forlornly around his empty apartment, pointing out where the sofas and chairs and table and television had been, noting wryly that the authorities had at least left them their beds to sleep on and their stove to cook on.
Then, to continue the talk, he took a visitor to his brother’s identical apartment, one floor down, that had not been raided, to discuss the matter further over coffee.
But the leaders of the uprising would have the tax protest viewed in a loftier light.
Their slogan: “No taxation without representation.”
One way a tax resistance campaign can get a leg up is through the acts of
sympathizers within the tax collection bureaucracy itself. After all, they’re
taxpayers too, and may feel more loyalty to their fellow-subjects than to the
government they’re subjected to.
To this end, some tax resistance campaigns have made strides by encouraging
resignations, defections, and goldbricking among those responsible for
carrying out the tax laws.
In this, they’re following the lead of Thoreau, who wrote:
Today I’ll give some examples of tax resistance campaigns that tried to
persuade the tax collector to switch teams.
Free Keene
A group of activists in Keene, New Hampshire, ranging from Christian
anarchists to “Free State Project” ballot-box libertarians, has been
experimenting with a number of creative civil disobedience projects.
In , Russell Kanning went to the Keene
branch of the Internal Revenue Service and tried to hand out leaflets to the
employees there. The leaflets quoted from the tribunal that presided over
war crimes trials in Japan after World War Ⅱ to the effect that people are
obligated personally to disengage from the crimes of their governments, and
then provided a sample letter these employees could send to resign from their
jobs.
Kanning was arrested by agents from the Department of Homeland Security and
charged with distributing materials in a federal building and failure to obey
a lawful order. After he was booked and released, he immediately returned to
the IRS
office to try again (without the leaflets, which had been confiscated). He was
arrested again and charged with disorderly conduct.
A few months later, Dave Ridley followed-up on Kanning’s action, at the
Nashua
IRS
office. He silently held up a sign that read “Is it right to work for the
IRS?”
and passed a leaflet through the window that read in part:
I have the right to remain silent.
IRS
agents have the right to quit their jobs. If that is not possible, they have
a responsibility to work as inefficiently as possible when taking our money,
and as quickly as possible when returning it.
The police were summoned and hustled him out of the building. They later cited
him for “distribution of handbills.”
Kat Kanning and Lauren Canario were the next activists in line, going to the
Keene IRS
office with a “Taxes pay for torture” sign and a stack of leaflets. They were
charged with “disorderly conduct and loitering, failure to obey a lawful
order.”
At every stage in the process, they tried to directly but non-aggressively
confront not only the
IRS
employees, but also the Homeland Security officers, court bailiffs, judges,
and other government collaborators: asking them why they were interfering
with American citizens “petitioning their government for redress of
grievances,” and asking them to consider taking up a more honorable line of
work.
The first intifada
At the launching of the first “intifada” resisting Israeli rule over
Palestinians, Palestinians who worked for the tax department under the Israeli
occupation resigned their posts. As a result of this and of organized tax
resistance, only about 20% of Palestinians subject to Israeli taxes in the West
Bank paid their taxes in 1993, the last year before Israel relinquished taxing
authority there to the Palestinian Authority.
Greek tax and customs officials
Complicating the Greek government’s campaign to bring in more tax revenue
during the recent Euro-region financial brouhaha, bureaucrats in the Greek tax
and customs office periodically went on strike
to protest the
accompanying austerity measures that cut funding for state employees.
British nonconformists
British members of nonconforming Christian sects who did not want to see their
tax money going towards schools that taught children the official, government
supported faith, resisted their taxes. The newspapers reported:
In Lincolnshire, the sitting magistrate recently refused to try cases of
resistance, and left the bench. Difficulty is experienced everywhere in
getting auctioneers to sell the property confiscated.
Whiskey Rebellion
As I mentioned earlier this month,
part of the problem the fledgeling United States government had when trying to
enforce its excise tax against the Whiskey Rebels was that it had a devil of a
time convincing anyone to serve as a prosecutor or exciseman.
From the beginning, the Whiskey Rebels counted on being able to convince their
neighbors not to help the federal government enforce the tax. George
Washington’s Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton complained to him:
The opposition first manifested itself in the milder shape of the circulation
of opinions unfavorable to the law, and calculated by the influence of public
disesteem to discourage the accepting or holding of offices under it…
Annuity Tax resisters
During the resistance against the Annuity Tax in Edinburgh, Scotland, a number
of members of the town council who were members of churches other than the
tax-supported establishment church resigned rather than be party to
administering the act that enacted the tax.
Auctioneers whom the government usually could call upon to preside at tax
auctions refused to take the contracts, and carters whom ordinarily could be
contracted to cart the goods refused, and so the town had to hire someone new
at a higher rate, and purchase new vehicles to haul seized property about.
Often in tax resistance campaigns, not everybody is able to be a tax resister, for instance because not everybody is responsible for the tax being resisted, or because the point of the resistance is that some of the people being taxed ought not to be (and so only that class of people is resisting).
In such cases it can be useful to inspire those who cannot themselves resist the tax to show solidarity for the movement in other ways, and it can also help to provide or suggest roles that non-resisting sympathizers can play in the campaign.
Today I’ll mention some examples.
The Rebecca Rioters knew how to make their tollgate destruction popular among people who couldn’t (or even wouldn’t) participate directly.
For example:
One night, Rebeccaites destroyed the Rhos Gate, the Rhydyfuwch Gate, and the gate on the Llangoedmore road near Cardigan.
“ was market day in Cardigan, and every one who drove in was exempted from paying the usual toll, except those who came over the coach-road.
The people, looking at things from that point of view, were filled with Rebeccaite enthusiasm.
On that day nothing was heard at public-houses but proposals of good health and long life to Rebecca.”
On another occasion, they pointedly left intact the gates on “the Queen’s high road” but destroyed those on roads that the various parishes were required to maintain.
“This rendered Rebecca not unpopular amongst some farmers and others, many of whom paid the fine, rather than be sworn in as special constables.”
The Rebeccaites also sometimes resorted to threats to induce reluctant people to participate.
In one example:
All male inhabitants being householders of the hundred, were to meet , at the “Plough and Harrow,” Newchurch parish, to march in procession to Carmarthen — to defy the Mayor and magistrates, and to destroy the gate on their return.
Rich and poor were to be compelled to attend, and in case of illness a substitute must be found.
All owners of horses were to ride.
All persons absent without a sufficient excuse or substitute were to have their houses and barns destroyed by fire.
and in another:
[I]n order to ensure a full attendance of her followers, the church doors in the neighbourhood of Elvet were covered with notices in the dead of night, signed by “’Becca,” commanding all males above the age of sixteen and under seventy to appear at the “Plough and Harrow” on under pain of having their houses burnt and their lives sacrificed.
The time and place of meeting were also published by word of mouth at most of the Dissenting meeting-houses throughout the hundred, and wherever a disinclination was known to exist on the part of any person to join in the procession and to take part in the intended proceedings, he was privately admonished if he wished to protect his property from the firebrand of the midnight incendiary, and to excuse himself from personal injury, that he had better join the procession — “or else.”
This species of intimidation had the effect of drawing together immense numbers to the place of rendezvous.
despite the threats:
[Their cheers] were lustily responded to by groups of spectators who had by this time completely filled Guildhall Square, so that the Rebeccaites could hardly pass through.
At one point they explicitly threatened an attorney to make him join them on one of their destructive sprees, “so that if any proceedings were subsequently taken, he as local solicitor might be made a party to them.”
They sometimes also forced the toll house operators to take part in the destruction of their own toll houses.
When Palestinian Jews practiced tax resistance against the British occupation government in the at least one Jew back in London stopped paying his income tax as well.
In , in support of Palestinian doctors who were refusing to pay an Israeli income tax, shopkeepers in Gaza City launched multiple two-day strikes.
Some men who were sympathetic to the tax resistance of the Women’s Tax Resistance League found that they could participate in the campaign by exploiting a legal technicality that made them responsible for paying their wives’ income taxes.
If their wives refused to pay, and they were unable to pay and had no property to seize, they might be imprisoned for tax refusal — and some were.
American revolutionaries who were using boycotts and other means to try to cut off the support of taxed and British-monopoly products found allies back in the home country in the form of manufacturers and exporters who begged Parliament to rescind the taxes so as to bring the boycotts to an end.
War tax resister Vickie Aldrich recently got some pro bono legal assistance from law students in her battle with the IRS.
When residents of Beit Sahour launched a tax strike against the Israeli occupation, Israel put the town under seige.
Christian groups around the world attempted to bring humanitarian aid to the city, or even to visit (including the heads of the Greek Orthodox and Armenian Orthodox churches), but were turned away by the Israeli military.
The success of the anti-Poll Tax movement in Thatcher’s Britain relied on mass popular support.
The Anti-Poll Tax Unions “had to make people feel wanted and included and give everyone a sense that they had a role,” said movement chronicler Danny Burns.
“In order to sustain a long and protracted struggle, it was necessary for as many people as possible to feel responsible for some aspect of the movement, however small.
In the fight against the bailiffs and sheriff officers, the kids hanging around the streets passed on the word as soon as they saw a suspicious-looking character.
Parents and pensioners who were not out at work organised telephone trees and were ready to be at each others’ houses at short notice.”
Sometimes the decisive turn in a tax resistance campaign has come when the resisters have coalesced into a formal group with the authority to organize and coordinate resistance actions.
Today I’ll give some examples of this.
The Great Confederated Anti-Dray and Land Tax League of South Australia formed in the to fight taxes associated with a recently-enacted Road Act, and, once organized, the League was successful in its fight.
Organizer Jonathan Norman remarked to a meeting of the League in : “They had before them an example of what might be achieved by union.
In everything they had been victorious; the dray-tax. which from time to time was threatened to be enforced, was ultimately abandoned altogether.
The various memorials from the different hundreds, backed by the memorial of the united delegates, had caused the Government to introduce an amended Act, which promised almost everything they desired.”
When Charles Ⅹ and his ministers threatened to bypass the elected legislature and start taxing and spending on their own initiative in , French liberals declared that since such actions violated the constitution, the people were under no obligation to pay for them with their taxes.
Taxed landholders in Brittany formed the “Breton Association” to coordinate their resistance.
This Association had a two-fold object.
They proposed, in the first place, to refuse to pay any illegal tax, and in the second place to raise by contribution a common fund for indemnifying any subscriber, whose property or person might suffer by reason of his refusal.
The members subscribed each ten francs.
In the event of any tax being imposed without the consent of the Chambers, or with the consent of a Chamber of Deputies created by any illegal alteration of the existing law, payment of the tax was to be refused, and the money subscribed was to be employed in defending and indemnifying the persons who should so refuse, and to prosecute all who might be concerned in the imposing, or the levying of such illegal taxes.
The association enacted a trigger mechanism for an organized tax strike and a process for collecting and distributing a mutual insurance fund.
In this way they were able to present a credible threat to the planned royal usurpation — so much so that the newspapers that dared to print the Association’s charter were prosecuted and their editors imprisoned.
This only served to fuel the movement: “The associations spread over the greater part of the kingdom; they embraced more than half the Chamber of Deputies, and a very considerable number of peers.”
The Rebeccaites formed Farmers Unions which met in secret to discuss the same sort of grievances that, in disguise, Rebecca and her sisters would address vigilante-style, and which corresponded with each other in a regional network.
One farmer said: “This Union among us is a very excellent thing if all join.
When they elect members of Parliament they do just as they please, and we have no voice, but here we have.
There is no way of putting things to rights till we get up this Union, and then we can do as we please and think best.
If we had had this Union many years ago we should be better off than we are now!”
The Women’s Tax Resistance League formed in when about twenty women from existing suffrage groups came together in London “with the single-minded aim of starting ‘an entirely independent society quite separate from any existing suffrage society with the object of spreading the principles of tax resistance.’ ” League organizer Margaret Kineton Parkes explained that it “included Suffragists from every camp, Conservative, Liberal, Socialist, as well as non-party, and was making every effort to get a large number of influential women to refuse to pay taxes” because “[t]he isolated refusal to pay was ineffective and only caused trouble to the refuser; but a large and unexpected number would cause considerable trouble to the Government and would bring the question at issue home to them.”
Elias Rishmawi was among those who organized tax resistance in Beit Sahour during the first intifada.
He remembers how important it was to have formed a network of committees so as to distribute communication and decision-making in anticipation of Israeli military disruption by means of curfews and arrests of the resistance leadership.
Direct action-oriented pacifists in the United States came together in to form Peacemakers.
“[T]his is not an attempt to organize another pacifist membership organization, which one joins by signing a statement or paying a membership fee,” they announced.
By the group had about 2,000 members, about 150 of which were resisting taxes.
A second group, War Tax Resistance, promoted the tactic within the anti-Vietnam War activist community.
In , the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee formed to help a variety of groups that included war tax resistance as part of their work to coordinate and share resources and expertise.
During the Great Depression in the United States, taxpayers’ leagues, some of which organized property tax strikes, proliferated in the thousands.
Such groups “spring up like mushrooms,” one critic complained, “every time you go out in the morning, you find more of them.”
These leagues attacked the taxes on multiple fronts — not only organizing tax strikes but also coordinating legal suits and pressuring political figures.
A proposed sales tax boycott in Ottawa in
was boosted by the group Human Action to Limit Taxes.
“As individuals we are lost,” one resister said.
“But as a group we would have some impact.”
In the Birmingham Political Union of the Middle and Lower Classes formed.
It would play a strong role — and would advocate tax resistance — in the battle to pass the Reform Act of .
But it also began as a war tax resistance group, asking its members to sign the following oath:
That in the event of the present ministers so misconducting the affairs of the country as to make it probable we shall be involved in a Continental war [with Belgium], we will consider the propriety of checking so mischievous an event by withholding the means as far as may lay in our power, and will then consider whether or not refusing to pay direct taxes may not be advisable.
Similarly, the Catalonian “National Union” began life as a committee to direct a tax resistance action in and grew into the organizing party for an ambitious reform movement: “its demands included the entire reorganization of the vital forces of the nation: fiscal and administrative reform, the amelioration of the judicial system, the introduction of an effective system of compulsory education, the improvement of the provincial governments.”
A variety of local groups, with independent organizations, were key to the victory of the Anti-Poll Tax movement.
In Danny Burns’s book on the Poll Tax Rebellion, he stresses how important it was for the success of the campaign that people formed and ran their own small-scale, neighborhood resistance groups, rather than ceding control of the movement to the various established left-wing partisan and labor-union groups who wanted to use the movement to their own ends but were also afraid to identify themselves too closely with the law-breaking resisters.
Prior to the Anti-Poll Tax campaign, many people’s only experience of politics was a traditional Labour Party or trade union meeting — the sort of meeting where the top table takes up 90% of the discussion; where the only items discussed are those decided by the executive committee; where half the meeting time is spent discussing procedural motions or the order of words in a resolution; where political factions throw rhetoric across the room in angry and unproductive exchanges.
Essentially, boring meetings which stretch long into the night.
Hundreds of thousands of people have been to these meetings just once and never returned.
To engage people in a mass campaign, the Anti-Poll Tax Unions had to challenge this culture of organisation.
They had to make people feel wanted and included and give everyone a sense that they had a role.… This immediate form of organisation also meant that people weren’t patronised by those who had political experience.
In the local groups, people didn’t need permission to act, they just had to get on the phone to their neighbours and get something going.
People stay involved in political campaigns if they can contribute in the way that they feel is most effective.
Very often this is not by sitting in boring meetings.
…most of the successful Anti-Poll Tax Unions operated on a principle of parallel development.
Rather than trying to assert majority control or spend hours reaching consensus, people were allowed to get on with what they thought was most important.
Everything could be done in the name of the Anti-Poll Tax Union, which existed to coordinate activity against the Poll Tax, not to specify its exact nature.
However, he also notes:
…it was sometimes in the places where the Anti-Poll Tax Unions were weakest that resistance was strongest.
For example, St. Pauls was almost the only area in Bristol which couldn’t sustain an Anti-Poll Tax group.
Local people didn’t feel the need to set up new groups because, as in many inner city areas, they already had strong networks of solidarity, and there was already a high level of general hostility to officials of any sort.
… By the end of , three times as many people had turned up to court to contest their cases from St. Pauls than any other area.
White supremacists in Louisiana met in
to form “The People’s Association to Resist Unconstitutional Taxation” to coordinate their resistance to state and city taxes enacted by the reconstruction government there, and to provide legal support for resisters.
Property owners of Silver Lake Assembly met in to decide how to respond to a property tax they felt was being illegally put over on them by a government with no authority to do so.
They decided to respond as a group, “and perfected an organization for the purpose,” issuing a resolution saying that they “individually and collectively will resist the payment of the so-called taxes.”
A few more glimpses at the Beit Sahour tax resistance campaign from the news of the time:
Sahour, . —
Israel lifted a six-week-old siege on the West Bank town of Beit Sahour and both Palestinian residents, who refuse to pay Israeli taxes, and the military authorities claimed victory.
An army bulldozer removed the dirt roadblock at the entrance to the town, sealed off .
, troops and tax collectors have confiscated cars, furniture and goods worth about $1.5m and frozen bank accounts of defiant residents.
As the siege was lifted, hundreds of residents gathered at a central intersection to celebrate and to escort journalists to homes and shops from which troops had seized goods.
About 50 Arab women and children marched down the main street singing “Biladi, biladi” (My country, my country), the outlawed national anthem of Palestinians waging a 22-month-old uprising against Israeli rule of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Israeli troops trailed the marchers in a jeep, ordering them in Arabic to return to their homes.
Brigadier-General Shaike Erez, head of the Israeli civil administration that governs the occupied West Bank, told reporters: “We are ending the operation because we have achieved what we wanted to do and more.
We received a list of 320 (residents who did not pay taxes) and we (eventually) dealt with about 400.”
Troops arrested 40 Beit Sahour merchants and the army fined four of them $3000 dollars or jailed them for six months, military sources said.
They said some merchants paid their taxes during the siege.
Hanna al-Atrash, mayor of the town, home to some 12,000 mainly Christian Palestinians, told Reuters: “It is a success for us and failure for the army.
The overwhelming majority of the people did not pay.
“I think that everybody here is pleased despite what we have suffered for .”
In the home of Isa Kukali, a 62-year-old retired electrician, family members told reporters that troops seized the living room furniture and also carried away the washing machine and refrigerator, including the food inside it.
Kukali sat on one of a few camp beds brought in to replace confiscated sofas.
The family had also borrowed a refrigerator from relatives.
“My father has not worked for 12 years.
But the troops saw that we have money and came in here and told us: ‘From this moment you must pay us taxes’,” Kukali’s son Issam said.
The Beit Sahour civil disobedience campaign sparked international protests.
The residents adopted the slogan of the American revolution against British colonial rule: “No taxation without representation”.
Israeli Defence Minister Yitzhak Rabin vowed to break the tax rebels and “teach them a lesson”.
The army is to begin calling tenders for the seized goods, security sources said.
“If they think we will pay taxes by taking our property, they are wrong,” said a 20-year-old woman who identified herself only as Sawsan.
“And if they sell it, we’ll never pay taxes again.”
Respected Israeli military commentator Zeev Schiff said the tax siege and collective punishment in Beit Sahour pointed out the traps that the army faced in the occupied areas because the campaign became a rallying point for the Palestinians.
“The need to extend the punishment to a whole community even against those who are prepared to pay taxes and those who co-operated with Israel in the past, is proof of failure,” Schiff wrote in the Haaretz newspaper.
“Beit Sahour became a symbol, a Palestinian flag,” he said.
Schiff quoted officials in the defence establishment as blaming the Shin Bet secret police for failing to arrest Palestinian activists who they said enforced the tax boycott and prevented merchants from compromising with the army.
The tax protest of a mainly Christian village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank might be the model for a non-violent campaign in the occupied territories reminiscent of the U.S. civil rights tactics of the 1960’s, observers said.
The residents of Beit Sahour, a village of approximately 10,000 people near Bethlehem, peacefully withheld their tax payment through a siege by Israeli troops that ended on in what many saw as a draw.
The villagers claimed a victory over Israeli authorities, but the Israelis say they got the revenues they wanted through the sale of villagers’ property they had confiscated.
“We will not finance the bullets that kill our children,” Beit Sahour residents said in a statement issued during the protest.
The army seized property such as cars and household goods from tax resisters to auction off in an effort to make up for the lost tax revenues.
News reports estimated more than $1.5 million in property had been seized.
Army officials said many residents would have liked to have paid their taxes, but were afraid of being branded as collaborators.
The head of the US Bishops foreign policy committe has expressed dismay over what he called Israel’s unjustifiable blockade of a predominantly Christian village in the occupied West Bank.
He also expressed the bishops’ support for the Catholic leadership in the area.
Archbishop Roger Mahony of Los Angeles, chairman of the Committee on International Policy, said he was particularly concerned that Christian leaders were barred by Israeli troops from bringing food and other supplies to the village of Belt Sahour (Catholic Herald, ).
“I have noted with dismay the reports of the continuing blockade of the village,” he said “I am particularly concerned that the Christian church leaders, including the Latin Patriarch, were prevented by the Israeli military from exercising their pastoral and charitable obligations.”
The archbishop made his protest to Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Moshe Arad, and to US Assistant Secretary of State for near Eastern Affairs John Kelly.
The residents of Beit Sahour, a village of approximately 10,000 people near Bethlehem, peacefully withheld tax payments to Israeli occupation authorities through a six-week blockade of the village by Israeli troops.
The villagers claimed a victory over Israeli authorities, but the Israelis say they got the revenues they wanted through the sale of villagers’ property they had confiscated.
“We will not finance the bullets that kill our children.” Belt Sahour residents said in a statement issued during the protest.
The army seized property such as cars and household goods from tax resisters to auction off in an effort to make up for the lost tax revenues.
News reports estimated more than $1.5 million in property had been seized.
Leading Christian clergy, including heads of Greek Orthodox and Armenian Orthodox churches, attempted to visit Beit Sahour during the siege, but were turned back.
At one point, the church leaders, along with several priests, sought to bring three truckloads of food into the village.
“They did not let us do our humanitarian duties,” Latin-rite Catholic Patriarch Michel Sabbah was quoted as saying.
The archbishop urged a strong US protest of "this unwarranted Israeli behaviour.”
I made note of people and groups that had deliberately exposed themselves to extraordinary taxes, or had flouted the conditions of tax-exemption, in order to be subject to a tax that they could then resist.
That reminded me of the draft resisters during the Vietnam War who deliberately refused to invoke exemptions from the draft for which they were qualified (such as the draft exemption granted to ministers) so that they could resist in solidarity with draft resisters who did not qualify for any such exemptions.
Some of the examples I mentioned are a variety of tactic that has occasionally accompanied tax resistance campaigns: renouncing of government privileges and titles.
Here are some additional examples from this category:
When Gandhi was commander-in-chief of the Indian independence movement, his campaign of non-cooperation included tax resistance and other forms of civil disobedience, but he not only instructed his nonviolent army to resist taxes, wear untaxed domestic cloth, break the British salt monopoly by harvesting salt, and so forth — he also told them to resign their government posts, renounce any government-awarded titles or authority, take their children out of government schools, not ask for protection from the government’s law or courts, and stop voting or running for office.
He explained why:
This is the way of non-co-operation, or peaceful severing of relations.
That is, that we should neither seek help from the Government nor offer it any help.
How can we part company with it?
First we should renounce titles.
For us now to hold titles is a sin.
Next we should give up the courts.
The dispensing of justice should lie in our own hands.
The courts strengthen the roots of the Government.
Lawyers should give up their practice.
If it is possible for them they should, after giving up legal practice, serve the country.
Even if they cannot serve the country the giving up of legal practice would be by itself sufficient service.
They should take up other trades.
Parents should withdraw their children from schools and universities.
Boys who have reached the age of 16 should be treated as friends and advised to withdraw.
They should be told not to continue their studies in these institutions.
They should be told to go to school at institutions where they can remain free.
We should not go for education to a place where the Government’s flag flies.
The Congress has also said that we should not go into the Councils.
The election to the Councils will take place on .
It is the day when we shall be tested.
First we should persuade the candidates to withdraw.
If they do not give in, it will be the duty of voters to remain at home and not to cast their votes.
We should go on pleading with the candidates till the night of .
We should fall at their feet and beseech them not to stand for the Councils.
If they do not come round but persist in going into the Councils it will be your duty to refuse all help and do no work for them.
Again, soldiering is a sin.
You should not get recruited as soldiers, but it is your duty to become soldiers of freedom.
…With great humility I ask you: What have you done?
Have you withdrawn your boys from schools and colleges?
If your boy is grown up have you made him aware of his duty?
Have you given him your blessing in this matter?
If you have not done this, why are you gathered here?
It is the duty of boys to leave schools and to convince their elders.
Have you decided not to vote?
Have you taken the swadeshi vow?
These questions concern everyone.
Government recruitment should stop.
We should take our litigation to our elders and seek justice.
This will put an end to the “prestige” of the Government.
The Government will at the same time realize that its hundred thousand whites can no longer rule over three hundred million people.
So long the Government has carried on its rule over us by making us quarrel among ourselves, by offering us enticements and by giving and taking help.…
The British occupation government responded by asking its Indian employees, who were normally forbidden to engage with political questions, to explicitly oppose Gandhi’s movement.
This instead triggered even more resignations from those who were not active in the independence movement but who felt they could not explicitly oppose it.
During the Bardoli satyagraha, for example, many members of the Bombay Legislative Council resigned in protest, some of the first resigners co-signing a letter in which they wrote that “when a Government forgetful of its own obligations commits grave breaches of law, and ruthlessly attempts to trample under foot such noble and law-abiding people, it is but fair and proper for us, as a protest against the high-handed policy of Government in that taluka [district], to resign our seats on the Bombay Legislative Council, and so we request your Excellency to accept our resignations of the same.”
Many local officials also resigned their posts, which meant a great deal of sacrifice for them and their families.
Gandhi said of them: “More purifying than this suffering imposed by godless and insolent authority is the suffering which the people are imposing upon themselves.”
By resigning, these officials, who were often part of the indigenous elite who had been bought off by the Raj with titles and state-guaranteed privilege, were risking all of that.
Resistance spokesman Sailendra Ghose noted that “the government in some provinces has refused to allow village officers to resign, dismissing those who refuse to carry out their duties and thus depriving their heirs of their hereditary rights as village chiefs.”
Quaker Meetings would frequently not only require that members adhere to their peace testimony by refusing to participate in military service or pay war taxes, but also that those members who had been in the military prior to becoming Quakers renounce their claim to military pensions.
Here is how the New England Yearly Meeting put it in their “rules of discipline” of 1808:
It is our sense and judgment, that it will not be consistent with our testimony against war, for any of our members to receive pensions from government, for military services performed before they became members, though reduced to necessitous circumstances; but that this necessity should be relieved by monthly and quarterly meetings, and thereby preserve our religious testimony against the anti-christian practice of war, and manifest their sympathy for their brethren, by contributing to their comfortable support.
Ghislaine “Ghis” Lanctôt embarked on a project of absolute individual independence from the governments of the world, something she termed “personocratia,” in .
She refused to cooperate with the government in any way, but also took a careful inventory of the benefits and privileges of the citizenship granted her by the government, and was careful to refuse those too.
She started by giving up her state health insurance card, later tossed her driver’s license and stopped paying traffic fines, gave up her claim to a family trust, and eventually let her passport expire.
She made a list of various state privileges that she was turning her back on: social security, professional licensing, insurance, legally protected property, certifications, intellectual property rights, the courts, access to banks, and so forth.
In Beit Sahour, during the first intifada, one of the ways the Israeli military occupation authorities would retaliate against tax resisters was to seize their identity cards, which would make it difficult for them to travel, get medical care, be employed, avoid arbitrary arrest, or “to pursue anything resembling a normal life under occupation.”
But the residents fought back in a creative and daring fashion: Hundreds of them voluntarily turned in their identity cards.
During the French wine-growers tax strike of , the municipal governments of the region resigned en masse.
The Mayor of Narbonne will open the strike.
He and the entire Municipal Council will resign , after having previously dismissed all municipal employes.
Officers of other cities will follow suit in the course of a few days.
Tax strike leader Marcelin Albert claimed that “12,000 cities, towns, boroughs, and villages in the south of France” were left without municipal governments as a result of the resignation.
The quitting of municipal officers is usually attended with much ceremony.
Generally a crape streamer is hoisted at the flagstaff, and the Mayor burns his official sash in public.
Beatrice and Cornelis Boeke
War tax resisters Beatrice and Cornelis Boeke felt that in order for their tax resistance to be consistent, they must also refuse to use state-run monopolies like the postal service and railways, relinquish their passports, stop contributing to retirement accounts, and renounce any claim to the protection of the police, courts, and military.
When the government started providing funding even for private schools, they withdrew and homeschooled their children.
They even stopped handling government-issued currency.
They took this to the point of abandoning their home rather than calling the police when vagrants moved in.
In Tasmania, in , 26 magistrates resigned their offices rather than try to enforce a widely-resisted tax.
Such an expressive demonstration on the part of gentlemen holding the commission of the peace incited the people to stronger resistance; for it appeared to them that a law which could not be conscientiously administered by the retiring justices was unworthy of obedience.
Tax resistance movements have often coordinated with labor strikes or business shut-downs as a way of further restricting government resources, demonstrating solidarity, and freeing up the time of resisters to engage in more campaign-oriented activities.
In some cases, these strikes are themselves a form of tax resistance — reducing the income or sales tax base by simply reducing the amount of income earned or sales made.
Here are several examples:
Labor strikes
In Germany, in , “A movement for a general refusal to pay taxes, originating in Württemberg, spread rapidly to other towns, principally Stuttgart, which was without gas, electricity and water for several days.
The strike began in the Daimler motor works in Württemberg, where the workers refused to allow the deduction of the legal tax of ten per cent from their weekly wages…”
A tax strike in aimed at the Hugo Chavez regime in Venezuela was accompanied by a multi-week labor strike that “bled the Chavez’s government’s economic lifeline, costing it millions of dollars a day.”
Prisoner slave laborers in the American state of Georgia went on strike in , refusing to work for the profit of the prison system.
In Savannah, Georgia, in , the city tried to impose a $10 tax on “stevedores and other laborers on the wharves,” which they refused to pay.
The city then locked them out of the wharves.
This, of course, seriously interfered with the shipping interests of the city, and the Council, finding that the laborers were not at all disposed to yield, and that meanwhile the “strike” was damaging the business community to the amount of thousands of dollars, and was driving all the vessels from this to other ports, met and reduced the tax to $3.
This, however, only tended to increase the feelings of the laborers, who had resolved not to pay any tax whatever, deeming it unjust, unconstitutional and oppressive to tax unskilled labor, and they determined that none of their number should work, whether they paid the tax or not.
During the recent Household Tax agitation in Ireland, the Civil and Public Service Union threatened to strike if the government tried to deduct the tax from the paychecks of resisting union members.
Ship stokers in France went on strike when the government tried to tax their incidental benefits like meals as income in .
The standoff kept the largest French trans-Atlantic ship stranded in port until the stokers’ employer agreed to pay the extra tax on their behalf.
In Birmingham, Alabama, in :
The plant of… [a] Paint company at North Birmingham, employing 200 men, closed down because a deputy tax collector served garnishment on five employees for the non-payment of poll tax.
Many of the men quit work causing the plant to shut down.
… The men persist in their refusal because they claim the tax is an unjust one and not constitutional.
The citizens all side with the strikers.
Hartals and business strikes
“Bushel Bob” Williams’ produce stand
When Argentina tried to increase taxes in the midst of a drought in , farmers there went on strike for a week and set up highway roadblocks.
American farmer Bob Williams, disgusted at the U.S. military budget, decided in to henceforth donate all of his produce to charity rather than sell it for taxable income.
For a week in , a strike spread amongst the vendors in Tehran’s bazaar until hardly any were open for business.
They were protesting a new VAT that would have applied to them.
Apparently this was a nonviolent resistance tactic that bazaar merchants used successfully before the Iranian revolution, but this was the first time they’d done it since.
20,000 lawyers in Delhi went on strike in , “paralyzing the lower courts,” when India tried to extend its sales tax to cover legal services.
In in Benares, the British imperial government tried to impose a house tax.
The residents responded with a hartal, or general strike: “the shops were closed, every kind of occupation was abandoned… a solemn engagement was taken by all the inhabitants to carry on no manner of work or business until the tax was repealed.
Everything was at a stand: the dead bodies were cast unceremoniously into the river, because there were none to perform the obsequial rites; and the very thieves refrained from the exercise of their vocation…”
Hartals and strikes, sometimes of specific industries and other times general strikes, were also frequently used in the later Indian independence movement led by Gandhi, sometimes in coordination with tax resistance campaigns such as the salt raids.
During the Bardoli satyagraha, for example, shopkeepers frequently shut down their operations whenever officials came to town, and hartals sometimes broke out spontaneously on other occasions.
Gandhi also led a strike of Indian miners in South Africa in that was directed against a poll tax on Indian immigrants, a strike in which hundreds were arrested, and which eventually drew in strikers from “harbour, corporation, and railway employees, as well as the drivers, cooks, waiters, and messengers.”
That campaign was successful at forcing the government to rescind the tax.
A Parisian cafe owner holds down the fort during a one-day business strike during the Poujadist campaign.
When the tax inspector called at St. Cere during the Poujadist tax strikes:
“The tax inspector rapped on steel curtain after steel curtain, demanding to be let in to see the books.
Nowhere did he get an answer.
When they found that even the bistros were locked, the hapless inspector and his guards gave up their mission and beat a humble retreat…”
During the first intifada in Palestine, the Unified National Command responded to a crackdown on the tax strikers of Beit Sahour by calling “an unprecedented five day in six general strike,” while “[s]torekeepers in the town launched a commercial strike that lasted three months…”
The Israeli practice of seizing equipment, supplies, and goods from businesses that refused to remit taxes also had the effect of putting those businesses into a state of strike whether or not that was their intention.
In , in support of Palestinian doctors who were refusing to pay an Israeli income tax, shopkeepers in Gaza City launched multiple two-day strikes.
In , Greek kiosk owners held a one-day strike to protest an increase in tobacco taxes.
In the Dutch West Indies in , “[m]erchants, as a token of their approval of [a] doctor’s refusal to pay the tax,” (the government was attempting to auction off his goods that day) “closed their places of business during the afternoon.”
In the waning days of the rule of the Gyanendra monarchy in Nepal in , people stopped paying taxes and utility bills, and accompanied this with a general strike.
In , cashew traders in Guinea Bissau went on strike:
“We cashew exporters have decided to boycott the current marketing season to protest the payment of a 50 CFA franc ($0.11) per kilogram export tax,” said the head of the exporter’s association.
In sympathy with the tax protests in Turkey in , there were often business strikes:
…all shops and businesses [in Kastamonu] remained closed during the day…
…merchants [in Erzurum] closed their shops in solidarity… shops were closed again…
Erzurum’s example of closing shops… [was followed] at Hasankale…
In the Ruhr, during the French/Belgian occupation of , businesses shut down rather than pay reparation taxes:
The owners of the German coal mines and foundries in the Ruhr are determined not to pay the 10 per cent. export tax imposed on coal by the French…
The owners will refuse to export an ounce of coal or coke.
They will dump the supplies in the yards, and are prepared for a long seige.
This was accompanied by a large-scale labor strike, which the German government supported by directly financially supporting the individual strikers.
Consumer strikes
In Cairo in , a boatload of cruise ship passengers refused to disembark because of a landing tax they would be forced to pay.
This so upset the tourist-dependent shopkeepers that they rioted and forced the tax officials to waive the tax.
In Melbourne, Australia, in “[b]etween 500 and 600 young men refused to pay the amusement tax at the Stadium last night to witness a boxing match between Edwards and Palmer.
They were patrons of the lower-priced seats.
The manager of the Stadium argued with the spokesmen for the crowd for some time, but neither side would yield, and the result was that the attendance was much smaller than usual.”
In the U.S., school districts often get government funding based on how many students are attending on certain “count days.”
One parent decided to use this as leverage, saying she would keep her children home from school on count days, and thereby deprive the district of money, to protest against poor district policies.
(I’ll cover consumer strikes of government-monopoly products in another episode of this series.)
an early tax form, from when paperwork was fired in clay
Tax agencies live by bureaucracy and paperwork.
Many of the earliest examples of writing in the worlds’ museums are tax records.
But some mischievous tax resisters have discovered that this is a vulnerability that can be targeted.
For example, , a video blogger going by the name “StormCloudsGathering” considered the idea of “filling out thousands of random tax returns with nonexistent names and numbers… so suddenly they get flooded with a bunch of returns that don’t make sense…”:
What’s even more brilliant about [this] option is that even non-U.S. citizens — people living in other countries — could participate.
You could send in hundreds of tax returns even if you’re an Indonesian.
You know: Americans can live in Indonesia, and they’re required to file taxes… there’s no way for them to be sure, just because it’s coming from Indonesia, that it’s not a valid tax return.
They would have to do the investigation, and that costs resources.
He recommends filing in the name of particular, offensive, multinational corporations, but I think the average person would have a difficult time filing a sufficiently complex return to serve as a convincing decoy in such a case.
Another option would be to file corporate returns for nonexistent corporations, or individual returns for phantom (or dead) people.
War tax resister Ed Hedemann has already made plans for what he calls “zombie war tax resistance” — filling in years of tax returns ahead of time and putting them in pre-stamped envelopes so that his survivors can continue to file (but, of course, refuse to pay!) after he’s gone.
“Why give the government a break from having to deal with your resistance when you die?”
he asks.
Hedemann also makes a point of periodically filing Freedom of Information Act requests for any information the IRS and other government agencies have been collecting about his activities — hundreds of pages — and he’s put together a guide for other tax resisters to follow in making their own requests.
Currently in the U.S. there is an epidemic of tax fraud in which the fraudsters file for phony tax refunds in the names (and taxpayer identification numbers) of other, real people.
This often causes the tax collection bureaucracy to swing into action against the victims of the identity theft, which is both a waste of resources and a way of further alienating the population from the government and its tax bureaucracy — potentially a model that a tax resistance campaign could benefit from.
The IRS has made a big shift in recent years from processing paper income tax returns, filled out by hand, to electronic filing.
This is more efficient for the agency, as it no longer has to hire as many people to laboriously transcribe the numbers from paper returns into its computer databases.
The agency estimated that it cost about 35¢ on average for the agency to process an electronically-filed return, compared to an average of $2.87 for a paper return.
This suggests that one way to make a minor dent in the agency’s budget and efficiency is simply to file paper returns rather than file electronically (this is still a legal option for individual filers, even those who go to professional tax preparers).
But if this became a strategy of a mass-campaign it could even cripple the tax collecting bureaucracy.
George Jakabcin, IRS assistant deputy associate chief information officer for systems integration, said in that the agency “would be in a world of hurt” if even half of the people who had switched to electronic filing at that time decided to switch back.
“We no longer have the capability to process the additional 43 million returns manually.
We no longer have the facilities, we don’t have the IT infrastructure in place to support them, we don’t have the people, and some would argue that we are beginning to lose the expertise.”
The IRS has tried to crack down on people who send them paperwork just to waste their time.
They have come up with something called the “frivolous filing penalty” and can use this to ding you $5,000 each time you file any sort of paperwork with them that takes a position they consider to be “frivolous.”
They can do this immediately and on the whim of whichever bureaucrat is handling your forms, without going to court, and you are only allowed to appeal your fine before a judge if you pay it first!
War tax resister Karl Meyer wasn’t about to let the IRS think it could intimidate him with such tactics.
So in , when the “Cabbage Patch Kids” dolls (each one slightly different) had become ubiquitous, he invented when he called “cabbage patch resistance” — filing a different, blatantly “frivolous” tax return every day.
He was assessed $140,000 in penalties in alone (though the penalty was only $500 back then).
The IRS never collected the money though.
The best it could manage was to seize and sell his car, for a little over $1,000.
“Constitutionalist” and “sovereign citizen”-style tax protest groups in the U.S. are fond of harassing tax officials and other government employees with lawsuits, liens, bogus quasi-official court filings, and so forth.
In one example, Eddie Kahn’s “Guiding Light of God Ministries,” filed some 2,000 misconduct complaints against IRS agents.
A newspaper article about a subsequent legal case against the group noted that:
Some agents have said that their supervisors ordered them to back off from audits or collection efforts in the face of [such] threats, just to avoid investigations by the Treasury inspector general for tax administration.
Some paperwork tricks are more like “hacking” in that they treat the IRS as a system that processes input and produces output, and note that certain examples of pathological input can result in output unanticipated by the system designers.
For example, the IRS gave out $20 million dollars in the filing season when people figured out that if they substantially overpaid a tax return with a bad check, the IRS would cut them a hefty refund check before they noticed they’d been had.
Here are some more examples of paperwork hacks being used against the tax collecting bureaucracy:
South Carolina’s state government recently passed a law that required all organizations that “directly or indirectly advocate, advise, teach or practice the duty or necessity of controlling, seizing, or overthrowing the government of the United States, the state of South Carolina, or any political division thereof,” to register their activities with the South Carolina Secretary of State and pay a five-dollar filing fee.
A member of the Alliance of the Libertarian Left (which probably qualifies, at least in its more ambitious moments) decided to register, but with a twist:
When belligerence and inhumanity prevail, the peaceful and the humane must find honor in being categorized as the enemies of the prevailing order.
Please keep me updated as to the status of our registration.
I look forward to hearing back from you as to our official recognition as enemies of your state and its government.
… P.S. I am told that there is a processing fee in the amount of $5.00 for the registration of a subversive organization.
Our organization is in fact so dastardly that we have refused to remit the fee.
Prussian farmers in used the bureaucracy against itself.
A New York Times report noted:
[T]he big agrarians… are determined to resort to sabotage of all the tax laws…
[A correspondent in East Prussia says] “They have all filed protests and demanded that they be relieved from paying the tax until the protests are settled.
That means a delay of at least three years in collecting the taxes, and it is said that the Provincial Treasury is inclined to grant this request.
The big agrarians declared that they would do the same thing with all the tax laws.
In Berlin the people might decree what pleased them, they (the agrarians) would not pay the taxes or subscribe to the compulsory loans.
They want to sabotage the whole taxation system that they hate, and consequently they want to make so much work for the Treasury officers that the latter don’t know which way to turn.”
During the Beit Sahour tax strike against the Israeli occupation, Elias Rishmawi worked to get a suit challenging the legality of the tax accepted by Israel’s court system.
He remembers: “I had never had an illusion that the Israeli supreme court would give any justice to Palestinians.
… [T]he appeal formed the legal coverage by which I and others were able to continue resisting from one side not paying taxes, since there is a case in court and they cannot force me pay until the case is solved they cannot take any actions against us since we have this case, and we kept challenging the system through different means.… This was impossible to achieve without the legal coverage of the supreme court.
Because then, I and the others, would have been considered as inciters and then might be imprisoned for ten years.
That’s why we needed that coverage.”
An early form of resistance to Thatcher’s Poll Tax was called the “send it back” campaign.
The idea was that people would register for the tax, as required, but would accompany their registration with questions that would require further manual processing by the individual councils that were processing the tax:
Government regulations state: “…if for any reason you consider that you are not a ‘responsible person’ please let me know and return the form to me without completing it.”
Stop It wants people to take up this offer by writing to ask if they should be the “responsible person” and suggests they ask who will have access to the information supplied and why the authorities require exact dates of birth.
The implementation of the tax was dependent on an accurate register and the protest campaign could make the register “wildly inaccurate,”… Labour MP Brian Wilson, chairman of [the anti-poll tax campaign called] Stop It, said: “It is a campaign of obstruction within the law that does not lead people to incur the substantial penalties that are built into the legislation.”
The aim was to have the legislation amended or abandoned.
For this and other reasons, the councils were inundated with paperwork, for which they were unprepared.
“Councils sat under a mountain of paper.
Everything they did seemed to create more work,” wrote campaign historian Danny Burns.
He quotes from the Poll Tax Legal Group:
The paper-work involved with administering the charge is enormous — and likely to get worse.
Backlogs switch from one area of activity to another.
Indeed, local authorities cannot really do anything without generating more paper-work.
Kate Harvey, a tax resister for women’ suffrage in 1913, once wrote: “I have just received the first demand note for this year’s taxes.
I have torn it up, put it in the envelope in which it came, and re-posted it to the Tax Collector.
I suppose it is now reposing in his rubbish basket.”
The Association of Real Estate Taxpayers in Chicago during the Great Depression led tens of thousands of property owners to demand reassessments of their property, which effectively swamped the Board of Review and allowed the property owners to legally delay tax payment.
Another way people can assist and show solidarity with tax resisters is by coming to their assistance if their property is seized.
Here are some examples:
Practical support
The War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund was established in .
It helps war tax resisters who have had penalties and interest added to their tax bills and seized by the IRS by reimbursing them for a large portion of these additional charges.
The more people we could recruit to shoulder the penalties and interest of resisters, the lighter the burden for everyone.
With the modest help we could provide, conscientious resisters were able to keep on keeping on.
The penalty fund had the added benefit of making us all tax resisters, not just those who withheld all or a portion of their income taxes.
The base list of supporters has been as high as 800 people sharing the weight.
In nearly every appeal, at least 200 people respond, usually more.
In all we’ve paid out about $250,000 to help resisters stay in the struggle.
The story of the seizure of the Kehler/Corner home was the subject of the documentary An Act of Conscience.
When the home of war tax resisters Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner was seized for back taxes, supporters came from near and far to maintain a 24-hour occupation of the home:
[David] Dellinger and others have come from as far away as California to the Colrain [Massachusetts] house…
Mr. Kehler and Ms. Corner continued to live in the house until they were arrested by Federal marshals last December.
Since then, friends and supporters of the couple have arrived to occupy the almost empty house in week-long shifts marked by the Thursday “changing of the guard” ceremony.
Because the house was sold in a Government auction in , all who go inside risk arrest for trespassing.…
For Bonney Simons of St. Johnsbury, Vt., sleeping on a bedroll in the house is her first official act of civil disobedience.
At 72 years of age, she said, it is time to “put your body where your mouth is.”
Suffragist tax resister Dora Montefiore barricaded her home and kept the tax collector from seizing her property for several weeks in , in what came to be known as the “Siege of Montefiore.”
She noted:
The tradespeople of the neighbourhood were absolutely loyal to us besieged women, delivering their milk and bread, etc., over the rather high garden wall which divided the small front gardens of Upper Mall from the terraced roadway fronting the river.
The weekly wash arrived in the same way and the postman day by day delivered very encouraging budgets of correspondence, so that practically we suffered very little inconvenience…
A woman sympathiser in the neighbourhood brought during the course of the [first] morning, a pot of home-made marmalade, as the story had got abroad that we had no provisions and had difficulty in obtaining food.
This was never the case as I am a good housekeeper and have always kept a store cupboard, but we accepted with thanks the pot of marmalade because the intentions of the giver were so excellent.
Examples like this also proved to be vivid anecdotes that the press could use when describing the siege and the support from sympathizers.
When the U.S. government seized Amish tax resister Valentine Byler’s horses and their harnesses while he was in the field preparing for spring planting, sympathetic neighbors allowed him to borrow their horses so he could continue his work.
Other sympathizers throughout the country who heard about the case sent Byler money — more than enough to buy a new team.
An auctioneer who was dragooned into helping the government sell some of the livestock of a man who had been resisting taxes meant to pay for sectarian education in , donated the fee he had earned for conducting the auction to the resister.
During the water charge strike in Dublin, “local campaign groups successfully resisted attempts to disconnect water and in the couple of instances where water was cut off, campaigners re-connected it within hours.
The first round was won hands down by the campaign and it was back to the drawing board for the councils.”
Similar monkeywrenching is being practiced today in Greece, where activists promptly reconnect utilities of people who have been disconnected for failure to pay the increased taxes attached to their utility bills.
During the Annuity Tax resistance in Edinburgh, people sympathetic to the resisters would bid on and return furniture and other items that had been seized and sold by the tax collectors.
The Rebecca Rioters, on the other hand, were characteristically more direct in their resistance:
Warrants of distress were issued… and the constables proceeded to execute them…
The constables then went towards Talog; but when on their way there they heard the sound of a horn, and immediately between two and three hundred persons assembled together, with their faces blackened, some dressed in women’s caps, and others with their coats turned so as to be completely disguised — armed with scythes, crowbars and all manner of destructive weapons which they could lay their hands on.
After cheering the constables, they defied them to do their duty.
The latter had no alternative but to return to town without executing their warrants.
The women were seen running in all directions to alarm their neighbours; and some hundreds were concealed behind the hedges, intending to appear if their services were required.
The entire district seemed to be aroused, and awaiting the arrival of the constables, who were going to levy on the goods of John Harris of Talog Mill for the amount of the fine and costs imposed upon him by the magistrates.
There could not have been less than two hundred persons assembled to resist the execution of process, and vast numbers were flocking from all quarters, in response to the blowing of a horn, the signal of the Rebeccaites to repair thither.
Various mounted messengers were scouring the country and sounding the trumpet of alarm.…
At Maesgwenllian near Kidwelly, several bailiffs were put in possession for arrears of rent to the amount of £150, but about , Rebecca and a great number of her followers made their appearance on the premises, and after driving the bailiffs off, took away the whole of the goods distrained on.
As soon as daylight appeared, the bailiffs returned, but found no traces of Rebecca, nor of the goods which had been taken away.
A group in Olive Hill, Kentucky in followed the Rebecca model, to an extent, “in a raid… by a band of between 800 and 900 men, who forced Levi White, Collector of Taxes, to give up a stock of goods which had been seized.
The goods were then taken back to the store of Levi Oppenheimer, where the official had seized them.”
Last year in Oaxaca, the PRI said that the would “defend up to the point of injunctions those citizens who suffer from liens imposed as well as judgments in order to prevent the impounding of vehicles, considering it unconstitutional that the police will impound them to stop the driver and remove the unit if the striker does not pay the corresponding [vehicle] tax.”
The IRS auctioned off a portion of Ralph Shinaberry’s property in after he refused to pay a fine for growing more wheat on his farm than his government-assigned quota.
“I don’t believe the Government can tell me how much I can grow,” he said, explaining his resistance.
The winning bidder, Herbert Jessup, told a reporter:
“I have no intention of taking possession of the property.”
When war tax resister Cosmas Raimondi’s car was seized by the IRS in , a handful of families in his parish offered to permanently loan him their car so he could still get around, and many others loaned him their cars temporarily.
“I’ve not had to ask one person,” he said.
In Beit Sahour, when the Israeli occupation authorities seized furniture and appliances from resisters, relatives and others would loan them spares, or camping furniture to use as replacements.
“In Bedfordshire in community pressure persuaded a minister to return goods seized from a Quaker for non-payment of tithes.”
Moral support
When Dora Montefiore was first formulating her “siege” strategy with fellow-activists Theresa Billington and Annie Kenney, they agreed to organize daily demonstrations outside of her home while she was defending it.
Montefiore remembered:
The feeling in the neighbourhood towards my act of passive resistance was so excellent and the publicity being given by the Press in the evening papers was so valuable that we decided to make the Hammersmith “Fort” for the time being the centre of the W.S.P.U. activities, and daily demonstrations were arranged for and eventually carried out. …
The roadway was… ideal for the holding of a meeting, as no blocking of traffic could take place, and day in, day out the principles for which suffragists were standing we expounded to many who before had never even heard of the words Woman Suffrage.
At the evening demonstrations rows of lamps were hung along the top of the wall and against the house, the members of the W.S.P.U. speaking from the steps of the house, while I spoke from one of the upstairs windows.
…shoals of letters came to me, a few sadly vulgar and revolting, but the majority helpful and encouraging.
Some Lancashire lads who had heard me speaking in the Midlands wrote and said that if I wanted help they would come with their clogs but that was never the sort of support I needed, and though I thanked them, I declined the help as nicely as I could. …
The working women from the East End came, time and again, to demonstrate in front of my barricaded house…
When the IRS seized and auctioned off the home and farm of Art Harvey and Elizabeth Gravalos in , other war tax resisters and supporters were by their sides:
“I might have cried if I were alone,” Gravalos admitted.
But she was far from alone.
About 75 supporters gathered outside the building and spoke of their solidarity with Elizabeth and Arthur.
About 35 supporters turned up for the second auction, this time held at the IRS office in Lewiston, Maine.
Demonstrators read excerpts from letters to IRS officials and to President Clinton urging them to call off the auction.
In , the IRS levied 78-year-old war tax resister Ruth McKay’s social security checks to recoup the taxes she had been refusing to pay over the previous 20 years.
To show their support of her stand, 40 activists from New Hampshire Peace Action joined her for a vigil at the federal courthouse in Concord, New Hampshire.
When war tax resister Maria Smith’s wages were garnisheed by the IRS in , fifty supporters held a special church service in her honor.
“One of the Valod Vanias,” whose land was seized by the government during the Bardoli satyagraha, “who thus lost all his valuable property, celebrated the event by inviting friends and soldiers of Satyagraha to a party.”
On the other hand, some campaigns have taken the position that sacrifices for the cause are their own reward — that martyrdom is a blessing and that it would be foolish for such resisters to seek or accept recompense.
Nathaniel Morgan was speaking with someone curious about the Quaker stand on war and war taxes, and had this to say:
I told him then that I and my father had refused to pay the income tax on account of war, and had refused it on its first coming out, and withstood it 16 years, except when peace was declared, and that our goods were sold by auction to pay it.
This seemed to excite his curiosity, and made a stand to hear further, on the steps above the engine, going down to the river; asking me if we got anything by that, meaning, was anything refunded by the Society for such suffering.
I immediately replied: “Yes, peace of mind, which was worth all.”
I gave some examples of social boycotts and shunning being used as a way of discouraging non-participation in a tax resistance campaign.
Campaigns have also used threats of violence and other, more ambiguous threats as a way of trying to coerce reluctant people into resisting their taxes.
Here are some examples:
During the Whiskey Rebellion, rebels threatened to destroy the stills of distillers who complied in paying the excise tax.
Here are some other examples:
A letter from “Tom the Tinker” (a collective alias used by the rebels) to one distiller told him that he must stop paying the tax, must join them in their paramilitary activities, and must publish the letter containing these threats in the newspaper at his own expense.
Alexander Hamilton complained that “nor were the outrages perpetrated confined to the officers; they extended to private citizens who only dared to show their respect for the laws of their country.”
Also: “a person of the name of Roseberry underwent the humiliating punishment of tarring and feathering, with some aggravations, for having in conversation hazarded the very natural and just but unpalatable remark, that the inhabitants of that county could not reasonably expect protection from a government whose laws they so strenuously opposed.”
“Robert Shawhan, a distiller, who had been among the first to comply with the law, and who had always spoken favorably of it… had his barn burnt, with all the grain and hay which it contained.”
There were “threats of tarring and feathering one William Cochran, a complying distiller, and of burning his distillery; and that it had also been given out that, in three weeks, there would not be a house standing in Alleghany County, of any person who had complied with the laws.”
“[M]en called at the house of James Kiddoe, who had recently complied with the laws, broke into his still-house, fired several balls under his still, and scattered fire over and about the house.”
“James Kiddoe, the person above mentioned, and William Cochran, another complying distiller, met with repeated injury to their property.
Kiddoe had parts of his grist-mill at different times carried away, and Cochran suffered more material injuries; his still was destroyed, his saw-mill was rendered useless by the taking away of the saw, and his grist-mill so injured as to require to be repaired at considerable expense.”
During the Fries Rebellion, also, one family “said there were some bad people living in the neighborhood who would do them injury if they submitted to the rates.”
The Rebecca Rioters sometimes took or threatened reprisals against those who willingly paid tolls or who refused to join their tollbooth destruction gallivants:
One notice from the rioters read: “This is to give notice, that the goods of all persons who will henceforth pay at Water Street Gate will be burned and their lives will be taken from them at a time they will not think — ’Becca.”
“Mr. Thomas of Clynarthen, having refused to join them, had his wheat-field entirely destroyed before morning, by their turning cattle from the mountain into it that night.”
“[T]he farmyard of Mr. Howell Davies, a respectable farmer living in the village of Conwil, and an Anti-Rebeccaite, was set on fire.
With the assistance of the neighbours the fire was ultimately got under, but not until two ricks of hay and three stacks of corn or straw had become a prey to the devouring element.”
During the tax strike in a French wine region, “there have been threats to burn the property of those mayors failing to resign and of those taxpayers who satisfy the taxgatherers’ demand.”
And “committees have been nominated to see individuals who have not undertaken not to pay taxes.”
In Ghana in , a meeting of rebellious groups “swore not to let the grandees go to the fort nor pay any tax, even if the government should fight with them, and to make war with any party breaking the agreement.”
At one point, making good on this threat, “[a] stir was made by some ruffians when they perceived the chiefs of Christiansborg were on the point of giving in, upon which the whole assembly, amounting to over 4000 men, at once took up arms to [threaten to] attack the merchants.”
A report on the Beit Sahour tax resistance movement said of businesses in the town that “if they paid, they undermined the resistance movement, [and] were harassed and threatened by intifada leaders.”
Other descriptions are more vague, and may or may not imply violent threats:
In the French revolution, “[i]f a docile taxpayer happens to be found, he is not allowed to pay the dues; this seems a defection and almost treachery.”
During the Irish Tithe War, “the public opinion of Ireland was dead against the payment of tithes.
That public opinion hinted pretty plainly to those who were willing, for peace and quietness, to pay tithes to their Protestant masters, that such payment would not necessarily secure to them peace and quietness.”
A meeting of Kilkenny farmers passed a resolution saying that, “we consider the man that pays tithes (unless he be a Protestant) an enemy to his neighbour, an enemy to his country, an enemy to his religion, and an enemy to his God.”
A tax resistance campaign can benefit its recruiting efforts, engage public sympathy, and constrain the response of the government, by getting a good spin out in the media.
Here are some examples:
The Bardoli tax strike was media savvy, both in terms of national establishment media, and in terms of local, down-to-earth outreach methods:
“A campaign like this could not be carried out without a publicity department,” wrote Mahadev Desai.
“The peasants could not be asked to subscribe to daily papers or even to the weekly Navajivan, and outside papers could at best give an outside view of the campaign.
… The arrangement was to issue a daily news bulletin and publish Sjt. Vallabhbhai’s speeches in pamphlet form and to distribute them free to the agriculturalists all over the taluka.
… The arrangement answered most admirably, the villagers waiting anxiously for the patrikas every morning and devouring the contents with avidity.
All the Gujarati and almost all the English dailies of Bombay reproduced them verbatim, and as the movement gathered force, every important town and village in Gujarat began to get copies of the bulletin with the result that over and above ten thousand copies distributed in Bardoli, four thousand copies were subscribed to by places outside.”
In the course of describing the organizational structure of the nonviolent resistance army, Mahadev Desai noted: “[U]nder these officers were privates ready to march anywhere and everywhere, at any hour of the night and day, and ready to do the lowliest of duties, from carrying a message to drawing water from the well.
… The round of duties of most of them began often as early as 3 A.M., when they started with their orders for the day to the various villages where they would distribute the daily news bulletins issued by the Publicity Bureau.
… All were to go amongst the peasants, acquaint themselves with their needs and difficulties, cheer them up, and explain to them the instructions of the Chief.”
Mahadev Desai continues: “And at the head of them all the Sardar, ever on the move, without haste and without rest, ever vigilant, his iron discipline ever unrelaxed, paying the penalty of his exclusive prerogative — speech-making — often at midnight, and often at three or four places in a day.”
… “The Bardoli victory was not won by a miracle.
It was the inevitable fruit of patient and incessant toil, the inevitable result of the teaching that the Sardar wore himself out to impart day in and day out.
During the first two months he gave three days in the week to Bardoli, but as soon as the Ahmedabad Municipality released him, all his waking hours were given to the people of Bardoli, the day usually beginning at 5 P.M. and ending at 2 A.M., with four or five speeches a day on average.”
The case of Valentine Byler, an Amish man who refused to participate in the American Social Security system for conscientious reasons, was notable for how it played out in the media.
Part of this was due to the clumsy heavy-handedness of the IRS, which seized Byler’s horses out from under him literally as he was working his field.
Asked about this, the IRS Chief of Collections said: “Plowing never occurred to me.
I live in an apartment.”
The frame of thoughtless-urban-bureaucrats vs. godly-heartland-people attached itself to the story, and editorialists across the country who were already skeptical of welfare state policies jumped on it.
“What kind of ‘welfare’ is it,” wrote the New York Herald Tribune, “that takes a farmer’s horses away at spring plowing time in order to dragoon a whole community into a ‘benefit’ scheme it neither needs nor wants, and which offends its deeply held religious scruples?”
Byler got letters of support from around the country.
And Congress eventually felt enough of the pressure that it carved out an exception for the Amish exempting them from the Social Security law.
Abby and Julia Smith, who were taxed excessively by an unscrupulous local government for which they, as women, had no voice in electing, knew how to make their struggle attractive to the news media.
Julia prepared a speech for the town council, which fell on deaf ears — but she then released it to the editor of a nearby newspaper, which reprinted it and compared the sisters’ actions to those American Revolutionaries who fought for the principle of “no taxation without representation.”
An accompanying editorial concluded: “It will not be creditable if Abby Smith and her sister are left to stand alone… to fight the battle of principle unaided.”
Sure enough, they found support — rhetorical and practical — from many quarters.
“[M]uch of the nation’s interest in the Glastonbury case was the work of Abby,” wrote Elizabeth George Speare in recapping the case, “who willingly took pen in hand to keep her public informed.
Though she once reminded a Toledo editor that she could not give quite so much time to answering such distant requests, she seems to have welcomed every opportunity to recount, in her pungent style, a tale which lost nothing in constant retelling.”
The Women’s Tax Resistance League in Britain made sure to have speeches and propaganda ready to deliver at any events — such as tax auctions — that the media might cover.
Such speeches might form the core of an overtaxed reporter’s coverage of such an event.
When Dora Montefiore barricaded her home against the tax collector in , she recalled:
In a bailiff had been put in my house, a levy of my goods had been made, and they had been sold at public auction in Hammersmith.
The result as far as publicity was concerned was half a dozen lines in the corner of some daily newspapers, stating the fact that Mrs. Montefiore’s goods had been distrained and sold for payment of income tax; and there the matter ended.
When talking this over in with Theresa Billington and Annie Kenney, I told them that now we had the organisation of the W.S.P.U. to back me up I would, if it were thought advisable, not only refuse to pay income tax, but would shut and bar my doors and keep out the bailiff, so as to give the demonstration more publicity and thus help to educate public opinion about the fight for the political emancipation of women which was going on.
They agreed that if I would do my share of passive resistance they would hold daily demonstrations outside the house as long as the bailiff was excluded and do all in their power outside to make the sacrifice I was making of value to the cause.…
…From the day of this simple act of closing my door against the bailiff, an extraordinary change came over the publicity department of daily and weekly journalism towards this demonstration of passive resistance on my part…
On the morning following the inauguration of the siege, Annie Kenney and Theresa Billington, with other members of the W.S.P.U., came round to see how we were getting on and to encourage our resistance.
They were still chatting from the pavement outside, while I stood on the steps of No. 32 Upper Mall, when there crept round from all sides men with notebooks and men with cameras, and the publicity stunt began.
These men had been watching furtively the coming and going of postmen and tradesmen.
Now they posted themselves in front, questioning the suffragists outside and asking for news of us inside.
They had come to make a “story” and they did not intend to leave until they had got their “story.”
One of them returned soon with a loaf of bread and asked Annie Kenney to hand it up over the wall to my housekeeper, whilst the army of men with cameras “snapped” the incident.
Some of them wanted to climb over the wall so as to be able to boast in their descriptions that they had been inside what they pleased to call “The Fort”; but the policeman outside (there was a policeman on duty outside during all the six weeks of a siege) warned them that they must not do this so we were relieved, in this respect, from the too close attention of eager pressmen.
But all through the morning notebooks and cameras came and went, and at one time my housekeeper and I counted no less than twenty-two pressmen outside the house.
A woman sympathiser in the neighbourhood brought during the course of the morning, a pot of home-made marmalade, as the story had got abroad that we had no provisions and had difficulty in obtaining food.
This was never the case as I am a good housekeeper and have always kept a store cupboard, but we accepted with thanks the pot of marmalade because the intentions of the giver were so excellent; but this incident was also watched and reported by the Press.
When I read stories from newspaper archives about the tax strike in Beit Sahour during the first intifada, I’m struck with how much more sympathetic the English-language press was toward the Palestinian people at that time.
They are depicted as human beings, with families and aspirations, and their grievances are taken seriously and explored and analyzed and given credence.
The contrast with the coverage in today’s media is stark.
Beit Sahour was a high water mark of sorts.
This can partially be explained by the fact that most of the resisters were Palestinian Christians, and so did not trigger the anti-Muslim bias that shapes much of the English-language reporting from the area — one news account made much of the fact that the Israeli military had seized “Christian crosses carved of olivewood and the statuettes of the Good Shepherd and the Madonna” from one resister.
But the resisters were also very deliberately media savvy: they stuck to nonviolent tactics, which, besides being tactically sensible under the circumstances, also made the draconian Israeli crackdown seem particularly bullying; and they used slogans, like “no taxation without representation” that could not help but fall on sympathetic ears in the English-speaking world.
Another article noted that when the Israeli military lifted its siege of Beit Sahour, “hundreds of residents gathered at a central intersection to celebrate and to escort journalists to homes and shops from which troops had seized goods.”
During the campaign against Margaret Thatcher’s poll tax, the very name “poll tax” was a propaganda coup.
Thatcher had launched the tax under the benign name “community charge,” but the opposition movement used “poll tax” right off the bat, and the name stuck.
That name had resonance with anti-poll tax campaigns of the past, dating back as far as the rebellion of Wat Tyler.
The movement also pitted the government against pensioners, the disabled, student nurses, families with live-in elderly relatives, and other such victims that made for a sympathetic media narrative.
“Stories like this flooded both the national and local media,” writes movement historian Danny Burns.
“One minute the focus was on the nurses, next on the disabled, then on the pensioners.”
The IRS includes a publicity strategy with their enforcement actions, and grades itself with how much publicity it gets when it cracks down on a tax evader, thus “sending the message to taxpayers that violations of the Internal Revenue Code and related financial crimes are being investigated and prosecuted.”
Since the IRS is already doing the work to make sure the press is aware of the action, and of course giving out their own spin, it makes sense for tax resisters to be prepared with their own message.
“Never let a lien, levy, seizure, auction, summons, Order to Show Cause, or indictment pass without taking the opportunity to publicize opposition,” advise the authors of the book War Tax Resistance: A Guide to Withholding Your Support from the Military.
“The IRS is very sensitive to adverse public opinion.
It is probably the most disliked agency of the government.
You may be surprised at the amount of support and sympathy you will get from the general public and media when struggling against the IRS — if you take care to organize properly.”
NWTRCC has some ideas on how to make a bigger media splash, including propaganda leaflets, props & costumes, theatrical protest ideas, penny polls, tax form burnings, bake sales, banners, vigils, and so forth.
Eric Frank Russell’s satyagraha sci-fi story …And Then There Were None is now on-line in a new and improved format.
Tom Cordaro remembers Catholic Bishop Walter Sullivan, who supported Cordaro during a dispute with the IRS over his war tax resistance.
“I could not believe that this man — who had never personally met me — was willing to stand with me and my parish in this struggle against the U.S. government.
Because of Bishop Sullivan I knew that we were not alone and that support for war tax resistance existed in the Church.”
James Drummond reviews the course of the rebellion against Thatcher’s poll tax:
“[I]t is worth pointing out the significance of this, and what it means for all of us fighting against cuts and austerity today.
Firstly, this was a struggle which united the left.
Secondly, not only did it unite the left, but it mobilised millions of working class people to take direct action and break the law in their own interests, in open defiance of the Labour Party and trade union leaders.
Thirdly, it was a campaign which sank real roots into working class communities.
Finally, after years of defeat both before and since, it was a victory for our class.
The campaign brought down Thatcher and forced the abolition of the tax.”
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
There were several references to tax resistance in the Friends Journal in , but many of them referred to some other time or country or religious denomination, and those that referred to American Quakers in the here-and-now lacked much urgency or enthusiasm.
Journal editor Vinton Deming marked the passing of Colin Bell in his opening editorial in the issue, and noted:
One spring at yearly meeting he spoke very movingly in support of young Friends faced with the draft.
He challenged some of us over draft age to consider that not only our young people were being drafted; our federal taxes were being conscripted for the war as well!
I visited him once at Davis House in Washington with a friend whose house was threatened with IRS seizure for unpaid war taxes.
Colin was keenly interested, shared a generous amount of time from his busy schedule, and was very supportive.
As we left he walked us to our car.
I still hear the cheerful sound of his words (and see the twinkle in his eye) as he leaned in the car window, shook our hands, and said, “Good bye, Friends.
Take care of your spirit!”
In a letter-to-the-editor in the issue, Carole Hope Depp split hairs over whether or not war tax resistance is civil disobedience — claiming that since the Constitution, the highest law in the land, protects freedom of religion, then a law that purports to force people to violate their religious scruples by paying for war must be void, and so those who resist it are not being disobedient at all.
an ad from the issue of Friends Journal
In the issue, Paul Zorn took issue with “some traditional Quaker attiudes and institutions,” including war tax resistance, as representing “an attitude that somehow Quakers are different from the bulk of society, and that much of our institutional effort should go to maintaining that difference… [and] that maintaining certain aspects of our uniqueness is more important than finding a larger consensus in society.”
Excerpt:
…Philadelphia Yearly Meeting is resisting an IRS levy on salaries of two employees to recover unpaid federal taxes because those funds would be used for military purposes.
The more I have talked with individuals and attended large and small groups, both in my monthly meeting and in the yearly meeting’s Representative Meeting, the more troubled I am with the policy, although I realize it has been fashioned with much care and concern for the Spirit over 15 years or more.
As I understand it, a tax refusal contest with the federal government usually ends with the government getting the money.
The main result of refusing taxes is to make a public witness, and to ease a conscience that is troubled by voluntarily supporting the military.
I am troubled that part of the public witness consists of breaking the law and attempting to justify it, especially when tax refusal is as likely to reduce funds for low-cost housing, etc., as it is to reduce funds for the military.
Regarding voluntary support of the military, I think it is part of the irony, tragedy, or reality of modern life that despite our best efforts, institutions to which we belong act on our behalf in ways that we consider wrong, evil, or disastrous.
At the present time, we cannot effectively separate ourselves from all such institutions, and we would lose some of our humanity if we did.
He suggested that Friends consider “rethinking how much corporate energy we should put into tax refusal as an aspect of our peace testimony” and instead “trying to deal directly with some of the major problems of society rather than trying to insulate ourselves from them.”
The issue also described the war tax resistance of Sharon Bienert, who wrote letters to the IRS, agitated for a legal peace tax fund, and meanwhile split her resisted taxes between a Quaker-run peace tax fund and an escrow account.
That issue also mentioned that war tax resistance was “strongly supported” by the Lafayette, Indiana, Mennonite Fellowship.
Fellowship member Ken Nagele redirected a military-percentage of his income taxes to a low-income loan program; Mary Ann Zoeller redirected hers to Amnesty International; other families have donated income to the church to keep their income low and resist taxes that way.
That issue also brought news of a peace tax fund legalization campaign in Australia which “would allow conscientious objectors to pay 10 percent of their income taxes into a fund to be used for nonmilitary purposes” but which had only gained the support of eight of the 76 Australian Senators thus far.
In the issue, Carolyn Stevens reviewed two books published by the Friends World Committee for Consultation’s Friends Committee on War Tax Concerns: Handbook on Military Taxes & Conscience and Fear God & Honor the Emperor which were collaborative efforts edited by Linda Coffin, Peter Goldberger, Robert Hull, and J.E. McNeil.
The first of these books concerned “the history of military tax refusal among Friends and biblical teachings on the subject[,]… personal stories of military tax resisters, one about international war tax refusal campaigns, and another that chronicles efforts to enact Peace Tax Fund legislation.
The book concludes with a series of study questions and a resource list.”
The second “tackles the difficult question of how religious employers may be called to corporate witness of military tax refusal, either organizationally or in support of staff members who are conscientious objectors.
There is a survey of minutes, resolutions, and guidelines adopted by church bodies, Quaker and otherwise.
A chapter on legalities, co-authored by Peter Goldberger and J.E. McNeil, calmly raises and responds to difficulties, real and imagined, that employers face when supporting a witness against military taxes.
Robert Hull’s chapter on discernment blends a secular management perspective with traditional religious concerns.”
Stevens was enthusiastic about the first book (a “high level of sincerity and scholarship [that] gives us wonderful assistance”), less so about the second, which she described as “awkward,” “clumsy,” and “defensive” though “rich in necessary information.”
The issue brought an update on Canadian war tax resister Jerilynn Prior’s test case in which she was trying to get conscientious objection to military taxation legalized under the freedom of conscience portion of the (relatively) new Canadian Constitution.
She wasn’t having any luck in the courts.
The article claimed that “[m]ore than 500 Canadians withhold the portion of their federal taxes that would otherwise go toward military expenditures.
Many instead allocate the money to Conscience Canada’s Peace Tax Fund.”
Beit Sahour
The story of the nonviolent tax resistance campaign against the Israeli military occupation of Palestine in Beit Sahour got some coverage in the Journal.
Editor Vinton Deming wrote an article for the issue that was hopefully subtitled: “Nonviolent strategies may help to bring an end to the Israeli occupation.”
It was based on his conversations with Mubarak Awad and Nancy Nye.
Awad founded the Palestinian Center for the Study of Nonviolence in and published a blueprint for nonviolent resistance to the Israeli occupation.
“At first, people thought we were a bit crazy, that perhaps I had come back from my time in the U.S. with some strange notions.
We started with just five people.
We would sometimes go to a public place and carry a sign that said ‘Down With the Occupation,’ or, ‘Don’t Pay Taxes.’
People at first would laugh and make fun of us.”
The Center later advocated a set of tactics, including “a boycott among the Arab population of all Israeli-made products; refusal to pay taxes or to work for Israelis; insistence that all mail be addressed to people by using the Palestinian language, not Hebrew; and the initiation of many self-help projects.”
Beit Sahour was an example of where Palestinians decided to try out some of these ideas in service of the intifada.
“People there,” said Mubarak, “to show their support for the uprising, decided they would refuse to pay taxes to Israeli authorities — no taxes at all.
The Israelis wanted to punish them so they came and confiscated the ID cards of a number of the business men.”
So what was the community’s response?
“Well,” Mubarak continues, “without your ID card you are stuck, you cannot go any place.
When people in the village heard about this, they said, ‘If they are going to take the ID cards of these businessmen, we are going to turn in our ID cards too.’
And they did.
So the Israelis called a curfew in the village and they said, ‘Here, please take your ID cards;’ they gave them all back!”
And the news of this incident spread to other communities?
“Yes,” Mubarak says, “everybody began thinking it was a good idea to do it.
You say, ‘OK, I’m not going to hurt the Israelis, but this is what I’m going to do.’
And people will get together and say, ‘Let’s do it.’
Palestinians are what I would call ‘trial and error’ in their approach.
Like, if this works, well, we’ll try it and continue to do it; if it doesn’t, it’s all right, we’ll do something else!”
The New York Times published an interesting piece on “Raising a Moral Child” that spotlights some of the current thinking on how children learn to become ethically engaged.
The summary is that it is important to praise and guide children with an eye to making them value their own characters and to understand how their behaviors form their characters.
Another data point that suggests the practical value of an Aristotle-style “virtue ethics” approach.
Those of us committed to fomenting tax resistance would be wise to keep our eyes on the research of those committed to encouraging tax compliance, as their conclusions often have mirror-images that will be useful to us.
The latest in this series is a paper by Richard Lavoie entitled Vox Clamantis in Deserto: The Role of the Individual in Forging a Strong Duty to the Tax System.
Excerpt:
Societies exhibiting high tax morale typically maintain stable levels of
high tax compliance over time (establishing a societal “taxpaying
ethos”) as these underlying foundational attitudes become enshrined as
self-maintaining social norms. However, if the underlying social norms
begin to erode over time, a society historically exhibiting a strong
taxpaying ethos can quickly flip into a non-compliant one once a tipping
point is reached.
With the exception of some aberrational sub-groups, the United States
typifies a society with a strong taxpaying ethos. However, in recent
decades the social norms forming the foundation of this ethos appear to
have weakened. Scandals at the Service have weakened its public image.
The rise of the tea party movement has questioned the efficacy and role
of government, as well as promoting the highly questionable proposition
that Americans are currently “overtaxed.” Politicians, who should defend
the government that they were elected to run, often act to undermine its
legitimacy and advocate for steep spending cuts in addition to tax
reductions.
These forces, among others, threaten the very foundations of our tax
system by undermining our historical societal faith in the fairness of
our tax system and the obligation to fund necessary government services.
The Tax Foundation has drawn up a map that purports to show how cigarette smuggling in the United States is correlated to the tobacco tax rates in those states.
So, for instance: “New York is the highest net importer of smuggled cigarettes, totaling 56.9 percent of the total cigarette market in the state.
New York also has the highest state cigarette tax ($4.35 per pack), not counting the local New York City cigarette tax (an additional $1.50 per pack).
Smuggling in New York has risen sharply since 2006 (+59 percent), as has the tax rate (+190 percent).”
The phone security consultants “pindrop” have done some back-of-the-envelope calculations on the massive ongoing criminal operation in which American immigrants are shaken down over the phone by people masquerading as IRS agents. They estimate that 450,000 people were targeted by this scam in alone.
Pindrop also posted their analysis of how the scam works, and even some excerpts from a recording of one of the calls.
This is the thirty-sixth in a series of posts about war tax resistance as it was reported in back issues of The Mennonite.
Today we enter the 1990s.
In residents began refusing to pay taxes to the Israeli occupiers.
Tax money should go for roads, health and local services, they said.
But the occupiers were supplying none of these services.
Instead they used taxes to fund the military occupation.
Residents adopted the slogan “No taxation without representation.”
The authorities responded with nightly curfews, mass arrests and a strong troop presence in the town.
But residents still did not pay their taxes.
For six weeks in , Israeli troops sealed off the town.
They seized property and belongings from businessmen and families who had not paid taxes.
Tax officials went from house to house humiliating and beating people, according to a account in the Jerusalem Post.
Israeli tax officials confiscated without trial several million dollars worth of property.
The tax siege has now been lifted, but Beit Sahour residents still refuse to pay taxes.
I recently attended a meeting that focused on the question of paying the military portion (about 50 percent) of our [U.S.] federal income taxes.
I left the meeting troubled, not because there were varying viewpoints but because many people appeared unconcerned about the issue and failed to address what I believe are key questions on the matter.
The question for me is not whether we should honor our government or whether a government has the right to collect taxes.
The crux of the matter is to determine when Caesar’s demands conflict with our obedience to God.
I fear that if I were to give Caesar all that he demands in war taxes, I would fail to honor God in four important ways.
I fear that by paying the military portion of my income taxes I fail to trust God alone for my security.
Throughout history nations have tried to secure their well-being and safety through military solutions.
Again and again in the Bible God asks us to resist such solutions and to trust him instead:
War horses are useless for victory; their great strength cannot save.
The Lord watches over those who have reverence for him, those who trust in his constant love.
He saves them from death… We put our hope in the Lord; he is our protector and our help (Psalm 33:17–20).
If I work several months each year to pay my nation’s military dues, am I not giving legitimacy to the military establishment’s answers for my security?
If I am willing to invest so much of my time and energy in a military solution, can I honestly say that God is my protector?
I fear that by paying my war taxes I fail to give my primary loyalty to Christ’s worldwide church.
My war taxes would purchase planes, bombs, guns and military training to be used in Third World settings.
Although our country is not involved in any declared war, our military might is felt keenly in Central America, the Philippines and the Middle East.
In fact, in recent years the United States has adopted a policy of promoting “low-intensity conflict” in countries that threaten to move out from under our sphere of influence.
This means keeping warfare away from the American public eye and avoiding the involvement of American soldiers in the fighting.
Yet our brothers and sisters in Christ do die in the struggle.
Can I say that my first loyalty is to the worldwide kingdom of God if I comply with structures that do violence to my neighbors around the world?
I fear that by paying my war taxes I fail to follow Christ as he calls me to love all people, even my enemies.
In Matthew 5 Jesus no doubt surprised his listeners by challenging them to love not only their friends but all people, just as God does.
This has not been an easy teaching for the church.
Peter struggled with it when he was called to go to Cornelius, a gentile, and Paul reminded the early church often that the gospel was not only for Jews but also for gentiles.
Ephesians 2:14
points this out: “For Christ himself has brought us peace by making Jews and gentiles one people.
With his own body he broke down the wall that separated them and kept them enemies.”
Do we believe that this can also apply to Americans and Soviets, rich and poor, capitalist and communist?
Can I believe this and at the same time contribute to the forces that are designed to destroy these very people whom Christ called me to love?
I fear that by paying my war taxes I fail to respect God’s creation.
In today’s world, militarism not only threatens people but all of creation as well.
While militarism is not the only way we dishonor God’s creation, it is through nuclear weapons that we dare to threaten all that God has made.
Can I claim to truly honor God if I continue to help pay for such weapons?
I think these questions have special poignancy for us as Mennonites.
We claim to be conscientious objectors to war.
Yet in a low-intensity conflict or in a nuclear war it is almost irrelevant to say that we will not serve in the military.
These kinds of wars do not demand our bodies but our dollars and our consent.
Thus we cannot ignore this issue of war taxes.
I recognize that sincere people differ on this issue.
Some encourage elected leaders to reorder our nation’s priorities.
Some give away more of their income so that they owe less income tax.
Some live in community so that they can live on lower incomes.
Some withhold a symbolic amount of all of their military taxes.
Some support legislative efforts that would allow conscientious objectors to designate the military portion of their federal taxes to a peace tax fund.
What is important is not so much that we all agree but that we agonize together on these questions.
Let us pray for wisdom as we wrestle with what this issue means for our faith in God, our witness as a Christian church, our faithfulness to Christ and our reverence for God’s creation.
This was accompanied by a sidebar invitation for people to redirect their taxes through “the Taxes for Peace fund.”
It added that “In , $5750 in Taxes for Peace funds were divided between the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund and Christian Peacemaker Teams; 1990 contributions will be divided the same way.”
Members of St. Louis Mennonite Fellowship recently passed a proposal to faithfully resist payments of the U.S. federal phone tax applied monthly to the fellowship’s phone bill.
The revenues will be redirected to Mennonite Central Committee.
“We wish to respect the convictions of our members and Anabaptist forebears and to be disciplined followers of Jesus Christ,” said Scott Neufeld, coordinator of St. Louis Mennonite Peace Witness.
Federal phone tax revenues, first collected in , contribute directly to the U.S. Armed Forces and other systems of war, Neufeld said.
Looking at our Anabaptist heritage and looking at our Scriptures in light of contemporary political realities, we do not have to be pressed to pray for peace while paying for war.
Our spiritual authority in Jesus Christ, as expressed by apostles and Anabaptist forebears, allows and empowers us to make the difficult decision to withhold war taxes.
Balthasar Hubmaier, writing about taxes paid to an unjust government, states, “…to come to the point, God will excuse us for nothing on the account of unjust superiors…” (Anabaptism in Outline, Klassen, p. 246).
The U.S. government has become unjust, and when a government is unjust, it has forfeited the right to expect my taxes.
As Christians and Anabaptists, we have a rich tradition of conscience.
In some ways we even have a tradition of anarchy.
Anarchy in the eyes of the world, that is, for we may claim a greater authority — God.…
The early Anabaptists — Menno Simons, Balthasar Hubmaier, Jacob Hutter and Peter Rideman — all spoke out on the proper attitude of a Christian toward government, on paying taxes used for war and on the production of weapons of violence.
For Anabaptist Christians the issue to pay or not to pay war taxes has a significant history.
Jacob Hutter wrote, “For how can we be innocent before our God if we do not go to war ourselves but give the money that others may go in our place?
We will not become partakers of the sin of others and dishonor and despise God” (“Plots and Excuses,” Klassen p. 252).
While this may refer to the practice of paying one’s way out of military service by supplying a replacement, it still holds true that aiding the carrying out of violence indirectly indicts the taxpayer as a participant in the violence enacted.
Similarly Peter Rideman asserts that one has a responsibility not only for what one produces but also for how those products are used by others.
Rideman states that Christians cannot build weapons of violence, even if they do not use those products themselves.
The one who produces weapons is responsible for the violence inflicted.
But the issue of our history as Christians and as Anabaptists concerning the issue of war tax resistance is made more difficult because of our reading of the biblical texts relating to government, particularly Matthew 22:21 (and other texts referring to government, e.g. Romans 13 and 1 Peter 2:14).
In any discussion of war tax resistance among Christians, the words of Jesus are almost always quoted, “…render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.” However, if we look closely at the political and historical context of these biblical texts, we have to ask ourselves how we can apply Jesus’ response in Matthew 22:21 to ourselves in our political and historical situation.
Trick question: Ancient Palestine, in the time of Jesus, was a territory held captive under Roman rule.
Foreign powers hostile to Judaism had occupied Palestine, installed a puppet ruler, King Herod, and sought to form alliances with certain Jewish factions.
The Pharisees, on the other hand, reflected the thoughts and feelings of the majority of the poor and middle-class Jews, feelings of resentment and anger.
The Pharisees, who had been plotting to do away with Jesus on any grounds possible, were seeking to trick Jesus.
On the chance that Jesus might make some incriminating statements, the Pharisees sent their disciples to Jesus along with representatives from Herod.
That way, if Jesus said something self-incriminating to the religious people or to the political regime, he could be arrested.
As it was, neither truth nor justice were being sought by this group when they asked Jesus the question about paying the tax.
It was a trick question, and Jesus responded with a trick answer.
“And Jesus said to them, ‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.’ And they were greatly amazed at him” (Mark 12:17).
But what does his answer say to us?
What direction does it give to those who are not asking trick questions but whose motives are truth and justice?
We must take seriously that we do not live in a political situation anything like ancient Palestine.
We live in , has witnessed amazing revolutions of democratization.
Democracies seek to do away with the dichotomy between the government and the people.
In a democracy there is no Caesar.
Since we are not ruled by a monarch, we have no “caesar” over us.
If there is a caesar over us, so to speak, then we are caesar.
The U.S. Constitution begins by naming our caesar, “We the people.”…
We, as responsible citizens, are the political and moral authority of the United States.
If our nation blunders and falls, if it is unjust and violent, if it has misplaced priorities, then the blame is on us and not merely upon those we have elected to represent our concerns.
Living in a democracy, we actually pay taxes to ourselves.
We are responsible for setting the budgets.
We are responsible for policies.
One of our greatest problems is that we have surrendered democratic government to bureaucracy, allowing others to make decisions for us.
We are the caesar to whom we are to render our taxes, not some authority outside ourselves.
As such, it is up to us to decide what we will or will not render.
It is this freedom of conscience that makes democracy both attractive to those who live without it and a headache to those who must operate with it.
For this reason, Plato said, democracy is the best form of a bad government and the worst form of a good one.
A restraint of evil: Those of us who withhold a portion of our taxes are trying to reorient our national spending priorities by saying we will not pay for war or violence.
The portion we do not pay we give away to those who will use it for peace.
While we recognize that we are breaking a law of the people (willing to take responsibility and to be accountable for our actions), we are not breaking a law against caesar.
What we are trying to do is give ourselves what we need to function as a government, that is, to function as a restraint of evil and to be a supporter of good (1 Peter 2:14).
Menno Simons wrote that the task of government is to “do justice… to deliver the oppressed,… without tyranny… without force, violence and blood” (“Foundation of Christian Doctrine,” Complete Writings of Menno Simons, p. 193).
Government ceases to be legitimate when it ceases to be a force for order in both foreign and domestic realms, when it ceases to provide for the needs of all, and when it ceases to be a body of law for carrying out justice without violence and bloodshed.
Would we continue to give our tithes and offerings to a ministry that has been proven to be unethical, caught in scandalous dealings and clearly immoral?
If we held our government up to the same standards as we do televangelists and their ministries, the government would not be able to finance its bureaucracies.
Our government has been caught in one scandal after another, involved in or supporting one war after another.
And because we are caesar, we are responsible for this scandalous behavior.
Even though we have given away our democratic rights to bureaucratic powers, we still will bear God’s judgment.
The majority of our federal budget pays for the operations of the world’s largest military system, which prepares for war with scarce resources.
It finances low-intensity conflicts throughout the world by supplying and sponsoring surrogate armies.
It has yet to finish paying for past wars.
Thus we must come to terms with the reality that we are producing and indirectly using weapons of violence.
Living in a democracy, we are, as citizens, weapons producers by providing through our taxes the capital needed for the production of B1-Bs, MX “Peacekeepers,” Apache attack helicopters, bullets, rifles and on and on.
The Scriptures, which determine the right function of government, the witness of our Anabaptist forebears and our democratic freedoms force us to act in ways that affect the political process.
For many, tax resistance is a way to bring about a change in federal spending priorities.
But much more importantly, it is a way to make one’s life have integrity and to align one’s life with God’s gospel of shalom.
The edition announced a “Standing Up for Peace Contest” with $1,100 in prizes available to “young people ages 15–23” who “interview someone who has refused to fight in war, pay taxes for war, or build weapons for war and share the story through writing an essay or song, producing a video, or creating a work of art.”
The Mennonite Church General Board, after years of study and discussion, brought the military tax question to a vote, then tabled it.
a majority of General Assembly delegates voted to “support” the efforts of church board employees who do not wish their taxes deducted so that they may deal with the government in regard to military taxes.
At the General Board meetings in Kalona, Iowa, members tabled a motion to honor requests of employees who ask that their income tax not be withheld.
Gary Jewell, a student at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminaries, Elkhart, Ind., handed out about $150 in $1 bills to passers-by in front of the downtown post office in Elkhart to express his opposition to U.S. military spending.
He gave away about half of what he and his wife, Jan Yoder, owe in federal income taxes.
The couple plans to give the rest to a charity like Mennonite Central Committee.
Stapled to each $1 bill was a statement by Jewell that read in part, “Today I choose to give my money away (call it a ‘peace dividend’) rather than to pay the remaining 60 percent of my federal income tax that goes toward present and past military expense.”
(The Elkhart Truth)
The edition included a sidebar with this quote:
“Until membership in the church means that a Christian chooses not to engage in violence for any reason and instead chooses to love, pray for, help and forgive all enemies; until membership in the church means that Christians may not be members of any military…; until membership in the church means that Christians cannot pay taxes for others to kill others; and until the church says these things in a fashion that the simplest soul can understand — until that time humanity can only look forward to more dark nights of slaughter on a scale unknown in history.
Unless the church unswervingly and unambiguously teaches what Jesus teaches on this matter, it will not be the divine leaven in the human dough that it was meant to be.”
―George Zabelka, who served as a Roman Catholic chaplain for those who dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on and
The General Boards of the General Conference Mennonite Church and the Mennonite Church issued their first joint statement as a merging body in .
It urged the U.S. to stand down from its Iraq war threats.
One of the seven points of the document calls congregations to confess “our own complicity and selfishness in utilizing more than our share of the world’s supply of oil and other resources… limited concern for longstanding injustices in the Middle East and… paying for the military buildup through our taxes.”
A regional report from the noted that in the Mennonite Conference of Eastern Canada, “A conference employee has requested that the conference not withhold his war taxes.
This issue will be brought to a future conference session.”
I asked Makram [Sa’ad] to tell me briefly the history of the tax resisters, particularly the group with which he was identified.
“The idea began a long time ago, well before the intifada.
The United National Leadership didn’t want people to pay taxes.
But it was a difficult decision which they didn’t try to enforce for fear of reprisals against non-payers by the Israeli authorities.
They weren’t sure our people were ready for reprisals and in many ways they were right.
“Whenever somebody refused to pay taxes, massive pressure by the authorities was directed at them.
Among other things, the police would never renew their identity cards, and if you don’t have an identity card then you’re violating security laws and you can be detained.
Or they wouldn’t renew drivers’ licenses and that too can lead to imprisonment.
I don’t have a license now because they wouldn’t give me a new one.
I drive without it; I take my chances.
“The principle behind non-payment of taxes is simple.
The UNL’s position was that people shouldn’t pay taxes because international law considers the imposition of new taxes on the people of an occupied territory illegal [VAT is a totally new tax imposed by the Israelis], and it is highly questionable whether an occupying power can raise the level of taxation.
But these two points are too complicated for our people to understand.
Instead, UNL wisely based their appeal to people to stop paying taxes on what is happening to the tax money.
We pay income tax, excise tax, property tax, municipal and other taxes, and we get nothing back.
The Israelis spend no money on public works or health services and extremely little on education and other services.
Showing that we weren’t getting any of the money back was a better way of explaining the problem, and this was coupled with figures showing that the Israelis use our tax money to support their hated military presence; they use it to finance their continued occupation.
“Beit Sahur [a town to the south of Bethlehem] crystallized the issue.
Beit Sahur was the place where the big confrontation over taxation, non-payment that is, took place.
You must remember that the Israelis fear non-payment of taxes more than anything else, and Beit Sahur was the test ground.”
“…Beit Sahur was the place where people began refusing to pay taxes; it was the place where this activity took on the semblance of a mass movement.
It started with a few people in the community and spread like wildfire and before long no one in the place would pay taxes.
So Beit Sahur became a whole town of over ten thousand people in open rebellion against Israeli rule, or what sustains it.
What made it worse for the Israelis was the ethnic composition of the town.
It is a mixed community of Catholics, Greek Orthodox, and Muslims. It sent out a message that all religious and ethnic groups were opposed to Israeli taxation policies.
“At first, the Israelis used one of the old methods they had used against non-payers in the past.
They took away their household belonging: fridges, gas ranges, and furniture, supposedly the equivalent of the tax overdue.
But this policy really backfired.
After it was imposed, nobody would pay a penny, not even the people who hadn’t joined the movement before.
What were the Israelis to do?
The government’s storage facilities near Sarafand [near Ramallah] were full of household goods.
People learned the art of conversation in Beit Sahur, after the Israelis took away all their radios and television sets.
“Each time the Israelis intensified their pressure, the Beit Sahuris responded with a gesture of defiance.
The Israelis stopped people from going to school, the army occupied the local schools for three months, so the people responded by turning in their identity cards — thousands of them did that.
An amazing community spirit surfaced.
“The army became desperate.
They were determined to break the solidarity of the people, and all the traditional measures failed to do it.
So, they imposed a state of siege.
It lasted forty-two days.
One couldn’t get in or out of Beit Sahur, and the only time one could move around inside the town was during the day, and even then everybody was subjected to harassment and abuse.
This was the most they could do, but we still held the line, nobody gave in.”
“There were no leaders; everybody participated.
If anyone, the religious leaders were the leaders.
The Muslim, Catholic, and Orthodox leaders would link arms and march in defiance, and on occasion they prayed together in the main square of the town.
We were all Palestinians and there were no leaders; we suffered alike and protested alike.[”]
“…We in Beit Sahur still don’t pay.
They lifted the siege for one reason only: the international community eventually raised a fuss about their actions, that’s why.”
Sa’ad goes on to talk about some of the Israeli reprisals against the town and against individuals in it, and his own experience with the military authorities who were trying to force him to pay taxes with harassment, confiscation of personal and business belongings, arrests, and beatings.
While I’ve been delving through the archives of Gospel Herald, links have been backing up in my bookmarks.
Here are some that concern war tax resistance in the here-and-now:
The Trump administration has decided it enjoys provoking trade wars, which perhaps have the blessing of distracting them from getting their jollies by provoking real wars.
But the prime mechanism — tariffs — is also a revenue source for the government.
Which leads war tax resisters like Lincoln Rice to ask, are these tariffs for war? and if so, what can war tax resisters do about it?
Thirty-Eight Years of Refusal — Erica Leigh, Georgia Pearson, Larry Bassett, and Bill Ramsey review the history of the recently-closed Conscience and Military Campaign Escrow Account, which was responsible for coordinating tens of thousands of dollars in war tax redirection.
Counseling Notes — News about government policies towards war tax resisters, including the use of private debt collectors, IRS summonses, passport revocations, and a sharp decline in levies.
Colrain After 25 Years — A 25th Anniversary celebration of the actions surrounding the Corner/Kehler house seizure, coinciding with the New England Regional Gathering of War Tax Resisters.
War Tax Resistance Ideas and Actions — Including the Maine War Tax Resistance Gathering, and obituary notices for war tax resisters Ray Gingerich and Naomi Paz Greenberg.
NWTRCC News — Including an announcement of the NWTRCC national gathering in Cleveland.
Adrienne Maree Brown writes about her war tax resistance in the wake of a wage levy, and reflects on the disadvantages of going it alone as opposed to resisting as part of a supportive group. Excerpt:
i still deeply agree with the politics that led to this action, but i know now that i didn’t do it the right way.
i acted as an individual, as if my singular act of rage should be respected, as if it could have meaningful impact on the systems of oppression that lead to the military spending i want to divest from.
it helped me sleep well at night, but it wasn’t tied into a collective strategy, a system of accountability around whether it was effective.
someday i hope to be part of larger direct action efforts around debt and taxes, but from this struggle i have learned in a most personal way the importance of the collective.
Is there a war tax resistance movement?
According to a pseudonymous author in a back issue of Conscience (the newsletter of the Conscience and Military Tax Campaign), “War tax resistance is real, but the war tax resistance movement is fiction.”
War tax resistance is a tactic, says the author, whereas movements coalesce around goals, so there will never be a war tax resistance movement, though there may be movements that incorporate war tax resistance.
Erica Leigh looks back at the Beit Sahour tax strike as it was covered at the time, in a two-part series of excerpts from Conscience (part 1 and part 2).
Leigh writes: “The tax resistance in Beit Sahour was due to a high level of community cohesion, organization, education, and solidarity, something that’s missing from our scattered war tax resistance organizing around the United States.
Most of our finest moments in US war tax resistance arose from such concentrated and dedicated efforts in a small geographic region, even when the total number of resisters was small.
Food for thought!”
As the Cold War sputtered to a close during the Gorbachev era, the urgency went out of the war tax resistance movement — something I’ve also noticed in my recaps of Mennonite and Quaker war tax resistance — as can be seen by the reduced attention given to the subject in Brethren periodicals during this period.
The issue brought the news that the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (Quakers) had been sued by the IRS which was trying to force it to turn over taxes that had not been paid by two of its conscientiously objecting employees (source).
Excerpt:
In its countersuit, the Quaker group contends that “for the Meeting to pay over to the IRS, in defiance of an employee’s Quaker beliefs, the amount of taxes which had been refused on grounds of religious conscience by that employee, would violate the most fundamental religious principles of the church.”
Samuel D. Caldwell, general secretary of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, said the military tax refusers are not tax evaders.
“They would gladly pay their full share of taxes — and more — if they had assurances that it would go to peaceful purposes.”
[T]reasury bonds [are] a very safe investment but one which “raises the issue whether one wants to invest in the current priorities of our government where so much money is spent on the military budget”…
IRAs are another way people can reduce their tax contributions to military spending.
Earnings on an IRA are tax-deferred until retirement.
In many cases IRAs are tax-deductible.
It is also possible for employers to set up tax-deferred retirement plans…
The issue introduced readers to tax resistance as a tactic of nonviolent resistance, summarizing the story of the tax resisting town of Beit Sahour in occupied Palestine (source).
A profile of Curtis Dubble (the recently-elected Annual Conference moderator) in the issue included his recollection of the war bonds pressure during World War Ⅱ:
“For me there were a couple of struggles,” he says. “In the shoe factory they put pressure on me to buy war bonds.
I couldn’t stand that pressure, so I bought a few.”
But his conscience wouldn’t allow him to continue to support the war effort in that way, so he cashed them in.
The teller at the Myerstown bank “looked at me like I was crazy,” he recalls.
Later, when asked to sew soles on military shoes, he refused.
A feature on married co-pastors in the issue included this note about Louise and Phil Rieman (source):
[T]heir strong stance on war tax resistance [is] a challenge their congregation has had to wrestle with. “One of our biggest joys in this congregation,” says Phil, “is the support we’ve felt in asking the church to cooperate with us on this conviction.
Perhaps because there are two of us, this has allowed them to be less hesitant, knowing that if one of us is arrested, the pulpit can still be filled.”
Last-minute taxpayers in Iowa City, Iowa, rushing to mail their returns late at night on , were met by demonstrators in front of the post office, protesting tax money being spent for military purposes.
Among the demonstrators was peace activist Marianne Michael, a member of the Panora (Iowa) Church of the Brethren.
Said she to a newspaper reporter, “It’s obscene that the government spends so much on the military when there are so many things here at home that we need to work on.
The US has a poor sense of values when our tax money is spent on things that destroy human life.”
Meanwhile, the Bible Monitor wasn’t budging.
From the issue (source):
…we do not believe a Christian is called to picket abortion clinics, refuse to pay “war taxes,” or take a part in the many popular anti-government demonstrations supported by both “fundamental” and “liberal” wings of christendom. In our opinion, such actions are a part of the fanatic fringe and not being faithful.
[“We have no need to stockpile nuclear weapons and threaten our planet Earth under the guise of ‘security.’ We cannot find a reason to help finance the death squads of right-wing governments in Central America.” This is part of a statement by Bob Bady and Patricia Morse, war tax resisters from Western Massachusetts.
The house which they built with their own hands over a ten-years period was put on the auction block by the IRS, for taxes owed the federal government.
A bid was made by two unknown persons and the property sold to them.
Bob and Pat have been given a 180 day period in which to “redeem” their place and then apply the repurchase price against the still due taxes.
The couple say they will not do this, and will also resist any attempt to remove them from their house by means of a nonviolent occupation.
By the time this issue is put in the mail, the fate of another house, that belonging to Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner, may have been decided.
They and their nine-year-old daughter, Lillian, are neighbors of Bob, Pat, and her seventeen-year-old son.
Randy and Betsy’s house was auctioned on , but in that case the IRS ended up as the owner of the house, after “bids” in the form of Nicaraguan currency, canned goods for the poor, and offers of community service, were turned down by the IRS.
They, too, will prepare for a Gandhian nonviolent occupation if the IRS attempts to remove them.
Acts of civil disobedience against war taxations take many forms.
Karl Meyer sees the value of tactical efforts to avoid a date with the IRS; Randy, Betsy, Bob, Pat and many in the Catholic Worker movement find it imperative to inform the IRS directly of any such actions, and welcome others to write for more information on the possible Satyagraha campaign, American style, which may occur if the IRS attempts to evict them from their homes.
Please contact: War Tax Refusers Support Committee, c/o Traprock Peace Center, Keets Road, Deerfield, MA 01342.
Karl Meyer is always happy to discuss questions and problems concerning war tax resistance.
He may be reached at: 1460 W. Carmen, Chicago, IL 60640, (312) 784‒8065.
―Eds. Note]
By Karl Meyer
In , when Mohandas Gandhi searched for a tactic of civil disobedience that would galvanize India in the struggle for self-rule, he recognized that the use of salt was a necessity at the heart of Indian village life, yet salt production was a monopoly controlled by the British rulers.
Every time Indians bought salt they paid a burdensome tax to the British.
He began a campaign for self-rule with a march to the sea, to take untaxed salt from it, in violation of British rule.
His campaign was rooted in resistance to taxes on an elemental commodity of everyday life, just as our own American Revolution began around resistance to a British tax on tea.
Striking at these basic taxes struck at the heart of British rule.
In , in Gandhi’s India, jail was the ordinary ultimate sanction for enforcing government control.
Death was the extraordinary ultimate sanction.
During the salt campaign, hundreds of satyagrahis were beaten with clubs when they tried to enter a saltworks.
In two months of , more than 32,000 Indians were convicted of political offenses and jailed.
Gandhi once said, “Rivers of blood may have to flow before India gains her freedom, but it must be our own blood.”
In North America [today], the system of control seems far more benign than this.
The front line agencies of government coercion, which are Selective Service and the IRS, believe that they can control U.S. dissenters adequately by compiling computerized data about them, their whereabouts, their means of education, their livelihood and their financial assets.
With this information the enforcement agencies can apply adequate pressure with civil penalties, by withholding benefits or by seizing a punitive share of income or assets.
They think they can pin us down while they extract our teeth, and then allow us to gum our verbal protests as much as we please.
In , at the height of the Vietnam War, we started a tax refusal campaign to beat the withholding system by claiming extra allowances on W-4 Withholding Exemption certificates.
It worked. Hundreds of refusers began to do it.
At first in , the IRS tried to squash that movement by putting a handful of resisters in jail.
But that didn’t work well.
Putting conscientious war tax refusers in jail created martyrs, martyrs created publicity and publicity created more resisters.
So the IRS stopped putting us in jail and began to search around for better control tactics.
I think they understood the potential of classic jail-going civil disobedience better than we do.
Today, the U.S. government basically declines to imprison war refusers for their ordinary crimes.
Hundreds of thousands refuse to register for the draft — none is in jail today.
Thousands openly refuse taxes for war — none is in jail today.
The Warfare State
In America today, the internal systems of control by the warfare state have evolved to more benign forms.
For many people this apparent benignity masks the horror of reality.
The U.S. administration and Congress have repeatedly said: “Rivers of blood may have to flow before we suppress the struggle for self-rule in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, but that will be all right because it will be their blood.
North Americans will not care because we will see to it that none of their own blood will flow.
We will control them with media manipulation and with electronic information gathering and processing systems.” They believe that they will control adequately the society of the future by gathering information efficiently and processing it instantaneously.
They will have information about the flow of every dollar that represents our personal belongings and our personal productivity.
These streams of dollars will be the blood of the future.
Once the IRS has identified and located every vessel of human interchange through which they flow, the tax gatherers will tap those vessels where they please and gather the blood of our productivity and our belongings, without a word of acquiescence or protest on our part.
The machine grinds on, impervious to picketing and ordinary letters of protest.
It ignores them because they have no numbers and produce no dollars.
Perhaps electronic information is not bad in itself; but if we allow these systems to divest us of our human work, and to use it to harm people in other countries, the end of this stream of dollars will flow red with human blood, as it does today in Salvador.
(Excerpted from a longer article, “Satyagraha in 1984: Gandhian Resistance to War Taxes in the Age of the Computer.”)
By Betsy Corner and Randy Kehler
The federal government’s policies regarding nuclear weaponry and military interventions contradict our deepest moral and spiritual values — values which, we believe, should apply as much to public as to private life.
We are not religious in a formal way, but we do struggle to accept and live by the proposition that we are all children of God.
We take this to mean, in a very real sense, that all people everywhere are our sisters and brothers whom we must try to love and, in any case, refrain from deliberately injuring.
For us, this applies especially to the poor, including our sisters and brothers in Central America who are suffering and dying as a result of U.S. policies and U.S. arms, and our sisters and brothers here in our own country who are hungry and homeless while our government pours billions of dollars into an insane nuclear arms race that threatens to kill us all.
How can we willingly give money to the federal government when we know that it will be used to cause, or threaten, so much harm to other members of our human family?
Our answer is that we can’t.
We are convinced that our government’s policies are not just immoral, but also illegal.
The United States is a signatory to international treaties that prohibit the manufacture of genocidal weapons of destruction and forbid the use of force to overthrow foreign governments.
According to the U.S. Constitution, these treaties have the same binding force as domestic law.
Yet we continue to produce more and more nuclear bombs capable of destroying all life on earth, and we persist in sending arms and material to groups attempting to topple governments deemed “unfriendly” to U.S. interests.
Who is the real lawbreaker — we who refuse to pay for these criminal activities, or the U.S. government, and their tax collectors, who carry them out?
The Nuremberg Principles that resulted from the trials of Nazi war criminals, and which were subsequently ratified by the U.S. government, hold that individual citizens who commit or collaborate with “crimes against humanity” must be held responsible for their actions even though they were “only following orders” or “only obeying the law.”
We believe that preparing for nuclear war, and waging actual war against people in countries such as Nicaragua and El Salvador, are both crimes against humanity — and that helping to pay for them is a form of collaboration.
We view our war-tax resistance not only as serving our country’s best interests, but also as highly consistent with the rich American tradition of nonviolent civil disobedience — a tradition that includes the Boston Tea Party, the early colonists’ refusal to pay British stamp taxes, Henry David Thoreau’s refusal to pay taxes during the Mexican-American War, and the refusal by black Americans to obey racially discriminatory laws during the Civil Rights Movement of .
Nonviolent acts of protest and noncooperation have always been crucial to the maintenance of a free and democratic society.
Are we nervous about the possibility of losing our house? Sure we are to some degree.
We don’t want to lose our house any more than anyone else does.
It has been our home for ten years and it represents the only material security we have.
But we have to ask ourselves, is our home more important than the tens of thousands of homes that have been destroyed by U.S.-sponsored bombing in El Salvador or by U.S.-sponsored terrorism in Nicaragua?
More important than the hundreds of thousands of homes our country has denied to homeless people here in America?
More important than the millions of homes here and around the world that will be incinerated in a flash if the nuclear arms race is not halted and reversed?
If, by risking the loss of our home, we can raise one more voice in protest against all this needless destruction, then it will be worth it.
When we grow anxious about the consequences of our war-tax resistance, it also helps to remember the good that comes from redistributing our federal tax money.
Last year Don Mosley, who coordinates a project called “Walk In Peace,” which raises money for people who have lost arms and legs in Nicaragua, wrote to us:
“Your contribution all by itself is nearly enough to finance the complete rehabilitation (including the making of artificial limbs) of five people.
I hope you can grasp that in human terms…”
For us, that’s what it all comes down to: human terms.
And that’s what keeps us going. At this point in our lives, we can’t not resist the federal government’s taxes.
The issue of The Catholic Worker reported on the inspiring tax resistance campaign of the mostly-Christian Palestinian village of Beit Sahour against the taxes collected by the Israeli occupation:
Peaceful Tax Resistance in Beit Sahour
By Terry Rogers
The Palestinian Center for the Study of Nonviolence, founded in East Jerusalem in by Mubarak Awad and others, offers a wide range of educational programs and research in the history, theory, and methodology of nonviolence for Palestinians in particular and the Arab world in general.
In , the PCSNV published an analysis of the 22 most recent leaflets of the Unified Command of the Intifada.
These leaflets, printed anonymously every two weeks, give specific instructions to the Palestinian population in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
The Center’s study, which counted the frequency with which various actions were urged, found that only 9.6% of the leaflets’ instructions proposed violent acts.
The rest included such nonviolent actions as strikes; boycotts of Israeli jobs, goods, and services; tax resistance; participation in popular committees; cancellation of celebrations; surrounding and protecting children who are beaten by soldiers; and others.
The authors of the study conclude: “It has not been proven that the Intifada is a nonviolent struggle, only that violence is not necessary for the intifada to continue.”
The tax resistance of the village of Beit Sahour in the West Bank is a recent example of one of these nonviolent tactics and has attracted widespread international attention.
A small middle-class village of 12,000 near Bethlehem, Beit Sahour is a close-knit community of extended families, most of whom have lived there for generations.
The population is eighty percent Christian, and its economic base consists of several hundred small family enterprises.
Residents of Beit Sahour have the highest percentage of university graduates of any village in the occupied territories.
Since the occupation, they have a history of strong political organization, and many cooperatives and neighborhood committees have been established there.
Recently, the village has been known for welcoming Israeli peace activists into its homes and churches, organizing dialogues and joint peace demonstrations.
The commitment to tax resistance in Beit Sahour began in and intensified in .
The rationale for tax resistance in the occupied territories has several bases.
The sales tax, or VAT, was imposed by Israel after the occupation; its legality is disputed by Palestinians because, according to international law, an occupying power has no right to impose new taxes.
Also, Palestinians under occupation maintain that only a small portion of their taxes pays for the limited public services in the occupied territories, and Israel cannot prove otherwise as it does not publish a budget of its income and expenses there.
Finally, since Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip cannot vote, they have no control over taxes or public expenditures.
A statement from Beit Sahour on stated, in part:
“We will not finance the bullets that kill our children, the growing number of prisons, the expenses of the occupying army.
We want no more than what you have: freedom and our own representatives to pay taxes to.”
Tax resistance is risky, for without a certificate that all taxes have been paid one cannot, for example, register a car, renew a drivers’ license, travel out of the country, register the birth of a child, or receive permission to bury a family member.
Nevertheless, significant numbers of Palestinians under occupation have refused to pay taxes or file tax returns.
Beit Sahour was recently singled out for harsh collective punishment as an example to others in the territories.
, the village was declared a closed military zone.
For the first five days a 24-hour curfew was imposed, and the subsequent curfew was 5 pm to 5 am.
Many telephone lines were cut, soldiers were posted on rooftops throughout the town, and press, solidarity, and religious groups were denied entrance, including the consuls-general of six Western European countries.
Under military protection, tax authorities visited ten residents daily, confiscating and sometimes destroying business and personal property that was sometimes worth much more than the taxes owed.
At times property was taken from the members of the extended families of tax resisters.
Three hundred families had property confiscated and five hundred other families had their bank accounts frozen.
Much property was receipted, but not all receipts were signed and some were receipted only as boxes.
Forty Sahouries were jailed for nonpayment of taxes and forty-two placed in administrative detention.
To protect tax authorities during these raids, the soldiers forced drivers of passing cars to park their cars in a ring around the house being raided, and commanded passersby to stand in a ring outside the cars.
Residents of Beit Sahour described the tax raids as harsh and arbitrary.
Some who had paid taxes were mistakenly raided and some of the soldiers taunted and threatened family members and children during the raids.
On , the United Nations General Assembly, in a nearly unanimous resolution, condemned the Israeli government for the tax raids in the occupied territories.
By the end of the siege, much of the productive base of the village had been destroyed, yet the mood there was one of celebration.
On , with the soldiers gone, observers heard whistles, chants, and cheers echoing through the streets.
In their all but empty homes, residents who had been raided spoke proudly of the village’s steadfastness and the villagers’ mutual support.
In recognition of the devastating effect of the siege and confiscations, the Palestine Central Council, meeting in Baghdad, voted to ask contributions from PLO members and employees to help compensate the villagers.
Israeli peace activists, many of whom have made friends in Beit Sahour through the previous months of dialogue, have also shown solidarity.
After the siege, they were invited to a service for peace in the Beit Sahour Roman Catholic Church, and though sixty were turned back by soldiers at roadblocks outside the town, a dozen who had spent the night there were able to take part in the service.
Their spokesman, Hillel Bardin, told the two thousand Palestinians in the congregation,
“There is a group of Israelis here with me today who’ve known you for a long time; who’ve had the honor of meeting you, talking with you, learning about you in a way few Israelis have…
I admire the courageous people of Beit Sahour for coming together today to call for peace between our peoples.”
The Mufti of Jerusalem also attended the service, and the presence of a Muslim holy man in a Christian church was a sign of increased unity among Palestinians themselves.
Another expression of support for Beit Sahour was an Israeli gift of a truckload of tree and vegetable seedlings, delivered .
Some Israelis have held protest demonstrations during the selling of the confiscated goods at the Ben Gurion airport.
Israeli and Palestinian women are protesting the harsh exposure to cold at the Anata Detention Center where 35 tax resisters from Beit Sahour are being held.
Members of Yesh Gvul, Israeli soldiers who refuse to serve in the occupied territories, were stopped by an army roadblock when they tried to make a solidarity visit on , but hundreds of Sahouris arrived by side paths to greet them outside the town.
The increasing numbers of Palestinians and Israelis who are organizing against the occupation, both jointly and in their own communities, are drawing from, and making a significant contribution to, the theory and practice of nonviolent struggle.
Military authorities have told the villagers of Beit Sahour to expect another tax siege within six months, but there is no sign that the Sahouris will change their stand.
International pressure and expressions of concern are an essential part of the protection and encouragement desperately needed by Palestinians and Israelis working for a just and peaceful solution to this conflict.
