Who Am I?
In 2003, when the United States launched its “shock and awe” attack on the people in Iraq, I decided to stop paying for the stupid and cruel actions of the U.S. government. I became a tax resister. But it was only after I started to resist that I became aware that I was joining a community of tax resisters and a historical lineage of resisters and resistance campaigns.
The more I connected with this community and researched this lineage the more interested I became in the history of tax resistance, its varieties, and the many creative tactics people have developed in the course of tax resistance campaigns. I dug through the archives, and kept finding more interesting leads. At the same time I monitored ongoing tax resistance actions around the world to see how they played out in today’s contexts. Meanwhile, I blogged on the subject and used my blog as a way to categorize examples and to cross-reference common threads between them in the hope that some day I might draw some useful conclusions from what I was finding.
I published a tax resistance reader in 2008 that brought together documents from some of the more interesting examples of tax resistance campaigns from around the world and throughout history. I followed that by publishing a documentary history of the development of war tax resistance among American Quakers.
I spent two years on the administrative committee of the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee and learned more about the challenges of building a campaign out of a group of diversely-motivated tax resisters. That group sent me to Colombia to an international conference on war tax resistance where I met some of our counterparts in other countries. There, I gave a presentation on the lessons war tax resisters can learn from historical tax resistance campaigns. That was my first attempt to coalesce the material that evolved into this book, which was originally published as 99 Tactics of Successful Tax Resistance Campaigns in 2014.
―David M. Gross