Suzie Halewood
April 15, 2024
“Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime”
Ernest Hemingway, 1946
This tax year, the so-called Ministry of Defence will be given £69BN of taxpayers’ money, to effectively subsidise the arms industry and fund more wars of aggression while offering little or nothing in the way of defence.
A further £116BN of taxpayers’ money will go to the banks, interest on money that never existed for wars that are not only unnecessary and illegal, but which neither benefit the UK taxpayer, nor those who have lost life and limb in any one of the smorgasbord of conflicts the UK has instigated since WWII.
Originally published on Off-Guardian on April 12, 2024
War was outlawed in 1928 by the General Treaty for the Renunciation of War. Known as Kellogg-Briand Pact, the treaty was signed by sixty-three nations, including Britain & America who ratified the Pact condemning recourse to war and agreed to settle all disputes peacefully.
Yet in spite of this treaty and many others – from the Geneva Convention to Nuremberg and the UN Charter – still being in force, Britain has deployed its armed forces in combat missions 83 times in 47 countries since the end of the Second World War, with episodes ranging from brutal colonial wars and covert operations to efforts to prop up favoured governments. Attempts were also made to overthrow less favoured governments such as Guyana & Iran (1953), Egypt (1950s), Iraq (2003) and Libya (2011).
It isn’t as though HM Government doesn’t know when it’s breaking the law. Criterion 2c of the Consolidated EU and National Arms Export Licensing criteria clearly states that the government will ‘not grant a licence if there is a clear risk that the items might be used in the commission of a serious violation of international humanitarian law’. Yet the UK government did grant a licence to sell arms to the Saudis, while the Saudis continued bombing Yemen in violation of International Humanitarian Law.
Today, the UK government is committing the same offence Gaza, by licensing arms to Israel, a state currently subject to an ICJ ‘plausible genocide’ ruling where genocide includes killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group and deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of the group in whole or in part – such as the withholding of food, clean water and electricity.
More than 600 lawyers, academics and retired senior judges signed a 17-page letter calling for the UK government to end weapons sales to Israel, warning that serious action was needed to ‘avoid UK complicity in grave breaches of international law, including potential violations of the Genocide Convention’. Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden announced the UK government would be ‘holding Israel to high standards’ (a lower bar would be hard to envisage) adding ‘We will of course act in accordance with our obligations under law in respect of arms sales’.
What kind of person needs advice from 600 lawyers, academics and retired judges, plus 800 civil servants worldwide, in order to understand that it isn’t acceptable for a first world super-power with nuclear capabilities, to bomb a blockaded, starving nation, which has no army, air force, navy and no means of defence or escape? What personality-type needs a piece of paper to understand such actions are inhumane? Those whose moral bankruptcy is at rock-bottom, namely governments, arms manufacturers, private bankers, re-construction companies, money launderers, lobbyist MPs and the rest – all of whom have benefitted financially across the centuries from the deaths of millions.
Most people have a conscience. They don’t need a law telling them not to kill. No law is going to prevent those with the desire to kill, Dennis Nilsen, Harold Shipman, Fred West or the UK government.
Many are now refusing to pay tax on ethical grounds and are willing to accept the consequences of standing up to a morally bankrupt government protected by a mostly cowed judiciary. HM government and their courts may struggle to claim that those who refuse to pay tax on ethical grounds are in violation of the law, when their taxes are being used to fund activities which are themselves in violation of international and domestic law.
No government lacking the conscience to uphold international law, can be trusted to pen the legislation used to coerce taxpayers into funding government crimes, while claiming the failure of the taxpayer to fund such crimes…is against the law.
As yet there is no UK case law allowing the withholding taxes on ethical grounds, but there are many international humanitarian laws that have been ratified into UK law, which make it clear that it is a criminal offence in Britain to give money to a person or organisation if there is a reasonable cause to suspect that it may be used for criminal purposes, such as funding terrorism, war or genocide.
The MOD’s own Manual of Military Law (1955) Part I, Chapter VI, Article 24 states:
If a person, who is bound to obey a duly constituted superior, receives from the superior an order to do some act or make some omission which is manifestly illegal, he is under a legal duty to refuse to carry out the order and if he does carry it out he will be criminally responsible for what he does in doing so…
Nuremberg Principles Part IV: The fact that a person acted to the order of his government or a superior, does not relieve him of responsibility under international law provided that a moral choice was in fact possible to him.
The puppet show that is parliament, a sorry shambles of empathically-challenged lobbyists and grifters passing themselves off as servants of the people yet unable to respect the will and wishes of the people – the majority of whom back an arms export ban to Israel – should surely be coming to an end sometime soon.
In the interim, the moral choice, surely, is to not sponsor genocide. Taxpayers can vote with their wallets, by refusing to fund an arms industry dependent on division and conflict, in a bid to prevent trillions more being invested to serve the interests of the few at the cost of the many.
The author
Suzie Halewood is a mathematician and filmmaker. www.dv19.org – this homepage is about “How to Ethically Withhold Tax. No to funding wars of aggression – not today, not ever.” Visit it! And then continue to ProbityCo !
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i think it is important to make clear, that production and sale of military weapons, and of course war itself, all are severe crimes against humanity, and that soldier are the most miserable thing a human being can be,
there can be no excuse period!
i think it is important to make clear that, both production and sale of military weapons, as well as war itself, all are severe crimes against humanity, and to make it clear too that soldier is by far the most miserable thing a human being can ever be,
there are no way it can be justified, period!
An excellent article on the futility and criminality of wars. Unfortunately, many Western governments have become addicted to war and, like all addictions, the military addiction is very difficult to overcome, especially when huge profits are at stake. President Eisenhower warned us about the “military-industrial complex”, but what we have today has gone well beyond anything that he could have imagined. The problem is that war addiction is the most dangerous addiction and carries with it huge risks not only to hundreds of thousands of people who fall victim to it but, given the nature of modern weapons, it can pose a threat to the survival of humanity as a whole.
During the colonial period, wars made some sense for the imperialists who could fight weaker nations, subjugate them and steal their wealth. However, today even weaker countries have the ability to make wars prohibitively expensive for the aggressors and can even turn the war into a regional or a world war, with unimaginable consequences. In the early 40’s a few thousand militant Zionists could attack Palestine, kill more than 15,000 Palestinians, engage in ethnic cleansing and occupy their land, and no one batted an eyelid.
However, for the past seven months, a heavily-armed apartheid regime which enjoys the “ironclad support” of the biggest military power in the world has been killing and wounding over 110,000 Palestinians in Gaza, mainly women and children, has destroyed more than 80% of civilian infrastructure, made more than 90% of Gazans homeless and is still sinking in a quagmire. What is more, despite possessing very powerful and extensive propaganda tools in nearly all Western countries, it has not been able to pull the wool over people’s eyes and cover up its crimes.
On the contrary, in all Western capitals and in the Global South, millions of people have been marching and denouncing the genocide in Gaza. University campuses, even in the heart of the United States, are echoing with the shouts of tens of thousands of students, Christians, Muslims, Jews, and of all nationalities and races, calling for an end to the genocide. Israel is not winning this disastrous war. On the contrary, with the exception of a few Western leaders, the apartheid regime has been shunned by the world and has become a pariah regime.
Wars do not pay any longer. They only bring murder, destruction and defeat. It’s time to end all wars.
Thanks a lot! I fully agree with the fundamental point you seem to be making, namely that wars are not only destructive of others but destructive to ourselves, an addiction that ends up destroying the core of our own society – in this case the entire Western world. They pay only for a small elite grooup that has no common interest with society at large, namely the MIMAC – Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Compplex, as I call it. It’s time to end all wars – YES – and introduce intelligent conflict handling and resolution – the UN Charter’s Art 1 that peace shall be established by peaceful means. And one way to achieve that is, of course, that citizens stop financing it all via their tax money. It is not easy – since in many countries the tax is already deducted when people get their salaries but, still, it can raise awareness and tax denials for those who can would still have a huge impact.
Best, JAN