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| Notes
on the 11th International Conference By Larry Rosenwald, NWTRCC Delegate (Photos and conference statement can be view at http://peacetax-2006.com/.) To set the scene, first: Woltersdorf is a small town just east of Berlin, reputedly inhabited by German's new "radicals," i.e., neo-Nazis (so I was told by a man I met in the streetcar that took me there), but very beautiful and apparently placid, with a canal running through it, and the Mayor of the town showed up for a plenary session on "Responsibility," and spoke very movingly. The conference itself took place at the "Haus Gottesfriede," i.e., the House of God's Peace - a lovely and simple space, its name offering the first suggestion, though not the last, of how religious an atmosphere this conference would have, much more so than any American conference on wtr I've ever attended. There were sixty-five participants. The number was lower than average for these conferences; so was the number of participants at the New England WTR gathering I attended in early November, to report on the Berlin conference, so as a person attentive to numbers I found myself wondering whether the lower numbers reflected a decline in the strength of our movement. About half the participants were from Germany, and most of the rest from other European countries, with a few Americans and one Canadian. But there were also two participants from Ghana, one each from Eritrea, Nepal, and India, and there would have been one from Colombia had it not been for what were described as visa problems; one observer commented, "Colombia has become a country it is very hard to bring people from." So declining intensity, perhaps, but a more strikingly international profile than the other conferences I at any rate have attended, and the Ghanaian and Eritrean participants in particular had a big effect on the conference, in shifting its perspective towards Africa's nine wars and the role of the small armaments industry in making those wars possible. In this largely European context, American war tax resistance turned out to be quite unusual. (Indeed, war tax resistance itself - as opposed to peace tax campaigns - turned out to be quite unusual.) That is partly a question of demography, of who the participants were. They are, as noted, more religious than we are, or at any rate more religious on the whole than the wtrs I know or know of. They are more likely than we are to describe themselves in relation to their religion, more than a few were or had been pastors or deacons or other religious functionaries, a retired pastor was one of the speakers at the Responsibility panel. They are also less likely than we are to be committed to renunciation, to voluntary poverty, to austerity (the beer available at every lunch and dinner was one indication of that, but not the only one). They are also more focused on law and legislation than we are, by which I mean several things. First, most of the Europeans are focused chiefly on something like the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund, i.e., on convincing their national legislatures to recognize a right of conscientious objection to military taxation. (It is confusing for them, I think, that in the US we have both an American "national campaign," i.e., the NCPTF, and also a community or movement of some 8,000-10,000 war tax resisters and then there's us, who are either supportive or not supportive of the NCPTF but in any case separate from it; I took some time to make this distinction clear.) Accordingly, they are more likely than we are to initiate court actions (as opposed to being summoned into them), their goal in initiating such actions being again to change the legal situation, in the court actions as in the legislative campaigns. They are also more focused on the UN than we are, and on other international courts, e.g., the European Court of Human Rights. They are, on the other hand, less focused, or maybe not focused at all, on building a movement of people who will refuse war taxes, to the extent possible, here and now, in willingness to suffer the consequences. There were few or no stories of houses being seized or defended, of jobs being threatened or changed, or levies executed at banks or workplaces. And there were no stories that I can recall of choosing a life of voluntary simplicity in order not to be contributing to the military budget. Some notable events at the conference, in more or less chronological order: a) At the first plenary session, Derek Brett, of Conscience and Peace Tax International, summarized his quite impressive study of conscientious objection around the world. The general picture, he says, is of "the rise and fall of conscription." (The study is downloadable at http://cpti.ws/cpti_docs/brett/intro.html.) We know in the United States how easy it is to end conscription and go on making abundant war, of course, so the conclusions Derek was reaching may not seem auspicious to us. But the study is excellent. b) Also at the first plenary session, Christian Bartolf, a German scholar of Gandhi and director of the Gandhi Information Center, presented his campaign to get signatures for a petition against military conscription. He has at the moment some 12,000 signatories, including several winners of the Nobel Peace Prize (plus Studs Terkel and Pete Seeger). He was quiet, thoughtful, and unemphatic in his speech, but it is possible that this campaign could be important. (The list of signatories is at http://home.snafu.de/mkgandhi/manifest.htm.) c) The British case of the Peace Tax Seven was perhaps the case most often and prominently discussed at the conference. (The British national campaign is hosting the 2008 conference, partly in relation to this case; everyone wants to know how it's going to turn out.) In that case, seven British opponents to war are, in the characteristic European mode, seeking an exemption from being required to pay taxes to the military. They have made a dvd documenting their case - a good documentary, lively and unpretentious. Their case has been rejected by all the British courts to which they have turned, and they are now heading for the European Court of Human Rights, and in connection with that trying to raise some $100,000 for their costs there. Nice people, too. (Information about the case at http://www.peacetaxseven.com/, about the documentary at http://www.peacetaxseven.com/contempt.html.) d) One prominent theme, there as in many wtr gatherings here, had to do with reaching young people. Some conference participants were young, to be sure (the youngest I met was 22, a British woman who works for the Quaker Council on European Affairs), but most were between 50 and 70, so one could feel the urgency of the theme just by looking around the room. One response came from a Dutch group headed by Bart Horeman, and associated with Euro's Voor Freede; this group presented its website (not yet up and running), which is aimed at young people, interactive, involves lots of clicking and cool images. Oddly, none of it is focused on war tax resistance; the focus is more on lifestyle choices, the ones bearing on an individual's ecological footprint, and there is also a digital penny poll, frankly borrowed from US practice A second response, in my view considerably more promising both in its direct relation to wtr and in its capacity to engage young people, was a street-theater workshop led by two Berlin-based street theater teachers, Til Baumann and Harald Hahn, themselves both young, with a good record of working with political groups, inspiring and smart. It turns out to be both challenging and feasible to create images illustrating, or at least leading to consideration of, paying taxes for peace, and there was nothing stodgy about their work or about them. (Harald's website is at http://www.harald-hahn.de/, and the section to look at is the one called "Politisches Aktionstheater," which is, as its title suggests, in German, but also has some wonderful photographs.) Of all the workshops and presentations at the conference, this was the one that left me most hopeful; I'll end this report on that note of hopefulness, rather than on any of the gloomier thoughts stated or hinted at earlier. -end- |
| National
War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee |