Why it is your duty to stop supporting the government → the danger of “feel-good” protests → liberals can be infuriating → “cargo cult” fetishization of 60s activism

A while back I decided to try to get involved with the anti-war, “progressive” movement. I’m a veteran of this political wing, having done my share of peace marches, protest rallies, and civil disobedience sit-ins back in the day. But I drifted away some time ago and I’m finding it hard to drift back.

My motives for returning include the desire to join forces with people who are working for similar goals, and the hope that I can encourage people who already consider themselves to be in the opposition to try tax resistance as a technique.

What’s making it difficult for me to return is that, in San Francisco, to be part of the anti-war, progressive movement means to be sharing the stage with a whole bunch of unapologetic Stalinists, paranoid schizophrenics, ersatz intifadists, tin-eared rhetorical broken-records, insatiable identity-politics police, new-age gurus of every variety, publicity hounds, careerist Democrats, and the like. Even our right-wing counter-protesters aren’t very witty.

It’s not as though you can even really say of all of these freaks, “well, their hearts are in the right place,” because, more often than not, they aren’t.

And demonstrations in San Francisco — what are they demonstrating exactly? That a bunch of San Fransiscans are upset about Dubya’s policies? Big surprise. The march was more like a parade — everyone marching behind their flags, with their costumes and props, mostly there to impress each other and to feel important and right.

In conversation with another tax resister I compared it to the “cargo cult” phenomenon. The most photogenic parts of a successful protest movement like the civil rights movement in the United States — and therefore the most-often-seen in documentary footage — were big rallies and marches like the March on Washington, civil disobedience like the lunch counter sit-ins, and confrontations with baton- and hose-wielding cops. So today’s protester thinks that if those elements can be resummoned somehow, success can’t be far behind.

They might as well expect to gain independence for California by throwing crates of tea into San Francisco Bay. A superficial fetishization of the theatrical residue of history gets you a renaissance faire, not a successful political movement.

But I went through the effort of getting that rant out of my system so I could move on to better things. I started attending the Designs on Democracy conference in Berkeley today. It’s a set of panels and workshops and such about how “progressives” can craft their messages more effectively.

And it was really good. People were thinking practically, and facing things honestly and realistically. I hadn’t seen anything like it from the left in too long. I can’t say I agreed with all of the shared political assumptions (it’s probably a bit of a stretch to call me a “progressive” these days), but I was delighted to see a group of dedicated, rational, pragmatic, good-humored people working for positive change.

I heard a lot of good advice about “framing your message” that I can start putting into practice right away. And I got a good dose of relief and encouragement from hearing ideas for powerful and revolutionary social change being articulated by people who have their heads screwed on straight.

Jim Macdonald has posted an Open Letter to National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance concerning their March 20^th civil disobedience action at the Pentagon.

In that action, 200 protest marchers carried a coffin covered with pictures of Iraq War victims to the Pentagon, ostensibly in order to deliver this coffin to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The police who guard the Pentagon set up fences to block the path of the protesters, but 51 of them climbed the fences and were arrested.

As eager as I am to see people committing to civil disobedience, I am very skeptical of the value of these arrests. I’ve called these sorts of things “cargo cult” protests because they seem to be the result of fetishizing a single element of successful civil disobedience campaigns (that is, that people got arrested during them) as though that element is sufficiently powerful all by itself even when it is ripped from its context.

Jim Macdonald’s “Open Letter” covers many other topics as well, but has some very good observations on this theme that caught my eye (excerpts):

At the site of the arrest, I understand that many people were moved and empowered by the experience. I am thankful for that, but as an individual witnessing it, I have to admit that I was not moved in any good way and was in fact horrified by what I was witnessing. Watching person after person climb and go under this arbitrary fence line into the waiting arms of the Pentagon Police left me wondering if everyone in the action had undertaken the action simply to be arrested. It seemed there was a great rush of enthusiasm toward climbing the fence.…

The aim of the protest was to reach Donald Rumsfeld. Of course, activists know where Rumsfeld lives, where he goes to church, and probably could easily determine on any given day where Rumsfeld is. If we wanted to reach Donald Rumsfeld, why did we feel it was necessary to have so much ceremony before going the long way to an office we could in all likelihood never be able to reach? Who were we speaking truth to? Did we go through all that trouble to put on a display for a small section of the Pentagon police force? If so, why didn’t we say that from the start? And, if we are speaking to them, why didn’t we aim from the beginning to deliver them the coffin? Didn’t we avoid such a tactic because what we are after is an end to the war in Iraq and that we believe that Donald Rumsfeld has some power in making that stop?

It seems to me that what happened on Monday was generally a display of vanity and not Satyagraha. We chose a route and a course of action that was least likely to reach Donald Rumsfeld and chose instead to put on a spectacle, one carefully negotiated with the same law enforcement people who you chose to defy at the end.…

Perhaps, it was a media event, but what did it expose? Was it new? For all the media that showed up, I was not surprised by the relatively small amount of coverage of the event. Was this a grand show of resistance rather than the real thing, a staged place for a staged confrontation with little consequences for anyone involved in the action? If Satyagraha is supposed to change the hearts and minds of the oppressor through the cheerful suffering of the oppressed, I wonder who had soul force on either side of the fence. It seemed that the police officer standing solitarily and doing his job quietly while standing in the face of verbal abuse seemed to have at least as much of the spirit of a satyagrahi, at least on this day. And, as someone who believes that the prisons should be emptied and that it should be criminal to be a police officer, that is saying something! Is that why some people were driven with all sincerity to thank the police for the job they were doing? And, if we had less soul force than the police, that is a sad state of affairs.

In short, this was not a symbolic action. Many actions are derided for being merely symbolic, but I challenge that view in many respects. All actions aim to speak at those we think are perpetuating injustice, and so any action that is worthwhile is in some sense symbolic. Actions that are called “merely symbolic” are often not symbolic at all because they do not speak to their intended targets. They are like letters that don’t spell up a word, or noises that are incoherent. You have heard the philosophical riddle about whether a tree that falls in the forest with no one around to hear it makes a sound; one can say the same about actions like this. And, while some of us heard it; while some in the Pentagon heard it, it did not really make a sound that anyone could understand.

Jonathan Meier writes, “if we want to change the world, we have to do the unexpected. Over and over again”:

Politicians expect protests. They expect rallies. They expect marches and people screaming in the streets. I hate to say it, but these types of actions aren’t going to do a damn thing to transform the world and bring about reconciliation (though, perhaps, they might be effective in creating the type of pressure necessary to stop a current political trend, if the rallies themselves are unexpected, as in the case of Ukrainian citizens per their 2004 election).

The mistake that activists are making, I think, is that rallies and marches have become organizing principles and, hence, are treated as ends in themselves. This creates a situation where activists are trapped in their own expectations.

This week is the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Japan. Groups across the country are stepping up their anti-war and anti-militarist actions this week as part of a two-month campaign that includes another of Cindy Sheehan’s “Camp Casey” encampments in Crawford, which will then follow Dubya back to Washington to become “Camp Democracy”, and which will then culminate in the Declaration of Peace campaign and civil disobedience actions toward the end of September.

Last night I went to a “spokescouncil” where representatives of San Francisco groups were planning an August 9^th action focused on the war contractor Bechtel, which is headquartered in the city.

The meeting, of about 25 people from about as many local activist groups, was uncharacteristically efficient and on-topic. There was an agenda, which was followed, and the meeting finished early, with everyone knowing what the next step was and who would be responsible. Nobody sabotaged things by rambling about the imminent arrival of the benevolent Andromedians, or by complaining about their favorite minority being underrepresented and demanding mea culpas all around.

Keiji Tsuchiya spoke for several minutes, through an interpreter. Mr. Tsuchiya was a 17-year-old draftee training at a base across the bay from Hiroshima when it was bombed. He saw the “boiling cloud” rise from the city and was among the first responders who went over to try to help.

As he spoke, he held up child-like drawings that he had made a few years ago from his memories of the aftermath of the bombing. Here are people with skin hanging from them like sheets walking like ghosts through the city as we clear paths through the debris. Here is the corpse of a horse that smelled so bad we stopped everything else to dig a hole and bury it, towels around our mouths to block the stench. Here is a woman, so badly burned we did not know how she could scream, trapped under the wreckage of a house.

Everywhere people yelling, “Soldier, give me water!” Two charred corpses along the road, probably elementary school students from what was left of their clothes. Everywhere, messages written on stones and walls and fragments of buildings from people who were trying to find their loved ones. The soldiers, who had been given horse meat earlier in the day to supplement their usual rice and soybean meals, pulling corpses from the river (men floating face-down, women face-up) and cremating them on makeshift pyres on-shore. Here’s the river, and those are the corpses, and here are our fires. “One, two, lift!” we would dump the body from a stretcher onto the fire.

On the last day before returning to base, Tsuchiya found a completely-charred body but with a relatively-untouched lunchbox at its feet full of the same food the soldiers usually ate — soybeans and rice (though lately it had been hard tack and water). He cried out in anguish, desperation and anger at a God that would allow such cruelty. Later he learned more about the horrible injuries people had suffered and about the after-effects of the radiation. He himself has had many health problems connected with the radioactive black rain that fell on the city while he worked there.

Now Keiji Tsuchiya is the Vice-President of a chapter of Hidankyo, an organization of atomic bombing survivors that works for global nuclear disarmament. He will be speaking at the Bechtel action as well.

After he spoke, the group began to discuss the possibility of a civil disobedience action at the Bechtel protest. Questions like “do we want to do an action where people risk arrest?” and “who here is planning to risk arrest?” The discussion went on in this vein for a while, with getting arrested seeming to be an end in itself, with no discussion at all of what specific action would be leading to the arrest or what noble goal the people being arrested were going to be thereby thwarted from accomplishing.

I’ve seen this before, this weird reverence for getting arrested doing civil disobedience as if it were itself a magically powerful thing. I’m not sure I fully understand the psychology behind it. I asked the group at that point — the only occasion on which I spoke up, actually — “what is the goal of the civil disobedience action — to get arrested, or to inconvenience Bechtel, or to get press coverage, or what?” The consensus seemed to be that inconveniencing Bechtel — or “shutting down” Bechtel if you allow for hyperbole — was the goal.

And then it got interesting. Two women at the meeting spoke up, saying that they had tried, on their own, to deliver a message to Bechtel’s C.E.O. one day. Bechtel’s security, realizing that some sort of protest action was in the offing, started their standard procedure for such things — which was to shut down the building and let nobody in or out (even employees).

Two people, not intending to be arrested, managed to shut down the Bechtel home office for 45 minutes one day just by showing up and asking to speak with the boss. A civil disobedience action, with a dozen protesters sitting down and locking arms at a police cordon around Bechtel until they are arrested and hauled away, might be just as effective at meeting the same goal.

Nonetheless, people remained enthused about doing the standard civil disobedience action (about two-thirds of those in attendance planned to participate), and the rest of the meeting was spent seeking volunteers for various roles that are useful in such an action — police liaison, convener, communicator, legal/jail monitor, follow-up coordinator.

In general, a very encouraging meeting. People got down to business with appropriate seriousness and efficiency, and what needed to get done got done. My usual complaint about “cargo cult” civil disobedience applies, but perhaps I’m missing something.

Today, some bits-and-pieces that have collected over the past weeks that I haven’t been able to fit in anywhere else:

• A site calling itself The $3 Trillion Shopping Spree brings the war tax resister “penny poll” into the digital age: asking people to fill a shopping cart with things they’d rather have bought than the Iraq War for that $3,000,000,000,000.
• Steev Hise reports back from the NWTRCC conference in Birmingham, Alabama.
• The Tax Prof Blog notes a study on cigarette smuggling in the wake of sharp rises in tobacco taxes in some states. The Tax Foundation says this has often been accompanied by a rise in smuggling-related crime.
• A TIGTA audit shows that in conflicts with the IRS, low-income taxpayers get poor service from the Taxpayer Advocate Service. Another TIGTA report looked at the challenges facing the government in its attempts to close the “Tax Gap.”
• The IRS got caught playing a sneaky trick in Tax Court — a “fraud on the court” in the words of one judge, who applied sanctions to the agency in 1,300 cases it was prosecuting, leading to over $30 million in refunds.
• The Tax Foundation notes that while we’re distracted complaining about the windfall profits of ExxonMobil and the like, the real bandits are getting off skot free: “the total amount of taxes the company paid or remitted [last quarter was] $29.3 billion, nearly three times the net profits it earned for shareholders. The financial statements of two other large U.S.-based oil companies, ConocoPhillips and ChevronTexaco, show similar large tax payments. Indeed, these three companies paid or remitted a combined $47.8 billion in taxes in the first quarter of 2008, nearly $28 billion more than they earned in net profits.”
• Mimi Copp says that the Iraq War has cost American families about $16,500 each. But she’s decided to stop payment. “It is something that I’ve been thinking about for a long time. But this year, with a core group of people in my church community, Circle of Hope, I was able to walk with them through the discernment process and I felt quite strongly about doing this form of resistance to war-making, while at the same time redirecting money to life-giving initiatives. Here’s a letter to the editor I wrote for tax day, which was not published.”:

  How can we stop the war in Iraq? Soldiers can refuse to fight. Government leaders can de-fund the occupation. Taxpayers can stop paying for it.

  This year I will not pay my federal income tax to the U.S. government. I will no longer support my country’s war-making by giving it my money.

  In FY 2006, out of every dollar the U.S. government spent, 5 cents was spent on education and 12 cents on food and housing assistance, while it spent 41 cents on war & preparations for war. This type of spending does not reflect my Christian values and therefore I will not support it.

  Instead, I will redirect my tax dollars to two organizations working on life-giving initiatives: healthcare for the uninsured and aid for Iraqi refugees.

  When Congress passes the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Bill (HR-1921), I will resume paying my income tax to the U.S. government.

  I know that I will be breaking the law and I am prepared to accept the consequences, because when a country wages war there are consequences; ask a solider returning home or an Iraqi refugee being resettled in Philadelphia.

• The MakingPeace blog reports on another variation of the “penny poll”-style war tax protest. It’s pretty simple: just pieces of paper on which are printed “I’d rather buy _______ than war!”, accompanied with magic markers aplenty.
• Everybody in the willfully ineffective wing of the American anti-war movement is going to Cleveland next month for an Open National Conference to Stop the War in Iraq and Bring the Troops Home Now. They seem to have concluded, before the conference even begins, that the most important thing they can be doing right now is to organize another big march and rally like the ones that have been so effective in the past.
• The Urban Institute has published a paper on War and Taxes to note that the Iraq War seems to be an anomaly in that the U.S. government is spending hand over fist on the war, but not trying to raise revenue accordingly.

Yesterday, the California Supreme Court affirmed that when the voters of California amended their state constitution so as to restrict “marriage” to opposite-sex couples, they were exercising their legal prerogative to do so.

Why bother to have a government if it cannot restrict people’s rights? And in the finest form of government — that is, democracy — it is the majority that gets to decide which minorities’ rights get restricted in which ways. Thusly the California Supreme Court ruled. Sort of.

I haven’t read the ruling too closely, nor am I really qualified to do so, but from what commentary I have read by people who have credentials and training in law, it seems as though the court has ruled that the people of California may take away “marriage” from same-sex couples, but only to the extent that this doesn’t have any effect at all on their legal rights and privileges. In other words, the people can refuse to let their government call same-sex marriages “marriages” but they cannot direct their government to discriminate against those marriages in terms of their legal standing.

If true, that’s not much of a defeat for gay rights advocates, and not much of a victory for the traditional-marriage partisans.

But, in any case, so far has the tide of opinion on this subject turned during the past several years, that instead of gay rights advocates seeing this as a small setback in the context of an ongoing victory in their battle for equal rights, they are seeing it as an outrage against the equal rights they already assume belong to all of us.

It’s this sort of uncompromising assertion of dignity that has gotten the gay rights movement so far so fast in recent years.

But today I got distracted thinking about one of the ways this outrage expressed itself: by more than 100 people getting arrested for blocking a city street.

This is a peculiar and popular form of protest. It bears some resemblance to civil disobedience, but is really its own, distinct phenomenon. In true civil disobedience, one of the following two conditions must hold:

1. Either the law that you are breaking is itself immoral in some way, and that is the reason you are breaking it,
2. or, although the law itself might be unobjectionable to you, you are acting to prevent a wrong (or promote a good) in a way that requires you to incidentally break that law.

So, for instance, people breaking the Fugitive Slave Act by operating a station on the Underground Railroad were breaking a law that they believed was itself an immoral, unjust law. Many tax resisters believe that it is immoral and unjust to force people to pay for, say, the war in Iraq, or the salaries of government torturers. On the other hand, people who are arrested at blockades aren’t usually opposed to laws against trespassing or blocking traffic or whatever they end up being charged with — they are violating those laws incidentally to performing some action that they hope will lead to some greater good or prevent some greater harm.

But in the case of the people who were arrested blocking the street in San Francisco last night — and much the same is true of most other so-called “civil disobedience” actions I’ve seen in recent years — they were neither asserting that laws against blocking traffic were immoral, nor were they saying that blocking traffic was a way of preventing some greater harm that would be caused by allowing that traffic to proceed as normal.

Instead, getting-arrested — whatever the charge and whatever the action leading to it — was itself the point, and seemed to be mostly a way of publicizing and amplifying one’s sense of outrage, anguish, or commitment. Less like a civil disobedience action, it was more like the action of a mourner who wails and covers himself in ashes, or a penitent who whips himself with a lash. Being arrested has become a sort of government-sponsored method of certifying the strength of one’s opinion.

Some excerpts from an article covering the arrests:

Earlier in the day, police arrested more than 100 protesters blocking Van Ness Avenue near the Civic Center after giving the chanting, sign-waving crowd more than an hour to vent its anger and sadness. Many of those arrested were released in time to return for the evening event.

Shortly after noon, officers began arresting anti-Prop. 8 protesters, starting with clergy members. The arrests went so smoothly they seemed choreographed — which in a way they almost were, considering the police and protest organizers had been talking for days to make sure everything went smoothly and peacefully.

“It’s the right thing to do,” Rabbi Sydney Mintz of Congregation Emanu-El of San Francisco said of her decision to protest Prop. 8, shortly before she was led off with wrists tied.

Mintz received her citation and was back on the street by 6 p.m., this time with her 8-year-old son Gabe Newbrun-Mintz, who said his mother’s arrest was “sad.”

But she stayed in the street “so that they would know she was serious about the civil rights,” he said.

Mintz said, “The police handled it very, very well and I think we made our point.”

None of this is necessarily bad, though it is a little weird when you pause to think about it. No weirder than sackcloth & ashes or self-flagellation, though, I suppose. I’m struck by the phrase “Mintz received her citation” in the above excerpt, phrasing that would apply equally well to a summons to appear in court for a violation of the law as to an official commendation of praiseworthy action.

But while this sort of thing seems mostly harmless, I am worried that people have come to confuse this sort of theatrical arrest-as-protest activity with genuine civil disobedience, and so are losing track of the actual practical power that well-crafted civil disobedience campaigns and actions have.

Much later, I read the essay The Modern Martyr by G.K. Chesterton, which covered some of the same ground more than a century before I got around to it. ―♇ 14 August 2016