Deja Vu

Death and Taxes

Tags:

anarchy,

government,

Leo Tolstoy,

tariffs,

taxes,

Texas

2010: Before crashing his plane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas, software engineer Joe Stack wrote a suicide note explaining that bloodshed is both the modus operandi of the ruling class and the sole recourse for its overtaxed victims:

We are all taught as children that without laws there would be no society, only anarchy. Sadly, starting at early ages we in this country have been brainwashed to believe that, in return for our dedication and service, our government stands for justice for all. We are further brainwashed to believe that there is freedom in this place, and that we should be ready to lay our lives down for the noble principals represented by its founding fathers. Remember? One of these was "no taxation without representation." I have spent the total years of my adulthood unlearning that crap from only a few years of my childhood. These days anyone who really stands up for that principal is promptly labeled a "crackpot," traitor and worse. While very few working people would say they haven't had their fair share of taxes (as can I), in my lifetime I can say with a great degree of certainty that there has never been a politician cast a vote on any matter with the likes of me or my interests in mind. Nor, for that matter, are they the least bit interested in me or anything I have to say… And justice? You've got to be kidding! Sadly, though I spent my entire life trying to believe it wasn't so, but violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer. The cruel joke is that the really big chunks of shit at the top have known this all along and have been laughing, at and using this awareness against, fools like me all along.

1894: In The Kingdom of God is Within You, Leo Tolstoy proposed a radical break with the what he considered a corrupt Russian Orthodox Church, advocating the establishment of a new kind of Christianity, an act which ultimately led to his excommunication. In the manifesto he explained that only the threat of pain and death compelled the workingman to pay taxes, but he always emphasized a nonviolent response to this injustice, citing the Gospels as his moral reasoning.

One would think it was perfectly clear that if men, who consider it unjust (and all the working classes do consider it so nowadays), still pay the principal part of the produce of their labour away to the capitalist and the landowner, and pay taxes, though they know to what a bad use these taxes are put, they do so not from recognition of abstract laws, of which they have never heard, but only because they know they will be beaten and killed if they don't do so…

Just as a trained tiger, who does not eat meat put under his nose, and jumps over a stick at the word of command, does not act thus because he likes it, but because he remembers the red hot irons or the fast with which he was punished every time he did not obey: so men submitting to what is disadvantageous or even ruinous to them, and considered by them as unjust, act thus because they remember what they suffered for resisting it.

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