Gavin,

I agree with you that nobody in the Federal government (or any other branch of government) has any right to extort taxes from Ed and Elaine Brown, or from anyone else who refuses to pay them. I agree that doing so is morally equivalent to slavery. I also agree with you that passing a law doesn’t make it one bit more just to engage in this form of robbery.

So my question is: why waste time on legalistic arguments like Russo’s and the Browns’ when you are arguing against the Feds’ right to demand taxes?

You seem to have just said that it wouldn’t matter to you whether or not the Feds ever passed a law requiring individuals to pay income tax. So why dwell on whether or not they did pass such a law? If they did, people have every right to ignore, evade, defy, and/or resist such a law–since it is nothing more than usurpation and highway robbery. If they didn’t pass a law, then the injustice of extracting taxes still doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that they didn’t pass it. After all, as I think we just agreed, even if they did pass such a law, it would still be unjust to treat people that way.

In either case, why not focus on what you seem to think is the real issue–i.e., the obvious injustice of tax laws, and the right of folks to ignore, defy, evade and resist unjust laws?

Here is a story of yet another couple standing up for workers/citizens rights in this country. There exists no law in the United States requiring an individual to pay a tax on his/her labor, also know as “income tax.”

The laws on the books can always be changed. For example, if a critical mass of people came to accept Russo’s or the Browns’ arguments that there is no legal obligation to pay income tax, the Congress could pass a new law or even a new constitutional amendment, in a matter of days, that would unambiguously authorize a tax on individual income and demand that each individual worker pay it.

Supposing that they did pass such a law, would you then support the Feds’ efforts to extract the tax by force, and to fine, besiege, jail, and/or kill those who refuse to pay it, since there would then be a law that “required” workers to pay up? Or would you continue to view income taxes as an injustice?

abb1:

But of course he has a defensible record – considering the time, place and circumstances. Certainly not less defensible than, say, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson or Winston Churchill.

Excuses are not the same thing as defenses, and if Lenin’s human rights record comes out “not less defensible” compared to that of two slavemasters and an imperialist terror-bomber, that does not strike me as a particularly high standard to hold him to.

abb1:

Why are you comparing Brezhnev’s Russia with Guantanamo Bay? It doesn’t make sense. Are you saying that under Brezhnev the Soviets were held in prison cells and tortured? Nothing can be further from the truth.

This is a plain lie. I do not know whether you are repeating it out of ignorance, or callousness, or deliberate dishonesty, but whatever the case, this assault on memory and truth is perfectly contemptible. Here is a bit about one of the most notorious programs of Comrade Brezhnev’s security forces:

Anne Applebaum:

Thanks to [Vladimir] Bukovsky’s efforts, we know, among other things, what happened at the 1967 Politburo meeting which took place just before his own arrest. Bukovsky in particular was struck by how many of those present felt that bringing criminal charges against him would cause a certain reaction inside the country and abroad. It would be a mistake, they concluded, simply to arrest Bukovsky—so they proposed to put him in a psychiatric hospital instead. The era of the psikhushka—the special mental hospital—had begun.

… In the aftermath of the Thaw, the authorities began once again to use psychiatric hospitals to incarcerate dissidents—a policy which had many advantages for the KGB. Above all, it helped discredit the dissidents, both in the West and in the USSR, and deflected attention away from them. If these were not serious political opponents of the regime, but merely crazy people, who could object to their hospitalization?

With great enthusiasm, the Soviet psychiatric establishment participated in the farce. To explain the phenomenon of dissidence, they came up with the definition of sluggish schizophrenia or creeping schizophrenia. This, scientists explained, was a form of schizophrenia which left no mark on the intellect or outward behavior, yet could encompass nearly any form of behavior deemed asocial or abnormal. Most frequently, ideas about a struggle for truth and justice are formed by personalities with a paranoid structure, wrote two Soviet professors, both of the Serbsky Institute:

A characteristic feature of overvalued ideas in the patient’s conviction of his own rectitude, an obsession with asserting his trampled rights, and the significance of these feelings for the patient’s personality. They tend to explit judicial proceedings as a platform for making speeches and appeals.

And, by this definition, just about all of the dissidents qualified as crazy. … In one report sent up to the Central Committee, a local KGB commander also complained that he had on his hands a group of citizens with a very particular form of mental illness: they try to found new parties, organizations, and councils, preparing and distributing plans for new laws and programs.

… If diagnosed as mentally ill, patients were condemned to a term in a hospital, sometimes for a few months, sometimes for many years. … In both the ordinary and the special hospitals, the doctors aimed, again, at recantation. Patients who agreed to renounce their convictions, who admitted that mental illness had caused them to criticize the Soviet system, could be declared healthy and set free. Those who did not recant were considered still ill, and could be given treatment. As Soviet psychiatrists did not believe in psychoanalysis, this treatment consisted largely of drugs, electric shocks, and various forms of restraint. Drugs abandoned in the West in the 1930s were administered routinely forcing patients’ body temperatures above 40 degrees centigrade, causing pain and discomfort. Prison doctors also prescribed tranquilizers [antipsychotic neuroleptics, such as Thorazine and Haldol —R.G.] which caused a range of side effects, including physical rigidity, slowness, and involuntary tics and movements, not to mention apathy and indifference.

… Eventually, the issue galvanized scientists in the Soviet Union. When Zhores Medvedev was condemned to a psychiatric hospital, many of them wrote letters of protest to the Soviet Academy of Scientists. Andrei Sakharov, the nuclear physicist who was, by the late 1960s, emerging as the moral leader of the dissident movement, made a public statement on Medvedev’s behalf at an international symposium at the Institute of Genetics. Solzhenitsyn, by now in the West, wrote an open letter to the Soviet authorities protesting Medvedev’s incarceration. After all, he wrote, it is time to think clearly: the incarceration of free-thinking healthy people is SPIRITUAL MURDER.

— Anne Applebaum, GULAG: A History (2003), pp. 547–550.

Robert Whitaker:

The first rumblings that the Soviets were using neuroleptics to punish dissidents surfaced in 1969 and burst into public consciousness a year later. Dissidents would be diagnosed with “sluggish schizophrenia,” their reformist ideas seen as evidence of their “delusions” and poor adjustment to Soviet society, and then sent to one of twelve special psychiatric hospitals. …

What the senators heard chilled them. One expert witness, Canadian psychiatrist Norman Hirt, told of a mélange of treatments used to torment the dissidents. Wet pack, insulin coma, metrazol–all familiar to students of American psychiatry–were three such methods. “The fearfulness of these experiences cannot be described adequately by any words,” Hirt said. However, written appeals from Soviet dissidents, which had been smuggled out and given to the Senate, described neuroleptics as the worst torture of all. A person who is given aminazine (a neuroleptic similar to Thorazine), wrote Vassily Chernishov,

loses his individuality, his mind is dulled, his emotions destroyed, his memory lost … as a result of the treatment, all the subtle distinctiveness of a person is wiped away. It is death for creativeness. Those who take aminazine cannot even read after taking it. Intellectually they become more and more uncouth and primitive. Although I am afraid of death, let them shoot me rather than this. How loathsome, how sickening is the very thought that they will defile and crush my soul.

Comparisons were drawn between such forced drug treatment and the medical experiments of Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, all of which led Florida senator Edward Gurney to conclude: “Most horrifying of all in this psychiatric chamber of horrors were the many accounts of the forcible administration by KGB psychiatrists of chemicals which convert human beings into vegetables.”

Over the next few years, Soviet dissidents published further details of this “chamber of horrors.” Aminazine and haloperidol were the two neuroleptics most commonly used to torment them. In a samizdat manuscript titled Punitive Medicine, dissidents described the incredible pain that haloperidol could inflict:

The symptoms of extrapyramidal derangement brought on by haloperidol include muscular rigidity, paucity and slowness of body movement, physical restlessness, and constant desire to change the body’s position. In connection with the latter, there is a song among inmates of special psychiatric hospitals which begins with the words, “You can’t sit, you can’t lie, you can’t walk” … many complain of unimaginable anxiety, groundless fear, sleeplessness.

Doctors used neuroleptics, the Soviet dissidents stated, “to inflict suffering on them and thus obtain their complete subjugation. Some political prisoners do recant their beliefs, acknowledge that they are mentally ill, and promise not to repeat their ‘crimes’ in return for an end to this treatment. American psychiatrists also heard usch testimony firsthand. On March 26, 1976, Leonid Plyushch, a thirty-nine-year-old mathematician who had spent several years in the psychoprisons before being freed, spoke at a meeting of the New York Academy of Sciences. That produced this memorable exchange:

Q: What was the most horrifying aspect of your treatment?

A: I don’t know if there are irreversible effects of psychiatric treatment, but all the inmates at Dnepropetrovsk Special Psychiatric Hospital lived in the fear that there would be such effects. They had heard stories of those driven by the treatment into permanent insanity. My treatment, in chronological order, began with haloperidol in big dosages without “correctives” that avoid side effects, essentially as a torture. The purpose was to force the patient to change his convictions. Along with me there were common criminals who simulated [mental] illness to get away from labor camps, but when they saw the side effects–twisted muscles, a disfigured face, a thrust-out tongue–they admitted what they had done and were returned to the camps.

Such descriptions stirred newspapers and television networks in the United States to condemn, with great fervor, the Soviets’ actions. Not long after Plyushch’s testimony, the New York Times ran an extensive feature on “Russia’s psychiatric jails,” in which it likened the administration of neuroleptics to people who weren’t ill to “spiritual murder” and “a variation of the gas chamber.” Dissidents, the paper explained, had been forcibly injected with Thorazine,”which makes a normal person feel sleepy and groggy, practically turning him into a human vegetable.” Neuroleptics were a form of torture that could “break your will.”

–Robert Whitaker, Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill (2002), pp. 215-217. Emphasis mine.

“What is overlooked by liberal critics of this action is how the corporate media is used as an arm of the state, or where the state is controlled by folks the ruling class dislikes, as an agent of counter-revolution.”

Don’t kid yourself. This isn’t a matter of “the ruling class” attacking the anti-ruling-class government. The government is a ruling class: that is what governments do. This is a competition between two would-be ruling classes over which one is going to be dominant. I don’t know about you, but I am an anarchist, and I don’t give a good god damn about which gang of thugs wins, or about whether “revolutionary” or “counter-revolutionary” jackboots end up on the people’s necks.

On the other hand, I do care a lot about how far a government can get away with using the force of arms to silence its critics. Which seems to be what’s happening here. That’s a big deal, even if the critics are real creeps. After all, they always come after the soft targets first.

“One can imagine how a TV station that helped organize a coup against the American Government would be treated. …”

There’s an awesome standard. If the U.S. government might have done even worse, then it’s O.K.?

“The media should reflect the views of 95% of the population, not the interests of the wealthy and powerful 5% of exploiters and oppressors. The only way we can have genuine freedom of expression and freedom of the press, is for the people to own and control the mass media.”

I agree that that would be a good thing. But there is a question as to how ordinary people can come to own and control media operations. By any means necessary? I sure hope not.

“This cannot happen via state ownership, one merely substitutes one giant corporation for several big corporations.”

So why are you cheering this gang of thugs on, since the proprietary control of airwaves by the State apparatus is exactly what they are asserting as the basis for closing RCTV’s broadcasts down?

You seem to be blowing a lot of hot air at the anticipated reactions of “liberal critics.” But that’s like shooting fish in a barrel. Of course liberals are a pack of hypocritical blowhards. What else is new? That doesn’t eliminate the obvious danger of a State–any State, not just the ones you or I especially dislike and spend most of our time protesting–becoming increasingly brazen about its rough handling of dissidents, nor does it eliminate the obvious injustice of the government using its usurped control over the airwaves to safeguard its hold on power.