How you can resist funding the government →
other forms our opposition can take →
peace movement: marches, protests, and so forth →
movement introspection
Joining Loeb on the panel were Susan Griffen and Toni Mirosevich, each of whom contributed to the The Impossible… volume.
The purpose of Loeb’s books, and of this panel’s discussion, was to combat feelings of burnout and powerlessness amongst activists who are frustrated that they were unable to stop the war on Iraq and that they are unable to make much political headway in a country without a functioning opposition party.
Myself, I didn’t walk away particularly reinspired or reenergized, in part I think due to the soothing NPR-voices everyone was using.
I think I’m in what Loeb called “the global fraternity of the cynical.”
He mentioned in this regard Milan Kundera, who refused Václav Havel’s request that he sign a petition requesting that the Czech government release political prisoners.
Kundera thought the petitioning was useless and was essentially a self-promotion stunt on Havel’s part.
Havel responded that although individual petitioning efforts often did come to nothing, the process of petitioning helped to build a movement and “people’s civic backbones began to straighten again.”
Loeb suggests that other actions, like these large protest marches that seem to change nothing, have beneficial effects like these that can be hard to see at first.
Even in the grimmest of circumstances, a shift in perspective can create startling change.
I am thinking of a story I heard a few years ago from my friend Odette, a writer and a survivor of the holocaust.
Along with many others who crowd the bed of a large truck, she tells me, Robert Desnos is being taken away from the barracks of the concentration camp where he has been held prisoner.
Leaving the barracks, the mood is somber; everyone knows the truck is headed for the gas chambers.
And when the truck arrives no one can speak at all; even the guards fall silent.
But this silence is soon interrupted by an energetic man, who jumps into the line and grabs one of the condemned.
Improbable as it is, Odette told me, Desnos reads the man’s palm.
Oh, he says, I see you have a very long lifeline.
And you are going to have three children.
He is exuberant.
And his excitement is contagious.
First one man, then another, offers up his hand, and the prediction is for longevity, more children, abundant joy.
As Desnos reads more palms, not only does the mood of the prisoners change but that of the guards too.
How can one explain it?
Perhaps the element of surprise has planted a shadow of doubt in their minds.
If they told themselves these deaths were inevitable, this no longer seems inarguable.
They are in any case so disoriented by this sudden change of mood among those they are about to kill that they are unable to go through with the executions.
So all the men, along with Desnos, are packed back onto the truck and taken back to the barracks.
Desnos has saved his own life and the lives of others by using his imagination.
Loeb says he hoped in his most recent book to avoid sentimentality, and “stories that offered hope but didn’t ring true,” but he gave into temptation and included Griffen’s story of surrealist poet Robert Desnos, and it’s hard to blame him since it’s such a nice story, almost made for Hollywood.
But it made me skeptical of his other success stories, like when he told us that the U.S. peace movement, while it was failing to stop the war in Vietnam, succeeded (though it didn’t know it at the time) in preventing Nixon from following through on his inclination to turn Vietnam into a nuclear war.
I liked Toni Mirosevich’s story about dockworkers helping to smuggle contraband jazz into the Soviet Union better.
Not only did it sound more likely, it also was more down-to-earth and easier to cast myself into in imagination.
I tried to picture myself risking a trip to the gulag to make a samizdat bootleg of Miles Davis.
The war tax resistance movement is a little self-conscious about being a bit long in the tooth.
How to encourage more young people to become war tax resisters and to participate in the war tax resistance movement is a regular topic of discussion at NWTRCC meetings, for instance.
It isn’t as though there weren’t any young war tax resisters, or that the ones that exist aren’t active — indeed there are two young activists on NWTRCC’s Administrative Committee.
But there’s no denying that grey hair is overrepresented.
Part of this may come from the fact that a lot of young people don’t have much experience with paying federal taxes, and so the gravity of the situation hasn’t hit them yet.
And part of this may be that for a young person applying for student loans and trying to break into the job market, tax resistance seems to interfere with other important goals.
Part of it also may be that the war tax resistance movement has developed a culture that carries along with it traditions and cultural assumptions that are more comfortable to an older generation of activists (for instance, the folk songs we sing).
A few years back, Dan Berger and Andy Cornell, two young activists, toured the eastern United States to promote their books and to put their fingers on the pulse of radical activism in the country.
Along the way, they stayed the night at the home of a war tax resister.
Here was their impression:
Intergenerational movements are not simply about people of various ages being in the same room.
Instead, it is about building respectful relationships of mutual learning and teaching based on a long-haul approach to movement building.
In raising this issue, we saw three typical responses that are generally unhelpful to building intergenerational groups and movements:
The Nike Approach (Just Do It!)
the older activists who tell young people to just go out there and change the world already and to stop looking for validation from older people.
But young folks aren’t looking for a go-ahead; we are out there, doing our best.
Validation and encouragement from people we respect can bolster our resolve, but what we’re really looking for is mentorship, multigenerational commitment, and solidarity.
We’re willing to put ourselves out there, even to make mistakes.
But it would be helpful if we didn’t have to make the same mistakes older people have already made.
And young folks need to see that older activists maintain their political commitments in both word and deed.
The Retired Approach (We Had Our Turn, Now You Try)
several older activists echoed the sentiment that they did their best and now it was up to us.
Some with this position argue that they and their generation need to get entirely out of the way of the young folks, which functionally removes older people from the equation.
This abandonment masquerading as support is equally unhelpful in actually learning from the past and moving forward together because it serves to enforce a generational separation.
The Obstructionist Approach (Only If You Accept My Politics and Unquestioned Leadership)
people with this position demand adherence to the politics and vision of the older generation as the prerequisite for any working relationship.
They make The Retired Approach more appealing and are a reminder that, frankly, some people do need to get out of the way.
This is where older allies committed to collaboration could be potentially helpful, proving that political divides are not inherently generational gaps.
A lack of intergenerational relationships and groups is apparent nationally and locally.
In one town we visited, for instance, the “peace community” seemed to lack any relationship to anyone under 50 or to impoverished communities of color that are most directly affected by the war machine.
Another town saw a largely generational split over confrontational anti-war activism, where older people generally refused to support any confrontational tactics and anyone using them.
Yet when the younger folks went out by themselves to picket the recruiting station, they were able to successfully shut it down on two separate occasions.
Intergenerational movement building could be useful not only in expanding the base of people willing to engage in such confrontational tactics (and thereby hopefully contributing to hastening the war’s end) but also in trying to push other older people to work with and support youth leadership.
Young people, for our part, make it difficult for movement veterans to find us and assess our work when we organize only as temporary affinity groups that usually lack office space and sometimes even contact information.
Expressing interest in building such ties is also important.
When one of us off-handedly commented to an SDS veteran and radical historian that many younger activists would appreciate being asked by organizers of his generation to have coffee or lunch and talk shop, he seemed genuinely surprised.
“Really?
You think folks would want to get together with people like me?”
We assured him that we at least appreciated it — especially when the older folks picked up the tab.
What young people don’t want to deal with is patronization or abandonment, people who focus on their glory days or on lecturing “the youngens.”
What young folks do want are older activists who remain steadfast in their resolve and organizing, who seek to draw out the lessons from their years in the struggle (and are clear about where they differ with others of their age cohort without being sectarian), who look to younger activists for inspiration and guidance while providing the same, and who are focused on movement building.
Building on the more multigenerational roots of Southern organizing, two older organizers in Greensboro beautifully summed this up at an event in saying, “We aren’t done, we’re not leaving, and we’re in this together.”
If, as we argued throughout the tour, militancy is not to be conflated with violence or property destruction, but is instead understood as a stance of political integrity and commitment in spite of serious consequences, activists young and old might also more seriously consider the challenge directed at the two of us by a long-time radical pacifist anarchist who housed us for a night: the challenge of becoming “war tax” resistors.
While the unpublicized, moralistic actions of scattered, aging individuals that seem to have characterized the war tax resistance movement for many decades haven’t proven particularly appealing to many younger radicals, it seems that a coordinated, media-savvy campaign of joint declarations of tax resistance by a significant group of the younger-generation activists, expressing an explicit anti-imperialist politics, has enough potential to ignite debate as to at least be given a thoughtful appraisal.
“After all,” expressed our new friend, “the only thing the government wants is your money.
They sure don’t care if you vote, or if you approve of what they’re doing.”
We may be tempted to petulance in our civil disobedience, conscientious objection, and even just our petitioning and protest, and I think we would be wise to be on guard against this temptation.
Petulance paints the relationship between the protester and the target of the protest as like that of an unruly child to a parent.
Petulant tactics can take the form of making “demands” with nothing much to back them up but the demand itself.
Or they can take the form of protest methods that seem taken from the playbook of a two-year-old — grown-up versions of “I’ll hold my breath until I die if you don’t give me what I want” or “I’m going to stomp my feet and scream if I don’t get my way.”
By taking the form of a tantrum, petulant protests increase bystander sympathy for the parentish figure and reduce sympathy for the childish figure, while at the same time reinforcing the idea that the parentish figure ought naturally to be making the decisions.
In other words, petulant tactics bolster the authority of the target of the protest.
Wise parents do not give in to temper tantrums, and similarly, targets of petulant protests appear wise and sympathetic when they do not give in or when they defuse the protest by conciliating in token and condescending ways.
This makes it less likely that the goals of the protesters (to the extent that they depend on action by the protest target) will be met.
Petulance is not an act of assertiveness, but a symptom of submissiveness.
Petulant tactics can reinforce protesters’ feelings of inferiority and powerlessness, and thereby discourage them from taking the necessary bold, confident, and effective steps to create change.
Inferior and powerless people whine, make toothless demands, and throw tantrums. Equal and confident people look each other in the eye, state their cases calmly and forthrightly, and do what they feel they have to do without making a big hullabaloo.
Petulant protesters, by reinforcing the feelings of social superiority in their targets, can make those targets less inclined to negotiate or to listen.*
Defenders of petulant protest tactics might argue that because their targets are not like wise parents at all, but like foolish ones, petulant tactics are best since in such cases the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
Also, some protesters may be forced into positions of powerless inferiority and then have no recourse but to use petulant tactics that are appropriate to such a position — for instance, the Irish prisoners who used tactics like hunger strikes or smearing the walls of their cells with feces.
But even if there are situations in which petulant tactics are called for, I think such tactics are frequently used, especially today, at times and in ways that are counterproductive.
In many such cases, switching to tactics that are dignified and that assert the social and ethical equality of the protesters and the protest target would be more effective — both at winning the immediate goals of the protesters and (what ought to be among the long-term goals of anyone working for a better world) at fostering more healthy relationships among people and between people and institutions.
For example, the lunch counter sit-ins during the American civil rights movement were done in a dignified way: polite, well-disciplined black Americans sat at “whites-only” lunch counters, and stayed there in patient expectation of being treated in a reciprocally dignified manner although they were refused service.
If they had chosen a petulant mode of protest, they might have then begun chanting, or yelling at the staff, or maybe vandalizing the lunch counters.
Instead, they stuck with the quiet dignity approach, and let the white racists monopolize the petulant tactics (violence, verbal abuse, spitting on or pouring catsup over the protesters, that sort of thing).
The dignified mode arguably was a more effective tactic for ending lunch counter segregation (the immediate goal of the protests), but was certainly a more effective strategy for discrediting racism and Jim Crow and in increasing sympathy for the civil rights movement.
This example is more cut-and-dried than most, since the battle against Jim Crow was so centered on asserting dignity and equality — but I think most other individual and grassroots political actions would also benefit from transcending the petulant and taking a forthright, dignified, confident posture.
How do we defend ourselves against this temptation to use the petulant mode at times when it is unnecessary and counter-productive?
First, acknowledge that the temptation exists, and that it springs from internalized feelings of social and ethical inferiority with respect to the protest target.
We go into petulant mode for much the same reason a child does — because we despair of being listened to or heeded any other way and we are too powerless, inarticulate, or uncreative to use more effective methods of meeting our goals.
Second, make an effort to examine protest tactics that we come across or that are proposed to us with an eye to discerning to what extent they use the petulant mode.
Share your observations with others; compare notes.
Evaluate protests not only in terms of how they might meet immediate goals but in what impressions they create or reinforce about the relationship between the protesters, the protest targets, and bystanders.
Third, reimagine our relationships with the targets of our protests in such a way as to suspend or dispel the internalized feeling of inferiority.
If you felt yourself to be the social and ethical equal of the people who are the target of your protest (as you perhaps already consider yourself to be, on a rational level), how would you convey your protest to them and how would you expect them to respond?
Fourth, know that petulance is usually meant to intensify or amplify a protest that feels too small, unnoticed, or insufficient.
When you feel the petulant temptation, see if maybe you can amplify your protest in some other fashion.
If not, consider that maybe a quiet, dignified, under-the-radar protest might nonetheless be more effective in the long run than a loud, annoying, attention-getting, petulant one.
Fifth, be honest with yourself and others about what you are doing and what goals you can reasonably expect to accomplish.
Petulant protest often is accompanied with bluster and exaggeration, which can lead to discouragement when reality sets in.
By taking care in this way, we can increase the effectiveness of our actions, reduce the risk of discouragement and burnout, become more appealing and convincing to potential sympathizers, and contribute to a better world in the long run.
* Gandhi, on this point, counseled:
“Non-cooperation is not a movement of brag, bluster, or bluff.
It is a test of our sincerity.
It requires solid and silent self-sacrifice.
It challenges our honesty and our capacity for national work.
It is a movement that aims at translating ideas into action… ¶ A non-cooperationist strives to compel attention and to set an example not by his violence but by his unobtrusive humility.
He allows his solid action to speak for his creed.
His strength lies in his reliance upon the correctness of his position.
And the conviction of it grows most in his opponent when he least interposes his speech between his action and his opponent.
Speech, especially when it is haughty, betrays want of confidence and it makes one’s opponent skeptical about the reality of the act itself.”
When I originally wrote up these observations, I used Gandhi’s hunger
strikes as an example of a variety of petulant protest that may have been an effective one.
After reviewing some of what Gandhi wrote about the tactic, though, I’m not sure it qualifies.
When he was on hunger strikes, he often compared himself to a parent, and those he was trying to influence to children.
He viewed hunger strikes (sometimes, anyway) as a form of penance he would undertake because he had failed to discipline his (metaphorical) children well; the “children” would then, because of their esteem for him, repent and get straight (at least if the strike worked as planned).
This is a little odd, and bears some resemblance to the petulant mode I’m trying to describe, but isn’t quite the same.
It is all well and good to consider the impressive variety of tactics that historical tax resistance movements have used to supplement their campaigns, but how do you go about choosing the right set of tactics that will do the most good for your campaign in the here-and-now?
This has lately been a frequent topic of discussion in American war tax resistance circles.
Some American war tax resisters have been pushing to convert us from being a coalition of people with a common interest in war tax resistance into an actual movement that has precise goals, particular tactics designed to meet the goals, metrics to measure success, and so forth.
(If you’d like to review some of the back-and-forth on this topic, take a look for example at The Picket Line entries for , , and , Larry Rosenwald’s War Tax Resistance Manifesto, and some of the wtr-s email list threads starting in .)
So far, these efforts have floundered in their attempts to move from this sensible-sounding idea towards an implementation that actually defines which goals and which tactics and which criteria we’re all supposed to unite behind.
Why might this be so?
Why has it proven difficult for a group of people with such a specific and unusual preoccupation as war tax resistance to make headway towards agreeing on something seemingly so basic as which goals they are pursuing?
There are several varieties of war tax resister
It turns out that there are distinct varieties of war tax resisters, and that while unsurprisingly they have a shared interest in the nitty-gritty of tax resistance and a shared dislike for militarism, when it comes to motives, goals, and tactics these varieties are in important ways very different.
There are four varieties of tax resister:
conscientious objection
A tax resister who is motivated by conscientious objection wants his or
her conscience to be free of the stain of complicity with what the government does with the tax money.
Such a resister doesn’t necessarily care if the government knows about his or her resistance, and doesn’t necessarily feel like he or she needs to be part of a movement — resisting taxes is the right thing to do, resisters like this feel, and they’d do it even if they were alone.
civil disobedience
A tax resister who is using tax resistance as a form of civil-disobedient
protest is trying to amplify the effect of his or her protest by breaking the law, publicly, and inviting the legal consequences.
It is a way of communicating the strength of the resister’s objections, and his or her willingness to sacrifice for these beliefs.
If the government responds by seizing the tax money, that doesn’t necessarily represent a defeat, since the tax resistance is more about taking a principled oppositional stand than about the actual money involved.
nonviolent conflict
A resister who hopes to use tax resistance to reduce the resources
available to the government and thereby force it to change its behavior (or perhaps even to replace it or force it to relinquish control), is using tax resistance as a form of nonviolent conflict.
Such a resister needs lots of comrades to join in the struggle, and prefers tactics that cost the government the most.
legal test-case
Some tax resisters resist because they conclude that the tax they are
resisting was enacted illegally, or is imposed by an institution without the proper authority to do so, or that it is being illegally applied to them.
They resist in anticipation of such a legal theory being found to be correct, and for the tax to be legally abolished.
In the war tax resistance movement you find this in resisters who argue that the Nuremberg Principles say taxpayers are legally obligated to avoid paying for aggressive war and war crimes, or that the option of conscientious objection to military taxation is a human right.
Many other tax resistance movements do not have the same variety
These varieties are not unique to war tax resistance.
They are found in all of the tax resistance campaigns I have studied.
But most of those campaigns have been dominated by a single variety, and so it has been much easier — almost second-nature — for them to decide on their goals.
For example, Quaker war tax resisters in the early years of the United States were almost exclusively motivated by conscientious objection.
Their goal was to have a conscience clean of involvement in shedding the blood of others, and they developed techniques that satisfied this goal.
Tax resisters in the women’s suffrage movement in Great Britain wanted to demonstrate the self-serving hypocrisy of a male-exclusive government that treated women as people when it came time to tax them, but as non-people when it came time to ask for the consent of the governed.
These resisters courted arrest and property seizure and used such events as opportunities for protest.
They are classic civil-disobedient protesters, and their tactics reflect this.
Tax resisters in the movement pressing for the Reform Act of wanted to “stop the supplies” — that is, withhold enough money from the government that it would be crippled and would be forced to grant the movement’s demands.
This is why they augmented their tax strike with a run on the Bank of England.
They were using tax resistance as part of a campaign of nonviolent conflict meant to force political change.
Property tax resisters in Depression-era Chicago refused to pay while they pursued a legal challenge to property assessments that had left many wealthy and well-connected property owners exempt.
(They won their case, which found the assessments — and therefore the taxes based on them — to be invalid.)
The challenge for American war tax resisters is that their “movement” is not any one of these things, but is an unstable amalgam of elements of all four.
Some resisters are conscientious objectors, some are civil disobedients, some are nonviolent resistants, some hope to legalize war tax refusal, and some straddle two or more of these varieties.
Because of this, there is little agreement to be had once you get past the tactic of tax resistance itself.
This could change.
If the number of war tax resisters were to grow much larger for some reason — for instance because of an unpopular war, a religious revival that emphasizes pacifism, or a revolt against government spending that highlights Pentagon profligacy — perhaps the swelling of the movement would make one variety or another overwhelmingly predominate, and such a movement could more easily unite behind particular goals and tactics.
Another possibility is that a subset of current American war tax resisters who are united by all being of one variety decides to unite on their own behind a particular campaign with goals and tactics that are appropriate to them.
If they have success with their approach, they may find that some of the resisters who currently find homes in the other varieties will come to find that approach more to their liking, or will find ways to make it compatible with their own.
These varieties are not entirely distinct
You may notice that the varieties I listed are not entirely distinct.
For example, some of the women in the Women’s Tax Resistance League pursued legal challenges that made them seem very much like people in the legal test-case category.
Some of the property tax resisters in Chicago were also motivated by a civil-disobedient protest against corrupt and big-spending government.
It is possible for a war tax resister to belong to two, three, maybe even all four categories simultaneously.
And many of us in the war tax resistance movement are motivated by more than one of these categories of resistance, or may find ourselves migrating from variety to variety over time as our motivations change.
But there’s a right way and a wrong way to do this.
You cannot just haphazardly mix-and-match motives, goals, and tactics and expect to come up with something that makes sense (unfortunately, I sometimes see war tax resisters try).
Consider these examples:
“I resist taxes because I’m unwilling to be complicit in the belligerence of the government. I hope to convince many people to take this stand, and so I am very public about it. I am willing to risk government retribution by doing things that make my resistance more disruptive to the state. I hope that if enough people join me, we will rise up to reorganize society in a less violent way.”
“My conscience will not allow me to contribute to killing in any way, so I withhold €84 from my income tax bill and give it instead directly to the Ministry of Education. If enough of us do this, maybe one day the schools will have all the money they need, and the army will have to hold a bake sale if it wants to buy another tank.”
In the first example, the resister talks about his or her motives (“I’m unwilling to be complicit in the belligerence of the government”) sounding like someone motivated by conscientious objection, but chooses tactics (“I am very public… I am willing to risk government retribution by [being] more disruptive to the state”) that sound like they spring from civil disobedience as protest, and has a goal (“we will rise up to reorganize society”) that involves ambitions of using tax resistance as nonviolent force to cause governmental change.
And that’s fine. None of this is contradictory or incompatible.
You can be motivated by conscientious objection and decide to use tactics of civil disobedience to pursue a campaign of nonviolent resistance.
But the second example is more problematic.
The resister again sounds like he or she is motivated by conscientious objection (“My conscience will not allow me to contribute to killing in any way”) but the tactic chosen, to withhold and redirect a symbolic portion from the tax bill, is incompatible with the motive.
Someone whose conscience will not allow them to contribute to killing in any way, if that person considers their taxes such a contribution, will be just as unwilling to pay the second €84 as the first €84, and of course each € after that.
Furthermore, this resister’s goal — to make the military have to hold a bake sale if it wants to buy a tank — is also not compatible with that symbolic tactic.
So a resister like this is incoherent and confused, and is therefore less effective and less persuasive.
Different varieties of resister evaluate tactics differently
Evan Reeves with his 5,574 checks
Remember Evan Reeves?
He’s an American war tax resister who decided to protest the connection between taxes and war by paying his taxes, but in a unique way: he wrote 5,574 checks, each one for ⅟5,574th of his tax bill (about 96¢), and each one bearing the name of a different war victim in the “memo” field.
This was an innovative, creative, interesting tactic — but if you try to imagine how it appears from the vantage point of war tax resisters in each of the varieties I described, you’ll get some idea of how difficult it can be to pick a tactic that pleases everybody.
Here is one way I have imagined four resisters evaluating Reeves’s tactic:
“That wouldn’t work for me. If I pay my taxes, in any form, I help to pay for war. If I did this, at the same time I was expressing sympathy for 5,574 war victims, I’d be paying for their victimization.”
“That’s a great way of making the connection between taxes and the victims of war, and it’s very media-savvy as well. Not only that, but you may get some people at the tax office to scratch their heads and put two and two together. The only thing that would be better is if it were illegal, so that it put you in clear opposition to the government.”
“How much does it cost the government to process a check? If it’s more than 96¢ you may have struck upon a way for people to withhold resources from the government without risking legal sanction. It’s worth investigating further.”
“I don’t get it. How does this get us any closer to legalizing conscientious objection to military taxation? The whole point is that you shouldn’t have to pay those taxes in the first place.”
There’s also a fundamental ideological divide at work
Another thing that can make it difficult for American war tax resisters to agree on tactics and goals is that there is a fundamental disagreement among these resisters about whether the U.S. government is salvageable.
Many American war tax resisters believe that their government is, by and large, a force for good that ought to be preserved and strengthened, and that its militarism is a flaw that for the time being and in some contexts necessarily puts conscientious people in opposition to it.
Our goal, such resisters believe, is to reform the government by removing this flaw so that it can do the good work it ought to be doing without tangling us in its bloody errors.
Many other American war tax resisters believe that their government is, by and large, a force for evil — an irredeemable tool of militarism whose primary function is violence.
They believe that conscientious people like themselves ought to be wholly in opposition to it, should withdraw allegiance from it, and hope to replace it with something else entirely.
I see this divide come into play frequently among American war tax resisters.
It makes a big difference when evaluating tactics because resisters in one camp will ask “but how does this weaken the government?” while resisters in the other camp will ask “but how can we do this without weakening the government (or seeming to ally ourselves with enemies of the government)?” and immediately they’re at loggerheads.
There are war tax resisters who can say, almost in the same breath, that people ought to refuse to pay their taxes because so much of the federal budget is for war, and that corporations ought to pay more taxes because they have a responsibility to help pay for government programs. At first this didn’t make any sense to me at all, but then I came to realize that if you believe that government is essentially good, though terribly flawed, and if you are a tax resister as a mode of civil-disobedient protest, it’s not contradictory to want to resist taxes yourself (to amplify your protest) while hoping that corporations pay more taxes (so the on-the-whole benevolent government can accomplish more) — misguided, perhaps, but not contradictory.
In conclusion…
Anyway, I bring all this up in part because I think it helps to explain why some of the arguments that occupy the modern American war tax resistance movement never seem to go anywhere, but also in part because I want to prepare people who read about my catalog of tax resistance tactics.
It is very unlikely that all of the tactics on the list will appeal to you.
Some of the tactics will seem to you to be bizarre, counterproductive, or irrelevant to the sort of campaign you are hoping for.
This is because tax resistance is a tactic that belongs to movements of many sorts, with many motivations, and many goals.
Which tactics will best harmonize with tax resistance will depend on the variety of tax resistance campaign they are part of.
I tried to get a little buzz going in American war tax resistance circles by highlighting my articles on
Larry Rosenwald wondered whether it was worthwhile to try to pick tactics that appeal to all factions of the modern American war tax resistance movement.
Might it not be better, he suggests, to select the most powerful tactics, even if they’re ones that not all resisters will be interested in signing on to?
He may be right about that, but the example he chose to illustrate it — “the peace tax legislation activism that’s the heart of many European war tax resistance initiatives, and the American campaign for a peace tax fund” — strikes me as the least powerful and among the most divisive of the possible tactics we could be considering.
This just goes to show how difficult it may be to get the movement, such as it is, to rally around a particular set of effective tactics.
Conscience & Peace Tax International
The 14th International Conference on War Tax Resistance and Peace Tax Campaigns in Bogotá coincided with the biennial meeting of the general membership of Conscience & Peace Tax International (CPTI), and most of the international conferees were either individual members of CPTI, were representing a member organization, or were carrying one or more voting proxies from members.
CPTI is a group nominally devoted to advancing the legal right to conscientious objection to military taxation (COMT) on the international level (such as at the UN).
I say nominally because I saw almost no evidence of this at the gathering.
Dan Jenkins passes the mic at the CPTI general assembly
I heard a lot about CPTI at the conference but everything I heard about CPTI was about CPTI — that is, about what their bylaws did or should read, who among its board ought to be exercising what powers, where its headquarters ought to be located, how its internal conflicts ought to be resolved, and so forth.
It is the most narcissistic organization I have ever seen.
We had several hours of sessions of official and unofficial meetings of CPTI, along with much chatter in between other sessions (as well as downright lobbying and intrigue… I not uncommonly came upon people having hushed conversations in corridors who looked up at me suspiciously and stopped their conversation for fear that I might be a spy for the other side!), and exactly none of it had anything at all to do with advancing the cause of COMT.
On a number of occasions I asked individual CPTI members and board members if they could tell me what things CPTI is most proud of accomplishing for conscientious objectors to military taxation over its almost twenty-year existence.
They had a devil of a time coming up with anything.
Mostly they responded that they’d managed to win UN “special consultative status.”
I then would ask what had this status helped them to accomplish for conscientious objectors for military taxation.
I would be told that this allows them to put papers on important desks, to make presentations in UN conference rooms, to attend sessions of UN bodies… stuff like that.
And what has any of that done to help conscientious objectors to military taxation?
Nothing yet, would be the answer, but we hope if we keep at it…
In short, I saw no evidence of anything substantially productive that had come out of CPTI’s two decades of work, and nothing approaching a concrete, specific plan to advance the recognition of COMT on the international stage.
But CPTI didn’t seem to want to talk about any of that anyway.
What they mostly talked about was whether they should be based in Belgium or England, whether their by-laws had been translated correctly (or possibly deliberately deceptively!), whether member organizations that are not formally incorporated ought to be expelled from membership, and so forth.
The organization’s by-laws are intricate and legalistic to an absurd extent, especially when measured up against the budget and size of the group (this is, I was asked to understand, somehow a strict requirement of the laws of Belgium), but even so they are so clumsily written that the board members could not even answer basic questions like “do we need a two-thirds majority of the quorum to pass this proposal, or a majority of non-abstaining voters when a quorum is present?” or “for the two-thirds vote do we round up or down?” or “which voting rule applies to this proposal?” There was talk of consulting a lawyer just so that CPTI could get clarity as to the meaning of its own by-laws!
CPTI held what was to be a two-and-a-half hour General Assembly with 18 agenda items.
It took them that long to get through the 10 non-controversial ones (1. Welcome, 2. Quorum confirmation, 3. Agenda review, 4. review of the 2010 minutes, 5. review of the 2011 minutes… and we’re behind schedule already).
Partially this was because the board is so bitterly divided and the general assembly has become so partisan that they had to reach outside CPTI entirely to choose a neutral chairperson for the meeting — who was chosen almost as the meeting began, who was unfamiliar with the by-laws and process of the group, and so who necessarily had to continually ask for clarification as to how he ought to be doing his job.
The meeting transformed a group of earnest COMT activists into a tense, hostile assembly of distrust and pain.
If only it were the case that CPTI were simply incapable of accomplishing anything!
Instead, it accomplishes the sowing of discord among COMT activists and the wasting of their time and energy.
The hours we spent at the CPTI assembly, at the hastily-scheduled supplemental meeting the previous day, and at the various conspiratorial side conversations that made me feel like I was in the Hells of Congress… what might we who had traveled so far to come to the conference have accomplished with those hours if we hadn’t been distracted by CPTI?
The contrast couldn’t have been greater between the focused, practical, strategic activity led by ACOOC (see ’s Picket Line) and the narcissistic and counterproductive flailing of CPTI.
It was an embarrassment to the COMT movement.
Wolfgang Steuer reads from a commemorative book being presented to outgoing CPTI board member Dirk Panhuis
The good news is that at the “conclusion” of the meeting (at item 11 of the agenda after which they finally gave up) the assembly voted to begin the process of disbanding CPTI.
The bad news is that they plan to resurrect it like a vampire in England (the dissolution applies to the current Belgian-based organization).
The occasion instead calls for a wooden stake through the heart.
The COMT movement would be better-off simply disbanding CPTI and leaving it at that. CPTI is a toxic organization and people devoted to furthering the COMT cause should consider it an obstacle at best and an enemy at worst (by which I absolutely do not mean to say that any of its members or board members as individuals should be considered that way).
Many of those involved in CPTI hope that the move to England and the opportunity to rewrite the bylaws will permit the organization to reform into something worthwhile.
Few saw wisdom in my advice to simply disband and move on to more productive activities (most citing the hard-won golden apple of UN special consultative status as their reason for wanting to keep CPTI alive in spite of its dysfunction).
My advice, though, would be to approach even a newly-reformed CPTI with a garlic wreath around your neck and a silver cross in hand.
Cindy Sheehan addresses the Spring 2013
NWTRCC national gathering in Asheville, North Carolina
I’m back from Asheville, North Carolina, where NWTRCC
was holding its Spring 2013 national gathering: A pretty town, though it was
a stormy weekend so we didn’t get out much.
There are several distinct varieties of war tax resister, each with subtly different motives for their resistance and a somewhat different idea of what war tax resistance is meant to accomplish. Because of this, when we counsel or try to recruit new resisters, it is important that we take the time to learn what sort of resisters they are.
A quarter of a century has passed since Ciaron O’Reilly, with a sledgehammer and a bottle of his own blood, took his first tilt at the U.S. war machine.
The Brisbane-born man served what is believed to be the longest jail stint for a civilian protester on U.S. soil during the first Gulf war, over a New Year’s Day sortie by a band of Catholic peace activists into Griffiss air force base in New York in .
He poured blood on a runway from a bottle bearing pictures of Iraqi children and smashed up the tarmac till his hands were blistered, while his cohorts did the same to the engine of a B-52 bomber on standby for raids in the Gulf.
O’Reilly regards an absence of solidarity with the imprisoned U.S. army whistleblower Chelsea Manning — as well as Assange, Snowden and hundreds of conscientious objectors — as the signal failure of a long-hobbled peace movement.
He says a protest leadership that is “increasingly NGO-ish and [based on] left-wing kind of cults” has failed to translate mass demonstrations into support for individuals whose acts have proven much more troublesome to the establishment.
O’Reilly has also been instrumental in fundraising campaigns for “simple things” he says the mainstream anti-war movement has neglected.
These included raising funds to help Manning’s family visit her in Fort Leavenworth prison, where she is serving 35 years for disclosing classified U.S. information, including the “collateral murder” video of Reuters journalists being gunned down by U.S. troops in Iraq.
O’Reilly also helped raise the rent for the partner of the British navy medic Michael Lyons.
She had faced eviction from her apartment after Lyons was sent to Colchester military prison for refusing to go to Afghanistan.
“It wasn’t rocket science, it wasn’t difficult,” he says.
“And that’s what the anti-war movement should be doing.
If you’re not in jail, you should be supporting people who are for non-violent anti-war resistance.”
He still gets the occasional visit from the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, whose main concerns seem to be the Pine Gap U.S. base and the Amberley air force base, west of Brisbane.
The spooks see in O’Reilly a war opponent not content to simply join conventional demonstrations, which he calls “a dead end really, marching up and down empty streets like a strange dance”.
“You should actually go to places like Amberley and Gallipoli barracks [in Brisbane],” he says.
“You’d be more effective with 100 people at the gates there than with 10,000 in the city of Brisbane.
“You can’t have a peace movement with a gentlemen’s agreement where they have a war, and they say, ‘you can have your protest as long as we can have our war’.
“That’s the gentlemen’s agreement that we didn’t stick to.”
“I resist taxes because I’m unwilling to be complicit in the belligerence of the government. I hope to convince many people to take this stand, and so I am very public about it. I am willing to risk government retribution by doing things that make my resistance more disruptive to the state. I hope that if enough people join me, we will rise up to reorganize society in a less violent way.”
“My conscience will not allow me to contribute to killing in any way, so I withhold €84 from my income tax bill and give it instead directly to the Ministry of Education. If enough of us do this, maybe one day the schools will have all the money they need, and the army will have to hold a bake sale if it wants to buy another tank.”
