A Peace Tax. Our right to stop financing the murders

Leo Tolstoy Center for Nonviolence

Apr 25, 2020

With what can we confront the law that turns people into murderers? Literally, without any exaggeration…. Perhaps, the best choice would be the law of humility and love: “Acquire the Spirit of Peace and a thousand souls around you will be saved.” But, when we are learning humility, it becomes impossible to put up with killing and mutilating people. Just impossible.

It is the time to share results of our initiative, which would be interesting for anyone, who finds murders and maiming to provide safety for yourself or others unacceptable. The results are interim, but they are worth looking into.

In short, the raw data is this

On the one hand, the Constitution guarantees each of us the right not to participate in armed violence and bloodshed, and the Federal Act regulates “repayment of the debt to the Motherland” in the form of alternative service — with no weapon in hand.

On the other hand, government budgets are a real thing. They are generally designed to pay expenses from a general pool of money into which our taxes flow. When we are paid our wages, or receive a service, or buy a product, we automatically pay a tax — which goes, among other things, to maintain governmental security forces. (Here we are not even mentioning all sorts of other taxes, excise duties and fees, charged separately.)

Thus, each of us daily supports the army, the police, and other security agencies by paying a tax:

1. on our income — from business, employment, sale of property, etc.;
2. on our expenditures — on any good or service, literally on every loaf of bread and carton of milk, every liter of gasoline, and every kilowatt of electricity.

What does this mean?

Yes, we kill and mutilate people. And, before anything else, we threaten them with it. Not by ourselves, not with our own hands, but with the hands of others — which is twice as bad. And we finance it daily, and draw more and more people into it — leaders and functionaries of the security forces, yesterday’s boys and girls.

We pay for it throughout our lives. Day after day, month after month, year after year. As if this is how it should be. As if we want it to never stop.

What to do?

Change the situation.

How?

It can be done the familiar way — with "small good deeds," nurturing the seeds of peacefulness so that years later the flowers of peace will bloom. But at the same time you'll have to kill and maim people every day.

Or we can stop killing people. By redirecting our money from bloody defense to exclusively peaceful purposes — fostering mercy and compassion in children and adults, developing and introducing nonlethal and non-injurious means of individual and collective defense, rewarding peaceableness and peacemaking instead of punishing and avenging evil. Or (at the very least) to strictly humanitarian purposes: equipping hospitals, building schools, repairing roads, and so on.

It is logical to call it a “peace tax”.

Can’t we just eliminate the military-police tax?

It would be quite enough if it were collected separately — at least enough to move on to the next point: refusing to finance the security forces with state revenues from the sale of natural resources, and so on.

But the habit of imposing a bloody “duty to the Motherland” on one’s neighbors (especially on the younger ones) will not disappear from society overnight. Therefore, at this stage, every military-police service or tax needs an alternative — and it’s better if that alternative is peacekeeping rather than anything else. Or at least simply peaceful, like the ACS.

Why is it still not realized?

Indeed, such a mechanism still does not exist in any country of the world, including the most developed democracies, such as Switzerland. However, movement in this direction has already started. And in some countries, peace tax legislation is already under consideration at the highest levels.

That’s why we started with the main point

And we began, as the situation requires — with the Government, the country’s main legislative body (not counting the President, the commander-in-chief, whose involvement is best left uninvoked). First, we drew the officials’ attention to a horrible contradiction: one law guarantees people the right not to commit large-scale executions, and at the same time, another law forces the very same people to finance murders and mutilations.

Who are “we”?

We are Vitaly Adamenko, compiler of the library "Beyond Violence," and Alexander Suslin, author and editor of the knowledge base "Tolstoy Center." We are not experts in public financial management, so we did not offer to the Government our solution for re-crediting of taxes. But we were confident that, due to the extreme importance of the topic, the officials were bound to pay maximum attention to this question and professionally (unlike us) address the implementation of a peace tax mechanism, just as tax reduction legislation and the civil service were adopted in the past.

So what did we get in response?

This is the summary of our dialog with the State. More precisely — our dialogue with the Administration represented by the staff of the senior administration of the executive branch, the, Ministry of Finance, the Lower and the Upper houses of the Federal Assembly. With people who, as it turned out, displayed an extraordinary level of indifference and cynicism.

• We tell them about murders and mutilations of people — they tell us about “wastewater treatment” and “grants for painters.”
• From us to them: “What steps are going to be taken?”— from them to us: “We shall take it into account in our work where possible.”
• From us to them, about the necessity of urgent changes in the law — from them to us: “Thank you for your active citizenship; we simply follow the law at all times.”

Corresponding with officials took almost two years (from 2018 to 2020). A mutually respectful dialogue never took place. Not to mention any steps to implement the initiative itself.

So what is the result?

We understood that, despite the support of lawyers, the chance of getting the legislative process moving was about 1% — considering that similar bills in the US and Europe sit on shelves for years, even decades, despite all societal efforts to advance them. But it was necessary to try, and that is what we did.

In the end, we had every reason to take the matter to court. To that very court, which is entirely encompassed by the concept of "security forces," since it is based not on trust and respect, but on punishment for disobedience.

At that point, the circle was closed for us. We had no choice but to draw a line.

For those who wish to continue

The “peace tax” initiative was launched following the model of alternative civilian service and automatically inherited its strengths and weaknesses. Anyone wishing to use this point as a starting place in the future should pay attention to these contradictions — first and foremost, the inadvertent legitimization of military-police expenditures. Not to mention the main issue: the futility of translating the divine language of love into the human language of law.