The refusal to pay taxes has been a powerful form of resistance against war and imperialism in North America since before the United States even existed. It may provide a potential mode of resistance against American funding for violence in Gaza, too.
In 2003, the activist Julia Butterfly Hill—best known for the 738 days she spent living in an endangered California redwood tree to prevent it from being cut down in the late 1990s—held a press conference in San Francisco announcing that she would refuse to pay $150,000 in federal taxes. Instead, she declared, she planned on rerouting the money to after-school programs, community gardens, and various other ends. “I ‘redirect’ my taxes rather than ‘resisting’ my taxes. I actually take the money that the IRS says goes to them and I give it to the places where our taxes should be going,” Hill explained in a 2005 interview with The Edge. “And in my letter to the IRS I said, ‘I’m not refusing to pay my taxes. I’m actually paying them but I’m paying them where they belong because you refuse to do so.’”
The IRS must have received many such letters that year. One woman—not a prominent activist like Hill but a mother of two living in Massachusetts—had her letter reprinted in the New England-based pacifist newsletter Peacework. “I am a responsible citizen, earning a salary at a local health clinic,” the letter explains. “I am not an anarchist. I am taking whatever steps I can to prevent the murder and torture of my fellow humans.” The $1,507 she owed the IRS would instead “go to research to stop AIDS and cancer, the construction of a battered women's shelter in Somerville, and programs which empower homeless people in Boston.”
Perhaps both women had taken a literal page out of War Tax Resistance: A Guide to Withholding Your Support From the Military, which had come out in its fifth edition in early 2003. It was a timely release: “As we go to press, President George W. Bush—promising a global war without end against terrorism—has the U.S. military massing on the borders of Iraq for a possible ground invasion,” the book opens. “Military spending, which had been on a modest decline through the 1990s, is once again rising as sharply as it did during the Reagan years.” On the precipice of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the American left found itself facing a war that would rival Vietnam in duration. Would the tactics that protesters had wielded against American imperialism during the 1960s and 1970s work in a new century—a new millennium?