A rarely used tactic in tax resistance campaigns is for resisters to turn themselves in for prosecution for having paid taxes. This was used by a group of Welsh war tax resisters who went to the police and “confessed to the crime of paying income and VAT taxes used for British nuclear programs, in violation of international law” in . The police declined to make any arrests.
An American war tax resister reports that when he refused to pay his taxes in , “I also asked the IRS if they could provide legal assurance that paying taxes would not leave me open to prosecution under the Nuremberg Principles. The IRS replied that they could not provide a quick response to my letter since they had received ‘a large number of similar requests.’ ”
The legal reasoning, in the abstract, is not all that far-fetched, but it is a sort of affected naïveté to expect the government to respect it in this fashion. This sort of tactic is a form of symbolic protest and can help to educate people about their accountability for war crimes conducted with their acquiescence and support.
