Once Again On Making Allies Where You Can-On The Question Of The War Tax Resisters

 

 

 

Frank Jackman comment:

 

Recently I made a comment concerning this same general subject of basically individual resistance to war by refusing to pay for the war taxes demanded by the government to continue their endless wars where I mentioned that a long time ago I had given up trying to figure out the best way to combat war, the best way to make the war- makers scream “uncle” (“Uncle Sam,” better). This of course was said in frustration after I/we had tried to shame the monster back in the old days of the Vietnam War with marches, vigils, rallies in our local cities and towns, and ultimately Washington when the monster continued to prove unmovable. Tried to shut down their damn government, unsuccessfully, bitterly unsuccessfully, on May Day 1971 and got nothing but mace, tear gas and mass arrests into the bastinado for our efforts. Tried to get to the front-line fighters of their wars-the mainly working class soldiers, the cannon-fodder, the grunt who fight every war with coffeehouses and advice that it was in their hands to end the damn thing. To walk away guns in hand and say the hell with it and if that didn’t work maybe “turn the guns around” on those who were ordering the fighting from the front-line generals to the President and his cronies.

 

All along that way, working in the background a lot except for the requisite formal endorsement of whatever good work was worth endorsing-on paper anything- stood the War Resisters League with the seemingly simple proposition that if you, meaning you the individual, withheld your war tax money from the government that would dry up their capacity to fund war, and thus put a big crimp in their ability to wage war.

 

I also mentioned in that comment that sometimes though a simple proposition turns into its opposite, turns into a nightmare of bureaucratic paperwork when you come right down to the core of the matter. The dear friends at the IRS do not like, very much do not like, folks who do not pay their taxes, for good reasons or bad. Strangely go after the good reasons, the refusal to fund wars reasons almost more fervently that fraudulent tax evaders and others seem not to pay their fair share for the wars they have created, or have a vested interest in. Don’t like folks sending in letters in lieu of taxes saying exactly why they are not paying up. Get worked up so bad that they have a field day dragging you before investigators, inspectors, supervisors, boards, and such. Are gleeful when they are able to finally garnish your salary including lots of penalties and interest. So that simple strategy, one might say absolutely rational strategy, got added by one Frank Jackman to the heap of ideas that did not work out so well about stopping the war-makers in their footsteps. Oh, by the way, that has not stopped one Frank Jackman from protesting every other way he has been able to raise as much hell as he could with the war-makers.