Jason Laning at friendly/agitate tells us how he wrestles with paying taxes for war, and shows us his version of the “tax forms as origami armaments” art idea, recently upstaged by another artist on the cover of the New Yorker.
His arguments for tax resistance strike a familiar chord:
[A]s long as we pay taxes, we are all complicit in the innocent deaths resulting from the Iraq War. This is in spite of whether we voted against Bush, wrote daily letters to our congresspersons, or attended every anti-war protest .
I think many Americans either forget or willfully ignore this fact. They perform a kind of self-deception by reassuring themselves that their responsibility for U.S. military action ends at the Presidential voting booth — that once a leader is chosen through an electoral process, that all responsibility then lies with that elected official.
Wrong. The simple fact is this: while many democratic anti-war activists clamor (at present, in vain) for Congress to cut off funding for the war, each individual American citizen holds a powerful tool for direct action against war within their grasp. The President may be the Commander in Chief, and Congress may have control of the war treasury, but we, as the American taxpayers, are the ones who provide the actual funds. If Americans are sick of war, they can simply choose to stop paying for it.
