Paying taxes doesn’t make one complicit in a conflict nor correspondingly a legitimate target therein.
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 2022 “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.
By Andrew Korybko
