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March 29th, 1971. This is the open letter which I send to the Internal Revenue Service annually at this time of year, Commissioner of Internal Revenue US Department of the Treasury, Washington DC. Dear sir and closed. Please find my income tax return for the calendar year. 1970.

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I am declining to remit the approximately 15% which is still due over and above the amount which was withheld at the source of payment. I shall attempt to explain for the sixth consecutive year why I feel it obligatory for me to persist in this form of

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action. Such action has no precedent in my life as an American citizen. I'm well aware that some tax protesters are opposed to all wars and therefore opposed to all related taxation even to paying benefits to veterans of past wars. I respect the position of these protesters,

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but I do not personally agree with it. I believe that there can be such a thing as a just war. I think the war against chattel, slavery in this country 100 and 10 years ago was morally right and necessary. I believe there was a just war

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within my own lifetime. Indeed, I felt so strongly that Hitlerism had to be stopped for the sake of humanity and that it could only be stopped by physical force that I volunteered for service in the United States Army. And I have never regretted doing so. One

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of the casualties of our time, I fear is the ethical and historical judgment of the US Supreme Court which recently ruled in effect, that one cannot draw a moral distinction between our war against Nazism in the 19 forties and our current war against the nationalist movement

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in Southeast Asia. There is a difference, sir. And all my faculties of reasoning and feeling agree that the difference is so profound. I must continue to insist upon it and act upon it no matter what the Supreme Court may say, or the Congress or the President

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or the Internal Revenue Service or anyone else. And no matter what may be the consequences of my action to give you the, I give you this personal background in order to try to make a fundamental point which I have tried to make in all five of

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my previous letters to you, but which may not yet be clearly understood. I withhold my co-operation from an immoral activity of the US government, not from rejection of the government as such, but from rejection of the immoral activity. Unlike some protesters, I still do not believe

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the two are synonymous every year, every month, every day that the government persists in its unjust war, makes it more difficult for me to sustain my belief. But for the moment, at least by an increasingly attenuated act of faith, I continue to resist the counsel of

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those who say our policies in Southeast Asia are a logical, inevitable outgrowth of the capitalist imperialist dynamic, et cetera. I continue to resist the urgings of those who say that our institutions must be raised to the ground before anything good or healthy can come out of

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the United States of America. I continue to believe that our war against indochina represents an aberration and wandering from our appointed path that it is possible for us to find our right, our rightful path again and that the path leads toward basically humanizing destinations. I continue

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to believe that this country possesses and has on a number of occasions exercised extraordinary. I would say even unique powers of self correction. Yes, we had chattel slavery at our beginnings, but I cannot agree with those who feel we are therefore all marked forever by that

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original sin. The record shows that we abolished slavery within 75 years, which is a great deal faster than societies generally are able to recognize and extirpate evil institutions. Yes. For another while, we permitted robber barons to plunder the land and mercilessly exploit wage workers. But I

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cannot agree with those who claim we are still being ground under by the iron heel of Robber barons. The record shows that we started bringing our powers of self correction to bear upon these excesses in the first decade of this century and sharpened such powers enormously

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in the 19 thirties and continued to consolidate them in new social and environmental legislation every year. Yes, our forebearers treated American Indians shamefully. But the existentially important point is not what happened then, but what is happening now, many of us today are demonstrating that we are

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still quite capable of feeling shame over what our forebears did and are trying to redress those old wrongs. I do not know of any other people on earth about whom quite as much could be said. Although I can think of many peoples who have conducted themselves

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shamefully in their histories. I continue to believe as Robert Kennedy believed that most Americans are basically generous and compassionate that the soul of America is essentially decent, not vicious. I hope you can understand, sir, what I am trying to say, I respect and revere this country,

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not because it is heaven on earth for no country is or ever will be that. But because it has shown itself unusually capable of self criticism and insight, unusually capable of making amends, correcting errors. Rising above previous limitations. I respect and revere this country because it

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is not a fixed state, but a process of becoming. And that in my view is the best that can be asked of an individual, a nation or anything else which is human. Can you understand, sir, I have to oppose American policy in South Southeast Asia. Not

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because I hate my country, but precisely because I love my country. If this sounds ethnocentric and insensitive to the innocent Laotians and Cambodians and Vietnamese who have been sacrificed on the altar of our present unholy policies. I beg forgiveness of their survivors. If I had been

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to Southeast Asia and had seen the maimed Children devastated crop lands and other works of death and destruction we have wrought. Perhaps I would feel as some others do that. This country has damned itself beyond the possibility of salvation. But I have not seen those things

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and I do not feel that kind of ultimate despair. All I have personally seen and therefore all I can know for a certainty is what the war against Southeast Asia is doing to Americans themselves. The people I see around me every day, I see generosity and

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compassion being blighted hearts being hardened, the soul of America being converted into something ugly and unrecognizable. I see people growing cynical, confused, suspicious of one another, contemptuous of one another hateful toward one another. I see our precious irreplaceable life energies more precious than any other resource,

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more precious than any treasure being dissipated on a cruel futile exercise in bullying and vain glory. In the words of Arthur Hoppy of the San Francisco chronicle. I crave an America. I can root for once more. I crave in America, I can once again regard without

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the feelings of guilt and shame, which wither the spirit immobilize the energies, rob life of its proper savior. There is a terrible irony in the timing of the internal revenue service. We who would like to be proud of our country are obliged in the spring of

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every year to think particularly long and hard about the activities of government. For. This is the time when we are required under penalty of law to compute the financial tribute we have paid and shall pay to that government and its activities. This is the season coinciding

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roughly with the vernal equinox. When our thoughts should be turning toward reaffirmation of such human qualities as hope and creativity in which the way, excuse me in much the way the rest of the natural world reaffirms the principles of life and growth every spring. This is

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the time when a dormant bulb produces a hyacinth. A U gives birth to a lamb. The fields are covered with leaves of grass, the trees reveal their faith that there shall be a harvest by putting forth fruit buds. When man was closer to his roots in

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the natural order of things, he sensed that he should be a part of this annual renaissance of optimism and beauty and gladness. He planted his corn or potatoes or rice or whatever, knowing it was a work of goodness, perhaps even holiness. And he characteristically celebrated his

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reunion with the earth by song, dance, love making worship. But for most of us, this time of year now contains nothing of planting growth, goodness, creation, joy, love worship or life. Spring has become a kind of perversion. A time for covenants with death. A time when

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we are forced to pay for armaments, we abhor a time of offensives into Cambodia last year, Laos. This year, next year, we do not know what spring will bring, but we wait with fear and trembling. I repudiate such covenants with death and will not pay for

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their enactment and enforcement. I take my stand with life and to demonstrate for the sixth year now that I will gladly pay for life affirming works. I am contributing the aforementioned 15% of my income tax to what I like to think of as a sort of

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shadow government organizations which are advancing the legitimate purposes of a humane society. Works of mercy, liberation and justice. These branches of my shadow government include the United Farm Workers organizing committee, League for Industrial Democracy, American Friends Service Committee and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. I fervently

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hope that it will not be necessary for me to have to write to you again in this same vein. Next year. Sincerely yours, Henry Anderson. These remarks are entitled the politics of retribution. The date is April 17th, 1971. Last month. My commentary took the form

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of an open letter to the Commissioner of Internal Revenue on the subject of income tax refusal. This month, I should like to read another open letter to an altogether different public figure on an altogether different matter. The following is addressed to Wilmont Sweeney, vice mayor of

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Berkeley regarding the elections which recently took place in this city. Dear Mr Sweeney, as I write a recount is pending which will determine whether you shall be mayor of Berkeley for the next four years or only one of eight council men for the next two years.

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But the burden of what I have to say is essentially the same regardless of the outcome. More important by far than the title of the office you hold is the kind of person you are. I regard you as the nearest approach. This strange city of ours

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has at the moment to a knowledgeable, effective and reasonable community leader. And it is in that spirit that I write to you. I should like to begin with an interpretation of what happened in last week's municipal election to understand the results. I think it's necessary to

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go back at least two years to events which took place in April and May of 1969. On April 1st of that year, you will recall. There was another council election. 44 year terms were open at that time. In the resulting scramble you led with about 19.5

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1000 votes. 2nd and 3rd places were taken by Messrs mclaren and Price whom we may fairly characterize, I think as moderate conservatives, they received about 13.5 and 12.5 1000 votes respectively. Fourth place went to Warren Widener, a political neophyte Zack Brown with about 10.5 1000 votes.

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Missed out as did Lonnie Hancock with about 10,000 and Joseph Groden with about 9000. The Berkeley gazette crowed that the town had come to its senses had taken a hard swing to the right, had rejected anarchy, had restored balance to the council. Had thrown off the

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10 year grip of the Democratic caucus, et cetera to be sure a liberal democratic incumbent Brown had been defeated, which was almost unprecedented. Another candidate endorsed by the Democratic caucus, Mister Groden had lost. There can be no doubt that there had been a certain amount of

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community reaction against street confrontations and the somewhat equivocal position which some councilman had taken toward them. But a more thoughtful analysis did not bear out the theory of a hard swing to the right. There was for one thing, the demonstrable fact that you got 50% more

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votes than price or mclaren even more to the point. The left of center vote had been split between at least a dozen candidates while the moderate conservatives concentrated all their efforts upon the team of price and mclaren through such discipline. 25% of the vote was parlayed

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into victory over a fragmented 75%. There were now four counsel votes more or less to the right of center. And with the subsequent resignation of Mister Swingle only four to the left of center. This was not a balanced counsel but one in which the moderate conservatives

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Johnson Price and mclaren were overrepresented. The Liberal Democrats yourself and Missus May were greatly underrepresented and only the radical right in Mister Deb Bonus and the radical left in Mister Dellums and perhaps Mister Weidner were in reasonable proportion to their real standing in the community. The

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lessons of that election were evidently lost on some community groups but evidently not on others. In May of 1969 a second event took place which was crucial, I think to everything which has happened in Berkeley since it would be impossible to imagine a plan for the

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further division of the liberal left plus consolidation of the radical left more foolproof than what has become known as People's Park. I do not believe anyone involved was astute enough to write such a script. It just worked out that way. The record shows that the Campus

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and Telegraph Avenue activists as they call themselves had alienated almost everyone with their street brawling and window smashing. But now they were doing something constructive, something which appealed mightily to the growing liberal concern for ecology and to the basic liberal sense of fair play. After all

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that vacant lot had been nothing but an ugly eyesore before Roger Hines ordered people's park fenced off the people who had built and used it reacted, the police overreacted and we all remember the two weeks of military occupation which followed the radical left remembers vividly there

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is no other plausible way to account for the implacable animus. They bear to this day not only toward the police but toward William Hanley. And the whole city manager concept of government. Much has been said about the organizing job the April coalition did in the south

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campus area to register thousands of voters and deliver them to the polls on April 6th of this year to vote the straight coalition ticket. But having worked as a union organizer off and on for nearly 12 years, I can assure the political pundits that no one

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can be radicalized by rhetoric alone. The greatest organizer in the world cannot organize any substantial number of people until they are aroused about something. People's park provided that state of readiness in a way that cries for a third world college and other alarms and excursions could

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not possibly do. Furthermore, people's park fundamentally shook the assumptions of many moderates who saw with their own eyes, things they would not have thought possible, such as Berkeley policemen, the finest in the country clubbing women whose only offense was that they couldn't run away fast enough.

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Dellums capitalized upon the animosity and polarization which were generated at that time in his upset of Congressman Kalen the following spring, mead capitalized upon it in his victory over Assemblyman Milford and the April coalition has now capitalized upon it. They could not otherwise have obtained 15,000

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signatures on their police partition initiative, which for all its incoherence was the closest thing to a coherent plank in their platform. Then Mira D do the plank was overwhelmingly defeated. I'm quite sure the liberal majority of Berkeley would have approved a reasonable reform measure such as

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an independent police review board. But the majority was not sufficiently outraged to other people's park excesses to abolish the police department altogether, which in effect is what the April coalition called for. Yet even more wondrous despite the overwhelming defeat of their platform, three of the four

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council candidates who ran on that platform were elected depending on the outcome of the recount. They seem to have carried along with them, a mayor with only technical objections to their platform and they promised to use their four vote block to appoint 1/5 council member who

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thinks as they do on all things, giving them seemingly complete control over the fate of Berkeley for at least four years to come. How was this possible? Evidently because those riding on the People's Park backlash were shrewd enough to have learned from the mclaren Price campaign

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of 1969. They agreed upon a slate of candidates well in advance and they disciplined themselves tightly against diversions, centrists and moderates. Apparently having learned nothing from history were again divided at least a dozen ways, the one moderate who had the wit to see that 12 to

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4 will not go, did not practice what he preached and himself siphoned off enough votes to have returned an entire slate of moderates. The media talked this time of a hard swing to the left but it was nothing of the sort any more than there had

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been a hard swing to the right. In 1969. About two thirds of the Berkeley electorate is still moderate, but it proved itself once again vulnerable to a well run candidate by a a well run campaign by a tightly disciplined minority. The counsel is again unbalanced this

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time in the opposite direction and even more wildly than before. Only one political position in the city can be said to have representation roughly in proportion to its numbers in the populace price and mclaren fairly represent the Republican constituency. The Liberal Democratic majority is still grievously

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underrepresented with only you and mister Kren to speak for it. And even Mr Kren is talking somewhat erratically. The SDS panther, peace and freedom and other types to the left of the Democratic Party are grotesquely overrepresented and now demanding even more overrepresentation permit me now to

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speculate about the future on the basis of what members of the April coalition have said and done to date. And even more particularly on the basis of my experiences in trying to work with some of them on union organizing peace and other activities over the years,

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I believe we are about to witness a new kind of politics never seen before in Berkeley or anywhere in the United States for that matter. And that it will bear no resemblance to the new politics as that phrase is used so glowingly by radical rhetoricians with

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a golden age of participatory democracy and uh other things which sound good in actual practice. I fear it will prove to be a politics of devil theories, scapegoating a politics of retribution as we may see already if we have eyes to see in the cry for

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the scalps of the city manager and chief of police, as though a few blood sacrifices of political enemies will propitiate the demons which beset us and will solve all our woes. I suspect we are about to witness a politics of hubris in which ideologists and Tyros

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suffer and in the process make us all suffer from the common ideologists and Tyro's assumption that there is one and only one correct answer to the hitherto intractable riddles of human existence that they alone are privy to that answer that all else is error and that

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error has no rights. I fear it will prove to be a politics of monolithic if I may use that word in which personal judgment is subordinated to a party line, which is not thereafter amenable to rational dialogue or empirical evidence. I fear it will prove also

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to be a politics of ineptitude for not one of the coalition slate has had so much as a single day in any sort of public office and their mayor's credentials are scarcely more impressive. The radical right is justly criticized when it puts up rank amateurs like

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George Murphy and Ronald Reagan for office. Such criticism should be applied even handedly to the left. Politics is a skill which requires experience scarcely less than the practice of surgery, the law, violin playing or any other art or science. If power corrupts, then it must be

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most corrupting to those who have had the least practice in recognizing and rejecting its sweet and subtle seductions for these reasons and many others, there is not time to elaborate here. I fear that the new politics will prove to be a politics of profound and pervasive

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un democracy that decentralization as they call, it will prove to be little more than a mask for a new kind of elitism that power to the people will prove to be limited to the people who happen to have power at the moment. And the minority which

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happened to vote for them, that freedom from oppression will prove to be an even more unpalatable form of oppression. Instead of the two thirds majority working its will upon a reluctant one third minority, the one third minority will now have its way with an unwilling two

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thirds majority. We may see this already. If we have eyes to see in the promise by the newcomers that once in office, they will force down the throats of beans. The very pill that is the police partition scheme which was just repudiated by a majority of

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more than 2 to 1. This I fear is a characteristic example of what community control quote unquote will mean in the most speak. I hope I am wrong. I hope there is substance to the old liberal faith that even irresponsible people when put into positions of

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responsibility, begin acting responsibly. I used to believe that myself, but I must admit I have never actually seen it work. I foresee extremely difficult days ahead for everyone in Berkeley who tries for dialogue, who tries for pluralism, who tries for perspective and proportion, who tries to

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resist being drawn into the vortex of political revanchism. I foresee agonizing days ahead for you, especially for you are the nearest thing Berkeley has to a symbol of reasonableness and if there is any quality ideologues cannot abide it is reasonableness. I need hardly tell you how

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gleefully extremists of the right and left. Go to bed together in this respect for their concerted attack upon you is the only reason you are not mayor elect of Berkeley today. I trust sir, that you will bear up under these painful times ahead with as much

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good humor and grace as the difficult circumstances permit. Even though there will doubtless be occasions when your voice on the city council will be a lonely voice. I trust you will not grow disheartened, disheartened from the venom and vituperation, which are always the lot of reasonable

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men in unreasonable times. Keep the liberal and libertarian faith, Mr Sweeney, we need you as our standard bearer for the change back in the direction of dialogue and democracy which I trust is going to come one day.