Come December, and with it the withering of The Picket Line. Sorry ’bout that. I’ve been without much inspiration to write these last few days. Today, only a tidbit:
In an unexpected real-life mirroring of some speculative journalism I published here , the prime minister of Thailand has asked Thai citizens to construct paper cranes, which will then be dropped over three “restive provinces” in a massive origami bombing.
Armchair nonviolent activists who have been following with envy the “People Power” uprisings elsewhere now have a couple of new ways to channel their frustration:
One is by reading Ira Chernus’s book American Nonviolence: The History of an Idea, which is now available on-line.
And the other is by playing a video game, of all things. This new game is in the war gaming tradition, but with a twist:
A pro-democracy group has sponsored a free video game designed to teach political activists how to plan and execute strategic non-violent warfare.…
“It lets them try different things on the computer before they try them in the real world,” said Ivan Marovic, a consultant on the game, and a former Serbian student leader who helped organize the protests that ousted Slobodan Milosevic. “I wish I’d had it.”
Sponsored by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, the game, called “A Force More Powerful,” resembles a cross between a political science model and one of the popular city-builder games. The player represents the chief of staff of a non-violent resistance movement. He gives orders to various characters within the movement, who will attempt to carry out actions such as making speeches and organizing demonstrations.
The non-player-characters are rated for factors such as willpower and ambition. “There is a balancing act between the different egos and wills of the individuals involved,” said Bob McNamara, a producer at Breakaway Games… “They will always attempt to carry out your orders, but if they don’t like the task, the chances of success will be modified. We wanted to capture the dynamic of the fact that you’re in a movement of volunteers, and they won’t always do what you say.”
The game’s artificial intelligence controls the members of the targeted regime, who can be persuaded or bribed to become neutral or even defect.
“Governments are not monolithic,” said McNamara. “Suppose you have a regime character who is intolerant of violence. If that person were to see the regime use violent repression, he might become disgusted. Or suppose the regime is conscious of its international image, whether for aesthetic or economic reasons. If one of the regime members is a businessman with a lot of international business ties, then going to the international community to put pressure on him might work.”
“A general will not shoot demonstrators if support for the regime is too low,” agreed Marovic, who has advised pro-democracy movements in Georgia and Ukraine. “This happened in the Ukraine, where the security forces changed sides.”
While “A Force More Powerful” sounds like a more sophisticated version of political entertainment games such as Tropico, where players impersonate a dictator, or Revolution, where they try to overthrow one, what makes this design unique is its emphasis on methodical military-style planning. Indeed, the process resembles how U.S. military commanders war game a situation by considering various alternatives and their consequences.
When a player begins a scenario, a series of menus force him to create a strategic estimate. First, he chooses his goals from a list that includes regime change, altering specific regime policies such as racial discrimination, persuading security forces not to intervene and gaining the support of the media. “You can devise a strategy based on what you feel is the best way to proceed,” McNamara said.
Next comes choosing tactics that range from strikes to protests. Finally, the player divides his plan into phases and which objectives he’ll try to achieve in each phase. At the end of the game, an evaluation screen will inform him how well he did versus the expectations of the scenario designer.
The game’s extensive scenario editor enables users to tailor the game to their own nations. Scenarios can range from building up support in a single neighborhood to waging non-violent conflict across an entire nation, said the Breakaway designer. The game is designed to be as open-ended as possible, with players able to choose multiple tactics. “We don’t give a player two choices at some point in the game, and say, ‘pick one,’ ” said co-designer Ananda Gupta. “The player has tremendous free-form control over the strategy and options.”
“A Force More Powerful,” which is designed for low-end computers, will be available for free in . It will be distributed on CDs and on the Internet. Versions are planned for specific regions and languages. While repressive regimes will attempt to suppress the game, McNamara and Marovic are confident that it can be distributed to pro-democracy groups.
But will the activists even want it? Some may dislike it because it’s just too practical, said Steve York, senior producer with York Zimmerman, which produced the award-winning television series also titled “A Force More Powerful.” York said it’s easy for idealists to forget that successful activists such as Gandhi and King devoted a great deal of time to preparation and organization.
“A non-violent movement has to take a lot of time and prepare. They have to know their strengths and weaknesses and those of their opponent. People tend to forget that non-violent resistance has a hard-headed, practical side.”
“This game means they don’t have to learn the hard way,” York added. “It’s very difficult to wage a conflict using these techniques. They can learn without harming themselves,” he explained.
Marovic, the former student leader, said that many of those who planned the toppling of Milosevic played computer strategy games. “Out of 10 people in the leadership, five played strategy games, such as ‘The Operational Art of War,’ ” he recalled.
But lack of experience and expertise in strategic mistakes hampered the protesters. “We weren’t trained at the higher military schools,” Marovic said wryly. “We couldn’t have the structure that the military people could.” This led the Serbian protesters to move too quickly to confront the Milosevic regime in . “We entered the engagement phase too soon, without entering the buildup phase. We should have gotten more public resources, more human resources, more members, more supporters.”
The consequences were more than student arrests. “We lost politically,” Marovic recalled. “That was the main loss. Milosevic managed to avoid the worst scenario for him, which was to step down, and through some legal manipulation, he managed to politically diminish the protest.”
By , the opposition had learned its lesson. “If you look at the media, it looks like people just fill the streets,” Marovic said. “The game will show it’s not like that.”
Well, what can you do when you’re born with a name like Bob McNamara?
But seriously, folks… nonviolent conflict seems to have finally gained some official respectability, and good cash money to go along with it — from private groups like the Soros Foundation and even from the U.S. government, which occasionally finds its motives running parallel to those of “People Power” movements, and gives them a boost.
But though realpolitik is naturally at play here, I can’t be too cynical — it seems to me that “People Power” uprisings have a much greater likelihood of generating long-term positive change, even when funded by self-serving governments from outside, than do the alternative techniques of bombing the bejeezus out of everybody until the dictator finally falls. There’s something very healthy about establishing the precedent of getting together with your neighbors and throwing the bums out.
And on that note, let me recommend Claire Wolfe’s new article: “Twelve Tips for Toppling Tyrants”
Some bits-and-pieces from here-and-there:
A driver has racked up dozens of speeding tickets in photo-radar zones on Phoenix-area freeways while sporting monkey and giraffe masks, and is fighting every one by claiming the costumes make it impossible for authorities to prove he was behind the wheel.
It took Arizona state police months to realize the same driver was involved and was refusing to pay the fines. By the time they did, more than 50 of the tickets had become invalid because the deadline for prosecution had passed.
Arizona began deploying the stationary and mobile cameras on state highways a year ago, and through had issued more than 497,000 tickets. Of those, about 132,000 recipients had paid the fine of $165 plus a 10 percent penalty, netting the state more than $23 million. Arizona is the first to deploy such technology on highways statewide.
Many of the remaining tickets are either new, being appealed or have just been ignored. The state didn’t have figures immediately available on the breakdown.
The backlash against the cameras has been fairly constant, however. Arizonans have used sticky notes, Silly String and even a pickax to sabotage the cameras.
Many believe the shooting death of speed-enforcement van operator Doug Georgianni on on a Phoenix freeway was a result of anger over the cameras, although authorities haven’t made that direct allegation.
“It’s a peaceful act of resistance — that’s what this country was founded on,” VonTesmar said. “I’m not thumbing my nose at DPS, but photo radar is not a DPS officer protecting public safety. It’s nothing but a speed tax.”
James Warren Doyle, Catholic bishop of Kildare and Leighlin in the early nineteenth century, was an insightful pioneer of the tradition of mass nonviolent civil disobedience that would later be developed by Gandhi and King.
On , Doyle wrote to the pastor of Graig at the beginning of a tithe resistance campaign he was promoting:
The new Government will make a show of vigour, but they will shortly learn that no coalition can ever take place between those who plunder and they who are plundered.
Irish Catholics were required by law to pay a significant tax for the upkeep of the Anglican Church of Ireland (as were Irish non-Catholics), which, though the “official” church, was not the chosen church of most of the country (less than 10% of the population of Ireland were Anglicans). As one historian put it: “The Protestant [Anglican] clergy lived comfortably all through the country, and ministered on Sundays in decent well-kept churches to congregations of perhaps half a dozen, or less; for all which the Catholic people were forced to pay… while their own priests lived in poverty, and celebrated Mass to overflowing congregations in thatched cabins or in the open air.”
Even for members of the Church of Ireland sometimes their only contact with the church was with the tithe collector, as the Church was content to collect its dues without bothering to establish a church house or to deign to send a minister. Indeed, the Church had in many cases abandoned parishes outright (some parishes — one source says 160 of them — had no Anglican parishioners to minister to at all), and instead leased or auctioned tithing rights to professional “tithe proctors” whose profits were limited only by the extent of their ruthlessness.
Adding to the resentment was that while most subsistence farmers were required to turn over 10% of their produce to the Church of Ireland, wealthier (and usually Protestant) owners of grassland for grazing had long been exempt (an early attempt at reform in abolished this exemption, and changed the 10% tithe requirement to an apportioned and more consistent salary). Furthermore, exemptions like these were regional. Presybterian farmers in the North had managed to get potatoes and flax exempt from tithes there, while Catholic farmers in the South still were forced to pay tithes on potatoes, and didn’t grow flax. The whole thing reeked of being a tax on poor Catholics to support Anglican absentee landlords.
And the poor Catholics occasionally made their feelings known. One writer said: “The despoiled peasant is recorded to have now and then revenged himself upon the agent of ecclesiastical extortion by placing that functionary, deprived of his nether habiliments, astride upon a restive horse, with no other saddle than a furze bush.”
In , the new Anglican tithe-proctor of Graigue (a parish of 4,779 Catholics and 63 Protestants) decided to break with the tradition of his predecessor and collect tithes not just from the local Catholics, but also from their priest: one Father James Warren Doyle. Doyle refused to pay, and the proctor seized his horse. A mass civil disobedience campaign that would become known as the Tithe War followed.
Doyle, though a strong foe of tithes, and an early (for a priest) member of the Catholic Association, was of a reformist bent, and from the pulpit he denounced the lynch-mob violence of radical levellers who had banded together in secret societies like the “Blackfeet” and “Whitefeet” (descendants of the Whiteboys) to combat extortionate tithes and rents by force. Eager to avoid the revolutionary excesses he feared from Daniel O’Connell’s popular independence movement, and opposing O’Connell’s periodic campaigns to repeal the Act of Union that bound the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland together, Doyle tried to counsel his friends in government to pass reforms that would take the wind out of the agitators’ sails and preserve the Union. Doyle wrote to Edward Bligh, Lord Darnley, about the state of affairs in Ireland, warning:
The people in parts of this country, of the counties Kilkenny, Wexford, and Tipperary, have, within the last fortnight, assembled in bodies of several thousands to demand the reduction of tithes, and in some places have resolved not to pay any tithe until such reduction is made.
In , O’Connell and other agitators were arrested. This served mostly to make them prominent martyrs and to increase Irish distrust of the government. The law under which they were charged expired during the course of the prosecution, turning the case into an embarrassing sham. Doyle was caught between being sympathetic to the cries for justice coming from his Catholic flock, and trying to dampen an emerging violent rebellion he was certain would be a bloody and disastrous one. He warned:
There is a very extensive combination against the payment of either tithes or a composition for tithes existing at the present moment. Government has assembled in the County Kilkenny a large police force to awe the people into the payment of them. This proceeding will not be successful. The clergy should be instructed to make abatements and keep things quiet; but there is a military spirit in the Government, which creates the necessity for employing force.
On , in Newtownbarry, some 120 British yeomanry fired on a group of tithe resisters who were trying to recapture some seized cattle, killing eighteen people. Doyle had counseled against calling out the yeomanry (“who for many years past have been religious or political partisans,” that is, Orange protestants) to repress the tithe resisters, saying this would needlessly inflame matters and deepen the conflict between the people and the government. Later that year, Irish patriots — hopeless of legal redress (there were no Catholic judges or magistrates in Ireland) — struck back violently, killing eighteen of the yeomanry in a retaliatory ambush. (The numbers of dead and wounded in both of these cases vary with the source you consult.) William John Fitzpatrick (Doyle’s biographer) writes:
A number of writs against defaulters were issued by the Court of Exchequer, and intrusted to the care of process-servers, who, guarded by a strong force, proceeded on their mission with secrecy and despatch. Bonfires along the surrounding hills, however, and shrill whistles through the dell, soon convinced them that the people were not unprepared for hostile visitors. But the yeomanry pushed boldly on: their bayonets were sharp, their ball-cartridge inexhaustible, their hearts dauntless. Suddenly an immense mass of peasantry, armed with scythes and pitchforks, poured down upon them — a terrible struggle ensured, and in a few moments eighteen police, including the commanding-officer, lay dead. The remainder fled, marking the course of their retreat by their blood just as, through the intricacies of English law, the decadence of Ireland had long been traced. In the mêlée, Captain Leyne, a Waterloo veteran, narrowly escaped. A coroner’s jury pronounced “Wilful murder.” Large Government rewards were offered, but failed to produce a single conviction.
Doyle reported another tithe-related killing that took place on : “[A] most brutal murder was committed near Gowran. The victim was employed, I heard, levying distress for tithes. There is a radical error in the mode of conducting the affairs of this country.”
He then published two essays, one of which concerned the tithe question, in the form of a letter to Secretary of the Treasury Thomas Spring Rice. It celebrated historical Irish resistance to mandatory tithes as growing from their “innate love of justice and an indomitable hatred of oppression” and recommended that the current mandatory tithes be replaced by a land tax that would be distributed by secular authorities (for the support of the poor, which subject the first of the essays addressed)
Henry Maxwell, Lord Farnham, attacked Doyle in the House of Lords, saying that Doyle was the head of a tithe resistance conspiracy and was responsible for the Newtownbarry massacre. Fitzpatrick again:
It was quite true that Dr. Doyle had frankly adverted to the tithe system as unjust in principle and odious in practice — as an impediment to the improvement of Ireland in peace as well as in agriculture — as injurious to the best interests of religion, oppressive to the poor, inconsistent with good government, and intolerable to the Irish people. In justification of those strong phrases the Bishop detailed many striking proofs of their truth, from the tithe laws enacted in the Irish Parliament to the Battle of Skibbereen*; and he inquired whether the recent slaughter at Newtownbarry was the effect of a cause different from that which produced the former collisions. The exaction of tithe was incompatible with the peace of Ireland. It had been hated and resisted before [Doyle] was born, and it would be cursed when he lay in his tomb. That the system was not less injurious to agriculture than to peace he clearly demonstrated. He had seen the hay left to rot and the field unfilled rather than pay the tithe of the produce to the parson.
The ministers of the Church of Ireland, Doyle concluded, are “taking the blanket from the bed of sickness, the ragged apparel from the limbs of the pauper, and selling it by auction for the payment of tithe.” This was no exaggeration. People had testified in Parliament to just such Scrooge-like abuse. To the tithe collectors, nothing was too petty to seize, and nobody was too poor to be collected from. One auction notice from Ballymore in read:
To be soaled by Publick Cant in the town of Ballymore on 15 Inst one Cowe the property of Jas Scully one new bed and one gown the property of John quinn seven hanks of yearn the property of the Widow Scott one petty coate & one apron the property of the Widow Gallaher seized under & by virtue of a leasing warrant for the tythe due the Revd. John Ugher.
The opposition to the tithes became increasingly bold and creative. One worried parliamentarian noted in a news account of a mock funeral held in Ireland at which 100,000 people attended, “who assembled to carry in a procession to the grave two coffins, on which were inscribed Tithes and Rent.” The thought that resistance to the taxes levied by foreign, absentee clergy might spill over into resistance to the rents levied by foreign, absentee landlords was frightening to the ruling class.
“But in your opposition to this pest of agriculture and bane of religion,” Doyle wrote to his parishioners, “keep always before your eyes a salutary dread of those statutes which guard the tithe. Let no violence or combination to inspire dread be ever found in your proceedings [alluding to the Whitefeet and other such guerrilla groups]. Justice has no need of such allies. In these countries, if you only obey the law and reverence the constitution, they both will furnish you with ample means whereby to overthrow all oppression, and will secure to you the full enjoyment of every social right.”
Doyle was summoned to London to testify before a hostile “Tithe Committee,” which suspected that rhetoric like the above was given with a wink and a nod to the resisters.
Doyle used the occasion to prosecute the tithe system, giving a history that proved that the tithes had been loathed and resisted from the beginning, that furthermore their original justification had been as money set aside for the poor with the clergy as the administrators of this trust but that over time the clergy had simply taken over the tithes as their own salary, and that outbreaks of paramilitary violence in Ireland over the centuries were empowered by the tithe system.
Asked whether his statements encouraging the Irish to see the tithe laws as unjust encouraged lawless behavior, he replied by reminding the committee of the noble disobedience in their own history: the opposition to ship writs, the revolution of , and so forth. Then, in a passage that reminded me of the rhetoric of Martin Luther King, Jr., he said:
[N]o man ought to be condemned for exhorting people to pursue justice in a certain line, though he may foresee that in the pursuit of that justice the opposition given to those who are proceeding in a just course may produce collision, and that collision lead to the commission of crime; but our duty, as I conceive, is to seek for the injustice, and there to impute the crime … It is to that injustice, and not to those who pursue a just course for the attainment of a right end, that the guilt is to be ascribed.
He was now frankly advocating “passive obedience and nonresistance” — that is, refusal to pay the tithes, and using any legal methods to avoid them, but unresistingly accepting any legal consequences of refusal to pay. “I maintain the right which [Irish Catholics] have of withholding, in a manner consistent with the law and their duty as subjects, the payment of tithe in kind or in money until it is extorted from them by the operation of the law.” Fitzpatrick says that Doyle ended his first day of testimony “by declaring that he would allow his last chair to be seized — nay, sacrifice his life, before he would pay an impost so obnoxious and iniquitous.”
The next day he was asked whether by advising his parishioners to resist the tithes, he wasn’t essentially urging them to steal from those to whom the tithes were due. In response to this question, he brought up the Quakers:
I find in Ireland the religious denomination of Quakers; and they, on account of a peculiar tenet of their religion, refuse to pay tithes in money or kind to the parsons within whose jurisdiction they live; they suffer their cattle or goods to be distrained, and they have never been charged on that account with robbing the parson.
He concluded by presenting the government committee with what must have been a very tempting proposal: why not have people pay their 10% tithes to the government instead of the Church, and then the government can divvy out the money in a more fair manner. Shrewd.
But victory was some ways off yet. Doyle encouraged the resisters to trust in the strength of what Gandhi would later call satyagraha:
The advocacy of truth will always excite hostility, and he who enforces justice will ever have to combat against the powers of this world. I have, through life, regardless of danger or injury, sought to maintain the cause of truth and justice against those “who seek after a lie” and “oppress the weak.” We, who are now embarked in this cause, have to renew our determination, and in proportion as power is exerted against us to oppose ourselves to it as a wall of brass. Let us receive but not return its shocks; for if we abide by the law and pursue truth and justice we may suffer loss for a moment, but as certainly as Providence presides over human affairs every arm lifted against us shall not prosper, and against every tongue that contendeth with us we will obtain our cause.
Peace, unanimity, and perseverance are, therefore, alone requisite, under the Divine protection, to annihilate the iniquitous tithe system, to lift up the poor from their state of extreme indigence, and consequent immorality, and to prepare the way for the future happiness of our beloved country.
In there was another “massacre” when a protestant clergyman led a military force to claim his tithe of growing crops direct from the soil of a farmer. Doyle continued to counsel nonviolence, though his idea of staying within the law got more and more flexible. Fitzpatrick says in an unsourced footnote “A man in confession to Dr. Doyle said, ‘I stole from the pound a cow which had been seized from me for tithe.’ Dr. Doyle made no comment: the penitent thought he might be dozing, and repeated that confession. ‘What else?’ was the sole response.” Elsewhere, Fitzpatrick writes:
Dr. Doyle told the people not to infringe the law, but gave it to be understood that they might exercise their wit in devising expedients of passive resistance to tithes. The hint fell upon fertile soil. An organised system of confederacy, whereby signals were, for miles around, recognised and answered, started into latent vitality. True Irish “winks” were exchanged; and when the rector, at the head of a detachment of police, military, bailiffs, clerks, and auctioneers, would make his descent on the lands of the peasantry, he found the cattle removed, and one or two grinning countenances occupying their place. A search was, of course, instituted, and often days were consumed in prosecuting it. When successful, the parson’s first step was to put the cattle up to auction in the presence of a regiment of English soldiery; but it almost invariably happened that either the assembled spectators were afraid to bid, lest they should incur the vengeance of the peasantry, or else they stammered out such a low offer, that, when knocked down, the expenses of the sale would be found to exceed it. The same observation applies to the crops. Not one man in a hundred had the hardihood to declare himself the purchaser. Sometimes the parson, disgusted at the backwardness of bidders, and trying to remove it, would order the cattle twelve or twenty miles away in order to their being a second time put up for auction. But the locomotive progress of the beasts was always closely tracked, and means were taken to prevent either driver or beast receiving shelter or sustenance throughout the march. This harassing system of anti-tithe tactics, of which an idea is merely given, soon accomplished important results.
Archbishop Whately mentioned some interesting facts. “I have received information which leads me to feel certain, in some instance, and very strongly to suspect in many others, that the resistance to tithe payment in numerous parishes may be traced to the reading of Dr. Doyle’s letter. All composition has been refused. Every possible legal evasion has been resorted to to prevent the incumbent from obtaining his due. A parish purse has been raised to meet law expenses for this purpose, and the result has been that in most instances nothing whatever, in others a very small proportion of the arrears, has been recovered. I know that in one parish some extensive farmers had reduced into writing a form of proposal for a composition, and that the proposal was signed by the parishioners at a fair in the neighbourhood. The fair was held on Saturday; and in consequence, as is supposed, of Dr. Doyle’s letter having been read and commented on next day, instead of his receiving the proposal for composition, notices were served on the clergymen, by those very persons, to take the tithe in kind. He was forced to procure labourers to the amount of sixty, from distant counties, and at high wages, who yet were incapable of obtaining more than a small portion of tithes, being interrupted by a rabble — chiefly women — though men were lurking in the background to support them. He instituted a tithe-suit which was decided in his favour; but, instead of receiving the amount, he was met by an appeal to the High Court of Delegates, and is informed that a continued resistance to the utmost extremity of the law is to be supported by a parish purse.”
The Carlow journals of the day furnish graphic details of a tithe seizure in that town, and of the surrender of the cattle to their owners. The following is culled from “The Sentinel,” a Conservative organ, and cannot, therefore, be suspected of exaggeration:— “Yesterday being the day on which the sheriff announced that, if no bidders could be obtained for the cattle, he would have the property returned to Mr. Germain, immense crowds were collected from the neighbouring counties — upwards of 20,000 men. The County Kildare men, amounting to about 7000, entered, led by Jonas Duckett, Esq., in the most regular and orderly manner. This body was preceded by a band of music, and had several banners on which were ‘Kilkea and Moone, Independence for ever,’ ‘No Church Tax,’ ‘No Tithe,’ ‘Liberty,’ &c. The whole body followed six carts, which were prepared in the English style — each drawn by two horses. The rear was brought up by several respectable landholders of Kildare. The barrack-gates were thrown open, and different detachments of infantry took their stations right and left, while the cavalry, after performing sundry evolutions, occupied the passes leading to the place of sale. The cattle were ordered out, when the sheriff, as on the former day, put them up for sale; but no one could be found to bid for the cattle, upon which he announced his intention of returning them to Mr. Germain. The news was instantly conveyed, like electricity, throughout the entire meeting, when the huzzas of the people surpassed anything we ever witnessed. The cattle were instantly liberated and given up to Mr. Germain. At this period a company of grenadiers arrived, in double-quick time, after travelling from Castlecomer, both officers and men fatigued and covered with dust. Thus terminated this extraordinary contest between the Church and the people, the latter having obtained, by their steadiness, a complete victory. The cattle will be given to the poor of the sundry districts.”
This sort of contest continued for some time, until at last Mr. Stanley, in Parliament, avowed that notwithstanding a vigorous effort made by the Crown to collect arrears of tithe, with the aid of the military, police, and yeomanry, they were able to recover from an arrear of £60,000 little more than one-sixth of that sum, and at an outlay of £27,000. £1,000,000 was voted by the Legislature for the relief of the Protestant clergy. There was also a subscription opened. The Duke of Cumberland, the Duchess of Kent, the Duke of Wellington, Lords Kenyon, Bexley, and even Dr. Doyle’s correspondent, Lord Clifden, contributed £100 each.
The government responded with a repressive Coercion Act, which instituted martial law and banned public meetings. The resisters got creative:
It was illegal to summon public meetings, and so no public meeting was summoned. But it was not illegal for the people of a particular town or parish to announce that on a certain day they were going to have a hurling match, and it was not illegal for the people of other counties and towns and parishes to come and take part in the national sport. It was perfectly plain, however, that the large assemblages that thus came together, met, not for the purpose of ball-playing, but for the purpose of opposing a strong front to the hated tithe system. Men came to these hurling matches to talk of other topics than balls and sticks. These hurling matches became the recognized medium of public opinion, and 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.
The government insisted that there was nothing legal about this “passive obedience and nonresistance” campaign: “[I]t is not compatible with law to evade the performance of the obligations it imposes, and to frustrate the means it provides for their enforcement.” Doyle responded, some years before Thoreau made the same point, that “some laws may be so unjust and so injurious to the public good that ‘to evade them’ is a duty, and ‘to frustrate the means provided to enforce them’ is an exercise of a social or moral virtue.” Still, he insisted on nonviolence:
We bless those who sympathize with us, we shun those who co-operate in the enforcement of an odious law against us; but if any one resort to violence or intimidation whilst our goods are taken from us, him do we disown.
The government eventually (in ) enacted concessions that maintained most of the revenue from the tithe system while making it less confrontational: they lowered the tithe rates by 25% and made them collectible from the landlords as “rent”, not directly from the tenants as “tithe”. Mandatory tithes were nominally abolished in Ireland. The million-pound loan that Parliament had made to cover the tithes in arrears was converted into a gift, an additional quarter of a million was added to that, and the outstanding tithe debts were canceled. This effectively ended the Tithe War. The Church of Ireland was made formally independent from the government, and the mandatory tithes/rents for its support were given a 52-year sunset period, in .
Most of the information and quotes in this Picket Line entry come from The Life, Times, and Correspondence of the Right Rev. Dr. Doyle, Bishop of Kildale and Leighlin () by William John Fitz-Patrick.
* The “Battle of Skibbereen” was an earlier, , tithe-related massacre. In the reports I’ve been able to find out about it on-line, a protestant parson by the name of Morrit, who was the beneficiary of the tithes, actually was the one to give the order to fire. The following poem was an imagining of Morrit’s address to the police:
Brave Peelers, march on, with the musket and sword
And fight for my tithes in the name of the Lord!
Away with whoever appears in your path —
And seize all each peasant in Skibbereen hath!
Hesitate not — the law is on our side you know!
“The Church is in danger!” and yonder the foe!
If women and children expire at your feet!
’Tis a doom good enough for the Papists to meet!
The rebels refuse their last morsel to part —
Let your bullets and bay’nets be fleshed in each heart!
No matter what Priests or Dissenters will say —
I’ll get all my tithes, or I’ll perish to-day!
The inscription from a monument dedicated to victims of a massacre that took place during the tithe resistance campaign. Photo by Kman999, some rights reserved.
Today, some dispatches concerning a mass tax strike in the south of France in :
Marcellin Albert
French Wine Growers’ Plan
General Refusal to Pay Taxes If Relief Is Not Soon Granted
Copyright, , by The New York Times Co.
Paris, .— Marcélin Albert, the leader of the winegrowers’ agitation in Southern France, does not place much reliance in the Governmental promises of relief.
He continues to organize his forces with a view to a general refusal to pay taxes after , if the promises are not put in action by that date.
Students of George Lakey’s peace and conflict studies program at Swarthmore College have assembled an on-line database of historical nonviolent actions, analyzed and categorized according to the scheme developed by Gene Sharp.
You can search this database by country, era, campaign “wave” (e.g. “Arab Awakening” or “U.S. Civil Rights Movement”), methods (e.g. “revenue refusal”), or by hunting for search terms in the action descriptions.
George Lakey describes the usefulness of the project:
Both strategists and scholars will be interested in the abundance of patterns among the cases, to be noted and explored. One reason these cases are presented in a database rather than in book form is to make it easier to explore connections: patterns are more visible and easily accessible. As the database grows, connections will become even more noticeable.
After World War Ⅰ, Germany was forced to make reparations payments to the victorious powers. Germany failed to keep up with the demanded payments, and so in , troops from France and Belgium occupied the Ruhr district of Germany.
Germans responded with a campaign of mass nonviolent resistance. Tax resistance was among the tactics.
A news report from :
Resistance of Mine Owners
Berlin,
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 as from . 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. The proposal is to eventually make a mercantile sortie which will shatter the export trade of other nations.
The resistance was still going on at least as late as :
On the Ruhr.
Situation Improved.
German Resistance Lessening.
Owners Pay Coal-Tax.
Paris, . — The French Minister for Public Works (M. Le Trocquer) reported to the French Cabinet optimistically upon the situation in the Ruhr. He declared that German resistance was lessening and that railroad position was constantly improving.
The “Daily Telegraph’s” correspondent at Dusseldorf reports that there is some evidence of a weakening of the German passive resistance. The coal owners, at one or two points, are paying the coal-tax, enabling coal to enter unoccupied Germany.
Another article added some details:
The Ruhr Crisis
Passive Resistance Weakening.
London, .
The Dusseldorf correspondent of The Daily Telegraph states:— There is some evidence that the passive resistance in the Ruhr is weakening. As an instance, he says that the coalowners at one or two points are paying the coal tax, which is enabling them to send coal to ports of Germany which are not occupied by the French and Belgians. The greatest difficulty in the Ruhr is the paucity of bank notes. Numerous firms and municipalities there, he affirms, are demanding authority from Berlin to print their own notes in order to pay their workmen’s wages.
The organized passive resistance campaign in the Ruhr had many components, and broad participation. It is a real-life example of nonviolent resistance as a national defense strategy — the leaders of the nonviolent resistance campaign were the leaders of the German government. (Not a particularly good example, necessarily, as they didn’t have any experience in this style of defense, any plans or practiced procedures, or any trained leaders — they were more or less making it up as they went along.)
One of the ways the German government supported the campaign was by funding the strikers itself, to the tune of 715 million marks. Alas, it did this by printing off more currency, which helped fuel the hyperinflation of 1923.
Danny Burns’s book Poll Tax Rebellion (AK Press, 1992) tells the story of the grassroots tax resistance campaign that sank the poll tax in Britain and dragged Margaret Thatcher’s decade-long reign as British prime minister down with it.
Margaret Thatcher’s span as British prime minister included a paring down of the welfare state, aggressive attempts to reduce the power of organized labor, privatization and deregulation, and a flattening of the tax rate. You may recognize this deck of cards as being similar to what Ronald Reagan played with in this same time period (), and indeed the two were influenced by a similar set of economists and ideologues.
The poll tax was meant to replace local property taxes, which had been set on a local, council-by-council basis. Thatcher-aligned Conservatives disliked these property taxes, which were often raised by left-leaning local councils, and which applied only to property owners (or, indirectly, to renters). Using an argument familiar to those following current debates about the personal income tax in the United States, these critics said that because many voters did not pay these taxes, but received the benefit of the government services the taxes paid for, they were biased toward ratcheting up the tax rate to effectively confiscate and redistribute wealth from property owners, which was unfair to those taxpayers and had negative consequences in general. To fix this problem, they believed the tax should instead be applied to everybody alike. And in case the resulting voter pressure wasn’t enough to keep the rates down, the central government should have the ability to cap the poll tax and prevent spendthrift councils from raising it too far.
And so the poll tax was born. It faced immediate opposition, but at first it was unclear how this opposition would take form. The Labour party wanted people to petition and protest against the tax, but they mostly wanted people to resent it and to identify it with the Conservatives because Labour saw it as a winning issue — the party had no interest in trying to actually defeat the tax as they felt it worked to their advantage. In addition, Labour worried that if people tried to avoid the tax, for instance by not registering as residents of a tax district, they might also try to stay off the voter rolls and thus reduce Labour’s pool of potential voters.
To those targeted by the tax, though, resentment and protest were not going to be enough. For people at the bottom of the income and wealth scale, the poll tax was a considerable hit, and resistance wasn’t just an option, but a necessity. Mass-resistance to the tax was organized in a strikingly grassroots fashion, often confronting antagonism not only from the government but also from establishment opposition parties and organized labor.
The resistance to the poll tax was widespread, varied, and ultimately successful. In 1990, Thatcher resigned as prime minister and a new team took over the Conservative party and immediately flung the albatross of the poll tax from its neck, replacing it with a tiered-rate property tax.
Today I’m going to review some of the tactics that made this campaign successful.
The very name “poll tax” was a propaganda coup for the opposition. The government had rolled out the program with the benign-sounding name “community charge,” but the “poll tax” name stuck. Poll taxes are never popular, and resistance to poll taxes has a resonance in British history with previous popular struggles.
The victims of the poll tax were a sympathetic lot, including pensioners, the disabled, poor families, student nurses, and people with elderly live-in family members, and the resistance movement was not shy about using this to its advantage.
Public burning of tax bills, and frequent leafletting and postering kept the resistance in the public eye and made sure people knew there was an ongoing resistance campaign. A community arts group created a travelling performance about the poll tax and how to resist it, and enacted it in various communities.
Some councils tried the old trick of publishing a list of people who were behind on their taxes as a way of “shaming” them before their neighbors. Instead, when this happened, people who were resisting their taxes but who were not on the list wrote letters-to-the-editor of the periodicals where the lists appeared to ask why their names had not been included on the roster.
The resistance movement summoned up images from respected tax resistance campaigns of Britain’s past as a way to make its movement seem more respectable and part of a patriotic lineage. There were references to the women’s suffrage movement and the American revolution, but even more often to Wat Tyler’s poll tax rebellion of .
The phrase “No Poll Tax Here,” seen on many of the signs and posters used by the resistance movement, also hearkened back to the Reform Act-related tax resistance of , in which people placed “No Taxes Paid Here” signs in their windows.
(The anti-poll tax resistance was so popular and successful that nowadays it is the model hearkened back to by movements like the current resistance to the Household Tax in Ireland.)
On at least one occasion, the resistance movement took a door-to-door survey of households both to gauge their interest in resisting, and as a pretense to spread the resistance idea. One result of the surveys was that between the people who planned to pay, and the people who couldn’t or wouldn’t pay was a large (55%) middle-ground of people who were sympathetic with resistance and would be willing to resist if they knew enough people were with them. On seeing this result, Burns says, “we knew that non-payment was going to be massive.”
Another clever variety of survey was this:
[One] group then mass-produced a window poster which said “No Poll Tax Here.”
The poster was dropped through the letter-boxes of 2000 households and the group waited to see who put them up.
Posters appeared in about 100 windows.
Activists the went round and spoke to these people individually, inviting them to attend the next organising meeting…
Implementing the poll tax required registering everyone in the United Kingdom, and keeping track of them as they moved from one council district to another. The people who designed the poll tax program underestimated how difficult it would be to do this adequately, even if there hadn’t been a lack of enthusiasm for the project by the individual councils or outright opposition from those being taxed.
Some of the earliest resistance tactics aimed at exacerbating this problem, and the only tactic promoted by the Labour party that could be described as an actual resistance tactic falls in this category:
[The “Stop It” campaign’s] one serious initiative was the “send it back” campaign, which told activists to return the registration forms and ask awkward questions of the council officers.
Its aim was to delay the system and to make “a legitimate protest.”
Burns notes that this was of questionable effectiveness, in part because it was not pursued very vigorously, and in part because by encouraging people to register in any form — even in a temporarily obstructionist way — this provided registration information to the poll tax collecting authorities that could later be used against resisters.
Clogging the bureaucracy with paperwork was nonetheless an effective tactic, particularly later in the resistance struggle as the councils had to go through the process of pursuing those who did not pay:
…councils were inundated with correspondence.
Many people genuinely didn’t understand what the Poll Tax was about.
Others mounted campaigns to delay registration by endlessly asking questions about the form.
All of these had to be answered.
Councils sat under a mountain of paper.
Everything they did seemed to create more work.
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.
If they attempt to canvas more people for registration they will also produce more people who will refuse to register.
―Poll Tax Legal Group
Whereas in the past, summonses issued by councils against people in arrears on their taxes had been pro forma things, rubber-stamped by judges without the summoned defendant even being expected to turn up — when people were given summonses for their poll taxes, the resistance movement encouraged them to go to court and to use whatever means they could to stretch out the time of their court appearance.
Mathematically, if even a fraction of the people summonsed actually turned up in court and were given even a few minutes of time to explain themselves, the courts would be unable to handle the load. Local Anti-Poll Tax unions trained members in the law so they could help individual resisters stand up for their rights in court.
There were frequent examples in which thousands of summons were dismissed for technical errors or just because the courts were overwhelmed.
In a strategy modeled on one used in South Africa’s apartheid-era townships, neighborhoods declared themselves “no-go” areas for sheriffs, and posted watchouts to warn people if bailiffs or other enforcers were on the way.
Activists in Edinburgh formed a group called “Scum-busters” which was equipped with CB radios and squadrons of cars.
Telephone trees were organised; bailiff companies were monitored; their car registration numbers were taken and distributed to activists in all the local areas.
The Camden group recruited taxi firms to keep an eye out for bailiff vehicles while they did their rounds and to call in their spottings.
The movement tried, without success, to convince local councils — many of which were left-leaning and not sympathetic to Conservative policies — to resign their offices, or to illegally refuse to enact their budgets according to the poll tax law. They also failed to convince the labor union representing the workers who worked in the bureau enacting the poll tax to refuse to implement the tax.
The movement had unexpected allies, of a sort, in the bailiffs who were assigned to distrain goods from tax defaulters. Being used to unorganized, ashamed, impoverished pushovers, these collection agencies were overwhelmed by organized resistance and found themselves unable to recoup the expenses of collection. For this reason some went bankrupt, while others were reluctant for merely financial reasons to handle cases of distraint for failure to pay poll tax.
The movement also used the threat of shunning or boycott to discourage people from cooperating with the poll tax. The government tried to recruit newsstands to be deposit points for poll tax payments, as convenient supplements for government-run depots like post offices. But when the resistance movement got wind of this, “communities made it plain that they would no longer use the shops” of those who collaborated in this way.
In some cases, the intimidation went beyond threats of boycotts and shunning to vandalism and violence:
Windows have been smashed and graffiti daubed over businesses which have become agents… to collect the community charge… one agent in Patchway has now declined taking an agency after a brick was thrown through his window… [another] had the words “Poll Tax scab” and “you’re the first” scrawled in white paint across his window.
A Circle K store in Cardiff… had its door locks jammed with superglue.
Posters implicitly or explicitly threatening bailiffs and judges with lynch mob justice were not uncommon:
One showing a vicious dog, read “Bailiffs? Make my day!”
Another showing a picture of Malcolm X holding a machine gun [sic] looking out from behind the curtains, read: “Bailiffs we’re ready.”
A third showed a picture of a bailiff swinging in a noose.
It read “Dead bailiffs don’t knock on doors.”
In some areas bailiffs and registration officers were photographed and their portraits were reproduced on posters which read “wanted” and listed their “crimes.”
Some canvassers quit their jobs under the pressure of such violent threats, and one committed suicide with his family blaming it on being “sworn at and threatened” by those he encountered. On one occasion, molotov cocktails were thrown at an (unoccupied) poll tax office.
A large group of protesters converged on and surrounded the home of the head of a bailiff company. Finding him not at home, but his garage door open, they held a mock auction of his property.
There is one plausible story in the book of a poll tax office’s database being compromised and a large percentage of registered people being deleted from the system. On one occasion, a bailiff’s vehicle had its tires slashed. On another, resisters occupied the poll tax office, took up stations at the payment windows, and told people who had come by to pay their taxes to go home instead as the tax had been rescinded.
Several attempts by bailiffs to seize property from resisters were foiled by blockades of hundreds of protesters, several deep, surrounding the resister’s home and preventing access. Sometimes this would extend to barricading the streets of a neighborhood, and in at least one case, of an entire town.
There were also several examples of groups of protesters occupying government and law-enforcement offices, courtrooms, and council chambers in such a way as to make business there come to a halt.
A group of legal advisors assembled a series of bulletins and a how-to guide to help people become familiar with their legal rights and with the process the law was likely to take in their cases. This gave them the confidence to pursue their resistance up to the limits of their comfort level, and also the techniques to make their resistance most effective.
Non-registration was as important as non-payment, and had to be pushed early in the campaign, while the Labour and other mainstream liberal opposition was still advising people to register but be angry about it.
When resisters were served with a liability order, it would be accompanied by a questionnaire that included questions about the resister’s employment (which could be used to help the government seize the resister’s paycheck). Although it was legally mandatory to fill out these questionnaires, and penalties were threatened against those who refused, only about 15% of the people who received such questionnaires returned them.
Everybody potentially had a role to play in the resistance. People who did not owe tax could be legal advisors or join phone banks. Even children served as lookouts to watch for bailiffs.
The most successful groups used a bottom-up organizing model, where most decisions were made independently in small, locally-convened groups of resisters. This served to empower individuals and to encourage them to rely on their own initiative rather than on the decisions of a far-off activist elite.
Here’s an interesting technique for bringing people together:
An independent television company approached the Easton group in order to work with us on a film about the Poll Tax.
The film was never shown, but the way the community was engaged in the process of making it is instructive.
The film producers wanted a shot of all the doors in the street, opening one by one as the occupants came out of their houses with banners and signs.
Charles, the local street rep, went round to people’s houses every evening for a week and explained to them what was wanted.
Out of 30 houses in the street (a cul-de-sac) 28 agreed to participate.
The street is multi-racial with a fairly wide class mix.
It was inspiring to see white working class men standing shoulder to shoulder with Asian women and their kids, holding the same banners and engrossed in conversation.
Some of them had never spoken to each other before.
…[V]irtually every one of those households joined the Union, and most still had posters in their windows a year later.
People were brought into the campaign, not through a leaflet or a canvasser, but through an interesting activity.
They didn’t have to go to the campaign, it came to them.
When people received summonses, they could call a hotline number to get an information package in the mail. These numbers were posted on walls and utility poles all over. Volunteers were given legal training so that they could help summonsed people as informal legal advisors, and a more formal and credentialed legal advisory group in turn advised them.
Brian Wright, the first resister imprisoned for failure to pay, got 800 cards and letters from well-wishers while in jail, and hundreds demonstrated outside his cell.
The police cracked down on anti-poll tax demonstrations, in what seemed to the demonstrators like a deliberate attempt to turn them into bloodbaths, intimidate people from participating, and divide the movement into “lawless” and “respectable” factions. This seemed to work to some extent, at first, as some prominent spokespeople for the anti-poll tax movement distanced themselves from those arrested for “rioting.” But an independent group formed and dedicated itself to defending anyone arrested at these demonstrations, and organized itself in such a way as to be solely representative of the defendants (not of any other organization). Volunteers were sent to every police station to welcome demonstrators as they were bailed out, and the organization was able to share resources (like videotape disproving police testimony) and tactics among legal teams representing different defendants.
…a prisoners support group was set up… supporting 27 long-term prisoners. …
The TSDC made sure each prisoner was written to at least once a week by members of the campaign and visits to prisoners were coordinated through the campaign.
Those who had been inside offered support and advice to those who were about to be convicted, and a newsletter was produced which published the letters of prisoners.
The campaign… paid for newspapers and books; a Walkman cassette player for every prisoner; £10 a month income (the maximum they are allowed).
In addition to this some of the families were offered limited financial support for visits…
The resistance campaign that defeated the poll tax was diverse and creative in its tactics, and its success makes it a model worth learning from. Danny Burns’s book about the campaign is a helpful overview of these tactics and of the dynamics of how they were applied.
The 14th International Conference on War Tax Resistance and Peace Tax Campaigns gave conscientious objectors to military taxation from around the world a chance to compare notes on activities in their countries.
Many groups reported a greying, shrinking movement that struggles to maintain enthusiasm or to make significant headway on primary goals. There were a few bits of news that I thought were especially worthy of note:
Conscience UK took the step of asking a professional consultant to do a market analysis. They identified a market segment that is particularly susceptible to the COMT message, and also learned that their messaging was flawed: the new generation identifies the term “conscientious objector” as being archaic and not relevant to them.
Conscience UK has responded to this by recharacterizing its campaign from one that supports conscientious objection to military spending into one that promotes nonmilitary security solutions and wants to give citizens the option to fund them instead of the military. It is collecting examples of successful nonviolent conflict prevention/resolution groups and actions, which it hopes to promote in a “Meet the Real Peacekeepers” campaign. It is also developing a strategy game (tentatively titled “Spend & Defend”) which it hopes to use to highlight how using nonviolent conflict prevention/resolution tactics is more effective and less costly than relying on military solutions.
Another innovative idea comes from Norway. Activists there are forming what they call the Norges Fredsfond (Norwegian Peace Fund) and are soliciting taxpayers to donate to the fund. When they reach a critical mass of contributors the fund will gain tax-exempt status, and so these donations will reduce the contributors’ taxes at their marginal tax rate (typically 28%, according to Fund promotor Øystein Øgaard — which means that, at least from one way of looking at it, an objector can offset his or her war tax by contributing about three times the amount of the tax to the fund).
The fund is being designed as though it were a government-run peace tax fund accepting tax dollars that would then fund peace-promoting projects. They hope that by laying the groundwork of creating and running such a fund, they will be better able to convince the government to legalize COMT and absorb the fund as the lawful COMT alternative fund.
Other than the Norwegian proposal (which is just getting off the ground), there is little new to report on the Peace Tax front. There are many organizations in many countries working for this, and one international group nominally devoted to the same task, but none are making any headway or reporting any big changes in their approaches. Belgium’s campaign is dormant for lack of activist support, and Germany has suspended lobbying activity after their lobbying campaign resulted in negligible results.
Those of you who are following the U.S. version of the legislation can be assured that it will be introduced again this year, without any anticipated changes. The number of cosponsors for the House bill shrunk to eight last year, and four of those have now moved on from the House (the bill was not introduced in the Senate), so this is a challenge. The National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund has set a goal of 19 cosponsors in the House and a sponsor in the Senate this year.
I gave a presentation on the variety of tactics used by tax resistance campaigns throughout history and around the world to augment their campaigns, and tried to explain how reviewing these tactics and those campaigns might help us craft our campaigns to be more successful. You can find the slides I used in this presentation on-line if you’d like a better idea of what I was talking about.
Some bits and pieces from here and there:
In other news:
[T]rust in institutions in the United States crashed, posting the steepest, most dramatic general population decline the Trust Barometer has ever measured.
…The public’s confidence in the traditional structures of American leadership is now fully undermined and has been replaced with a strong sense of fear, uncertainty, and disillusionment.
Among the informed public, the trust crash is even steeper, with trust declining 23 points, dropping the U.S. from sixth to last place out of the 28 countries surveyed.
Vast swaths of Americans no longer trust their leaders. Government had the steepest decline (14 points) among the general population. Fewer than one in three believe that government officials are credible.
