How you can resist funding the government →
other forms our opposition can take →
nonviolent action; “People Power” →
satyagraha
I wrote the entry during the days before the invasion, sampling some style and content from Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau, and Voltairine de Cleyre.
I sent it out to my friends and family on .
I sent the news out to my coworkers.
I’d already spoken to my boss (& my boss’s boss) about my decision earlier in the week, before the invasion.
I’ve gotten a lot of support all around.
One of my coworkers said that although he disagreed with my politics, he admired my principles.
Many of my friends have sent messages of support, ideas for places to live, contact information for other people engaged in similar actions, worried questions, and general bemusement.
My flatmate and another friend of mine were arrested at ’s protests in San Francisco.
I went, but didn’t take part particularly actively.
I went to the Federal Building in mid afternoon, where officers in armor and with automatic weapons had the building surrounded and completely blocked off.
Protesters therefore seemed superfluous, but there were a bunch blocking a nearby intersection.
Splats on the ground in front of the building, I later learned, were from an earlier “vomit in.”
A group of about 20 Quakers held a silent vigil there also, with their signs.
In the Quaker Assembly refused a request of £4000 for an expedition into Canada, replying “it was contrary to their religious principles to hire men to kill one another.”
A friend of mine who is a Quaker, or at least who grew up a Quaker, has little patience for these demonstrations.
First he has an aversion to what he calls “hippies” by which term I think he means to cover the sort of scraggly lefty dopes who always show up at these things spouting simplistic chants and waving signs equating Bush with Hitler and adding that hemp could solve our energy crisis.
I’m with him.
It’s embarrassing to be sharing the anti-war argument with a bunch of idiots.
I’m heartened only slightly by knowing that if I were on the other side of the issue I’d have at least as many morons to deal with.
My friend is also unpersuaded that the recent protests were to good effect.
The protesters tied up the streets, shut down the federal building, stopped much of downtown’s business, kept over 2,500 police officers busy all day, were arrested in numbers of over a thousand, brought traffic downtown and on nearby freeways to a standstill — they more or less accomplished their short-term objectives.
But to what end?
I can see arguments for both sides.
On the one hand, shutting down the federal building (for instance) seems to me a perfectly legitimate tactic.
On the other hand, shutting down streets and businesses is confrontational and hostile towards people who would otherwise be reachable through persuasion and now may be less so.
Some of the protesters were verbally abusive towards the drivers of vehicles they’d stuck in traffic jams, which didn’t make sense to me except as a gloating display of power.
The whole exercise had a flavor of coercion to it — for instance the chant: “Whose Streets? Our Streets!”
The gloating way in which traffic was stopped seemed to say “we’ve got the power now, and we’re going to use it to decide how you’re going to have to spend your time.”
On the one hand, asserting power in an aggressive way seems a natural response to a government that has told you that you’re powerless and it can do what it likes.
On the other hand, I wonder if what we really need is more of an alternative to power politics.
Some of this is probably the influence of the Gandhi I’ve been reading lately.
I’ve been reading what he wrote about civil disobedience to see if maybe I’m a Gandhian pacifist.
I’m not.
Gandhi would have had the Jews willingly give up their lives en masse in hope of shaming the Nazis into reform (I’m not exaggerating, he’s actually got a brief essay to that end):
If I were a Jew and were born in Germany and earned my livelihood there, I would claim Germany as my home even as the tallest gentile German may, and challenge him to shoot me or cast me in the dungeon;
I would refuse to be expelled or to submit to discriminating treatment.
And for doing this, I should not wait for the fellow Jews to join me in civil resistance but would have confidence that in the end the rest are bound to follow my example.
If one Jew or all the Jews were to accept the prescription here offered, he or they cannot be worse off than now.
And suffering voluntarily undergone will bring them an inner strength and joy which no number of resolutions of sympathy passed in the world outside Germany can.
Indeed, even if Britain, France, and America were to declare hostilities against Germany, they can bring no inner joy, no inner strength.
The calculated violence of Hitler may even result in a general massacre of the Jews by way of his first answer to the declaration of such hostilities.
But if the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy that Jehovah had wrought deliverance of the race even at the hands of the tyrant.
For to the godfearing death has no terror.
It is a joyful sleep to be followed by a waking that would be all the more refreshing for the long sleep.
Now it’s possible that if the Jews in Nazi Germany had engaged in a sustained and disciplined satyagraha campaign, this might have offered some useful defense.
But I can’t go along with this romance with suffering and martyrdom.
I read with interest Gandhi’s descriptions of the salt tax revolt in India, but didn’t come away with much that I thought I could use.
Fans of libertariïsh science fiction may enjoy And Then There Were None by Eric Frank Russell ().
The story (complete at that link) tells what happened when a delegation from the Terran Empire dropped in on a planet of anarchist yokels who possess the ultimate one-way super-weapon which their folklore says was given to them by Gandhi.
I realized that the Empire did not deserve loyalty.
I felt that it deserved sedition.
Hence I have made sedition my dharma.
I try to explain it to others that while sedition is our dharma, to be loyal is a sin.
To be loyal to this Government, that is to say to wish it well, is as good as wishing ill of the cores of people of India.
We get nothing in return for the cores of rupees that are squeezed out of the country…
To approve the policy of this Government is to commit treason against the poor.
You should free yourselves from this latter offense.
I believe I have done so.
Hence I have become ready to wage a peaceful war against this Government I am commencing it by violating the salt law.…
No one says that the salt tax is just.
No one says that the expenditure on the army and the administration is justified.
No one holds that the policy of collecting land is justifiable, nor indeed that it is proper to extort 20 to 25 cores from the people after making them drunkards and opium-addicts or breaking up their homes.
Both foreigners and British officers to the fact that all this is true.
However, what can be done about it?
Money is required.
For what purpose is it required?
In order to repress the people.
I gave my opinion that violent struggle for political change in the United States was unwise and likely to be counterproductive.
But I also expressed frustration at the ingrained ineffectiveness of today’s nonviolent protests, and tried to imagine what an effective nonviolent resistance might look like.
I’m not a doctrinaire pacifist the way Gandhi was.
I can imagine causes I would kill for as well as those I would die for.
And yet it seems to me that we’re more likely to reach the goal worth aiming for — and I’m speaking here practically and not just idealistically — through nonviolent means.
I recommended yesterday that “[p]eople who are committed to (or who prefer) nonviolence and who regret the rise of the ‘black bloc’ and other violent protesters should ask how Gandhi prevented the Indian National Congress from choosing the tactics of those in India who were advocating armed insurrection.”
“The answer,” I suggested, was that Gandhi “was more hard-core than they were, and he demonstrated results.”
But I decided to take my own advice and take a closer look, since I’m not a scholar of the Indian independence movement.
I picked up some facts of interest, both about the practical appeal of Gandhi’s program to an Indian National Congress with lofty and concrete goals, and about the importance of, yes, tax resistance in that program.
If we step into the Wayback Machine, we’ll see an India that was fighting for its independence against a hypocritically blind and openly imperalist British empire.
Jawaharlal Nehru remembered:
I have always wondered at and admired the astonishing knack of the British people for making their moral standards correspond with their material interests and for seeing virtue in everything that advances their imperial designs.
[SNC 160]
The violent struggle for independence in India, which Nehru initially supported, predates Gandhi’s nonviolent satyagraha techniques.
In fact Gandhi’s first use of these new tactics in India were in response to the British administration’s draconian anti-terrorist laws which had in turn been designed to fend off the violent independence movement (and which sound awfully familiar):
In the Rowlatt Bills were promulgated.
Their intent was to control a few wartime manifestations of terrorism and to prevent their recurrence during the postwar period… They incensed Indians and provided a focal point for resistance.
The bills made trial without jury permissible for political offenses and extended to the provincial authorities the right to intern suspected terrorists without trial.
On the day they were to become law, Gandhi, fresh from a victorious campaign in Champaran… proposed a nationwide hartal.
[SNC 163]
The hartal was something akin to a general strike.
The “victorious campaign in Champaran” was Gandhi’s first Indian satyagraha campaign, conducted when he was a newcomer on the political scene without a lot of “cred.”
He had been acting independently of existing resistance organizations as the founder of his own group called the “Satyagraha Sabha” because, in his words, “all hope of any of the existing institutions adopting a novel weapon like Satyagraha seemed to me to be in vain” [GAA 456]
The Raj responded to Gandhi’s new national campaign and the outrage over the Rowlatt Bills with violent reprisals, which included perpetrating the vicious Amritsar massacre and imprisoning Gandhi for .
Gandhi’s first national campaign of non-cooperation went nowhere.
Yet the Indian National Congress decided against a violent revolutionary movement and chose Gandhi as its commander-in-chief for the coming independence struggle.
One of Gandhi’s first acts in this capacity was to lead “what amounted to both a training exercise and a preliminary skirmish” [SNC 166] in Bardoli:
The farmers and peasants of Bardoli were being asked to pay a 22 percent land tax increase after a particularly bad agricultural year.
[Vallabhbhai] Patel led them in withholding all taxes until the increase was rescinded.
Solidarity was enforced in part through a social boycott of nonresisters.
The movement lasted , and ended with the resisters paying the tax into a government escrow account, pending an investigation of the fairness of the tax.
The investigation found that the tax was not justified, and it was withdrawn.
The Bardoli experiment demonstrated the power of disciplined collective action.
Nonpayment of taxes was an extremely aggressive act and subject to harsh penalties.
[SNC 166–7]
Gandhi and the Indian National Congress took heart at this victory.
Gandhi wrote about the British: “You have great military resources.
Your naval power is matchless.
If we wanted to fight with you on your own ground, we should be unable to do so, but… we cease to play the part of the ruled.
You may, if you like, cut us to pieces.
You may shatter us at the cannon’s mouth.
If you act contrary to our will, we shall not help you; and without our help, we know that you cannot move one step forward.”
[PNVA 84]
The key, according to Gandhi, was in withdrawal of cooperation.
“We recognize… that the most effective way of gaining our freedom is not through violence.
We will therefore prepare ourselves by withdrawing, so far as we can, all voluntary association from the British Government, and will prepare for civil disobedience, including nonpayment of taxes.
We are convinced that if we can but withdraw our voluntary help and stop payment of taxes without doing violence, even under provocation, the end of inhuman rule is assured.”
[PNVA 84]
The goals of the Indian National Congress were lofty.
“This was the first campaign in which immediate and unconditional independence for India emerged as the explicit objective and it mobilized more Indians for direct action in the service of that objective than any other single campaign” [SNC 157].
And the rhetoric was correspondingly confrontational.
Gandhi wrote: “sedition has become the creed of the Congress… Noncooperation, though a religious and strictly moral movement, deliberately aims at the overthrow of the Government, and is therefore legally seditious in terms of the Indian Penal Code” [PNVA 85].
Gandhi felt that “civil disobedience, once begun this time, cannot be stopped and must not be stopped as long as there is a single resister left free or alive.”
This was not a pastime for hobbyists or cowards.
Tens of thousands were arrested.
Hundreds killed.
Protesters had to be willing to be beaten with steel-tipped canes without even raising a hand to ward off the blows.
The first concentrated target of these protests was the Salt Act:
The existence of a government monopoly on salt, resulting from the Salt Act, perfectly exemplified the perceived evils of colonial rule.
Paying the tax on salt (and thereby providing much of the revenue to run the colonial regime) was more a mild irritant than a desperate hardship for most.
But why pay the bill for their own subjugation?
[SNC 172]
Gandhi also tried to extend this campaign to a boycott of foreign liquor and fabric.
Wearing homespun clothing (and thereby damaging the economy of occupation while at the same time encouraging self-reliance) became a symbol of resistance.
The Salt March, the Dharasana salt factory confrontation (one of the climactic scenes you may remember from Gandhi the movie), and “also the entire Salt Satyagraha campaign, were, technically, utter failures” when seen from the point-of-view of the lofty goals — that is, complete independence.
“Yet now we know that this bloody climax made India’s freedom inevitable, because it showed what the Satyagraha volunteers were made of, and what the oppressive system of government that the British had imposed on India was made of” [ITNOW 113]
Perhaps this is an example of the tendency of losers to use clever fantasy redefinitions to turn their losses into victories, a tendency I complained about on The Picket Line .
But it’s true that India did gain its independence, though , and it’s hard to look at the historical record and not conclude that Gandhi’s campaigns made Indian independence inevitable.
And it’s also true that Indians like Jawaharlal Nehru, who was not initially a proponent of nonviolent resistance, came to have respect for the effectiveness of the technique:
We had accepted that method, the Congress had made that method its own, because of a belief in its effectiveness.
Gandhiji had placed it before the country not only as the right method but as the most effective one for our purpose… In spite of its negative name it was a dynamic method, the very opposite of a meek submission to a tyrant’s will.
It was not a coward’s refuge from action, but a brave man’s defiance of evil and national subjection.
[PVNA 87]
Would that we could say the same for the nonviolent resistance movement in the United States today.
Last night I opened a collection of essays at random and fell into the middle of a discussion by American poet Karl Shapiro about Gandhi (On the Revival of Anarchism, ).
This was too good a coincidence, since I’ve been chewing over Gandhi thoughts in the last couple of Picket Line entries.
Shapiro gushes over Gandhi’s contribution to political thought:
Ahimsa, nonviolence, is a total force and a way of life.
It has the power of Christian humility, upon which it is partly based.
It is one of the noblest ideas advanced by modern man and it is destined to spread throughout the world.
It cannot be employed by governments because governments are by definition committed to violence.
Nonviolence is not a prerogative of governments but of men, even of one man.
One nonviolent man, like Gandhi or Christ, can change history.
Governments can only keep history on the march. Ahimsa can stop history.
These superlatives and sunny predictions are a little over-the-top, but Shapiro hits on something here that I’ve neglected:
Gandhian nonviolence not only can be an effective technique of political force, but it has certain built-in safeguards that make it difficult to use in the service of injustice.
A Gandhian revolution seems like one that is better-protected from devolving, as so many other revolutions have, into one in which the revolutionaries become the oppressors.
Shapiro writes that “governments are by definition committed to violence,” by which I think he is referring to the common political science definition of a government as an institution that has a (perhaps local and occasionally delegated) monopoly on the use of violence.
Could nonviolence be used in the service of injustice? Sure it could.
Nonviolent resistance is a force that can be applied justly or unjustly.
Some injustice, particularly state-protected injustice, masquerades as nonviolence while really having a violent nature.
So long as the threat of violence is enough to subdue challenges, what looks like “peace” prevails.
Nonviolent resistance can be a way of making this hidden violence explicit (and this is certainly one of its risks).
Gene Sharp writes of Gandhi’s nonviolent campaigns in South Africa:
The original “naked force of conquest” had been translated into the sanctity of law.
When the subordinate group challenged any law, even a trivial one, this was seen as “rebellion,” and increased “force” was applied to suppress the rebellion.
[Leo] Kuper points out that civil disobedience brought the violence behind the law and the domination into actual operation.
“Satyagraha strips this sanctity from the laws, and compels the application of sanctions, thus converting domination again to naked force.”
The nonviolent challenge had not created, but only revealed the violence.
“Force is implicit in white domination: the resistance campaign made it explicit.”
Gandhi initially used the English term “passive resistance” to describe his techniques.
But the phrase led to confusion.
Gandhi was once introduced to an English-speaking audience by a friend who inadvertently insulted Gandhi’s work in South Africa — saying that Gandhi’s forces “are weak and have no arms.
Therefore they have taken to passive resistance which is the weapon of the weak.”
Gandhi complained that “passive resistance” was an inappropriate description:
“it was supposed to be a weapon of the weak… could be characterized by hatred, and… could finally manifest itself as violence.”1
The term satyagraha (roughly “truth-force”) was coined and used instead, and Gandhi took pains to emphasize that it was a powerful tool for the strong, not a second-best tactic of the weak.
Satyagraha includes a more radical limitation than the renunciation of violence — in its purest forms it also includes the renunciation of force — except perhaps persuasive moral force — and sets much loftier political goals.
It does not claim victory in the defeat or subjugation of its foes — victory comes when those foes, under no threat aside from that of their own awakened consciences, willingly and gladly change their behavior.
This restricts the choice of nonviolent techniques considerably.
For instance: Would Gandhi have signed off on the lunch counter sit-ins of the American Civil Rights movement?
It is possible that he would have considered them to be too coercive.
Blockades and sit-ins designed to prevent people from doing business or moving about would be considered violations of satyagraha — only sit-ins like those caused when the authorities prevent people from legitimately continuing on their way would be used.2
All lawbreaking under satyagraha is to be done openly, and with the expectation and even invitation of state sanctions.
Would being a necessarily secret station on the Underground Railroad have been acceptable technique for a satyagrahi?
To Gandhi, the means so shaped the nature of the ends that this justified these scrupulous distinctions.
“Let us first take the argument that we are justified in gaining our end by using brute force because the English gained theirs by similar means…
[B]y using similar means we can get only the same thing that they got.
You will admit that we do not want that…
If I want to deprive you of your watch, I shall certainly have to fight for it; if I want to buy your watch, I shall have to pay for it; and if I want a gift, I shall have to plead for it; and, according to the means I employ, the watch is stolen property, my own property, or a donation.”
Satyagraha is designed not just as a tactic or weapon that might be useful for a particular battle, but as a solvent designed to dissolve injustice in general.
“This force,” Gandhi wrote, “is to violence, and, therefore, to all tyranny, all injustice, what light is to darkness.”
Violent, coercive or humiliating resistance techniques have certain pitfalls, for instance:
they might be applied unwisely or against the wrong targets, thereby causing more injustice than they relieve; they might cause such anguish or resentment in their victims as to provoke additional injustice on their part; they might encourage habits of violence, coercion, or humiliation in those who use them that would lead to injustice later.
The genius of satyagraha is that it is a strategy that addresses this.
It is a tool that is very difficult to use to serve an unjust cause, even by the unscrupulous or unwise.
Gandhi seemed at times to be promoting something like the “conservation of energy” principle in physics — as if there were a law of nature that if you add anger or violence to a situation, even in the service of justice, you will just increase the total amount of himsa (roughly, “harm,” the opposite of ahimsa).
Only through satyagraha can you be sure you’re working for the good guys and not just making a bad situation worse.
The satyagrahi eagerly, even masochistically, absorbs the harm inflicted by others, without retaliation or even resentment, and thereby retires that himsa for good.
Understandably, Gandhi, though he considered satyagraha “so simple that it can be preached even to children,” was frequently troubled by campaigns that went awry due to his followers’ imprecise understanding of or uncertain faith in the technique.
He had to pay a lot of attention to education and discipline, especially as his mass campaigns in India developed.
The full satyagraha vows were almost monastic in tone.
Again, I should mention that in spite of all of the pixels I’ve been using this week to talk about Gandhi and his program, I’m not a satyagrahi.
I’m interested in Gandhi’s theories, and I admire him for having followed them courageously and energetically to their logical extremes, but I’m not a true believer.
In an mention of Gandhi on The Picket Line I mocked him for his exceedingly idealistic opinion on how the Jews of Europe ought to respond to the emerging Holocaust (“The calculated violence of Hitler,” he wrote, “may even result in a general massacre of the Jews…
But if the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy that Jehovah had wrought deliverance of the race even at the hands of the tyrant”).
I still have a hard time imagining an appropriate and effective Gandhian response to Hitler.
But a few days after the attacks, I engaged in some light-hearted speculative journalism in which I tried to imagine an alternate universe where Dubya adopted a Gandhiesque defense posture:
On , the impossible — the unthinkable — became reality, world politics were turned on-end, and billions of people watched in rapt attention as their ideas of the possible turned brittle and shattered.
On , the United States put Operation Infinite Justice into effect, sealing our era off from the past even more decisively than the bombing of Hiroshima had done for the previous era.
Before this time, U.S. President George W. Bush was widely seen as an ineffective president — elected by less than the thinnest of margins, quickly losing his base of support in the Senate through misguided hubris, and thought even in Washington circles to be little more than the façade for the spokescommittee representing the real power in the executive branch.
During the initial stages of the crisis that led to Infinite Justice, there was little in President Bush’s actions or demeanor to counteract this impression.
His talk about a “crusade” to “rid the world of evildoers” harmonized well with the public mood, but was interpreted by many as a madman’s call to engage in a reckless, quixotic military adventure.
Perhaps even then, though, there was a method to his madness.
In any case, on the president emerged from a spontaneously-declared day of personal retreat and Christian prayer a changed man.
He took actual charge of the executive branch of which he was already the titular, legal head.
He took on the responsibilities, duties, and command of the U.S. armed forces, where he before had only the title “commander-in-chief.”
He frightened the bejeezus out of his cabinet.
Only a presidential pardon saved Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Colin Powell from being tried for treason after it was later revealed that they consulted with heads of U.S. intelligence about how to “renormalise” the president.
Bush shocked nearly everyone when he addressed the nation on , and announced his plan to drop flower petals on Afghanistan “until it smells like potpourri from border to border.”
He was direct with his unconventional threats to Osama bin Laden, who was widely believed to have inspired or even directed the terrorist attacks that had killed thousands of people and destroyed the World Trade Center in New York City, and who had taken refuge in Afghanistan.
“You have underestimated the American spirit,” Bush said.
“We will find you, we will surround you with bouquets, your feet will be unable to find the ground for the rose petals.
Our children will sneak up on you in the middle of the night and kiss your cheek while you sleep and wish you pleasant dreams.
We will pray for your health in our churches.
If you die, we will pile wreaths so high on your grave that nobody will be able to read the inscription on your tombstone.
We will donate money to charity in your name.
You think you can hide, but you cannot hide.
Wherever you go, you will return to the safety of your bed and find that we have already changed your sheets and washed your socks and put fresh soap in the bathroom.”
It goes without saying that this plan had critics among America’s hawks, but although today you will find few people who claim to have been against Bush’s visionary policy, at the time it was overwhelmingly unpopular.
Bush himself had initially started preparing a military response, and had called for Osama bin Laden to be surrendered “dead or alive.”
Most Americans were caught up in a terrible blood-lust, and reacted to his new speech with frustration and anger.
How many people remember that some of the national guard units called out to maintain order during the flower mobilization had to be used to put down rebellion by other units?
The mobilization itself was unprecedented.
The closest comparison would be the annual Tournament of Roses parade in Pasadena, which was much smaller then, and in any case is orders of magnitude smaller than Operation Infinite Justice.
Refrigerator trucks loaded with ornamental flower petals stretched in huge cross-country caravans that took them to coastal bases where transport planes carried them to the skies above Kabul.
Eventually, supplies of ornamental flowers ran low, and those who picked the petals were unable to keep up with the demand.
By the time of the Afghani surrender on , the U.S. was resorting to bombardments of whole daisies and dandelions.
At first, Afghanistan’s ruling Taleban government remained defiant — but their morale dropped significantly as footage of angry crowds burning effigies of Bush and the American flag under skies darkened by thousands of flower petals resulted in widespread ridicule throughout the Muslim world.
After the capitulation, other nations were quick to seize on the new form of warfare.
Russia was first to join the race, although early attempts were poorly executed, such as when Vladimir Putin ordered thousands of fully-sized ash trees to be dropped on Chechen rebels.
China and Taiwan almost immediately began flowerstrikes against each other.
Rebels in Chiapas began blanketing Mexico City with candy-filled pinatas in daring guerrilla raids.
And almost overnight, the world changed.
We can hardly recognize familiar emotions in the faces we see in pictures from that earlier era.
I’m basing these guesses about how Gandhi would apply his theories to the American civil rights campaign on how Gandhi advised the satyagrahis engaged in a campaign against the policy of excluding “untouchables” from the Vykom temple.
One wrote to him asking whether they should consider blockading the temple and preventing orthodox Hindus from entering until they allowed “untouchables” to worship there.
Gandhi responded, in part: “Such blocking the way will be sheer compulsion…
[The word] Satyagraha is often most loosely used and is made to cover veiled violence.
But as the author of the word I may be allowed to say that it excludes every form of violence, direct or indirect, veiled or unveiled, and whether in thought, word or deed…
Satyagraha is gentle, it never wounds.
It must not be the result of anger or malice.
It is never fussy, never impatient, never vociferous.
It is the direct opposite of compulsion.
It was conceived as a complete substitute for violence.”
On the other hand, Gandhi endorsed sit-ins at the blockades where police were preventing “untouchables” and their supporters from approaching the temple — these sit-ins were not coercive, but were reactions to the illegitimate coercion of the police.
It is guesswork to try to draw analogies to the U.S. civil rights movement, but I can certainly imagine Gandhi using similar logic to endorse the bus boycott, for instance, but not the lunch counter sit-ins.
My imaginary friend Ishmael Gradsdovic is, to put it mildly, an eccentric fellow.
For instance, he claims to have a tapeworm that is clairvoyant and that communicates with him telepathically.
Even knowing Ishmael as well as I do, I can’t tell whether this is a colorful metaphor, an artistic conceit, a schizophrenic delusion, or the honest truth in some way I can’t even imagine.
When Ishmael read my recent Picket Line entries concerning Gandhi and his satyagraha theory, he told me that coincidentally one of the things his tapeworm does is to channel the spirit of Gandhi, and that if I liked, he would try to arrange an interview.
How could I resist?
So what follows is, I should stress, an interview with the spirit of Gandhi, as channeled through a clairvoyant tapeworm that is communicating telepathically with an imaginary friend of mine.
Any resemblance to the actual opinions of Mohandas K. Gandhi may have been lost in transit.
Picket Line:
It is a delight, an honor and a surprise to be able to interview you Mr. Gandhi.
I am conducting this interview for my weblog — a sort of newsletter — which is concerned with how individuals can best respond to war and other state injustice, in particular through tax resistance.
I’m very interested in your thoughts on this subject.
Gandhi:
I’m actually fairly up on current events and I know what a “weblog” is.
Being a spirit isn’t as isolating as it is sometimes made out to be.
♇:
Then you know about the situation in Iraq and the growing belligerence and imperialism of my country.
Gandhi:
Of course.
♇:
Do you think tax resistance is a useful response to this?
Am I barking up the right tree?
Gandhi:Withholding payment of taxes is one of the quickest methods of overthrowing a government.
But there is no movement in America that has evolved the degree of strength and discipline which are necessary for conducting a successful campaign of non-payment of taxes.
Civil non-payment of taxes is the last stage in non-cooperation.
I wouldn’t recommend it until a movement has put other forms of civil disobedience into practice.
♇:
I’m considering it less as a revolutionary act by a movement and more as a way of ending personal collaboration with injustice.
Gandhi:
In India, non-payment of taxes meant confiscation of property and the threat of impoverishment.
And this may be why I am so cautious about advocating it.
I didn’t want people to face this sort of punishment unless they were fully prepared to respond to it fearlessly and nonviolently.
If you have a way to avoid paying taxes without being subject to penalty, then the worry is a different one:
your protest may not involve sufficient sacrifice.
♇:
I’m not really aiming at sacrifice so much as noncollaboration.
Gandhi:
There are two ways people collaborate with an unjust state.
One is to support it directly, by working for it and paying taxes to it and so forth.
The other is to depend on it and therefore allow it to justify itself.
If you depend on the state for protection, for justice, to educate your children, and so forth, you might as well be wearing the state’s flag on your uniform.
You may need to beware of relying on the state to provide you with a relatively risk-free way to feel like you are aloof from it!
♇:Touché! You’re starting to sound like an anarchist!
♇:
But at some point if the government is doing evil, it’s proper to consider yourself an enemy of the government and to try to obstruct it, isn’t it?
Gandhi:
I would say that it remains proper to consider yourself a friend of the government and to redouble your efforts to improve it — but this may take the form of refusing obedience to law and renouncing the benefits of the schools and courts and so on.
You’re not being a friend to an alcoholic when you buy him a drink, and you’re not being a friend to the government when you cooperate in its corruption and devolution into injustice.
♇:
If my friend the alcoholic gets drunk and takes up a gun and starts waving it around, or dashes out to the car with keys in hand, or starts beating her children — maybe the best thing for me to do in order to reduce the suffering she might cause is to restrain her by force and to lock her in a closet until she sobers up.
Is this utilitarian calculation, which seems to violate ahimsa, an incorrect one?
Why wouldn’t this sort of logic also apply to acting against the evils of armies or governments?
Gandhi:Your reasoning is plausible.
It has deluded many, and I once found arguments like this compelling.
I think I know better now.
If your goal is to take control of a violent apparatus like the state because you think you can use it more wisely, then a violent technique might be appropriate, but your success will be to have risen by violence to being a powerful violent man.
Your belief that there is no connection between the means and the end is a great mistake.
In the case of your alcoholic friend, I think I can imagine cases like the one you describe in which you could use force not against but wholly in the benefit of your friend — although it might not seem like it to her at the time.
Similarly, it is not forbidden to grab a child to prevent him from rushing out into traffic — this is physical force but not himsa.
Do not confuse this with fighting a government or army with violence.
You do not shoot a man with love for him in your heart.
♇:
I can imagine myself engaging in coercive or violent actions like blockades, sabotage, or even killing in order to stop terrible injustice and suffering, such as has been committed so frequently by states in recent history.
In fact, in these cases I imagine, I think I would feel cowardly and ineffective if I had to wait and raise an army of satyagrahis to patiently convert the enemy.
Gandhi:
This is the “what about Hitler” argument against reliance on non-violent resistance.
Violent replies to Hitler’s violent aggression failed, and failed again, and failed again, and then finally were triumphant (but it could just as plausibly have gone the other way).
Non-violent replies were rarely tried, and never in any sustained and disciplined way.
It is irresponsible to draw the conclusion from this that the only sensible response to Hitler is a violent one.
I do believe that where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence I would advise violence.
Fortunately, these are not the only choices.
♇:
What response would you suggest to a Hitler?
What if Imperial Japan had invaded India during World War Ⅱ?
This sort of disobedience is not the path you’re following with your tax resistance, if I understand it properly.
There are two varieties of civil disobedience: Aggressive and defensive.
Aggressive civil disobedience targets the laws of the state in order to revolt against the state; although under ordinary circumstances those laws are not themselves offensive, the state that benefits from them is.
Defensive civil disobedience, on the other hand, is disobedience of such laws as are in themselves bad and obedience to which would be inconsistent with one’s self-respect or human dignity.
Usually, tax resistance is of the aggressive sort — done by people who aren’t on principle opposed to taxes, but who want to defund the government they are opposed to.
Your tax resistance seems to be defensive in that you consider it to be inconsistent with your moral beliefs to pay taxes because of the use the tax money is put to.
It’s an interesting border case.
If you decide to go from defensive to aggressive civil disobedience, I would urge you to do so as a satyagrahi.
♇:
But how?
If you want to become a soldier, you enlist.
If you want to become a satyagrahi… what, exactly?
I know it is “devotion to Truth” but that’s a little light on specifics.
Can you give me some idea of what is involved?
♇:
That is strict discipline.
It seems, well, puritanical almost to the point of anorexia in its demands of self-control and renunciation.
If you expect everybody to become a saint before they can become a satyagrahi then I expect that the nonviolent army of satyagrahis will be a long time coming.
Gandhi:
First: I do not regard the force of numbers as necessary in a just cause.
In such a cause every man can have his remedy.
Second: I have found that the degree of success in a satyagraha campaign is in proportion to the purity of the satyagraha practiced by the participants — not to their numbers — and this inspires me to ask for the strictest discipline, even though it may sound “anorexic” to you.
People who aren’t ready to adopt satyagraha can work for justice in other ways, but being part of a civil resistance movement using satyagraha requires a single-minded dedication and devotion that is stricter than but in some ways comparable to military training.
♇:
It seems like satyagraha is a fairly brittle technique.
To be effective it has to be practiced with a daunting purity both of action and of motive.
It doesn’t take much violent thought or deed, either by an erstwhile practitioner of satyagraha or by an agent provocateur to make it ineffective.
Gandhi:
I think we did pretty good work in South Africa and India using satyagraha — and none of us, me included, were saints.
As I said, the more pure the satyagraha, the better the results, which is like saying “the drier the powder, the more effective the shooting” but when the time comes to fight, you use the powder you’ve got, as dry as you’ve managed to keep it.
Sometimes I called for mass nonviolent action among undisciplined volunteers in order to provide a safety valve to release tensions that would otherwise have led to violent uprisings.
I also sometimes regretted calling for actions before the required discipline was in place.
All in all I would prefer an utter failure achieved with non-violence unimpaired than to depart from non-violence even slightly in order to achieve a doubtful success.
Satyagraha is a new science, it is not perfectly understood, and there are risks involved in using it.
When the world becomes more familiar with its use and when it has had a series of successful demonstrations, there will be less risk in civil disobedience than in aviation.
♇:
Thank you.
I spent in the local university library, digging into whatever vein curiosity revealed, and predictably I started out by researching tax resistance.
I thumbed through Margaret Hirst’s The Quakers in Peace and War to find out a bit more about how war tax resistance evolved as an element of the Quaker tradition.
I read through a couple of sections of Nina Mba’s Nigerian Women Mobilized about the “Women’s War” in Nigeria, which was at least in part a tax revolt and was accompanied by or was in the form of massive tax resistance.
I read up on nonviolent resistance and tax resistance in the campaign against apartheid South Africa (I hadn’t really reflected before on how even though the ANC had abandoned nonviolence, it was the nonviolent tactics and campaigns that really won that war).
I found the on-line PDF of Strategic Nonviolent Conflict: Lessons from the Past, Ideas for the Future by doing a card catalog search, which is an awfully roundabout way of bypassing Google, but I hadn’t seen this before.
Then I did a spin through the stacks leafing through books covering the revolution in India and the satyagraha campaign there.
I’m not exactly confident of its likelihood, but I’m more and more convinced that if a successful and beneficial transformation of American politics and policy happens, it will be as the result of a struggle in the Gandhian mold.
I say this as someone who is not a pacifist and who does not have much patience with Gandhi’s religious folderol or with the American peace movement’s cargo cult-like adoption of the trappings of his strategy.
I think that the American opposition, having given the “lesser evil” voting strategy much more of a fighting chance than it deserved, should abandon it now without a backwards-glance, and adopt a Gandhian strategy of non-cooperation with what will of course be an increasingly awful federal government.
By this, I don’t mean to say that we should renounce violence.
We don’t need to.
We’ve been a goddamned bunch of pantywaists as it is — I’m supposed to waste my breath saying “no more throwing rocks at Starbucks, you naughty punk rockers!”?
When I say we should take up a Gandhian strategy I mean exactly the opposite of backing off or throttling down, I mean buckling down and ramping up a sustained campaign of non-cooperation, self-improvement, and social transformation.
And I’m patient.
(I’d better be.)
When we’re ready, when this gut anguish we’re feeling today turns into something that motivates us in a sustained way, then we will be able to summon the courage and discipline to engage in such a campaign.
And when we do engage in such a campaign, and only then, will we be taken seriously in ways that matter.
SATISH KUMAR: For the you have been on the march.
What are you aiming at?
VINOBA BHAVE:
At revolution.
In other words, I am aiming at the liberation of people from all kinds of suppression and exploitation.
We need to be liberated from the institutions which exercise authority in the name of service.
Institutionalized religion, for example, is an oppressive obstacle to the free experience of spirituality.
Similarly, institutionalized politics in the form of state, parliament, and parties have killed the sense of participation.
SK: You want to liberate people from the government, but some good governments do a lot of good work.
VB:
Good work which is done by government services is very far from good in its effects upon the minds of the people.
When elections take place the ruling party will ask for your votes because of all the good work they have done.
If it is true that they have done good work, the people will be oppressed by the sheer weight of their charity and that is exactly what saddens me.
SK: Why don’t you protest strongly when the government does something wrong?
VB:
It is true that I do not make such protest, but I do raise my voice when the government does something good.
There is no need for me to protest against the government’s faults, it is against its good deeds that my protests are needed.
I have to tell the people what sheep they are.
Is it a matter of rejoicing if you all turn into sheep and tell me how well the shepherds look after you?
What am I to say?
It seems to me that it would be better if the shepherds neglected their duty.
The sheep would then, at least, realize that they are sheep.
They might then come to their senses and remember that they are, after all, not sheep but men, men capable of managing their own affairs.
This is why my voice is raised in opposition to good government.
Bad government has been condemned long ago by many people.
We know very well that bad governments should not be allowed but what seems to me to be wrong is that we should allow ourselves to be governed at all, even by a good government.
To me the politics of government is not people’s politics.
We must find the courage to believe that we are capable of managing our own affairs and that no outside authority can stop us.
SK: It seems that you want no government at all, Vinoba.
VB:
I want self-government.
SK: What is the characteristic of selfgovernment?
VB:The first characteristic is not to allow any outside power in the world to exercise control over one’s self and the second characteristic is not to exercise power over any other.
These two things together make self-government and people’s politics.
No submission and no exploitation.
This can be brought into being only by a revolution in the people’s conscience and mind.
My program of giving and sharing is designed to bring it about.
I am continually urging that believers in nonviolence should use their strength to establish a government by the people and put an end to government by politicians.
There is a false notion in the world that governments are our saviors and that without them we should be lost.
People imagine that they cannot do without a government.
I can understand that people cannot do without agriculture or industry, that they cannot get on without love and culture, music and literature, but governments do not come into this category.
I would suggest that all our administrators and politicians should be given leave for two years, just to see what happens in their absence.
Would any of the ordinary work of the world come to an end?
Would the dairyman no longer make butter or the market gardener not sell vegetables?
Would people stop getting married and having babies?
If the government were to take leave for two years it would destroy the popular illusion that a government is indispensable.
SK: But some kind of government will always exist.
Can you give some constructive suggestion to make governments better?
VB:
It is difficult to make governments better, but if there is any ideal form of government then I would say that the best kind of government is the one where it is possible to doubt whether any government exists at all.
We ourselves should be seeing to the affairs of our own village, or community, or town, or locality, instead of doing just the opposite and handing over all power to the center.
The less activity, the better the government.
An ideal government would have no armies, no police force, and no penalties.
The people would manage their own affairs, listening rationally to advice and allowing themselves to be guided by moral considerations.
SK: The need for government varies when we have conflicting situations and a clash of interests between the classes.
VB:
It is impossible for the real interests of any one person to clash with those of others.
There is no opposition between the real interests of any one community, class, or country and those of any other community, class or country.
The very idea of conflicting interests is a mistaken one. One man’s interests are another’s, and there can be no clash.
If I am intelligent and in good health, this is in your interest.
If I get water when I am thirsty it benefits not only me but you also.
If we imagine that our interests conflict, it is because we have a false notion of what constitutes our interests.
SK: You command a significant influence on the government.
Why do you not insist that the government passes a law to socialize the land?
Why do you have to wander so from village to village?
VB:
The spreading of revolutionary ideas is no part of the government’s duty.
In fact, revolutions cannot be organized and brought about by the established institutions of politics.
The government can only act on an idea when it has been generally accepted, and then it is compelled to act on it.
We say that in India we have democracy, then the government is the servant and the people are the masters.
When you want to get an idea accepted, do you explain it to the servant or to the master?
If you put it before the master and he approves, he will instruct his clerk to prepare the deed of gift.
That is why I am putting my ideas before you — it is you, the people, who are the masters.
SK: If the revolutionaries are in power they can bring revolution in the society.
VB:
As I explained, the authority of the government is incapable of bringing about any revolutionary change among the people.
The day revolution gets the backing of the government it declines, becomes bureaucratic, institutionalized, and conformist.
A very good example is the Russian revolution.
You can see how revolutionaries become power mongers and office-seekers.
Similarly, the decline of the Buddhist faith in India dates from the day when it received the backing of the governmental power.
When the Christian faith was backed by the imperial power of Constantine, it became Christian in name only.
The power of religion practiced by the first disciples of Christ was seen no more and hypocrisy entered the life of the church.
In our own country history shows that when the movements of revolution and religious reforms won royal favor they were joined by thousands who were not really revolutionaries at all but merely loyal devotees of the ruling king.
Therefore, do not allow yourself to imagine that revolutionary thinking can be propagated by governmental power.
On the contrary, if there should be any genuine encounter between them, revolution would destroy the power of the state.
The two can no more exist together than darkness and the sun.
The exercise of power over others is not in accordance with revolutionary principles.
It is clear from a study of history that real social progress has been due to the influence of independent revolutionaries.
No king exercised the influence which Buddha exerted and still exerts on the life of India.
The Lord Buddha renounced his kingdom, turned his back on it, and after his enlightenment the first person he initiated was the king, his own father.
Later came the emperor Ashoka and a political revolution took place in India.
SK: Until we achieve this utopia what should we do?
VB:We should do everything at our command so that the need for a government should progressively diminish.
In the final analysis the government would give up all executive power and act in a purely advisory capacity.
As the morals of the people improve, the area of the authoritarian government will be reduced and government orders will be fewer and fewer.
In the end it will issue no orders at all.
The ultimate goal of my movement is freedom from government.
I use the words “freedom from government” and not absence of government.
Absence of government can be seen in a number of societies where no order is maintained and where anti-social elements do as they please.
A society free from government does not mean a society without order.
It means orderly society but one in which administrative authority rests at the grass roots level and every member of the community has active participation and involvement.
For this reason the purpose of my march is to rouse the people to an awareness of their own strength, to get them to stand on their own feet.
I want to see all the village lands in the hands of the village and not under private ownership.
And to that end I am trying to get the common people to realize their power and organize it independently.
SK: How will you go about bringing this people’s power?
VB:
The establishment of such a participatory, nonbureaucratic, self-directing society calls for a network of self-sufficient units.
Production, distribution, defense, education, everything should be localized.
The center should have the least possible authority.
We shall thus achieve decentralization through regional selfsufficiency.
I do not expect that every village should immediately produce all its own needs.
The unit for self-sufficiency may be a group of communities.
In short, all our planning will be directed towards a progressive abolition of government control by means of regional selfreliance.
Our goal should be that every individual becomes as self-reliant as possible.
SK: Is that what you call freedom?
VB:
Yes.
Because no real freedom exists today and we shall not get it so long as we carry on with our representative democracy.
We shall not get it until we decide to make our own plans with the use of our own brains and carry them out in our own strength.
As long as a few individuals are given all the power and the rest of the people hope that the government will protect them, this is not real freedom.
The present kind of democracy is a guided democracy, whereas in a free society we will have a direct democracy.
We shall not hand over all the public services to the few representatives.
In America all the power is in the hands of the President.
If he should make an error of judgment he might set the whole world on fire.
It is a terrible thing that such power should be entrusted to any representative.
That is why throughout the world today there is no real freedom but only an illusion of freedom.
To obtain this real freedom, we must form village councils, community councils, peasants’ councils, workers’ councils, on a small scale, and these councils should run their own affairs, settle their own quarrels, decide how their children should be educated, undertake their own defense, and manage their own markets.
This way there will be a general renewal of self-confidence and common people everywhere will get experience of public affairs.
SK: The proposal you are making will turn the whole system upside down and social life will be upset.
Does this fit in with your philosophy of non violence?
VB:
To many people nonviolence has come to mean that society should be disturbed as little as possible.
Our present set-up should continue to function without hindrance.
Some people understand by nonviolence merely that the changes necessary will be carried out extremely gradually.
Let there be no painful sudden change and so nonviolence is rendered innocuous.
But this way revolutions are never carried out.
Things remain pretty much as they are and people get satisfaction by adopting an ideal, paying it lip service, and talking about it.
This concept of nonviolence is very dangerous for revolution and very convenient to the cause of lethargic society.
So I beg you not to adopt any “go slow” methods of nonviolence.
In nonviolence you must go full steam ahead, if you want the good to come speedily you must go about it with vigor.
A merely soft, spineless ineffective kind of nonviolence will actually encourage the growth of the status quo and all the forces of a violent system which we deplore.
A non-revolutionary nonviolence is a conservative force and, therefore, it is not nonviolence.
Nonviolence is an active and effective weapon to fight against injustice and at the same time to build an alternative society.
Gandhi outlined three elements for social transformation and saw them as intertwined.
Social change will not come about by just doing one of them.
The three elements are personal transformation, political action, and constructive program.
Personal Transformation:
Gandhi saw this as a beginning, because even if each of us becomes “peaceful,” we still need to do more.…
In addition, personal transformation includes understanding the choices that we make.
In my own work with high school students, it is apparent that young people need to know about choices — how we live our lives, lifestyles choices, how we relate to others.
This can be the most important part of a workshop with young people, but it is something each and every one of us must explore.
War tax resistance is certainly an aspect of personal transformation, as we make decisions about what we do with our money, what we choose to support or refuse to support.
Political Action:
When asked what is nonviolent action, in the U.S. we often think of civil disobedience or particular actions.
I do an exercise in nonviolence trainings where I ask small groups to list 10 wars.
They do this quite quickly, but then they struggle to come up with 10 nonviolent campaigns.…
And usually they list tactics and movements rather than campaigns, not understanding the difference.
In contrast, when I’ve been in India, people describe nonviolent action as what they are doing in the villages, the constructive work they are doing.
Effective nonviolence is strategic.
Too often we see a problem but only think of single actions in response.
We don’t think strategically about a longer term response.
In her excellent speech at the opening of the World Social Forum in , Arundhati Roy said that even though the international anti-war outpouring on , was wonderful, it was a weekend, and, “Holiday protests don’t stop wars.”
In Gandhian campaigns of nonviolent action against specific evils, noncooperation is a key.
Gandhi’s Salt March initially involved only 80 people, but the act of picking up the salt from the sea and making their own salt in defiance of British taxed salt was revolutionary.
The power of the Salt March was that it became a massive campaign — there was something everyone could do.
Some packaged the salt, some sold it, all could refuse to buy the taxed salt and buy the alternative.
The people of India were saying no to the Empire and that became the turning point in their struggle for independence.
We say no as WTRs.
People in the military are saying no.
We need to explore more in our culture how we say no, how we noncooperate, and acknowledge that there is a network that exists that helps this happen.
Military resisters are not alone by and large.
These days Cindy Sheehan has helped galvanize the network and make it more connected.
To be effective political action, noncooperation needs to be one aspect of a strategic nonviolent campaign that might include other tactics such as protest, public pressure from boycotts, etc.
War tax resisters tend to be very experienced with the two elements above.
It is the third of Gandhi’s elements that we need to study and add to our efforts as we work for social transformation.
Constructive Program:
We are quick to identify and protest the things we don’t like in our society, but we are often asked “so what are you for?”
As revolutionaries we need to start building a new society in the shell of the old.
Gandhi said we should not wait for one to crumble before starting the other.
Constructive program brings people together to do the kind of community work that is empowering, bringing them to a point of self reliance and being ready to develop a new society.
To outline a nonviolent campaign involving all these elements, we need to begin to identify where the change is needed.…
When we talk about the “shell of the old” in the U.S., we can see with Hurricane Katrina that we are one hurricane away from being a third world country.
The structure is not working for people.
It is a façade that is only working for the people at the top.
The poverty, classism, and racism of our society was exposed by the winds and floods of Katrina.
Gandhi was working with a huge society of very poor people.
As we look at our nation of very poor and very rich people, the things that we identify as underlying our constructive program will be much different.
There is also the issues of who defines what the elements of a constructive program would look like in this society?
I think it is a continuous group process that needs to include those most in need of a new society, and those most interested in building one.
That is our challenge.
Gandhi was, among many other things of course, a strategist who as commander-in-chief of the Indian independence movement accomplished some of history’s most successful and organized tax resistance campaigns.
is the 100th anniversary of what Gandhi called — a campaign he helped lead in South Africa against one of the repulsive and racist laws that were perennially fashionable there.
He compared the campaign he was to help lead to the ongoing Russian Revolution:
It is interesting to compare the reactions of the Russian people to tyranny with our own reaction to it.
Under British rule, we draft petitions, carry on a struggle through the Press, and seek justice from the King.
All this is perfectly proper.
It is necessary, and it also brings us some relief.
But is there anything else that we should do?
And, can we do it?
We shall think of these questions later.
For the present, let us see what Russia is doing.
The people there, both rich and poor, do not send petitions and stop there.
The oppression there is such that it has given rise to a number of anarchists.
They believe that all rulers are oppressive, and the State should therefore be done away with.
To achieve this end, people in Russia kill the officials openly as well as secretly.
In this, however, they are making a mistake.
Such thoughtless adventures only serve to keep the minds of both the rulers and the ruled in a state of constant tension.
All the same, it is admitted on all hands that men taking such risks must be brave and patriotic.
Even young girls set out on such adventures and court risks.
A book was recently published about the lives of young women who have thus made themselves immortal.
Knowing that death is certain, these fearless girls, actuated by patriotism and a spirit of self-sacrifice, take the lives of those whom they believe to be the enemies of the country, and themselves meet an agonising death at the hands of officials.
Facing such risks, they serve their country selflessly.
It will be no wonder if such a country succeeds in achieving freedom from tyranny.
The only reason why it has not become free immediately is that such patriotism is misdirected, as we have pointed out before, and results in bloodshed.
In consequence, these people cannot, according to divine law, obtain any immediate benefit.
Do our people display patriotism of this order?
We have regretfully to say “No”.
No one can be blamed, for we have not yet been trained for this.
We are children in political matters.
We do not understand the principle that the public good is also one’s own good.
But the time has now come for us to outgrow this state of mind.
We need not, however, resort to violence.
Neither need we set out on adventures, risking our lives.
We must, however, submit our bodies to pain, and the new Transvaal Ordinance offers an excellent opportunity.
The Ordinance represents the limit of oppression.…
[I]f, disregarding our attempts at gentle persuasion, the Government enforces the Ordinance, Indians will not abide by it; they will not [re-]register themselves, nor will they pay fines; they will rather go to gaol.…
A mass meeting was held on at which this resistance campaign was launched.
Gandhi’s speech on that day, which he said later was delivered unprepared in response to the surprise proposal by one attendee that everyone present take a solemn oath to oppose the hated Ordinance, is a stirring bit of rhetoric that compares favorably in this American’s eyes with our “Declaration of Independence”:
I wish to explain to this meeting that there is a vast difference between this resolution and every other resolution we have passed up to date and that there is a wide divergence also in the manner of making it.
It is a very grave resolution we are making, as our existence in South Africa depends upon our fully observing it.
The manner of making the resolution suggested by our friend is as much of a novelty as of a solemnity.
I did not come to the meeting with a view to getting the resolution passed in that manner, which redounds to the credit of Sheth Haji Habib as well as it lays a burden of responsibility upon him.
I tender my congratulations to him.
I deeply appreciate his suggestion, but if you adopt it you too will share his responsibility.
You must understand what is this responsibility, and as an adviser and servant of the community, it is my duty fully to explain it to you.
We all believe in one and the same God, the differences of nomenclature in Hinduism and Islam notwithstanding.
To pledge ourselves or to take an oath in the name of that God or with Him as witness is not something to be trifled with.
If having taken such an oath we violate our pledge we are guilty before God and man.
Personally I hold that a man, who deliberately and intelligently takes a pledge and then breaks it, forfeits his manhood.
And just as a copper coin treated with mercury not only becomes valueless when found out but also makes its owner liable to punishment, in the same way a man who lightly pledges his word and then breaks it becomes a man of straw and fits himself for punishment here as well as hereafter.
Sheth Haji Habib is proposing to administer an oath of such a serious character.
There is no one in this meeting who can be classed as an infant or as wanting in understanding.
You are all well advanced in age and have seen the world; many of you are delegates and have discharged responsibilities in a greater or lesser measure.
No one present, therefore, can ever hope to excuse himself by saying that he did not know what he was about when he took the oath.
I know that pledges and vows are, and should be, taken on rare occasions.
A man who takes a vow every now and then is sure to stumble.
But if I can imagine a crisis in the history of the Indian community of South Africa when it would be in the fitness of things to take pledges, that crisis is surely now.
There is wisdom in taking serious steps with great caution and hesitation.
But caution and hesitation have their limits, which we have now passed.
The Government has taken leave of all sense of decency.
We would only be betraying our unworthiness and cowardice, if we cannot stake our all in the face of the conflagration which envelopes us and sit watching it with folded hands.
There is no doubt, therefore, that the present is a proper occasion for taking pledges.
But every one of us must think out for himself if he has the will and the ability to pledge himself.
Resolutions of this nature cannot be passed by a majority vote.
Only those who take a pledge can be bound by it.
This pledge must not be taken with a view to produce an effect on outsiders.
No one should trouble to consider what impression it might have upon the local Government, the Imperial Government, or the Government of India.
Every one must only search his own heart, and if the inner voice assures him that he has the requisite strength to carry him through, then only should he pledge himself and then only would his pledge bear fruit.
A few words now as to the consequences.
Hoping for the best, we may say that, if a majority of the Indians pledge themselves to resistance and if all who take the pledge prove true to themselves, the Ordinance may not even be passed and, if passed, may be soon repealed.
It may be that we may not be called upon to suffer at all.
But if on the one hand one who takes a pledge must be a robust optimist, on the other hand he must be prepared for the worst.
It is therefore that I would give you an idea of the worst that might happen to us in the present struggle.
Imagine that all of us present here numbering 3,000 at the most pledge ourselves.
Imagine again that the remaining 10,000 Indians take no such pledge.
We will only provoke ridicule in the beginning.
Again, it is quite possible that in spite of the present warning some or many of those who pledge themselves might weaken at the very first trial.
We might have to go to gaol, where we might be insulted.
We might have to go hungry and suffer extreme heat or cold.
Hard labour might be imposed upon us.
We might be flogged by rude warders.
We might be fined heavily and our property might be attached and held up to auction if there are only a few resisters left.
Opulent today, we might be reduced to abject poverty tomorrow.
We might be deported.
Suffering from starvation and similar hardships in gaol, some of us might fall ill and even die.
In short, therefore, it is not at all impossible that we might have to endure every hardship that we can imagine, and wisdom lies in pledging ourselves on the understanding that we shall have to suffer all that and worse.
If someone asks me when and how the struggle may end, I may say that, if the entire community manfully stands the test, the end will be near.
If many of us fall back under storm and stress, the struggle will be prolonged.
But I can boldly declare, and with certainty, that so long as there is even a handful of men true to their pledge, there can only be one end to the struggle, and that is victory.
A word about my personal responsibility.
If I am warning you of the risks attendant upon the pledge, I am at the same time inviting you to pledge yourselves, and I am fully conscious of my responsibility in the matter.
It is possible that a majority of those present here might take the pledge in a fit of enthusiasm or indignation but might weaken under the ordeal, and only a handful might be left to face the final test.
Even then there is only one course open to the like of me, to die but not to submit to the law.
It is quite unlikely but even if every one else flinched leaving me alone to face the music, I am confident that I would never violate my pledge.
Please do not misunderstand me.
I am not saying this out of vanity, but I wish to put you, especially the leaders upon the platform, on your guard.
I wish respectfully to suggest it to you that, if you have not the will or the ability to stand firm even when you are perfectly isolated, you must not only not take the pledge yourselves, but you must declare your opposition before the resolution is put to the meeting and before its members begin to take pledges and you must not make yourselves parties to the resolution.
Although we are going to take the pledge in a body, no one should imagine that default on the part of one or many can absolve the rest from their obligation.
Every one should fully realize his responsibility, then only pledge himself independently of others and understand that he himself must be true to his pledge even unto death, no matter what others do.
A frequent challenge to conscientious tax resisters whose resistance leads to fines and penalties is “won’t the government just end up with more in the end?”
All the readers of Young India may not know that Ahmedabad came under a heavy fine for the misdeeds of the .
The fine was collected from the residents of Ahmedabad but some were exempted at the discretion of the collector.
Among those who were called upon to pay the fines were income-tax payers.
They had to pay a third of the tax by them.
Mr. V.J. Patel, noted barrister, and Dr. Kanuga, a leading medical practitioner, were among those who were unable to pay.
They had admittedly helped the authorities to quell disturbance.
No doubt they were satyagrahis but they had endeavoured to still the mob fury even at some risk to their own persons.
But the authorities would not exempt them.
It was a difficult thing for them to use discretion in individual cases.
It was equally difficult for these two gentlemen to pay any fine when they were not to blame at all.
They did not wish to embarrass the authorities and yet they were anxious to preserve their self-respect.
They carried on no agitation but simply notified their inability to pay the fines in the circumstances set forth above.
Therefore an attachment was issued.
Dr. Kanuga is a very busy practitioner and his box is always full.
The watchful attaching official attached his cash box and extracted enough money to discharge the writ of execution.
A lawyer’s business cannot be conducted on these lines.
Mr. Patel sported no cash box.
A sofa of his sitting-room was therefore attached and advertised for sale and duly sold.
Both these satyagrahis thus completely saved their consciences.
Next time someone tells you that Gandhi’s methods only worked because the British were softies, remind them that historians are still debating whether the British massacred millions or merely hundreds of thousands of Indians following the Sepoy Mutiny.
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’llgetallmy tithes, or I’llperishto-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.
Some bits and pieces from here and there:
Taxpatriate satyagrahi Jeff Knaebel has a new (to me, anyway) website, Gandhi Swaraj Padyatra to accompany his thousand-kilometer padyatra (a sort of walking pilgrimage) to promote Gandhi’s philosophies.
The Philadelphia Daily News carried an obituary for long-time tax resister George Willoughby.
“The Willoughbys were also tax-resisters, withholding their federal taxes to protest their use for military purposes.
The IRS tapped their bank accounts to pay the taxes, but when the accounts ran dry, agents seized their 1966 Volkswagen.
Friends, brandishing balloons, party horns, cookies and lemonade, invaded the IRS office in Chester and bought the car back for $900.”
From the looks of it, tax resistance is the national pastime in Argentina.
This time, it’s shopkeepers in San Juan, who have announced a tax resistance campaign to protest the fact that the street vendors who compete with them for customers are untaxed.
The mayor says it’s all a bluff, and that in fact the shopkeepers frequently divert goods to the street vendors in an attempt to evade taxes.
The shopkeepers are paying their taxes into a fund that they say they will only relinquish to the government when it begins to crack down on street vendors.
An interesting article in the latest edition of The Wilson Quarterly looks at the team that Gandhi assembled to help him carry out his satyagraha campaign in India.
The Gandhi myth is all about a charismatic, saintly individual making change with his idiosyncratic gestures of integrity and conscience.
The real story has a lot to do with a well-managed organization of talented and savvy people acting with determination and making deliberate and thoughtful tactical decisions.
Bondurant was working in military intelligence during World War Ⅱ and was assigned to India where she translated Japanese communications.
While she was there she was exposed to Gandhi’s satyagraha techniques as they were being developed and put into use there, and she was impressed by what she saw and decided to give the subject some study.
Her book was one of the first attempts to methodically describe the theory behind the use of satyagraha in political conflict.
(Bondurant seems to have had some instinctual appreciation of satyagraha ahead of time.
Legend has it that when she went to learn Japanese in her eagerness to help the war effort, she was turned away — the class was for men only.
So she sat outside the classroom door every day until they relented and let her in.)
Gandhi himself did not pause to try and rigorously delineate the contours of his theory.
He explained himself briefly on many occasions, and you can piece together a picture of what he had in mind from various examples of these, but because he was developing his technique on-the-fly, experimenting and refining along the way, he sometimes contradicts himself, and the overall picture of what he developed can be a fuzzy one.
Bondurant’s is one attempt of many to try to make up for this lack of a formal understanding of satyagraha.
She starts by giving an introduction to what satyagraha is, how Gandhi developed it, and how he described it.
She then tells how it played out in a variety of campaigns (including the Bardoli Satyagraha, of particular interest to people interested in mass tax resistance), and what generalizations we can draw from seeing how these campaigns played out.
Then she inquires into how much the success of satyagraha depended on the preexisting cultural context of Hinduism.
(She suggests that while Gandhi was skilled at remixing the symbols and norms of Hinduism and of Indian culture to explain his technique, the technique itself is universal, and could just as easily be translated to another culture.)
Finally, she compares satyagraha, which is a theory of political action, to a variety of other, more static political theories — such as anarchism, Marxism, liberalism, autocratic idealism, and paleoconservatism.
She finds that the means-are-the-ends philosophy of satyagraha give it an edge over other political philosophies that tend to be vague on the means to be used to bring about preferred ends or to resolve conflicts.
I found the book to be thought provoking in many parts, but also to be a little dry and sometimes wordy and vague.
Among the more interesting bits was the discussion of whether Gandhi could be considered an anarchist.
Gandhi did not profess a particular political philosophy or theory of the state.
Sometimes the things he said seemed to have no interpretation but an anarchist one; other times, he explicitly envisioned and promoted particular state-based action.
Bondurant suggests that part of the problem people have when trying to get a straight answer to this question is that they take for granted the traditional description of a state as an entity that claims a local monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.
Just as Gandhi was innovating in developing nonviolent ways of projecting force or of resolving conflict, Bondurant thinks, he was also able to imagine a state-like institution that did not use or legitimize violence in its methods of projecting force or resolving conflict.
So that when Gandhi spoke of ideal governments or states, he may not have been imagining anything that would necessarily make an anarchist upset.
People will be less reluctant to take risks in a tax resistance campaign if
they know other people are willing to share those risks. One way of providing
this sort of reassurance is for resisters to join together in a mutual
insurance plan, so that if the government takes legal action against a
resister, or retaliates against them in some other way, they won’t have to
bear these consequences alone.
Today I’ll review some examples of how a variety of tax resistance campaigns
have created mutual insurance plans to protect resisters.
War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund
The War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund
reimburses American war tax resisters who have penalties & interest
seized by the
IRS.
The fund is operated by a team of resisters and sympathizers, and has hundreds
of subscribers:
In a core group of 83 people across the
country decided we could easily share $463.14 in penalties and interest
incurred by a few military tax resisters who appealed to the war tax
resistance community for help. 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.
Resisters who have had money seized by the
IRS
send the fund documentation showing how much of the seizure was the result
of interest and penalties, and then the fund sends out an appeal to its
members to help reimburse the cost:
We divide the total amount for all resisters by the number of active names on
the membership list to arrive at a “share.” We then send out an appeal to
both actives and inactive members. Each contributor pays all of a share or
whatever amount she can afford. Some pay more than a share. If we collect 75
percent of the total we ask for, each resister gets 75 percent of the amount
they requested. We cannot promise that we will collect the total amount
requested; usually, however, we can reimburse between 50% and 80% of each
appeal.
I have personal experience with this mutual insurance plan. In
the
IRS
seized some bank accounts of mine to recover taxes I had refused to pay. This
included $813 in interest and penalties. I applied to the War Tax Resisters
Penalty Fund, which sent me a check for $649 from the amount the subscribers
to the fund pledged.
Irish Land League
When the
National
Land League launched a rent strike targeting English absentee landlords in
Ireland in , it made sure resisters knew
it would have their backs if the landlords tried to evict them. The leaders
of the League issued a rent strike manifesto from Kilmainham Jail that
declared:
If you only act together in the spirit to which within the last two years
you have countless times pledged your vows, they can no more evict a whole
nation than they can imprison them.
The funds of the National Land League will be poured out unstintingly for the
support of all who may endure eviction in the course of the struggle. Our
exiled brothers in America may be relied upon to contribute if necessary as
many millions of money as they have contributed thousands to starve out
landlordism and bring English tyranny to its knees.
One of the ways this played out was for evicted tenants to be temporarily
put up, along with their livestock if any, on the property of unevicted
tenants and sympathetic landowners, in what came to be called “Land League
Villages.” Each family was given a small monthly allowance from the Land
League.
Dublin Water Charge Strike
In , the resistance campaign against the
water charge in Dublin initiated a mutual insurance fund. One of the campaign
leaders recalls:
Obviously the council/government tactic was to try to individualise their
intimidation. By summonsing individuals to court maybe they could bypass the
mass participation that the protests against disconnections had seen. The
campaign immediately took a decision that when any individual was summonsed
to court, we would turn up and contest every case — and that we would turn up
in force. It was at this time that we made a decision which would prove
crucial to the success of the campaign. We decided to initiate a membership
of the campaign at £2 per household. This money would go into a warchest to
pay legal fees so that no individual would be left facing a legal bill. The
idea that the individuals being taken to court were representing all of us
was paramount. Within weeks 2,500 households had paid the £2 membership fee,
and within 12 months there were over 10,000 paid-up households making the
campaign without doubt the biggest to have existed in decades.
Breton Association
When Charles Ⅹ of France attempted to bypass the legislature and enact his own
taxes in , French liberals in the Breton
Association organized tax resistance and created a fund to defray the costs of
any tax resisters who were prosecuted. By the terms of the Association’s
manifesto:
We declare… [t]o subscribe individually for ten francs… This subscription
will form a common stock or fund for all Brittany, destined to indemnify the
subscribers for any expense they may be put to by their refusal to pay any
illegal contributions imposed upon the public…
And this is how the fund was to be administered:
[Elected procurators are to] receive the subscriptions, to afford indemnities
conformably to the [section quoted above], at the request of any subscriber
prosecuted for the payment of illegal contributions; to sue in his name…
for justice against the exactors by all possible means allowed by law…
War of the Regulation
The Regulator movement, a tax resistance rebellion in pre-American Revolution
North Carolina, had an oath that members took that committed each of them to
come to the aid of any others who might be arrested or whose property was
being seized for nonpayment:
I will, with the aid of other sufficient help, go and take, if in my power,
from said officer, and return to the party from whom taken; and in case any
one concerned should be imprisoned, or under arrest, or otherwise confined,
or if his estate, or any part thereof, by reason or means of joining this
company of Regulators, for refusing to comply with the extortionate demands
of unlawful tax gatherers, that I will immediately exert my best endeavors to
raise as many of said subscribers as will be force sufficient, and, if in my
power, I will set the said person at liberty…
The oath also created a mutual insurance pledge:
I do further promise and swear that if, in case this, our scheme, should be
broken or otherwise fail, and should any of our company be put to expense or
under any confinement, that I will bear an equal share in paying and making
up said loss to the sufferer.
Reformed Israel of Yahweh
Members of the small Christian group called the Reformed Israel of Yahweh
were, like its founder, conscientious objectors to military taxation. When
some of the members of the group were convicted on tax evasion charges, the
Reformed Israel of Yahweh organization paid their fines.
Pacific Yearly Meeting
A committee of the collection of American Quaker congregations known as the
Pacific Yearly Meeting administers something it calls “the Fund for Concerns:”
Its purpose is to assist members and attenders of Monthly Meetings to follow
individual leadings arising from peace, social order, or spiritual concerns.
… Up to $100 per fiscal year per person will be available to help with the
interest and penalty expenses of war tax resisters who are members or regular
attenders of a Monthly Meeting. The Monthly Meeting must indicate approval
and provide matching funds.
New York Yearly Meeting
During the Vietnam War, the New York Yearly Meeting advocated war tax
resistance and “promised financial help through special committees if [Quaker
resisters] changed jobs or refused to pay taxes in protest against the war.”
Papuan Courier
In 1919, Papua, which had been a territory occupied and run by the German
Empire until World War Ⅰ when Australia took over, began to agitate against
taxation without representation, and many people refused to pay.
The Papuan Courier, which was sympathetic to the
tax resisters,
…as evidence of its bona fides on the question, has decided, to form a fund
for the defence of any resident who may by victimised, persecuted, or
prosecuted for failure to pay the tax, and to that end we open the list with
a contribution of Five Guineas.
Tithe War
In , Irish Catholics rebelled
against paying government-mandated tithes to the Anglican church. In this
case, the Catholic church itself provided some insurance to the resisters.
The Anglican archbishop Richard Whately complained:
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. … [One Anglican clergyman] 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.
Addio-Pizzo Movement
In , a number of individuals and businesses
opposed to paying mafia protection money began to use a number of techniques
to interrupt the payments and to support those resisters whom the mafia was
threatening with reprisals. The mayor of Palermo, Diego Cammarata, pledged
€50,000 to assist merchants who had been victims of extortion.
Peacemakers
The group “Peacemakers,” which launched the modern American war tax resistance
movement , had a mutual
insurance component from the beginning:
Peacemakers at the Ohio cell… established the Peacemaker Sharing Fund, a
mutual aid plan designed to insure aid to dependents of imprisoned
Peacemakers and to help finance group projects. During the Vietnam war, the
sharing fund became the main vehicle for donations to meet the needs of war
resisters’ families.
Penalty Sharing Community
The Iowa Peace Network maintains a mailing list of persons who have made a
commitment to the Penalty Sharing Community
to share in the penalties assessed to individuals and families who have
chosen to resist war taxes or have participated in civil disobedience or
non-violent direct action. When a request for assistance is received, a
mailing is sent out which explains the resister’s situation and the amount of
money needed. For example, if the resister was assessed a $300.00 penalty,
each of the persons in the Community would pay an equal portion of the
$300.00. Thus if there were 200 people in the Community, each would pay
$1.50. The Iowa Peace Network will also add into the amount requested its
costs for printing and mailing. Such costs have proven to be minimal.
Pioneer Valley War Tax Resisters
Members of the Pioneer Valley War Tax Resisters redirected their federal taxes
into an “alternative fund” that served partially as an escrow account, and
partially as a way of redirecting some of the money to charitable
organizations. Part of the fund was reserved to help defray any legal costs
incurred by members in the course of their resistance.
“New Rush” Resisters
White miners at the “New Rush” in Kimberly, South Africa, voted in
to form “a Defence League and Protection
Association… not to assail the Government, but to protect individuals if
assailed unrighteously by the Government.” The pledge of the association said
in part:
I shall to the utmost of my power, with purse and person, protect any and
every officer and member of the League against coercion or consequences of
what nature soever arising out of the action necessitated by this pledge.
The pledge had a clause that made it binding when it would be signed by 400
men, whereupon:
The Government will be defied if they dare to touch a single claim for
non-payment of license. The diamond buyers will refuse to pay further license
and will be defended from harm.
Ruhrkampf
When the Ruhr region of Germany began resisting reparation payments to the
victorious nations of World War Ⅰ, France and Belgium occupied the region
to take the payments by force. Germans responded with a campaign of mass
nonviolent resistance, including tax resistance, and were backed up by their
own government.
One of the ways the German government supported the campaign was by paying
the strikers itself, to the tune of 715 million marks. It did this in part by
printing off more currency, which helped fuel the hyperinflation of
(itself a sort of resistance strategy that
made it difficult or impractical to account for reparations payments).
Louisiana Anti-Reconstructionists
During the “Reconstruction” period after the American Civil War, white
supremacists in Louisiana refused their allegiance to a federally-backed,
mixed-race state government, and demonstrated this through tax resistance.
Several attorneys issued a statement offering to “engage themselves, without
compensation, and as a matter of public service, to defend professionally all
[tax resisters].” A mass-meeting issued a tax resistance pledge, and resolved:
That a committee of five be appointed to draw up a plan by which the citizens
may co-operate, to employ counsel and mutually assist each other in their
refusal to pay taxes.
Satyagraha in South Africa
Gopal Krishna Gokhale, an officer in the Indian National Congress fighting
for the independence of India, pledged £2,000 a month to support Indian
satyagrahis in South Africa who were engaged in tax resistance and other
tactics under Gandhi’s direction.
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.”
Some links that floated by my screen in recent days:
A new book, Gandhian Nonviolent Struggle and
Untouchability in South India by Mary Elizabeth King, takes a
closer look at the
Vykom satyagraha
campaign and deflates some of the myths about it. Analyses of
nonviolent action campaigns often suffer from a desire to prove that
nonviolence works or is better than alternatives. This desire can shape
the analysis so much as to make it less credible. So careful, detailed,
less-agenda-driven analyses are very valuable. I haven’t read this one
yet, but the review on nonviolence.org
whet my appetite.
A political opposition party in Burundi is calling for a tax strike
to protest what it characterizes as a violation of term limits by President
Pierre Nkurunziza. “We want to significantly target the economy of the
country to be sure that the president has no other choice but to yield to
the people’s demands,” said opposition figure Jérémie Minani. As most of
the government revenue comes from indirect taxes (and foreign aid), the
opposition is asking merchants to stop importing goods that are subject to
duties, and is asking people to stop using fuel, smoking, and drinking
alcoholic beverages, and to reduce their use of cell phones, to avoid the
value-added taxes on those products.
An early dispatch from the satyagraha movement, from the New York Tribune, :
Plan to Give Up All British Titles and Honors and Resign From Civil and Military Positions
Also Refuse to Pay Taxes
Drastic Action in Sympathy With Sultan to Soften Turkish Treaty
Drastic action, through a “non-cooperation movement,” is planned in India among the Moslems, with Hindu assistance, to force the government to take action toward obtaining such modification of the Turkish peace treaty as will make it more acceptable to the Moslem world, according to advices received here yesterday by the India Information Bureau.
On , it is stated by M.K. Gandhi, a prominent leader in India of the Satyagraha (passive resistance) movement, the newly devised “non-cooperation movement” is to be put into effect, if by that time a favorable reply is not received from the Indian government.
This movement, should the plans for it become effective, would be carried out in four progressively serious stages, thus:
First—Giving up all titles and honors conferred by the crown.
Second—Resignations from all government offices and from the legislative council.
Third—Resignation of officers and soldiers from all army duties.
Fourth—Refusal to pay taxes.
Hindu Leaders Join
The decision to this effect, the bureau says its advices show, was taken at a conference recently held by Moslem and Hindu leaders from all parts of the country.
An executive committee was appointed to organise a volunteer corps to collect subscriptions and prepare the Indian, public for this movement, to promote which meetings have been held all over India for some time past.
The Moslems, it is indicated, hold that the treaty as it now stands will injuriously affect Moslem prestige all over the world, and their desire is to compel the Indian government to present their demands for its modification to the treaty-making powers, and have them made effective.
The Moslems also hold that the Sultan, as their religious head, should have complete control of Constantinople.
