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Jeff Knaebel
Well, golly.
A long while back I was in the local university library doing some research on this and that, and I found an article in a journal called Gandhi Marg by Jeff Knaebel, titled “Some Thoughts on Civil Disobedience: My Duties and Responsibilities.”
I xeroxed some excerpts from the article to bring home, intending to do a Picket Line post about Knaebel’s tax resistance, but I never got around to it.
I think in part I just didn’t know what angle to take.
Knaebel, see, is hard core.
People sometimes hear about what I’m doing and shake their heads and say “I don’t think I could do anything quite that radical” but what I’m doing is just a frivolous hobby compared to Knaebel.
He started out as a pretty much All-American Boy type, from the sounds of it:
I served my country across a span of 30 years in a range of voluntary humanitarian and public service.
My work received awards and recognition from all levels of citizenship, including local community organizations, a State governor, Secretary of the US Cabinet and the President.
As an entrepreneur, I founded companies that created hundreds of jobs and financed a lot of kids through school, paid a lot of taxes.
I founded non-profit charitable organizations, co-created a new Montessori school, an adult learning center and indigenous social programmes.
I did significant work in the largest native American land settlement in history.
I obeyed the laws of my country.
It may sound like he’s tooting his own horn a bit, but this catalog of deeds is a deliberate “moral inventory” that he took in order to decide whether he “had earned the moral authority” to engage in Gandhian civil disobedience:
The following are required in order to earn the moral authority to make a distinction between moral and immoral law.
One must have obeyed consistently the law of his country.
He must have served society.
Must have embarked upon the work of self-purification and be adhering to the five basic moral precepts.
Must have met his family obligations and made arrangements for them to be covered in his absence.
Must be prepared for self-sacrifice, discomfort, possibly hardship.
One cannot disobey the law while continuing to live under its protection and with its comforts which are financed by the other citizens who are obeying it.
One must strive for harmony of thought-word-deed.
To think one thing, say another, and do a third is a lie.
One must be prepared to embark upon a programme of constructive service to humanity along with self-sacrifice.
What prompted Knaebel to choose this path?
“As I slowly progressed in self-purification and spiritual growth through meditation practice as taught by the Buddha,” he writes, “the inner moral conflict and despair arising from the knowledge that my labour — through the income tax — was being used to kill innocent civilians, women, and children, at many places around the world became unbearable.”
Knaebel first tried to find a way to satisfy his conscience while staying in the law as a good citizen and government supporter.
He quickly found that no such path was available: “it is clear that a citizen acting as an individual has no chance against the government in matters of conscientious objection to the income tax [and] that withholding the ‘war portion’ of a tax is ineffective.
It would be like trying to distinguish blood corpuscles which serve the liver from those that serve the lung.”
It is incomprehensible that any government has a moral right to force a person to kill, or through taxation to finance killing and even mass extermination of innocent human beings…
The government, having no moral right to require my participation, must rely on brute force to coerce my payment of taxes…
I cannot obey the law without violating my conscience and my loyalty to the human race…
The only safe and honorable course for me to keep my self-respect was to disobey and willingly face the penalties.
But that’s not all…
Having made the decision to cease filing and paying income tax, I undertook a radical reorganization of my life.
I would have to emigrate, to become a “tax exile.”
It would not be right to benefit from the facilities and protection of my country while not paying my share.
Reorganization had to be in gradual steps because of obligations to children.
Only when the youngest reached majority could I make the final move.
Withdrawing from my businesses, I began devoting myself to a wide range of humanitarian service without pay.…
The needs of my life could be met out of savings on which taxes had already been paid.
No income tax would be due for the remainder of my life.
As a tax protestor I cannot in good conscience make a claim for Social Security retirement benefits.
The funds I paid to Social Security over a period of 40 years are lost to me.
It is part of the price of freedom.
When my youngest child reached majority, I moved to India.
I ceased filing tax returns.
Demands by mail notwithstanding, I believe that filing is not required if the taxpayer has no income.…
The path of civil disobedience marked out by Gandhi requires self-sacrifice, self purification, and a constructive humanitarian programme to run alongside the action of non-cooperation with evil.
Here in an Indian village I rent two rooms of stone and mud, take two meals per day of rice-lentils-chapatti, bathe with a bucket of hand-carried cold water and use the same open field toilet as my Indian hosts.
My basic cost of living is about Rs 2000 per month (less than $50).…
My decision to undertake civil disobedience through emigration and self-imposed exile has entailed some hardship and risk.
My wife refused to live in India and found long periods of separation to be unacceptable.
She divorced me.
The life of an aging foreigner alone and homeless in India is not easy.
It is painful to be separated from family, friends, and homeland.
There are problems with safe water, food, health, sanitation, and personal security.
The cold of snowy winter in unheated rooms is penetrating.
Support arrangements are unstable and keep on dissolving.
Obstacles of language and culture are daunting.
It is a 2–3 day journey by jeep, bus, and train to the nearest bona fide medical doctor.
Hospitals of which I have personal knowledge are filthy and septic.
Disease is prevalent, civil disturbances are rampant, and war is an ever-present threat.
Everywhere I witness poverty, misery, and suffering.
Zoinks! You can see why I had a hard time coming to grips with this.
I spend a lot of effort on this site trying to convince people that tax resistance is something that can be done in relative comfort, without a great deal of personal sacrifice.
You don’t have to live in a cave!
And then here comes Jeff Knaebel, who is, well, pretty much sacrificing everything and living in a cave (or close to it, at the end of his article he says he’s planning “to build a meditation hut” “[h]igh above a mountain village in the Himalaya.”)
Why am I bringing this up ?
Well, when I first brought home the xeroxed excerpts of Knaebel’s article, I of course spent some time trying to track him down via Google.
To no great surprise, I found that there wasn’t much record of him on-line.
Probably no decent broadband up there in the hut.
But then LewRockwell.com posted the transcript of a talk that Knaebel gave in honor of the 75th anniversary of Gandhi’s salt march:
…The baseline fact is that the various Nation-States of this small and lonely planet have murdered around 200 million people in wars and internal conflicts during .
They have indirectly destroyed many millions more lives through Corporate-State institutionalized economic exploitation and ecological destruction.
From these facts arise the questions: Who are we?
What do we think we are doing?…
What was Gandhiji doing at Dandi?
Of course we know it was a protest against taxes imposed by the State, which were used to finance further exploitation and oppression of the people.
Gandhi taught Ahimsa, compassionate non-violence.
Taxation is the expropriation of private property under threat of violence.
What is this if not theft? What is theft if not violence? Is this what Gandhi taught?…
From whence comes the finance for Nation-States to murder 200 million people in ?
It comes from taxes mostly. Who paid the taxes? Was it not us as citizens?
So, who financed the murder and who is responsible?…
Peace is, at minimum, the absence of violence or threat of violence against persons and their property.
The State uses threats of force against my person and property if I don’t pay taxes.
Then it uses my tax money to murder innocent women and children in far away lands.
This is the breeding cycle of State-Corporate-sponsored escalating violence, opposite of Gandhi’s humane non-violence, opposite of the moral choice promulgated by all great wisdom teachings of humanity.
Power, especially power in a centralized government, promotes violence.
“War is the health of the State.” Only Liberty promotes non-violence.
Gandhi was a revolutionary for Liberty.
I wrote about the interesting case of Jeff Knaebel, who left his prosperous conventional American Dream life years ago to live in a hut in India.
He was unwilling to pay taxes that would make him complicit in the nightmare behind that Dream, and he took this stand to a level that seems extreme even here on The Picket Line where thoughts like this are eagerly entertained.
If I had not abandoned everything I had built up, leaving my country in order to escape slavery, if I were still a hard-working American taxpayer, I would have on my hands the blood of innocent Iraqi children, infants murdered in cold calculation as part of the price of oil and corporate dividends for the likes of Halliburton, Bechtel and Carlyle.…
Sadly, because of mental conditioning, ignorance and the power of media deception, I did not wake up in time to avoid the shame of knowing that some of my earlier tax dollars financed the murder of women and children in places like Nicaragua, Guatemala, Panama, Vietnam and Cambodia, among the many others where the American Empire has laid waste to land and life.
Thus, because of my own moral complacency in the drive to be successful in my former country, I cannot escape the shame nor the karma of having been a financial accomplice to murder through my failure to resist taxation.
I describe myself as a slave of the State, which remains true despite self-imposed exile.…
It is warmonger slavery because the product of my labor is coercively removed from me by taxation and placed in the hands of a group of politicians who have anointed themselves with the power to decide who shall live and who shall die.
No child on this earth is exempt from nuclear destruction, and where economies are subject to direct intervention by the State, the decision of whether a hungry child may receive wheat, or rice, or milk, or nothing at all is in the hands of a remote bureaucrat or politician who typically acts in his own self-interest, either as a rent-seeking bribe-taker or in order to gain an institutional favor.
The complaints are familiar to me; I’m more interested in his prescription:
How is it that we do not call the State by its true name of organized violence and perpetrator of mass murder?
Is it because we live in a sea of lies, deceit, manipulation, secrecy and hidden agendas, such that even language is corrupted so far beyond recognition that we are expected to believe heads of State who tell us brazenly that war is peace, that murder is liberation?
Or is it that we live in a mental condition of denial, benumbed by TV and media as by an injection of moral anesthetic?…
I suggest that peace-loving people withdraw as much as possible from interaction with and dependence upon the State.
Begin building an independent nonviolent culture of self-reliance as taught by Gandhiji.
This is now coming to life here and there among India’s villages.
Let the State die peacefully of its own internal rot and corruption.
Let us build our own wholesome lives.
The foundation of morality is respect for all living beings.
Let us free ourselves simply by refusing to cooperate with what we know is wrong.…
[O]ne potentially powerful way to begin is to be totally, transparently honest in word and deed with all others at all times.
Shine the light of Truth as exemplified by Gandhiji’s Satyagraha (strong adherence to truth).
Honesty means in part to call things by their true name directly, straight away.
Through this honest reporting, we might see what we are really doing, rather than being helplessly immobilized by the sheer horror of it all, or simply unable to find the pole star of truth to guide us on the sea of lies.
Immediately on reading this I remembered that back when I was reading Tolstoy’s essays on nonviolent direct action he had said something very similar — that the first and most important thing to do was to renounce falsehood and be determined to speak only the truth.
(The letter in which he most forcefully makes this point is, alas, only available on-line in Russian.)
Alexander Solzhenitsyn carries the torch in his essay, Not To Live By Falsehood, which I reproduce below.
Contrast that with the feeling of so much of the Democratic party, and of so many other people who consider themselves part of the opposition.
They believe the problem is that they are failing to “frame” their issues well, where “frame” is a nice word for “spin.”
They have seen how successfully the powerful have manipulated and petrified people through dishonesty, and they think the problem is that they aren’t as good at it.
Honesty may be the best policy, they say, for losers.
I myself have long been an admirer of the Sniggler — who deceives people into seeing the truth, makes counterfeits of fakes, turns artifice back upon itself, and impersonates the voice of authority in order to undermine it.
Fight tyranny instead by renouncing falsehood and speaking only truth?
That sounds suspiciously like the bliss bunny prescriptions to visualize whirled peas, and other romantic folderol set to the tune of one noble man standing firmly with his face to the worldly winds and stopping an empire by dazzling it with the overwhelming majesty of his integrity.
But perhaps honesty is a step that, while not sufficient, is necessary.
If you’re fighting for power, dishonesty has its place.
If you’re fighting against power and not to seize it for yourself, the means contain the ends and honesty may indeed be the best policy — or, at the least, one that has its place.
The moral high ground is undefended and almost abandoned.
Could it really be that it has no strategic advantage at all?
It is difficult to speak the truth — not just because there are many incentives to deceive, and not just because deceitful habits of language are broadcast on every channel, but because the truth is hard to get at, particularly through speech.
“I have decided to henceforth say nothing that is not true,” says the student.
“I’ll miss your voice,” says the Zen master.
But I may be setting the bar too high, and now it is set so low.
Consider that in many quarters it is still an open question whether or not the Dubya Squad tried to deceive people into believing, for instance, that Iraq was an imminent weapons-of-mass-destruction threat.
After all, Dubya never actually said the threat was “imminent” did he?
When we set the bar for honesty that low, when deceit is almost a sporting event in television entertainment, when it is a honored and appreciated part of statesmanship, and when people seek out their sources of education and information by how well they flatter and reinforce their own favorite lies — perhaps there’s really nowhere to go but up and so not much to lose by leading the way.
Tax resister Jeff Knaebel spoke on at the Gandhi National Memorial in Pune at an event honoring the anniversary of Gandhi’s birth.
A transcript of his speech is on-line.
Excerpts:
I left my country almost 15 years ago in order to start a new life in Sacred India, so as to be no longer an accomplice to this systematic murder by my payment of income taxes into this ruthless war machine.
One of the waypoints that crystallized my decision was a visit to the Museum at Los Alamos National Laboratory, birthplace of the atomic bomb.
The Temple of Death at the Mother Mandir of the Science of Total Annihilation.
How could I ever again be sweat at law in an economy whose best and brightest produce this abominable machinery of mass murder, with my tax support?
I joined the river of the dispossessed, the disenfranchised.
How can we call this a “civilization” — this mindless Corporate State War Machine — in the service of which so many children go to bed hungry, so many shattered lives are lived in silent, burning fury?
Gandhi wrote, “The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from the violence to which it owes its very existence.”
There was a recent movie Maine Gandhi Ko Nahin Mara, with theme “We have murdered Gandhi” (by disregarding his message of nonviolence).
I left the American Corporate Warfare State Machine in order not to be among those who murdered Gandhi.
Huck Gutman notices that the government is Lying about the Ruinous Cost of the War in Iraq:
“In , at the start of the Korean War, supplemental appropriations comprised almost three quarters of all appropriations.
By , supplementals were under 3 percent.
By , supplementals were down to zero.
¶
In , supplemental appropriations were seven times as high as regular appropriations.
, they were roughly equal.
In supplementals were less than a fifth of regular appropriations, and by they were down to zero.”
In contrast, 90% of the cost of today’s wars are being paid for off-budget.
Aaron Russo’s constitutionalist tax protester propaganda film “America: Freedom to Fascism” has picked up a couple of critical reviews from news.com and The New York Times.
You can listen to audio versions of Thoreau’s Walden, Cecile Andrews’s The Circle of Simplicity, and other works from the voluntary simplicity movement at SimpleRadio on simpleliving.net.
Taxpatriate Jeff Knaebel has started a web site to promote his brand of satyagraha:
Society without State.
It collects some of his writing, and his ideas for building a better society, and promotes his new book, Experiments in Moral Sovereignty — Notes of an American Exile.
For more on Jeff Knaebel, see also the following Picket Line entries:
Frequent use of the pronoun “we” on the site hints that there are others aside from Knaebel involved in the project, but this may be more of a prophecy hoping for self-fulfillment:
We believe the institutionalized structurally violent system of the Corporate Warfare State must be abandoned and allowed to die a peaceful death.
We hold the entire conception of the Corporation and the State to be morally invalid — that “legally mandated” limited liability and sovereign immunity, which enable men to act without accountability and responsibility — are the roots of a system which promotes the limitless play of greed and destruction without concern for the fate of future generations, who will inherit a wasted earth.
We are questing into unknown territory with this website.
We hope to have contributors who advance their ideas with full open attribution of authorship.
We are individual beings, working together in voluntary cooperation for our liberty and the survival of our species.
We pledge allegiance to no State, no flag, no government, and no “ism.”
We aim to be free, to think for ourselves, and to act on our own responsibility.
In any case, it looks to be a good site to bookmark if you appreciate the perspectives of an enthusiastic follower in the footsteps of Gandhi, Tolstoy, and Thoreau.
Some bits and pieces for your Sunday browsing pleasure:
If you know you can get by with little or no money, then you have the flexibility to follow your own path, to take risks, to refuse to knuckle under to people who don’t have your interests at heart.
That’s why it has always fascinated me.
The Nation-State is the sword over our collective heads.
This system of organizing a society of six billion human beings doesn’t work.
Its institutionalized structural violence is destroying humanity and the earth.
States have murdered more than 230 million human beings in .
A system that places the power of planetary incineration into the hands of a few psychopathically aggressive tyrants is clearly insane.
It is impossible to reform a system whose very foundation is organized criminal violence, lies and deceit.
It must be abandoned, as a sinking ship. Don’t fight it.
Just quit supporting it, quit cooperating with it, quit paying taxes to it. Simply leave it.
Build your own ark, or look for like-minded others to join, forming islands of light in a sea of darkness.
Remember Joe Darby?
He’s the soldier who, when he saw the Abu Ghraib abuse photographs, decided to blow the whistle.
How’d America treat him afterwards?
Well, he was promised anonymity, but Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfield outed him on television.
Then it hit the fan:
His wife had no idea that Mr Darby had handed in those photos, but when he was named, she had to flee to her sister’s house which was then vandalised with graffiti.
Many in his home town called him a traitor.
“I knew that some people wouldn’t agree with what I did,” he says.
“You have some people who don’t view it as right and wrong.
They view it as: I put American soldiers in prison over Iraqis.”
That animosity in his home town has meant that he still cannot return there.
Jeff Knaebel is a tax resister of the renunciate / satyagrahi school, and he occasionally writes up his experiences and theories.
Here are two pieces that he has recently made available on-line:
I made the decision to leave my own, my native land forever.
I would become a man without a country, separated by a vast ocean from friends, family and my young adult children.
No more would I smell the rain on high desert sagebrush, nor hear wolves howl across moonlit tundra, nor watch the Northern Lights dance in Arctic sky.
I would owe allegiance to all of humanity and to no State.
I would be the indentured servant of no gang of murderers sitting in any legislative body.
By paying no tax to any State would I finally make a farewell to arms. I would seek peace and brotherhood.
I would attempt Satyagraha, that strong adherence to truth which is love.
I would aspire to a life of Ahimsa — nonviolence — which is the active force of love.
Ignore the State.
Don’t fight it — that only feeds its expansion.
Don’t petition or plead, just quit paying for it, quit cooperating with it.
Starve it of energy and cash.
Simply leave it.
Build your own ark, join others in forming islands of light in a sea of darkness.
Each must work out his own destiny if he is to reclaim his conscience and personal integrity.
One must never give in to power.
Live by your own lights and your own wits, and face the consequences.
You will enjoy the happiness of the free and the brave.
I have chosen tax refusal and exile in a foreign land, together with radical renunciation of rules and laws — a renunciation that is escalating with time and disgust at what we have become.
I have set myself against blind obedience to traditional authority and patriarchal domination, as well as bureaucratic legalistic usurpation of individual rights.
I renounce the State and declare my right to ignore it.
I renounce any “authority” that demands violation of my conscience.
Some short bits from here-and-there around the web:
The Get Rich Slowly blog recently highlighted Don Schrader, a low-income / simple-living war tax resister and Albuquerque-area local legend.
At last count, there were 56 comments from people evaluating Schrader’s eccentric and dedicated lifestyle and the principles behind them.
The Colorado Springs Independent covers the war on war tax, and includes quotes from Peter Haney and Esther Kisamore.
Expatriate satyagrahi tax resister Jeff Knaebel delivered a speech at the Gandhi Sixtieth Memorial in Pune .
The text of the speech has been reprinted at LewRockwell.com.
Excerpt:
Complete non-violence today would mean acquiescence in systematic destruction of the whole earth, and thus all of humanity with it.
Some situations demand that we defend our land, our right to livelihood, and our lives with violent defensive action.
Direct Action Today, I feel, however, is best expressed in self-restraint, in the quiet refusal to buy corporate products, in boycott, in self-reliance and in tax refusal, in refusal to report for combat in aggressive war, in refusal to accept corporate and government media propaganda as truth.
I know what “simplified” means in these contexts, and I’m highly aware of being a war tax resister who doesn’t try to live such a life, at least in some senses of “simplified,” and I’m wondering, Where exactly… is there room for me, a war tax resister , “sustainable for the long haul,” and with every expectation of continuing to do war tax resistance as long as I live?
“Simplicity” isn’t… being presented as something to deliberate over; it’s presented as something to “embrace.”
Here are some more things that have cropped up on the web in recent days that have caught my eye:
The paleocon site LewRockwell.com seems an unusual home for Jeff Knaebel — a renunciate expatriate tax resister who is trying to retool Gandhi’s satyagraha for the 21st Century.
But they’ve hosted a number of his essays and speech transcripts, including, most recently, “The State Versus the Living Dharma,” in which he examines the proper relationship between a subject of a State and its government in the framework of Thich Nhat Hahn’s “socially engaged Buddhism.”
He concludes that because the State violates basic ethical precepts, not just incidentally but by its very nature, and because citizens who support the State take on a portion of the burden of these ethical violations, it is essential for people who want to live ethically to withdraw their practical and moral support for the State.
Excerpts:
I maintain that it is the right of any individual person to reject and renounce a government which violates his moral conscience.
I maintain that it is my personal right, in this very body, here and now, to ignore the State, and to refuse participation in its actions which violate humanity and life itself.
I also declare that the same is my intention insofar as refusal to pay direct tax to any nation-state.
There can be no treason if one’s first loyalty is to humanity and to life itself.
Human life is above Nation-State.
Personal conscience and individual moral sovereignty is above State sovereignty.
How can the question of treason arise when one refuses to murder helpless women and children?
He who claims self ownership can never commit treason because the State cannot own him.
He is not the property of the State.
At TCS Daily, Arnold Kling has put forward a proposal for a sort of distributed secessionism that he calls “splinter states.”
It sounds something like a loosely-organized set of independent, geographically diffuse, agorist economies, competing with the State without confronting it directly.
This proposal has triggered some long-overdue debate in libertarian circles about civil disobedience.
Lawrence Wittner tells anti-war activists that they shouldn’t be discouraged at how little progress they seem to be making, because a lot of the effects they have are behind-the-scenes and may not be widely noticed until years from now.
He gives an example from , in which public outrage and revulsion against atmospheric nuclear weapons testing overwhelmed Eisenhower’s inclinations to support the Defense Department’s desire for more nuclear weapons testing and development, and eventually led to a test ban treaty.
…[M]ake spending money into a conscious, deliberate process through which you take control and defend yourself, through which you demand full value.
When you are skeptical of people trying to sell you something, then you stop being vulnerable to the incredible bombardment of ads and opinions that urge you to be a fool for “the newest, the shiniest, the sexiest” acme product.
Remember… what you are actually trading is not a scrap of government paper but the irreplaceable time it took you to acquire that government scrap.
Make sure you receive something equally valuable in return.
Long before the incident with the swindling computer company, I’d lost the sense of “businessmen as heroic producers of wealth” which I’d absorbed (briefly) from Ayn Rand’s novels.
Experience taught that businessmen were no more honest or admirable than the average Joe; indeed, whenever money changes hands, honesty seems to decrease.
Moreover, as a libertarian I became acutely aware of how well-connected businessmen embrace the Corporate State and glut themselves on tax-funded contracts and state protections/privileges.
(The limited liability of corporations is a perfect example of the latter.)
Businessmen are often the biggest obstacle to the free market and the staunchest friends of government regulation.
In his article What Is The Enemy, Sheldon Richman writes, “the great threat to liberty is the corporate state, otherwise known as corporatism, state capitalism, and political capitalism.
(The Therapeutic State falls into this category, because the prime beneficiaries are corporate medical providers.)”
And, so, one of the ideological motivations behind my frugal rebellion was/is to remove myself from the role of obedient consumer, a role that helps to legitimize and sustain a system I find morally and politically bankrupt.
The moral necessity of defunding the US Empire is as follows:
The Empire is engaged in wars of aggression, the endless war on “terror,” violation of human rights and civil liberties, illegal rendition of terror suspects to foreign countries for torture and interrogation, denial of habeas corpus, denial of the Geneva Convention, torture, wiretapping US citizens, and use of depleted uranium weapons, an indiscriminate weapon of mass destruction.
Need I go on?
People said it couldn’t happen here, but now we are the “good Germans,” dutifully doing what the IRS tells us to do, while the government commits war crimes in our name with our money.
…[T]ake the following pledge:
“I withdraw my mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual energy from the corrupt US government.
I will not give them any financial support, nor will I willingly accept any tax-funded benefits from the US government.
I will put my financial resources to better use such as Vermont secession.
I will starve the beast.”
Hundreds of pages of recently unsealed court records detail how kickbacks shaped the [Iraq] war’s largest troop support contract months before the first wave of U.S. soldiers plunged their boots into Iraqi sand.
The graft continued well beyond the congressional hearings that first called attention to it.
And the massive fraud endangered the health of American soldiers even as it lined contractors’ pockets, records show.
Self-Realization cannot be achieved in the absence of the purest ethical life.
There is no possibility of an ethical life if, by the mere act of earning one’s daily bread, he becomes an accomplice to murder.
Thus does the State, by its mere existence, abrogate the ultimate right of the human being.…
…The simplest form of resistance is refusal of taxes.
It is also the most effective.
All war is tax-and-debt financed.
The common man pays in blood and sweat.
The parasitic Central Banker and his mouthpiece “Statesman” live well, in air-conditioned suites, enjoying the emoluments of those who are high on the predator food chain.
The fact that refusal of taxes may require a simplification and moderation of lifestyle has the double ethical benefit of helping to save our ecological commons from destruction.
Keep this in mind: what we vote for, and what we pay for, we are
responsible for. It is us.
The only ways to have clean hands are not to participate, or actively
resist.
Quit tax payments, and thus quit supporting organized crime.
Boycott the State. Do not vote. Do not ask it for anything. Do not
petition it. Give it no energy.
To extent possible, abstain from all interaction with the State. Try to
become self employed so you are out of the paper trail corporate-State
surveillance net.
Quit credit cards and all financial operations that are easy for the
State to surveil.
Avoid doing business with banks to the extent possible. They are spies
and bag men of the State.
One cannot be free so long as he uses credit cards and banks.
To extent possible, create a livelihood based upon work trade and barter
exchange.
Look for a piece of land in a wholesome and supportive community and
nourish yourself from a garden.
If there is a secessionist movement in your state or nearby, join it.
Check the website of The
Middlebury Institute.
In every way possible, become a moral sovereign and join in voluntary
cooperation with like minded others.
Educate and promulgate the ethics, values, and truths of Liberty.
The Buddha taught that sila (morality) in respect of non-killing is on three levels:
Abstain yourself from killing
Do not support others engaged in killing
Do not approve of others engaged in killing
It is clear to me that paying taxes to any government on this earth in present times amounts to direct finance of murder.
It violates directly and implicitly the Buddha’s precepts.
Paying taxes makes of one a material accomplice to murder.
How can I escape my derivative responsibility as an accomplice in finance of war when the whole economy is geared to war?
Simply to participate voluntarily as an “upwardly mobile” member of a mindlessly destructive culture is, at the least, acquiescence to mass murder.
I live on savings and try to contribute to society as a one-way flow.
I am aware of how fortunate I have been to enable this manner of living.
I was a moderately successful rat in the race who took his chance to jump off the treadmill.
I am not a highly evolved moral being.
Along with moderate success has come immense failure, primarily caused by my own flaws of character.
I am a learner.
I take solace in the perception that all of life is an experiment, and that there can be no failed experiment — only collection of more data.
Some bits and pieces from around the web:
Siân Cwper, a member of the Peace Tax Seven group that is trying to get conscientious objection to military taxation legalized in some pan-European legal forum, ran into some strangely passive-aggressive government opposition to her tax resistance:
They told her that she actually overpaid her taxes by mistake and is due a refund.
William Perez gives us the low-down on tax provisions in the recent bailout legislation.
None of this much mattered to me, but if you think you’ll have mortgage debt canceled, or install energy efficient or alternative energy related equipment or an electric car, or if you commute to your employer by bike, or paid tuition, or spent money on classroom supplies as a teacher, or paid property tax, or live in a disaster zone, there may be something of use to you there.
And you’ll need all the help you can get, once you see the bill.
I’ve admired the anti-war protesters in Olympia who periodically try to blockade the port there in an attempt to interfere with shipments of war materiel.
So far none of the people who have participated in these blockades have been successfully prosecuted.
But the port commission has decided to take the law into their own hands — they’re filing civil lawsuits against the blockaders.
I can’t imagine they see this as a cost-effective way of recovering the expenses the blockades have cost, but they may see it as a useful discouragement along the lines of a SLAPP suit.
I suppose we should expect more of this sort of thing — as more of the more execrable parts of government become quasi-privatized and generate profit for somebody, nonviolent resistance against these will cut into the profits of folks who can respond by filing suits to recover damages.
I’m keeping one eye on a tax protest going on in Iran.
For a week, a strike spread amongst the vendors in Tehran’s bazaar until hardly any were open for business.
They were protesting a new VAT that would have applied to them.
Apparently this was a nonviolent resistance tactic that bazaar merchants used successfully before the revolution, but this is the first time they’ve done it since.
The government has tried persuasion and token concessions with only some success, and analysts see the protest as part of more widespread anger about the government’s handling of economic issues, and an attempt to flex the muscles of the merchants’ union.
As it is right now, it’s mostly just a protest against a tax rather than conscientious objection or tactical nonviolent resistance.
But it could be the seed that grows into something bigger.
Today: some things from hither and yon that have caught my eye, but that I haven’t managed to weave into a Picket Line post yet:
Thanks to Amazon’s on-line reader, you can read excerpts from Gregory Vistica’s Fall From Glory: The Men Who Sank the U.S. Navy concerning the anti-WMD activism of Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen, and the FBI / Naval Investigative Service / Knights of Malta campaign to discredit him.
Hunthausen at one point resisted a portion of his federal taxes to protest against the United States government’s policy of threatening to attack its enemies with nuclear weapons.
Here’s an old article from The Libertarian Forum about a property tax strike in Chicago in that bears a lot of resemblance to the organized Chicago property tax strikes of the 1930s. I wonder if we’ll see more of this during the current economic troubles.
Here’s an undated report about Australian war tax resister Robert Burrowes.
“Robert has been refusing to pay part of his taxes in ‘legal tender’ (as stipulated by Regulation 58 made pursuant to the Tax Act ) because he does not want to contribute to military expenditure.
Instead he has attempted to pay ‘in kind’ with such constructive and symbolic items as shovels, trees and Aboriginal land… and by donating the balance of the claimed money to various peace and development organisations.”
There’s other stuff on-line about Burrowes’s case but I haven’t had time to look into it yet.
Glenn D. McMurry wrote up some memories of his time at Bethel College in the 1930s, including his recollections of Benny Bargen.
I had the opportunity of living in the Bargen home for an entire summer session.
That experience further confirmed my knowledge of Bennie’s character.
He was a dedicated Christian and a staunch pacifist, believing and practicing all forms of non-violence.
In conversations with Bennie one could almost be persuaded that all wars in which our country had participated could have been prevented by pacifist methods.
Non-violence for Bennie didn’t end with his war philosophy.
He didn’t want any of his money to be used for violence of any type.
Therefore, in order not to pay federal tax on his income, he would accept only a very low salary.
The Bethel administration wanted to raise his salary.
They tried every loophole in the book to help Bennie, and still conform to his desire to pay no income tax.
He remained content to live on his meager salary in order to be true to his moral beliefs.
To live out such a life style, Bennie had to make decisions that made life difficult for his family.
Near poverty became the family’s lot!
The administration gave the most meager housing.
Usually it meant an upstairs apartment requiring his climbing to the top with great difficulty [Bargen’s legs were paralyzed from polio].
It didn’t bother him, but it bothered Esther, his very dedicated wife.
She had high aspirations for herself and her two children, and she found it difficult to attain them because of Bennie’s demands.
Even his eating habits were affected.
He would figure his calories and eat only the minimum amount of food he felt he needed to keep alive.
In excerpts from his book Experiments in Moral Sovereignty, taxpatriate Jeff Knaebel investigates the link between war and taxes, as exemplified in Thomas Paine’s observation that “In reviewing the history of the English Government, its wars and its taxes, a bystander would declare that taxes were not raised to carry on wars, but wars were raised to carry on taxes.”
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.
I have just been made aware that Jeff Knaebel, the American entrepreneur and war veteran who turned into a pacifist, voluntaryist, Gandhian renunciate and expatriated to India, is dead.
In he destroyed his U.S. passport and applied for political asylum, saying that “I have been coerced to pay taxes which are then employed in bloody wars of aggression and coercive international economic practices which exploit weaker peoples whose lives, cultures, and ecologies are destroyed in the process,” and “I was not permitted to withdraw from citizenship and the concomitant complicity in mass murder which USG citizenship entailed.”
He found the Government of India to be unsympathetic to his hopes for political asylum and to his wish to live in a condition of “Statelessness.”
He concluded, hopelessly, that “a person striving for nonviolence at even the most rudimentary levels of non-support of killing is denied by law the right to exist” and took his own life by self-immolation.
I did not stay put and apply for Indian citizenship as the Court ordered.
The authorities have begun looking to arrest me because I did not follow their orders.
If apprehended and interrogated, my truthful answers will land me in jail.
I have chosen death under the open sky rather than the living death of imprisonment or any other form of enslavement by Power.
One tactic tax resisters have used from time to time is to pack up and leave when the tax collector comes calling.
Here are some examples:
Around the time of the Dharsana salt raids in Gandhi’s independence campaign in India, the government there was also stymied by mass migrations.
Here are some news accounts from the period:
Government agents began at once to attempt tax collecting, but in most cases found the natives had departed from their lands.
The situation was viewed with great anxiety, as continued maintenance of the tax strike would seriously hamper government revenues at the end of the year.
The evaders lock their doors and flee when tax collectors appear or hide in the fields, so attachment was resorted to.
The anti-tax campaign which it was said would replace the campaign against the salt laws already has been initiated in the Bardoli district where officials are arriving to post signs warning the peasants that their lands will be forfeit if they refuse to pay the dues.
Thus far they have found the villages deserted.
All-India national congress reports say that 50,000 peasants of the Bardoli region [population ~88,000] have left their homes resolved not to pay land taxes until swaraj, or home-rule is established.
Many left their household goods, chattels, crops behind, the government confiscating and auctioning them off.
[Though another account said “The inhabitants had left, taking everything movable, including the newly harvested rice crop, household goods, and cattle.
It was discovered that the villagers had been secretly removing goods and crops by night across the border into Baroda State territory, where the Baroda villagers harboured and helped them.”]
The peasants are said to have for their slogan, “No swaraj, no revenue.”
The leaders of the movement declare the peasants do not desire to evade payment, but simply will not pay until Mahatma Gandhi is released from jail and has ordered them to pay.
The congress characterizes the peasants’ actions as “an unrivaled example of a migration movement on the part of the people who are resolved to forfeit their all in the interest of the Gandhi cause.”
There is a movement of sorts nowadays that goes by the initials “P.T.” — often said to stand for “permanent tourist,” but also “prior taxpayer,” and a handful of others.
One advocate explained:
In a nutshell, a PT merely arranges his or her paperwork in such a way that all governments consider him a tourist.
A person who is just “Passing Through.”
The advantage is that being thought of by government officials as a person who is merely “Parked Temporarily,” a PT is not subjected to taxes, military service, lawsuits, or persecution for partaking in innocent but forbidden pursuits or pleasures.
Terry Gilliam, Monty Python’s Yankee animator and director of such masterpieces as Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Brazil and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, told an interviewer he renounced his American citizenship to become a taxpatriate: “I got tired of my taxes paying for exciting little wars around the world.
Then I discovered that when I died, my wife would probably have to sell our house to pay for the taxes in America.
The fact that Bush was [in office] there made it easier.”
Jeff Knaebel left his life as an American entrepreneur to become a stateless mendicant in India in order to stop paying for American military adventures:
Having made the decision to cease filing and paying income tax, I undertook a radical reorganization of my life.
I would have to emigrate, to become a “tax exile.”
It would not be right to benefit from the facilities and protection of my country while not paying my share.
I made the decision to leave my own, my native land forever.
I would become a man without a country, separated by a vast ocean from friends, family and my young adult children.
No more would I smell the rain on high desert sagebrush, nor hear wolves howl across moonlit tundra, nor watch the Northern Lights dance in Arctic sky.
I would owe allegiance to all of humanity and to no State.
I would be the indentured servant of no gang of murderers sitting in any legislative body.
By paying no tax to any State would I finally make a farewell to arms. I would seek peace and brotherhood.
I would attempt Satyagraha, that strong adherence to truth which is love.
I would aspire to a life of Ahimsa — nonviolence — which is the active force of love.
When the tax inspector came to town during the Poujadist uprising in France in , there might be nothing left to inspect — the business district having been abandoned in anticipation of the inspector’s arrival.
One account put it this way:
The tax inspector rapped on steel curtain after steel curtain, demanding to be let in to see the books.
Nowhere did he get an answer.
When they found that even the bistros were locked, the hapless inspector and his guards gave up their mission and beat a humble retreat…
Leaving the United States for tax reasons seems to be a growing trend.
One “taxpatriate” wrote:
I sleep much better knowing I no longer fund the military-industrial-banking complex.
Anybody can get mugged, but every U.S. taxpayer is a constant patsy for the political establishment.
The rip-offs are so unthinkably big and endemic, there’s nothing an individual can do to stop them.
If you fall for the political fallacy that “the government is the people,” you end up with the faulty conclusion that America must be overrun by war-crazed, lawsuit-happy, debt-addicted criminals.
How could anybody buy this after even a moment of clear thought?
There’s certainly no resemblance to the American people I know.
These problems stem from the military-industrial-banking complex, the dark heart of the U.S. political machine.
Why continue being the stooge that supplies the money to run it?
Looking at the world with fresh, open eyes isn’t easy.
One of the great benefits of liberating yourself from the grip of the U.S. political system is that the world becomes your oyster.
You’re free to embrace places that welcome individuals who seek to live peaceful and prosperous lives.
In Sierra Leone in , collectors of a new imperial government “hut tax” found fewer huts than they expected:
The trouble in Sierra Leone has arisen by the enforcement by the Government of a tax of 5s each annum on native huts.
In many cases the huts are not worth 5s, and when the tax collectors went round in many of the people knocked down their huts and slept under trees.
The tax collectors in Mytilene, Turkey, were so rapacious that much of the rural Greek population there abandoned their farms and “emigrated to the towns and cities in the hopes of subsisting on private charity” in rather than risk losing their farms to the tax collector before harvest time.
This passive resistance was the precursor to a more active tax resistance campaign that swept Turkey starting in .
And here is an example from the Boston Evening Transcript on :
J.F. Hathaway of Somerville Says He Will Move Rather Than Pay Tax Assessed.
A long-standing controversy between James F. Hathaway of Somerville, president of the Sprague & Hathaway Company, engaged in the manufacture of portraits, and the board of assessors of that city has culminated in a statement by Mr. Hathaway regarding his attitude in the matter.
It seems that in the principal assessors taxed Mr. Hathaway for corporation stock which he was supposed to own.
Mr. Hathaway and business friends made strong efforts to induce the assessors to abate the tax.
Acting upon the advice of the city solicitor, the board refused an abatement, and turned the bill over to the city collector for collection.
Mr. Hathaway says he will remove the plant from Somerville if the collector forces payment.
It appears from the statement he has given to the press that he made the same threat in , and that on , he packed up his furniture and prepared a move from the city rather than pay a tax.
Why he did not carry out his intention he explains as follows:
“While my household goods were being loaded on a wagon in order to get them out of Somerville before , I received a message to come to the City Hall at once on important business.
When this message came over the telephone the wagon had not been at my house more than fifteen minutes.
Evidently they had someone watching my movements; they did not think I intended to move out of the city.
I went down to City Hall and fond the full board of assessors there, the city solicitor, the mayor and several others, who were probably never there at that time in the morning except by appointment.
When I arrived, they asked me what I wanted, and I said: ‘Gentlemen, this is a nice time to ask me what I want.’
They proposed that I should pay one-half the tax, which I refused to do.
Then they proposed that I pay one-third of the tax.
I said: ‘Gentlemen, I will never pay one cent of it; if any part of it is just, it is all just.’
“They were all very anxious to find some way out of the difficulty and keep me in Somerville.
The city solicitor told them then and there they had no right to abate the tax; it had been legally assessed, and there was no legal way out of it.
But in a very few minutes they told me they would drop it; they were anxious that nothing more be said about it, and desired to let the matter drop out of sight as quietly as possible; they said they would never force the collection of the tax.
The day this matter of the tax of was settled the chairman of the board of assessors brought me home in his private carriage.
On the way, he said: ‘Mr. Hathaway, I am very sorry this ever occurred, and I am glad to find some way out of it.’
I asked him how about the future, and told him that if this thing was to be repeated next year or at any future time, my goods were all on the wagon then, and I might just as well get out of Somerville immediately.
He said: ‘This taxing of foreign corporations never has come up before, and probably never will again.
I assure you that so long as I have anything to do with the assessing of the taxes in this city you will never hear from it.’ ”
Hathaway went to jail in for refusing to pay the tax, but emerged victorious, as the Somerville Board of Aldermen voted to rescind his taxes.
“He had threatened to take his business out of Somerville if this was not done,” a news account says.
