On Making Allies Where You Can-The War Tax Resisters

 

 

Frank Jackman comment:

 

A long time ago I gave up trying to figure out the best way to combat war, to make the war- makers scream “uncle” (“Uncle Sam,” better). I/we tried to shame them back in the old days of the Vietnam War with marches, vigils, rallies in our local cities and towns, and ultimately Washington when they 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. 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.

 

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. Don’t like folks sending in letters in lieu of taxes saying exactly why they are not paying up. So that simple strategy, one might say 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 way he has been able to raise as much hell as he could with the war-makers.