Paying for Our Own Oppression

A month from now is the deadline for people in the U.S. to file their 2024 tax returns. This year’s filing will be a sobering experience for many of us who have become alarmed at the increasingly dictatorial Trump regime, as well as his regime’s alliance with Russian dictator Putin and betrayal of our democratic ally Ukraine.

In school I learned of the American Revolution and the slogan “no taxation without representation,” which galvanized the American colonist’s rebellion against British king George III. I question the extent to which we have representation now, with executive orders and the activities of Musk’s DOGE organization impounding funds appropriated by Congress. Essentially, our representatives in Congress have been sidelined along with the courts that have ruled impoundment illegal but lack enforcement power. Republican representatives have complained about themselves and their families being threatened if they cross their party leader. In town halls last month, they endured boos and criticism for mass firings of government workers, cutbacks to government programs, and the betrayal of Ukraine. (We’re talking about people in red states and red districts here!) The solution ordered from on high: Stop holding town halls. Stop listening to constituents who are hurting.

They are no longer constituents now anyway. They are subjects, and the so-called elected representatives have turned into enforcers, telling the people what they need to do to be well-behaved citizens rather than listening to their concerns. For instance, during his 2022 Ohio Senate campaign, current vice-president JD Vance told a Ukrainian American favoring US support for the country attacked by Russia, “Your country is the United States of America, and so is mine,” and now says it was “offensive” for the man to ask the US for such support.

It’s a small step from publicly denouncing dissent to taking steps to physically crush that dissent. Today, we’ve learned of the first political prisoner who has disappeared. Mahmoud Khalil was a spokesperson last spring for the students who set up tent camps on the Columbia University campus to protest US support for Israel against the Palestinians in Gaza. Regardless of one’s position in the conflict, in a democracy people have the right to protest. But even though Khalil holds a green card and is a legal resident of the U.S., he was arrested by ICE agents and currently cannot be found. HIs wife, eight months pregnant and a U.S. citizen, was told she could see him in a detention center in New Jersey. She went there. He wasn’t there. Maybe in a detention center in Louisiana, she heard. [Update 3/11/2025: Khalil is in a detention center in Jena, Louisiana. A judge has stayed his deportation pending a ruling on the case. I’ll continue to update this fast-moving story.]

I remember these kinds of shenanigans when Russian dissident Alexei Navalny was imprisoned, before his jailers and torturers killed him in February 2024. They were a familiar tactic of the gulag system — prisoners transported thousands of miles away, their families given misleading information and no concrete details for weeks or months.

Many years ago, when I was a student in a Masters of Library and Information Sciences program at the University of Wisconsin, I helped to organize a concert of a dissident popular music duo from Chile, Schwenke & Nilo. Nelson Schwenke and Marcelo Nilo had performed underground for almost a decade at that time, trying to inspire people to stand up against the repressive Pinochet regime. Because they were unable to perform or even sell their recordings openly, they could not make a living as musicians. Nelson managed the hardware store in a small town between Santiago and Valparaíso that belonged to his wife’s family. Marcelo taught music and mathematics at a voucher-funded private school in Santiago. For a month in 1990, I went to Chile to research the novel that would eventually become Gringolandia and stayed with Nelson and his family. One afternoon I watched as he prepared the taxes for the hardware store, and I wondered what he felt like, sending a percentage of the store’s profits to the government that had censored his songs, banned his performances, and threatened him and his family with physical harm. (The repression was so harsh that he and his wife ended up taking up an offer of asylum in West Germany, the land of his family’s heritage. The two of them struggled to adjust to the new language and culture and returned to Chile despite the dangers after a year.)

Thirty-five years later, the image of Nelson filling out the tax forms  and sending in the money to support the Pinochet dictatorship, which threatened and mistreated him, his family, and his country, has never left me. I never asked him about it — I felt it would be presumptuous for me, coming from a country that enjoyed a long-standing democracy but had also conspired to bring the dictatorship to power in 1973 — but knowing him, I think he would have considered the taxes a hill he was unwilling to die on. He was very much a rule-follower, though standing up to the oppressive regime through his music represented a higher ethical rule. I never thought at the time that Nelson and Marcelo’s activism, which served as an inspiration for me (with a shout-out in Chapter 27  of Gringolandia) would not become an actual guide to how I might choose to resist what is becoming a dictatorship in my own country.