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“Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil. … Acceptance of the lesser evils is consciously used in conditioning the government officials as well as the population at large to the acceptance of evil as such.” — Hannah Arendt
We march, we protest, we boycott. We chant, we shout, we write. We plead, we beg, we grieve. Nothing changes. We ask the dead for forgiveness. The powers that be ignore us, double down, send more weapons, extract more. Hoarding and domination is their goal, destruction and silencing, their modus operandi.
Yet giving up is not an option. We can turn away from our screens, for a moment, to rest, to breathe, to hold our broken hearts. To ensure we do not become numb. To gather strength. To prepare for what comes next.
In this space, we must endeavour to understand the context of what we face, to read history, to see the connections between the oppression, the destruction, the struggles – and to honour those whose shoulders we stand on. And then, Arundhati Roy says, we have to turn our skills toward understanding and exposing the instruments of the state.
While international law is being undermined, or even shredded, there are many creative tools, from boycotts to civil disobedience, that can be used against those governments and companies that fund, aid, and benefit from atrocities, and if strategic, become an extension of the global resistance movement.
In his essay on civil disobedience that would come to inspire Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr, Henry David Thoreau said that if laws were unjust, we had to transgress them. Thoreau himself was imprisoned for refusing to pay his taxes to protest against slavery and America’s war on Mexico.
The core of his reasoning was that while we cannot stop all wrongs in the world, it is our duty to ensure we do not, at the very least, give practical support to such wrongs. Being against slavery in opinion only and just waiting to cast one’s vote, was not sufficient.
“If the tax-gatherer, or any other public officer, asks me,” he wrote, “as one has done, “But what shall I do?” my answer is, “If you really wish to do anything, resign your office.” When the subject has refused allegiance, and the officer has resigned his office, then the revolution is accomplished.”
Similar ideas are echoing through in today’s resistance movements. A group of lawyers in the United States, for example, composed of former prosecutors, International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutors, and other human rights lawyers are aiming to prosecute individuals for war crimes and crimes against humanity being committed in Gaza under Universal Jurisdiction (which allows individuals to be tried in domestic courts for international crimes). And they are not just going after Biden, but all the staff that are enabling the atrocities to continue, from spokespeople to policy architects.
A campaign in the United Kingdom, No tax for genocide, is calling on British taxpayers to withhold their taxes on the basis that it is a criminal offence to pay tax if any of it is used to fund genocide, murder or any criminal activity as per the 1945 UN Charter, Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, Terrorism Act 2000 and The Nuremberg Code.
Political activist Ashish Prashar says that while most laws were not written for the collective peoples of this world, they can still be used for emancipatory struggle. Every law that was written, he argues, can be used against the government too.
Their team of experts have determined that British taxpayers can legally withhold taxation through a clear mechanism they will set out. They are not asking people not to pay tax, they’re withholding their tax in a revocable trust, and the government has to prove that it is not aiding or abetting a genocide to receive those funds. “This is resistance, not avoidance,” he continues.
And that’s really important because it’s government funding that was used to commit previous atrocities. So what this campaign is saying, essentially, is “You can’t have our money if it funds mass atrocities,” Prashar says.
While he admits that they may well be taken to court, Prashar says they would welcome this opportunity as he believes no judge in the country would actually say that what is happening in Gaza is not a genocide.
Whatever the outcome, we must not underestimate how every attempt at holding our governments to account, seeds new ideas, new tactics and new collaborations, whether for the people of Gaza, of Sudan or elsewhere. And, crucially, as Arundhati Roy advises, for democracy to be made real, we need to constantly question, provoke and initiate conversations between citizens and the state.
“It’s important to remember that our freedoms, such as they are, were never given to us by any government;” she wrote, “they have been wrested by us. If we do not use them, if we do not test them from time to time, they atrophy. If we do not guard them constantly, they will be taken away from us.”
Words, Veronica Yates and illustration, Miriam Sugranyes.
References
‘Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,’ Hannah Arendt.
My Seditious Heart, Arundhati Roy.
‘On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,’ Henry David Thoreau. Read it online here.
“Ashish Prashar on defunding the UK government to stop ‘genocide in Gaza.’” Palestine Talks, TRT World, 11 May 2024. Watch here.
No Tax for Genocide: https://notaxforgenocide.uk/
Further Resources
“Palestine boycott success: Barclays divests from Elbit Systems,” Ethical Consumer, Jasmine Owens, 31 October 2024. Read here.
15 Examples of Civil Disobedience (Which Have Made a Difference). Extinction Rebellion. Read here.
‘Civil Disobedience and Its Effects in Recent History Through 12 Examples.’ The Civil Liberties Union for Europe (Liberties), Jascha Galaski, 15 November, 2022. Read here.
‘Civil Disobedience Toolkit: A guide to civil disobedience.’ Amnesty International. View here.
‘Tax Refusal as Conscientious Objection to War,’ by Melvin D. Schmidt, National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee, Originally published in The Mennonite Quarterly Review, July, 1969. Read here.
“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.” — George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
“The death of human empathy is one of the first and most revealing signs of a culture that is about to fall into barbarity.” — Hannah Arendt
“Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.” — Oscar Wilde
“One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws."— Martin Luther King Jr.
"We have art in order not to die from the truth." — Friedrich Nietzsche
