Where There’s War, There’s War Tax Resistance
In its letter announcing this year’s Tax Blackout, We The People calls for “a revival of the War Tax Resistance movement popularized during the Vietnam Era,” drawing inspiration from folk singer Joan Baez who refused to pay 60 percent of her 1963 income taxes.
Baez undoubtedly raised the movement’s visibility, but today’s war tax resisters claim a much longer lineage. “Where there’s war, you’ll find war tax resisters,” begins a section on NWTRCC’s website called “An International History of War Tax Resistance: From 400 B.C. to 2000 A.D.” In an online workshop, Rice recently put it like this: “If we have enough information about a civilization, we can find evidence of war tax resistance.”
If you look hard enough, that evidence starts to crop up in unexpected places. In Aristophanes’ classical Greek comedy Lysistrata (sometimes translated as “Army Disbander”)—the starting point of NWTRCC’s 400 B.C. timeline—a group of women refuse to have sex with their husbands and lovers until the men agree to lay down their arms and stop the disastrous Peloponnesian War. Eventually, Lysistrata leads a group of women to storm the Acropolis and seize control of the state treasury, over the protests of an incensed (male) magistrate.
“We want to keep the money safe and stop you from waging war,” Lysistrata explains, likening her newfound control of the treasury to her traditional role in managing household finances.
“But that’s not the same thing,” pleads the magistrate. “The money purse is needed for the war!”
“Ah, but the war itself isn’t necessary,” quips Lysistrata.
One can draw a clear line from Lysistrata seizing the state’s purse strings to Baez’s protests. “We spend billions of dollars a year on weapons which scientists, politicians, military men, and even presidents all agree must never be used,” Baez wrote in a statement announcing her resistance. “That is not security. That is stupidity.”
Unified by this ethos, war tax resistance’s long history includes groups as diverse as the Quakers and the Black Panthers, with motivations ranging from the material to the divine. Poets and priests, as well as anarchists and athletes, have all joined their ranks at one point or another. “If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood,” wrote Henry David Thoreau in Civil Disobedience, which railed against the Mexican-American War. Fifty years later, upon learning of the assassination of Italy’s Umberto I, Leo Tolstoy wrote in “Thou Shalt Not Kill” that “if each private individual understood that the payment of taxes wherewith to hire and equip soldiers . . . are not matters of indifference, but are bad and shameful actions by which he not only permits but participates in murder,” then the “power of Emperors, Kings, and Presidents” to wage war would disappear.