How you can resist funding the government → a survey of tactics of historical tax resistance campaigns → choose a small, easy, high-participation tax to resist → phone tax resistance → criticisms of

Martin Kelley over at nonviolence.org hosts a debate about whether or not phone tax resistance is a worthwhile thing to promote.

He titled his original post “Recycling Dead Horses”, and concluded:

Back in the sixties, a bunch of radical pacifists jumped on the phone tax resistance and haven’t been able to let go in all this time. So why this clinging to phone taxes as a way of protesting war? I assume everyone likes it is because it’s safe. For those reasons it’s also entirely symbolic and almost completely meaningless.

Can’t we come up with new tactics? When will we be able to leave the Vietnam War to the historians and just move on? Many people think the old-line peace movement is a bunch of aging hippies; with campaigns like this, we kinda prove them right. Let’s brainstorm some new actions!

Robert Randall responds, saying:

I’m all for coming up with new tactics, and I think a lot of people have been doing just that. This doesn’t mean, though, that we have to leave old tactics behind if they can serve us. Nor should we assume that old tactics are not new tactics for some.

He says that phone tax resistance had become more complex in recent years because the number of phone companies had increased and there was no consistency in how they reacted to phone tax resistance. For this reason, phone tax resistance lost its appeal as an easy first step to war tax resistance, and people stopped promoting it.

Now, though, we have the possibility, through a large phone tax redirection campaign and the Internet, to learn and gather together the how-to-do-it information on all these different phone services.

The project has a long way to go before it has enough momentum to matter. Since the Hang Up On War campaign launched it has attracted a whole 68 signatories (as of ).

I noted that a new phone tax resistance campaign had been launched by a coalition of anti-war groups.

Phone tax resistance, because it’s fairly easy to do and almost completely risk-free, is seen by some tax resisters as a way of getting timid people to dip their toes in the pool. Other resisters don’t see these qualities as ones that make phone tax resistance worth recommending: “Why this clinging to phone taxes as a way of protesting war? I assume everyone likes it is because it’s safe. For those reasons it’s also entirely symbolic and almost completely meaningless. Can’t we come up with new tactics?”

I think the skeptics win this round. The hanguponwar.org site is down, and the site where it has been mirrored (http://www.nwtrcc.org/hanguponwar.org/) is only semi-functional. The most recent Google cache of the signatories page reveals that as of , a whole 110 people had signed on.

A modest and inoffensive campaign, demanding little from its participants, and without even enough infrastructure to maintain a functioning website for a year. It’s almost as if it had been designed to fail. Let’s make note of it, learn our lesson, and move on without over-doing the “hearts were in the right place” nonsense. There’s a war on, and the road to that particular hell was paved with just such good intentions.