Paying taxes doesn’t make one complicit in a conflict nor correspondingly a legitimate target therein.
Andrew Korybko
Zelensky told anti-government Belarusian media
last month that “Russians who pay taxes and thereby support the army,
or those who are mobilized into it, are outright criminals.” The
innuendo is that they’re participants in the conflict and that this
therefore justifies attacks against them. In fact, this is the same
twisted logic that Osama Bin Laden relied on in his November 2002 “Letter to the American People”, who also alleged that paying taxes makes one complicit in a conflict with all that entails.
In his words, “The American people are the ones who pay the taxes which fund the planes that bomb us in Afghanistan,
the tanks that strike and destroy our homes in Palestine, the armies
which occupy our lands in the Arabian Gulf, and the fleets which ensure
the blockade of Iraq…So the American people are the ones who fund the
attacks against us, and they are the ones who oversee the expenditure of
these monies in the way they wish, through their elected candidates.”
That’s not how international law works.
Although the
UN-enshrined order is increasingly eroding, it’s still universally
accepted that paying taxes doesn’t make one complicit in a conflict with
the innuendo that it’s legitimate to target them. Zelensky probably has
no idea that Bin Laden employed the same twisted logic as he did,
though Bin Laden was even more direct in explicitly arguing that this
“justifies aggression against civilians”, but that just goes to show
that Zelensky has been radicalized by his Banderite ideology into
normalizing terrorism.
The followers of World War II-era
Ukrainian Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera perversely justified their
acts of terrorism against Polish civilians on a similar pretext, both before World War II inside the Ukrainian-majority regions of the Second Polish Republic and during World War II’s Volhynia Genocide.
They blamed them for the perceived injustices committed against
Ukrainians by the state due to them paying the taxes that funded that
selfsame state. The end result was ethnically motivated terrorism.
In the present, the Ukrainian Armed Forces targeted civilians in Donbass in the eight years preceding the special operation
and then expanded the scope of their attacks afterwards, with the
innuendo being that they’re to blame for perceived injustices committed
by the Russian state since they pay taxes. No matter whether or not one
believes that these perceived injustices are objectively existing ones
in all three cases, respectively targeting American, Polish, and Russian
civilians in response is indisputably a crime.
The same
goes for if Russians targeted Ukrainian civilians in response to
perceived injustices committed against them by the Ukrainian state due
to them funding it with their taxes as that too would be a crime. Some
non-Ukrainian members of the West like those who participate in the
global harassment network known as “NAFO” have been just as radicalized
as Zelensky and many of his fellow Ukrainians into justifying attacks
against Russian civilians through the same twisted logic that was just
explained.
They’re likely not aware that Bin Laden earlier
employed the same arguments as Zelensky himself just did for justifying
attacks against an adversarial country’s civilians, and probably reject
what Biden Laden did, but can’t bring themselves to reject the Ukrainian
Armed Forces’ attacks against Russian civilians. This observation
speaks to the prevalence of internet-driven political radicalization in
today’s age that even non-Ukrainians half a world away from the conflict
zone in some cases support Ukrainian terrorism.