How you can resist funding the government →
other forms our opposition can take →
peace movement: marches, protests, and so forth →
recent anti-war movement actions
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.
After that I headed down to a newish lefty bookstore in the shitty district for a talk on “writing dissent.”
The speaker was a journalism professor who’d written a book on the topic, and his focus was on how to turn radical ideas into good, well-crafted, persuasive arguments for a variety of audiences.
He had some good, sensible advice on this.
I was more interested in getting some advice on crafting motivating as opposed to persuasive arguments — ones directed toward people who already are sympathetic to the opinions of we malcontents who believe that things are seriously off-kilter.
On this, his advice was less specific and less helpful, but I think this may be a harder nut to crack.
At a meeting of activists recently the question came up of whom we should be targeting with our protest.
Some people said we should target government buildings and defense contractors and put ourselves in solid opposition.
Other people said we should try instead to reach people who are on-the-fence and try to persuade them of our views.
I said that often I felt tempted to march upstream at the peace protests, carrying a sign that says “when you’re serious, get back to me.”
It’s not so much that we need more people on our side as that we need the people on our side to act like they mean it.
More evidence that the U.S. anti-war movement is being put to shame by its counterparts elsewhere:
Senior British army commanders believe popular opposition to the war in Iraq has worsened existing problems in recruiting young people for the armed forces.
¶ “The anti-war movement is exacerbating our recruitment problems,” one senior source told the The Observer newspaper.
¶ “The effects have been particularly noticeable in Scotland, but are spreading to the north of England and we’re beginning to see it as well in the west,” according to the source who was not named.…
[Senior officers] said it has been worsened by an anti-war movement led by parents who have lost sons in Iraq and supported by celebrities and political figures, according to The Observer.
¶ Other sources have reported parents refusing to sign consent forms for junior soldiers to sign up, the newspaper said.
¶ In some cases, local officials who have strong anti-war sentiments are also refusing permission for recruitment officers to put up stands at certain venues, it added.
Support for the Iraq war and the president’s handling of it are significantly lower than comparable polling numbers for Vietnam and LBJ at an analogous point in .
Yet since the war began, antiwar protesters haven’t been numerous, visible, or influential.
Weisberg comes up with some plausible reasons: there’s no draft yet, the U.S. death toll is low compared to Vietnam, the media is sanitizing the war for public consumption, the insurgents in Iraq are less sympathetic than those in Vietnam were, and Iraq is seen as an issue in isolation while opposition to the Vietnam War became part of a platform with civil rights, civil liberties, and social justice.
Oh yeah, and today’s protest organizers “are inevitably moth-eaten left-wing sectarians.”
To this, I would add that the media and the public have become more jaded and hard-to-impress.
In part because the Vietnam protests were part of a major cultural upheaval, they were hard not to watch.
Will hippies run naked through the streets?
Will dope fiends dose the cops with acid?
Will a crowd of wild negroes run rampant through the shopping district?
Will the National Guard shoot people?
Are they really trying to levitate the Pentagon with a big “Om”?
That “levitate the pentagon” protest, so notorious in the lore of the anti-war and yippie movements, was about a 50,000-person affair.
If United for Peace gets twice that many people at their march in Washington , how much coverage do you expect?
They say they had 350,000 marching in New York City .
Remember that?
If that had happened in , it would have been the biggest anti-war demonstration yet.
In it earned a 521-word article on page 35 of the New York Times the next day.
So even if today’s anti-war movement were every bit as big and active as its counterpart from , it wouldn’t seem like it from reading the papers.
Time has been kind to the anti-Vietnam War movement.
It has the advantages of having been right and — eventually — having met its goal of getting the U.S. out of Vietnam.
But I think its role in forcing the U.S. out is often exaggerated — both by participants who want to trumpet their accomplishments and by opponents who want to explain their failures.
The U.S. did not withdraw because the peace movement convinced it to, but because it was defeated by the Vietnamese, and by the rebellion of draftees overseas.
This isn’t to say that those protests and other anti-war activities by Americans at home weren’t helpful or important.
Similarly, the recent shift in the political winds over the Iraq war — which has made withdrawal of U.S. forces an almost respectable viewpoint — has come from a shift in popular opinion — in which withdrawal has become the majority view.
But this shift has more to do with the reality on the ground in Iraq and the overselling of the glorious victory on the U.S.S. Mission Accomplished to an easily-illusioned and -disillusioned public than it does with efforts at education and agitation by the anti-war movement.
Which is one more reason, I think, why the anti-war movement seems smaller and less-active this time around.
It’s stuck in a rut, doing the same old ineffective things again and again (marches, rallies, quixotic lobbying).
Smart people with anti-war views know that this isn’t helping much, and they either participate half-heartedly for lack of an alternative or they sit on the sidelines, frustrated.
I have said before that people who feel strongly that they want the U.S. out of Iraq — or that they want to end any of the government’s other ongoing atrocities — should not be protesting but should be resisting in some fashion.
And so I’ve spent some time studying the nonviolent conflict scholarship of the Gene Sharp school that has been so helpful to “People Power” movements elsewhere.
If the people of the United States want to actually change government behavior by asserting their own power, this is how it is done.
Don’t throw up your hands and say “impossible!” — RTFM.
Now Kevin Van Horn has called my bluff.
He’s organizing a “Beyond Ballots or Bullets” conference that will be held in a few months.
This conference will, among other things, prepare a Strategic Estimate for nonviolent struggle, based on Gene Sharp’s theories.
This is not a gathering for reporting on the current state of freedom; nor for denouncing the State’s crimes; nor for rhapsodizing wistfully about how wonderful a free society would be.
It is a working conference for those who have a burning desire to see a free America and are committed to making it a reality.
I like the sound of that!
On I mentioned that I was thinking of picketing the upcoming “Stop Funding the War in Iraq” protest rally at the San Francisco Federal Building as a way of trying to provoke some cognitive dissonance in the anti-war taxpayers who can, with a straight face, tell Nancy Pelosi that “you can’t say you oppose the war and fund it at the same time” while they continue to send money to the Imperial Treasury.
I thought that if I went through with it, I’d be in that “solitary crank” mode that I’m trying not to be typecast into.
But I managed to sell the idea to the Northern California War Tax Resistance group, so we’ll be there as a team, with our banner and our leaflets, asking people to wear “I refuse to fund this war!” stickers.
After dithering indecisively about it for days, and hoping that sacrifices made on the altar of procrastination would gain me some providential last-minute creativity the way it did back in college, I settled on a sandwich board sign also.
On the front:
…and on the back:
has come and gone, and along with it many demonstrations, rallies, die-ins, vigils, and the like here in the San Francisco bay area and elsewhere.
Truth is, I had a fancy new sign and couldn’t wait to show it off:
I was more interested in being a billboard than in doing active outreach on , but I was approached by people on several occasions who wanted to know more about tax resistance, or who expressed that they wished they could do it “but I don’t want to end up in jail.”
I assured them there was a tax resistance method appropriate to their desired level of risk, and I gave them the contact info for our local tax resistance group.
Then, on , came the Stop Funding the War in Iraq rally at the San Francisco Federal Building, which houses House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office.
Northern California War Tax Resistance was there to hand out stickers for people to wear that read “I refuse to fund this war!”
I figured a few people would take them and wear them without thinking much about it, a few people would refuse to take them without thinking much about it, and the remainder would have to think about whether they should start refusing if they hadn’t already.
As it turned out, just about everyone we offered the stickers to was eager to wear one, though it’s hard to tell which of these will put their money where their mouths are.
Hopefully a few, anyway, had that light bulb go on, and then looked around and wondered “have all these other people wearing these stickers started resisting their taxes?”
One of the speakers, conscientious objector and counter-recruiter Aimee Allison, even gave an unsolicited plug for war tax resistance in the course of her speech:
The true power — the power of funding the war — is within our grasp.
If we cut that off, we stop the war machine, we stop the crimes against humanity, we stop underwriting the war profiteers, we stop starving our social services including our own veterans who we’ve sent over there and do not get the support that they need when they get home.
We have got to answer the call of conscience, and, if our leaders don’t then we the people in the democracy will.
For those of you who haven’t been in the military let me tell you that it is time to get some skin in the game.
It is time to declare your city or your town or your church a sanctuary for soldiers who refuse to fight.
It is time to investigate the ways to assert your war tax resistance.
It seemed to me a grand success; though I suppose the proof will be in whether or not the people who saw or who heard the message will respond with action.
We’ll have a better idea of that as people begin to contact our group for information, counseling and workshops.
The war in Iraq could ultimately cost well over a trillion dollars — at least double what has already been spent — including the long-term costs of replacing damaged equipment, caring for wounded troops, and aiding the Iraqi government, according to a new government analysis.
The United States has already allocated more than $500 billion on the day-to-day combat operations of what are now 190,000 troops and a variety of reconstruction efforts.
In a report to lawmakers yesterday, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that even under the rosiest scenario — an immediate and substantial reduction of troops — American taxpayers will feel the financial consequences of the war for at least a decade.
The calculations include the estimated cost to leave some US forces behind for at least several years to support the Iraqi government, but they also predict other long-term costs, such as extended medical care and disability compensation for wounded soldiers and survivor’s benefits for the families of the thousands of combat-zone fatalities.
The cost of the war in Iraq and other military operations has soared to the point where “we are now spending on these activities more than 10 percent of all the government’s annually appropriated funds,” said Robert A. Sunshine, the budget office’s assistant director for budget analysis.
Proclaiming that one day of the Iraq War costs $720 million, or $500,000 a minute, the Quaker pacifist group American Friends Service Committee is taking the money-focused message to a dozen U.S. cities in a series of seven-foot (more-than-one-metre) banners.
The banners stress what could be bought with the war dollars: one banner says that the tax funds spent in Iraq each day could pay for 84 new elementary schools, while another says it could pay for health care for more than 163,000 people.
These messages will harmonize well with an upcoming war tax resistance campaign that’s designed to get thousands of Americans to resist the portion of their taxes that pays for war in the Middle-East and redirect it to better causes.
(I’ll share more details on this project as it starts to go public.)
there were large anti-war parades & such in many American cities.
Alas, if parades of this sort were sufficient to stop wars, the Iraq War wouldn’t have started in the first place.
But war tax resisters were also out in force, to try to convince the paraders to turn things up a notch by joining the War Tax Boycott.
I helped out at the San Francisco parade and convergence.
We handed out hundreds of boycott flyers to the attendees and helped many people who stopped by our booth trying to figure out how they could fit war tax resistance into their lifestyles.
The event was in some ways a typical eye-rolling San Francisco freak show.
You know that frequently-heard factoid about how there are more Jews in Manhattan than in all of Israel?
I think there are more Communists in San Francisco than in all of Cuba.
And of course the “9/11 Truth” folks were swarming like mosquitos.
The big surprise for me was the huge Ron Paul for President contingent.
I saw more of them than Kucinich for President and Cindy Sheehan for Congress people combined.
And they were particularly receptive to the “tax strike” idea.
was the sixth anniversary of
, and, not coincidentally, also
. To commemorate the latter, I joined up with some folks from
Northern California War Tax Resistance and
set up shop at a
BART station
to hand out flyers focusing on the cost of the gargantuan war budget.
A highlight for me was running into the fellow from the
IRS who
organizes the
VITA
center I’ve volunteered at the last several tax seasons. I’ve never let on
while I have been volunteering there that I’m a tax resister, but now that
he’s seen me with my “War Tax Resisters Aren’t Buying It” sandwichboard, I
guess I’m out of the closet. If I volunteer again this year, we’ll see if it
comes up in conversation.
Here are a couple of encouraging signs that the American anti-war movement
might be coming back to life:
A large coalition of anti-war groups are coordinating “a powerful and sustained nonviolent resistance” campaign beginning in in Washington, D.C..
Under this umbrella you’ll find groups like ANSWER, CodePink, National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance, Progressive Democrats of America, Veterans for Peace, and World Can’t Wait, and participants like Ann Wright, Bill Moyer, Chris Hedges, Cornel West, Cynthia McKinney, Dave Rovics, Derrick Jensen, Jodie Evans, Kevin Zeese, Medea Benjamin, Mike Ferner, Michael Lerner, and Ted Rall.
Meanwhile, the Come Home, America coalition is trying to make anti-war isolationism respectable again by coalescing a set of anti-war groups from across the American political spectrum around a call to bring American troops home from unsavory foreign wars.
“Signers include advisers to Presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton; former presidential candidates of the Libertarian, Socialist, and Green parties, as well as an independent, Ralph Nader; representatives of think tanks such as the Institute for Policy Studies, the Independent Institute, the Future of Freedom Foundation, the Hoover Institution, the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and Just Foreign Policy have signed on.
And editors from a wide range of publications, including The American Conservative, Antiwar.com, Black Agenda Report, Black Commentator, FireDogLake.com, Liberty for All, Liberty for America, OpEdNews.com, The Progressive, Progressive Review, Raw Story, and Reason have all signed on.”
Over at Slate, editor Jacob Weisberg tries to explain 
