Strategies for Opposition: The Draft - Tax Refusal - "Resistance"
Harrington, Michael
THE WAR IN VIETNAM has given rise to more agonies of conscience than any conflict in which America has participated during this century. The reason for this moral anguish is not hard to...
...This would grant federal protection to peace activists, the bases of whose actions are now wrongly considered to be only political and who are therefore excluded from the exemptions provided by the present law...
...Under such circumstances, I would , certainly affirm the right of all citizens to civil disobedience and, for that matter, to the violent overthrow of their own government— and the citizen's duty to refuse monstrous commands, even if that meant sacrificing life itself...
...This attitude shows, I think, a failure to distinguish between those forms of civil disobedience which deny the civil liberties of others and those which make a witness, whether in political terms or not...
...That is the central question...
...Thus, as so often happens, the violation of civil liberties in a "just" cause provokes the "unjust" to violate even more civil liberties...
...For there are indeed those who have accepted the logic of the National Advisory Commission on Selective Service and who have, with radical intent, defended a "general theory of selective disobedience to law...
...There was a tiny minority of pacifists who refused service...
...Yet the basic justification for the policy advocated here is the respect that a democratic society owes to the moral convictions of its members...
...Were such social conditions to occur in the United States, there would be similar disaffections from the society, no matter what the Selective Service law...
...Those of us who are against this terrible war are, I think, under a special obligation not to claim privileges from the society, not to tear it down because it has the gall not to agree with us, but to change it...
...burning a draft card can be a form of opposition to a foolish, antilibertarian law and also an antiwar witness...
...U U NDER THESE CIRCUMSTANCES, THE Selective Service law and administrative practices should be changed so as to allow for principled moral objection to a specific war...
...The government proceeded to insist upon a narrow, textbook definition of that Being and, in effect, restricted the protections of the law to members of the historic peace churches...
...They were disobeying the law as a witness to the outrage of their conscience but they were not interfering with those who felt otherwise...
...In this context, I take it as a gain for the entire nation that the young have insisted upon the necessity of making a con MICHAEL HARRINGTON scientious decision about the political use of violence...
...The middle-class, epater la bourgeoisie sources of this fantasy are revealed by the fact that "smoking pot" is put on a par with "tossing smoke bombs...
...This form of civil disobedience does not disrupt the democratic process...
...in certain forms of its presentation, it is not even Christian...
...Joan Baez and a group of people appeared at custody...
...It would be infinitely preferable, however, if this reform were to be a conscious act of the Congress, for that would give the firmest possible foundation to a nonsectarian reading of the First Amendment to the Constitution...
...Their point of departure is not rational or political, but it is substantial and understandable...
...By far and large their rationale was that the immorality of the government's action was so patent and urgent that the individual was obliged to take direct action to prevent Washington from carrying out its policy...
...Now it may rightly be said that these inflationary tendencies were given a considerable impetus by the war in Vietnam—but so was the employment of Negroes, and one would not oppose that...
...The committed racists of the South could, under a conscientiousobjector clause, refuse to pay their taxes, or that portion of them which would go to the abolition of poverty...
...As the New Republic described this mood in a sympathetic account of a demonstration in October, 1967, aimed at closing the induction center at Oakland, California: • . . Stop the Draft Week represented the transition from "dissent to resistance...
...And the fact that we can change it is something not to be too lightly dismissed...
...If the economy has ex cess capacity, Washington increases its spending in one way or another (through direct public investment, through a tax cut, etc...
...But even then, there was more than a little deception involved: the bonds which Americans pur chased to "buy" tanks, planes, hospital sup plies, etc...
...The reason for this moral anguish is not hard to find...
...On the one hand, they are horrified (rightly I would say) by this particularly ugly, futile combat in Vietnam...
...With the tragic intervention in Vietnam, however, popular opposition against the war became widespread...
...They have the worst of all possible worlds...
...But it would be intolerable if this procedure were made the norm...
...Finally, I would make a sharp distinction between these three forms of protest and the assertion of an obligation and right to disrupt the activities of a democratic government through force majeure, whether violent or not...
...Now three different acts are lumped together in this sentence...
...For that is what is at issue: whether this nation is going to insist that an entire category of individuals should be under legal compulsion to violate the dictates of their own conscience...
...Reagan is not seeking the Republican Presidential nomination...
...These protesters show little faith in a democratic people even though the number of citizens opposed to the war was increasingly dramatic throughout 1967...
...For it does not deal with the citizen who, on formal religious or philosophical grounds, refuses to serve because he is against a particular war...
...the former cannot...
...For under the new economics, a consistent "conscientious objector to taxation" would have had to oppose the tax cut in 1963-64, for that policy made it more possible for the government to spark the economy and thus increase the tax base in , order to raise the actual revenues which it received and devoted, in part, to Vietnam...
...It means that the individual is ready and willing to pay the legal price for making his point...
...And as a matter of principle, Zahn would have to recognize their right to express themselves in this way...
...The real purpose of the tax increase is to act as a damper on the inflationary trends which the Administration economists have discerned...
...the selective objector commanded to fight in this war—when the individual must place his conscience above the state...
...This is the right which was being claimed in the fall of 1967...
...The law, in other words, will provide exemption for a conscience formed in the Quaker tradition but not for one educated to traditional Catholic norms...
...He can be ordered to kill or to facilitate killing, and he may himself be executed if he refuses, particularly at the front line...
...It is being asked to suggest a public policy toward those who, for whatever serious and deeply held reason, feel themselves morally compelled to refuse service...
...It is not that he is simply politically opposed to the war, but that he maintains a moral position in which such political opposition makes it conscientiously impossible for him to be a participant in that war Such an attitude can be distinguished from one of political opposition pure and simple...
...But the question of tax refusal, on the grounds that the government is engaged in an immoral exercise and that tax payment would implicate the citizen in this guilt, is something else again...
...The language of Congress demanded (wrongly, I believe) that the objector base his claim on belief in a Supreme Being...
...T T HE PRESENT SELECTIVE SERVICE STATUTE should be both reinterpreted and revised in order to provide atheist and agnostic objectors with the same legal status as members of peace churches, land to permit exemption on the basis of moral opposition to a particular war...
...In talking about the coming Democratic party convention, Rubin was quoted by Newsweek as saying, "Can't you see it100,000 hippies all around the hall, smoking pot, faking delegates' cards, tossing smoke bombs...
...I will postpone commentary on the second part of this objection (tax refusal and conscientious objection) until I have considered the first point about tearing down the fabric of government...
...I I N SUMMARY, THE VIETNAM WAR has posed a number of different questions relating to the boundaries of the political and the moral and the interrelationships be tween the two spheres...
...Rightly outraged by a horrible war, many people seek desperately for some way that the individual can communicate his distress to the politicians and the IBM machines...
...it is the faith of the super patriots...
...It is in favor of the selective protection of conscience and it STRATEGIES FOR OPPOSITION uses religious criteria to determine which shall be respected and which shall be out raged...
...AP dispatch, January 27, 1968 MICHAEL HARRINGTON hope that being drafted is a worthwhile step toward revolution...
...That would not only overburden the conscience of the individual...
...if it is operating at full, or over-full, capacity, in theory the government is supposed to hold down demand either through cuts in spending (the favorite solution of the conservatives) or through an increase in taxes...
...but I suspect that another was that some of them were having a middle-class tantrum...
...But the United States of the Sixties is hardly Nazi Germany...
...For that matter, this writer was granted full objector status by a St...
...What the conservative Catholics and the Oberlin students fail to under MICHAEL HARRINGTON stand is that, although there is indeed no "moral right" for one who is aware of the immorality of a war to recruit fighters for it, there is a civil right for a Navy recruiter to state his point of view freely even if those more ethically sensitive than he know that he is objectively acting in an immoral cause...
...it will invite savage Rightist reprisals...
...The Court's strategy in Seeger was to work within the limits of the present statute and to duck the more basic issue of the constitutionality of the "Supreme Being" test...
...It emerges in the minds of all men of reason and good will when they face two inevitable questions...
...But most young political opponents of the war today are, I believe, in a heartrending dilemma...
...If he does not make his stand before induction, then the price of obeying his conscience, which now includes the possibility of his own death, has risen so high that only the most heroic person will, or can be expected to, accept martyrdom...
...BUT IT IS AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT MATTER when it is claimed that the alleged immorality of a government allows the citizen of an imperfect, but still functioning, democratic society to obstruct that government in carrying out its policies and to disrupt the activities of those who agree with that government...
...Given the hallowed American tradition of repealing bad laws by intelligent judicial reinterpretations of them, the very phrase, Supreme Being, could eventually be taken as symbolic Congressional language for any deeply held, ultimate principle, and atheists would thus be qualified as objectors under the present rules...
...Finally, some asserted a right to disrupt the prosecution of the war through nonviolent civil disobedience...
...When the courts and the Selective Service system originally interpreted the present statute, they did so in a literalist, undemocratic and antilibertarian fashion...
...At this writing, it has spread to the majority of the best students on the finest campuses...
...It is also an invitation to the American reactionaries to answer in kind...
...he will not be victimized by a mockery of the democratic process like the sit-in student of 1960...
...For it is precisely this policy which has caused so much anguish of conscience, made youthful opposition more and more frenzied, and even driven some to voluntary exile in Canada...
...For all these reasons, deliberate disobedience of the law may become necessary even though those involved are working within the democratic process...
...Although put forth by a member of the New Left generation this was, of course, a reiteration of the classic, conservative Catholic argument for refusing civil liberties to non-Catholic faiths...
...Yet it seems obvious to me that the right of the European resistant is as clear as the wrong of the American disrupter of democracy...
...In making this last point, I would distinguish between moral objection to war, or a war, and political objection to a war...
...Definitions of the religious spirit by thinkers like William James and Paul Tillich have already made a persuasive case for extending the concept to any transcendent commitment, earthly as well as heavenly, and this should be the rule of the courts...
...But this is not simply a repudiation of fundamental, and precious, democratic prin ciples contained in the Bill of Rights...
...Second, I believe that, in Reinhold Niebuhr's terms, it is "blasphemous" when an individual casually pretends to be the voice of God and thereby places himself above his fellow citizens...
...This extends the primacy of the individual moral judgment into political spheres where it has not been recognized in the past...
...It may well be, as Martin Luther King, Jr., obviously believed in Birmingham in 1963, that to obey such an order would constitute an irreparable loss to the movement...
...In short, I hold that, even in a manifestly inadequate democracy, the individual is normally obliged to obey the laws but may, under extreme and limited circumstances, be required to break them...
...In the First and Second World Wars and in the Korean War, the overwhelming majority of the American people believed that their country was acting in self-defense against German, Japanese, or North Korean aggression and was therefore justified in the use of violence...
...During the time that he is involved in this campaign he will not be commanded to do anything as decisive as taking another life...
...Under those circumstances, would the principled pacifist have insisted upon paying his tax...
...But whatever the motivation, the assertion of a moral right and duty to disrupt the democratic process is, on philosophical and practical grounds, wrong and dangerous...
...John son on the Vietnam question...
...It is significant that one of the precedents which Lynd cites to justify his position is that of the European resistance movements of World War II...
...Consider, for instance, this statement of Jerry Rubin, one of the organizers of the October 1967 demonstration at the Pentagon...
...There are extreme situations—the pacifist ordered to kill...
...Second, Lynd asserts that "We who burn draft cards, refuse induction, and block doorways believe that we act in response to an executive branch which is out of control...
...It is not to mount a protest, as was done at the Democratic party conventions of 1960 and 1964 by the civil rights movement, but to disrupt a public meeting...
...The Right pro posed to deal with the problem through cut-backs in social welfare spending, the Left through the utilization of a highly im perfect tax instrument which, for all of its faults, is the most progressive means of fighting inflation the society possesses...
...the example of the French, whose uprising was brutally supressed, what can happen under conditions of military defeat...
...Such a policy will threaten the very institution of the democratic dialogue...
...The theoretical and practical dangers of this attitude are enormous...
...and it will open up the way to violence...
...These deeply held, but unpacifist, attitudes toward the Vietnam War could not be -contained within the traditional categories This article is adapted from a longer essay which will appear in A Conflict of Loyalties: Selective Conscientious Objection, edited by James Finn and to be published by Pegasus in the summer of 1968...
...It would, of course, be infinitely preferable to have a clear declaration on the unconstitutionality of the current language...
...I sympathize profoundly with those who have taken this position—but I cannot agree with them, and not simply for reasons of economic theory...
...In other words, when is war rightful, and what is rightful in war...
...Perhaps the commonest objection," he writes, "is this one: Who gave a handful of peaceniks the authority to shut down the United States government or any part thereof...
...The new technique is political disruption, an attempt to "stop the war machine," entailing a renunciation of violence while still shrinking from a positive recommendation of violence...
...If an individual feels conscientiously compelled to take this course, I would defend all of his civil liberties, but I cannot agree that he has either enunciated a binding obligation or formulated an ef STRATEGIES FOR OPPOSITION fective tactic for bringing the killing to an the induction headquarters, made no atend...
...Lynd responded by defending "nonviolent obstructive tactics" as a "form of democratic dialogue...
...But such a reform of the law does not resolve the issue of politics and morality...
...THE WAR IN VIETNAM has given rise to more agonies of conscience than any conflict in which America has participated during this century...
...A similar situation arises when the law is being used as a hypocritical instrument of injustice...
...It merely states the fact that, under nonrevolutionary conditions of a majority democratic consensus, the emotions of patriotism and conformity are alas usually stronger than those of individual defiance on the basis of morality...
...And Hope to Die PENSACOLA, Fla...
...It is possible that at least some of this money will be channeled into the economy through direct social investments (if the reactionaries prevail, it will come in the form of a tax cut maximizing individual, rather than social, consumption and commercial, rather than collective, priorities...
...It was a recognition not only of a previous failure to change the Johnson Administration's war policy—that was to be expected —but a deeper recognition of a loss of momentum and a failure of nerve in the face of an exhaustion of tactical possibilities...
...Furthermore, once that war in Vietnam is over, I could see Gordon Zahn's principle of "conscientious objection to taxation" put to the most reactionary use...
...he will not be, through paying taxes, subjected to irreparable harm like the protest marcher...
...Exactly the opposite...
...But I also oppose the notion that one can easily violate the law in a democratic society...
...If the democratic structure collapses under the strain of its tensions, then politics will take to the street, but probably not in nonviolent form...
...But, and this is a very important point, the country at issue was Nazi Germany, i.e., a fascist dictator ship...
...Finally, the central problem is political...
...Louis draft board in 1951 after clearly enunciating a "just war" position...
...For it is precisely the point of the "democratic dialogue" that its rules and laws are a means of protecting the physical STRATEGIES FOR OPPOSITION and spiritual integrity of the citizen...
...He has told me many times he is not and if he'd lie to me, he'd lie to his mother," Goldwater said at a news conference...
...the tax payer is not really being ordered to do anything more specific than to help in maintaining a boom...
...No political situation in my memory has occasioned so much despairing discontent with the society, and a sophisticated pragmatism should have impelled the National Advisory Commission to provide some honorable alternative for young people who are now required to choose between jail and self-betrayal...
...Indeed, it is precisely the Commission's negative attitude toward selective objection which takes it into the area of making theological judgments...
...They said, It is one thing to deal in law with a person who believes he is responding to a moral, imperative outside of himself when he opposes all killing...
...There is, in this assertion of the duty of a righteous minority to repeal the (to me wrong) decisions of the majority, an element of elitism and snobbery...
...It allows protesters to manifest the intensity of their convictions and in this way to reach out to the consciences of their fellow citizens...
...In what follows I propose to apply this principle to the very difficult task of defining some important relationships of politics and morality as they have been posed by the horrible war in Vietnam...
...In World War I, some of them were political opponents of American participation, but in World War II most maintained their position on the basis of a transcendental commitment to abjure the use of force under all circumstances...
...I am convinced that, as Father Murray said, there is a principled "just war" position involving transcendental moral obligations which can MICHAEL HARRINGTON impose itself upon the conscience of religious, agnostic, and atheistic citizens...
...Students had trapped a Navy recruiter in a car for four hours until police broke them up with tear gas and water hoses...
...WHAT IS INVOLVED HERE IS one more manifestation of the increasing complexity of government...
...In societies where the political majority supports a war—and since this issue is raised within the framework of democratic principle, we can base our discussion on that presumption—the number of conscientious objectors will, I am convinced, be small...
...However, the discussion is not really over how to maintain stability during revolutionary times but as to what kind of protections a stable democratic country should afford to a conscientious minority...
...Error has no right," it was said, and is still said in Franco Spain...
...Here I would take the figure of Lenin as an illustration of my point...
...As of the fall of 1967, the United States Senate had not repealed the Tonkin Bay Resolution which the President uses as his legal mandate for the war in Vietnam...
...In a speech at Western Maryland College shortly before his death, Murray made an excellent statement on the significance of the "just war" position: It is not exclusively Roman Catholic...
...The moral objector invokes a principal that requires him not to kill at all, or only to kill when certain conditions of a "just war" are present...
...but neither of these acts involves obstructing the rights of the government or of other citizens...
...In other, and more complex, instances, students and intellectuals asserted an obligation, under the doctrine proclaimed by the United States in the Nuremburg trials, to refuse any form of support to the military effort, such as paying taxes...
...And indeed at the antiwar march of the Students for a Democratic Society in Washington in 1965, Staughton Lynd specifically argued for the desirability of a nonviolent coup d'etat in which the marchers would, on their own nomination, represent the supposedly voiceless majority of a democratic society and take over the buildings of government...
...For as long as there is a democratic process through which laws can be changed, the presumption is in its favor...
...Atheists and agnostics whose positions were rooted in deeply held convictions about the nature and destiny of man were sent to prison...
...So in this case —the most extreme one to be discussed here—a transcendent ethical duty is assumed to justify, not simply opting-out of the normal political process through tax refusal, but a form of nonviolent sabotage...
...In dealing with this strategy and the philosophy that justifies it, one is not confronting any of the traditional cases for pacifist civil disobedience...
...The local board then gave Seeger an exemption...
...In the latter case, the debate over tax refusal is not principled, but rather will be concerned with the effectiveness of the witness...
...L L EGAL REFORM TO GRANT OBJECTOR status to atheists and agnostics, and to permit selective objection on a moral basis, can easily be justified within the present legal framework of the United States...
...Refusing induction may well be an obligation imposed upon an individual by a conscience, or a "witness" form of political protest...
...Second, the National Advisory Commission on Selective Service erred when it refused to grant moral validity to the position of objectors to a particular war...
...IF THERE is any real danger of injuring the fabric of government in this Vietnam war period, it comes from not recognizing the rights of selective objection...
...The only way one can effect the purposes which the economy and the tax system serve is to gain control of the government...
...But, in any case, it is imperative that the society accept the claims to conscientious objection of agnostics and atheists as well as of Quakers and Mennonites...
...And tax refusal is one of the few means at hand...
...In point of principle, the state does not have the philosophicaltheological competence to decide that consciences formed in one religious tradition are deserving of respect while those shaped by another religious, or nonreligious, tradition are not...
...it would disintegrate the structures of freedom as they are now known...
...Johnson himself taunted the law-makers, the Senate could move to reconsider at any time...
...It held that the question of belief in a Supreme Being was complex and that it was therefore wrong to assume with STRATEGIES FOR OPPOSITION out a hearing that an "agnostic" could not possibly qualify...
...But even then, the obligation being stated is a transcendental one in the sense that it requires the objector to refuse combat in any and all situations which fail to meet his criteria...
...It is another to accord a special status to a person who believes there is a moral imperative which tells him he can kill under some circumstances and not kill under others...
...The National Advisory Commission on Selective Service took up this question and, by a majority vote, decided to urge that objector status be reserved for absolute pacifists...
...Second, he recognizes this issue: "When left-wing demonstrators impatiently abandon traditional political methods, do they not create precedents for right-wing direct actionists who, given the present temper of the country, would prove far stronger in any foreseeable confrontation...
...Hopefully, this larger point will become clarified in the course of analyzing the specifics of protest...
...He is therefore being told to give the utmost cooperation to an action which he regards as profoundly wrong...
...It is a frank, honest and inadequate attempt to deal with the problem...
...The military goods would have been produced whether the people purchased the bonds or not...
...And all the evidence indicates that such minorities will, in the absence of great transformations, be quite small...
...In the name of morality, a sort of pacifist, and not so pacifist, putschism is justified...
...And that is not what is at issue here...
...With peace it will be necessary to provide a substitute for more than $30 billion a year in federal spending...
...And the Commission apparently believed that a simple statement of the distinction between the two positions was one justification for it...
...The use of "trespass" statutes to enforce a de facto segregation is a case in point...
...The Russian and German examples show what is possible in a pre-revolutionary situation...
...the distinction is dim between a person conscientiously opposed to participation in a particular war and one conscientiously opposed to payment of a particular tax...
...They will crack heads and those attacked will fight back...
...The poetic imagery which Lynd had used at that time was to inspire at least a wing of the protesters when some tried to rush the Pentagon in October 1967...
...So in terms of the general theme of this chapter it is a case eminently worth examining in some detail...
...A relatively small minority of the antiwar young in America today adhere to this Leninist position...
...But my own advocacy of selective objec tion is not based on such pragmatism...
...Note that these rents in the "fabric of government" were not made because the Tsar, the Kaiser, or the French President recognized a principle of selective objection but because those societies were undergoing great upheavals in which "normal" obedience to law no longer made sense to great masses of people...
...Barry Goldwater says he is convinced that California Gov...
...What empirical data we have on the campus activists of the sixties indicates such a correlation between -scholarly attainment and political concern...
...The precise moment for action may come only once, and a retreat would mean that the group is not simply being asked to postpone a demonstration but to sacrifice its cause...
...The Supreme Court responded favorably to a due-process appeal but not to the substantive issue of whether the "Supreme Being" proviso was constitutional...
...If there is one certainty in American politics it is that Congress, in a united front of hawks and doves, will send sufficient military supplies to Americans in a shooting war...
...One rea son is that they were rightfully horrified by the monstrous war itself...
...Michael Miller, the New Republic, 1967...
...That is the conclusion of some absolute forms of judi cial pragmatism...
...At that very moment when the political strategy was becoming more practical, these young people turned their backs upon it...
...But can doorways be blocked by a minority in order to dictate to the political process what its majority decisions must be...
...He asserts that he would have no objection if the hawks or segregationists would practice them...
...A less dramatic, but somewhat analogous, case occurs when a march is enjoined by a court...
...Third, the "Nuremburg" analogy—whereby direct and personal participation in the genocidal activities of a fascist dictatorship is equated with paying taxes for a tragic war undertaken by a relatively democratic society—is too loose to be compelling...
...I personally do not think it is a very useful form of opposition mainly because it is almost inevitably restricted to the middle class...
...Now, however, Washington has become more frank about its general tax strategy, though it still resorts to patriotic appeals and old fashioned economics when that is politically convenient (as it has become for Mr...
...That is, to put it mildly, a hopelessly optimistic assumption...
...In point of fact, the government's denial of this right is doing much more serious damage to the social fabric than its recognition of this position possibly could...
...But this retrospective justification of the nonviolent campaign in the lunch rooms and department stores depended partly on the fact that the youth had correctly anticipated the federal law...
...IN A LETTER TO THE New York Times (October 27, 1967), Staughton Lynd, one of the leaders of the movement, defended this new tactic...
...Second, what are the norms that govern the measure of violence to be used in war...
...It went far beyond the ranks of the religious pacifists and was widely prevalent among the most intelligent and idealistic of the young...
...In World War I, there were well-known cases of desertion and re volt by the enlisted ranks in the Russian, German, and French armies...
...tempt to resist arrest and went peaceably with the police when they were taken into T IS A PARADOX THAT, in the fall of 1967 when public opinion polls suggested a majority of the American people were coming to oppose the war in Vietnam, a minority of protesters turned to desperate, antipolitical tactics...
...I would certainly agree with Staughton Lynd that it is a tragedy that they did not do so...
...The Commission also says that "selective pacifism is essentially a political question...
...In the course of coming to his decision, he may well take political considerations into account, i.e., a major Christian tradition requires that the war itself be "just," and a judgment on this criterion will inevitably intermingle politics and morality...
...Why honor the one and send the youth obedient to the other to jail...
...For if the executive branch is indeed "out of control," there are many ways of correcting this situation through democratic process...
...Lenin was against Russia's case in World War I, heart and soul—he was a "revolutionary defeatist...
...As a last generalization, it seems to me that anyone concerned with morality and politics should be wary of facile claims that the former must prevail over the latter...
...Here again, as in the case of atheists and agnostics, it would be possible to sneak into a decent position by juggling with the current phraseology...
...And I am convinced that it would be a relatively simple administrative problem to distinguish the committed from the frivolous, the evaders, and so on...
...Democracy is an excruciatingly imperfect method of political organization—but the very best there is...
...One should be careful, particularly in a democratic society, of proclaiming too many "Nuremburg" obligations...
...but it does not pass the supreme test, for it contributes little or nothing to ending the immoral war in Vietnam...
...I cite this case, not because it is at all typical, but rather to show that political opposition to a war, and moral objection to serving in it, are not the same thing...
...In some cases—the simplest to deal with—this was a legal matter, for the federal statute permitted exemption from military service only to those conscientious objectors who professed a belief in a "Supreme Being...
...I think they were wrong...
...But it would be much better if American society made an honest, candid decision to broaden the scope of its respect for conscience...
...Second, the rationale for tax refusal usually rests upon the old economics...
...First of all, it is important to distinguish between the compulsion directed against a soldier, or even a protestor enjoined from marching, and that exercised against a tax payer...
...Indeed, the one substantive rationale for the majority decision which I found—and with which I disagree—is this: •• . legal recognition of selective pacifism could open the doors to a general theory of selective disobedience to law, which could quickly tear down the fabric of government...
...Moreover," they continue, "the question of `classical Christian doctrine' on the subject of just and unjust wars is one which would be interpreted in different ways by different Christian denominations and therefore not a matter upon which the Commission could pass judgment...
...Worldview, March, 1967...
...At a discussion of the incident, as reported in the New York Times, one participant said that there was no "moral right" to recruit people to fight in an immoral war...
...Therefore, there does not seem to be a good case for a duty of tax refusal, although individuals may make the tactical decision to engage in this form of protest as a form of witness...
...Here is how Gordon Zahn puts the case: . . . we must now introduce a new principle of "conscientious objection to taxation" whereby the individual whose refusal to kill would be respected must now also be permitted to refuse to subsidize and underwrite the killing...
...Along with this would have to go some arrangement for "alternate payments" to support governmental activities which do not so violate the conscience of the individual...
...which the society had established for conscientious objection...
...Here I would argue that anyone who can show that he is opposed to all wars or all wars of a certain type should be granted objector status...
...It is intolerably anti libertarian to exclude atheists and agnostics from exemption as conscientious objectors MICHAEL HARRINGTON on the grounds that they are not motivated by belief in a "Supreme Being...
...For in the political realities of 1967, the real debate over the tax increase was a liberal-conservative antagonism over what groups should be required to sacrifice most in the fight against inflation...
...The majority of the National Advisory Commission voted against Murray's lucid presentation...
...That this force majeure may be nonviolent does not change the essential situation, for it embodies an extra-legal compulsion...
...To be sure, there can be mass resistance to war under certain circumstances, I am told that a significant number of French Canadians avoided service out of nationalist convictions during World War II and effec tively kept their government from sending draftees overseas...
...More to the point, if Congress refuses the tax increase, presumably to the cheers of at least some in the peace movement, the result will not be to bring the end of the war in Vietnam any closer but to place the main burden of that conflict upon the black and white poor...
...and there exist alternate methods of bringing the war to an end...
...He thus confuses a conquered continent under fascist military rule, where the only possible form of opposition was armed struggle and sabotage, with a democratic society in which civil liberties and the rights of political opposition remain quite intact...
...In view of the fact that it had held, in the previous paragraph, that this question is taken on the basis of a "moral imperative," 1 do not take this point very seriously...
...Tax refusal may well be personally therapeutic and morally exhilarating...
...This element of immediacy is made all the more acute when there is a very real possibility that higher courts will reverse the decision of the lower tribunals, or that a federal appeal will overturn a state decision...
...What is at stake in all of them is a definition of the relationship between politics and morality in that extreme situation when the state proclaims its right to take life and orders the citizen to execute, or cooperate with, its command...
...It is not only a rationale for an attack upon civil liberties but could open up an era of intolerance which will victimize the protesters more than those protested against...
...For according to our present economic logic, that would have been the only way to make it more difficult for the government to carry on its immoral war...
...Given the fact that many legal political alternatives are available to the protest movement, there is no justification for such an extreme position...
...I believe that a democratic society should not require its citizens to violate their deeply held principles...
...There is in all this, let it be freely admitted, more of a political dimension than is found in absolute, unconditional pacifism...
...In the Seeger case, an agnostic objector had been denied even a hearing on the grounds that his lack of religious affiliation a priori excluded him from any consideration under the law...
...Simply put, the First Amendment should apply to religion in a completely nonsectarian way...
...Most of the people who have been attracted to the notion of tax refusal during the course of the Vietnam War would regard all the foregoing as mere sophistry...
...It also has them when it is insincere, but I am quite willing to grant the bona fides of Navy recruiters...
...He can organize politically and change the government which administers the taxes...
...Yet he did not believe that his political stance required him to refuse military service...
...But even more to the point, the tax payer STRATEGIES FOR OPPOSITION who believes the war to be immoral has a clear alternative open to him, one that he can pursue without heroic courage and through the exercise of normal democratic rights...
...And from the point of view of human freedom, a tragedy will have occurred...
...First of all, Lynd candidly admits the criticisms of his position...
...In an aside, I referred earlier to the middle-class mood of much of this protest...
...As the late John Courtney Murray, S.J., put it, "the student community is to be praised for having raised a profound moral issue that has been too long disregarded in American life...
...And, perhaps most important of all, this is an elitist stance that justifies an attack upon the civil liberties of citizens, and government itself, on the basis of the presumed moral superiority of a minority...
...In its present form, where legal equality before the law is systematically contradicted by economic and social inequality, the democratic structure must be radically transformed...
...And in response to this challenge, former governor George Wallace of Alabama did indeed propose taking the "bearded professors who tell students they are for victory for the Vietcong" and putting them in jail...
...Yet in both cases even the Commission's language admits that the individuals are responding to "moral imperatives...
...IN THE PRE-KEYNESIAN DAYS, governments did indeed use tax bills as a means of rais ing revenues for specific purposes...
...I would deepen the point...
...In terms of the movement his arguments are significant and worth considering at some length...
...Significantly, Lynd does not really answer his own question about the creation of "precedents for right-wing direct actionists who, given the present temper of the country, would prove far stronger in any foreseeable confrontation...
...Should the antiwar movement, having not yet succeeded in winning a political majority to put an end to the killing, adopt a tactic MICHAEL HARRINGTON whose actual effect will be to tax the ghettos and the rural slums...
...Tax paying is one of the few "personal" relationships which the middle-class citizen has with the government...
...For, he argued with some prescience, it was in the army that the upheaval would begin...
...The intention of such words is clear enough...
...The Court of the victors which sat in judgment of the Nazis asserted a natural-law duty of resist ance, and even heroic resistance, to clearly immoral military orders...
...The courts could, using the prevailing legislative language, make a definition of Supreme Being in the tradition of William James and Paul Tillich and thus bring any deeply held fundamental principles under the operation of this clause...
...in World War II were primarily useful in controlling inflation...
...At the precise moment when the possibility of winning a majority through democratic action had become quite real, these activists chose to move outside of the democratic framework...
...on the other hand, they are not absolute pacifists and yet they do not have the Leninist...
...But, as Mr...
...But there are other reasons asserted beyond this ipse dixit...
...So it would be a gain for the entire society if the political order guaranteed fundamental rights to such principled, selective conscientious objection...
...One may indeed refuse the questions, but this is a form of moral abdication, which would likewise be fatal to civilization...
...It is only a first step...
...He is undisturbed by this possibility so long as the Rightists will stick to some pacifist rules...
...In recent years there have been some signs that the judiciary is moving in this direction...
...This interpretation of the law was, I believe, unconstitutional and, even though the courts have thus far rejected this assertion, I hope they will eventually come to recognize it...
...John Courtney Murray, S.J., was a supporter of the American presence in Vietnam —and an advocate of the rights of "selective conscientious objection" in that war...
...Now all of these cases are, I submit, much more immediate than the act of paying taxes...
...In Oakland during that week, the first protest was made according to accepted nonviolent rules...
...Part of the philosophical underpinnings of this position was revealed at a debate at Oberlin College...
...Moreover, the very structural evolution of modern government, particularly on questions of fiscal policy, undermines the assumption that there is any relationship between a particular tax and a war policy...
...Error has, in short, civil rights, and particularly when it is honest, sincere error...
...In this context, President Johnson's 1967 proposal of a tax increase is, despite his politically motivated statements to the contrary, only tangentially related to the war in Vietnam and certainly not "necessary" to the prosecution of that conflict...
...These various issues are obviously related to one another, yet it is extremely important to understand the different questions they pose and to treat each in its turn...
...The best way to do that is through democracy itself, and this requires that the losers abide by the political victories of the winners...
...The size of the federal budget is now dictated by the general state of the Gross National Product...
...My own analysis is based on the following premises: I reject the proposition that a society's de cision to employ violence against its alleged enemies cannot be questioned...
...In the doing, he might unwittingly help to create a fine instrument for the states' righters...
...Since he believed that the only way to end this war, and war itself, was by the revolutionary overthrow of the existing order, he urged his followers to go into the army precisely because they were antiwar...
...This writer was twice arrested in the course of such demonstrations and is thus obviously sympathetic to the tactic...
...The soldier is being drafted into a situa tion in which his support of what he regards as an immoral cause will be personal and immediate...
...In this he differs from the soldier, marcher, or sit-in activist...
...The basis of this opinion is sociological, not ethical...
...First, what are the norms that govern recourse to the violence of war...
...But the response to this should be to organize a movement to force them to do so through the democratic process...
...It is understood in this philosophy that when issues are to be settled in the street—even if the initial intentions are nonviolent—passions and force majeure take over...
...But the Commission is not being asked to pass this judgment on the various advocates of the "just war" position any more than it has to choose between, let us say, Protestant and Jewish versions of absolute pacifism...
...In the sit-in decisions, the Supreme Court of the United States effectively admitted that normal democratic process had so broken down in the South—or rather, had become an instrument of antidemocratic tyranny—that Negro youth were justified in anticipating a higher federal legality by disobeying a local ordinance...
...The latter case can be contained within the democratic framework...
...The effective establishment of theistic religion which has prevailed for more than two decades should be ended as soon as possible...
Vol. 15 • March 1968 • No. 2
