William Tecumseh Sherman’s Army Field Manual 2010. Acrylic on wood panels, 26 x 72"
In the United States, the Revenue Act of 1861 established the first income tax (a flat one) to pay for the Civil War (3% on incomes above $800). It was revised to be more progressive with the Revenue Act of 1862, (5% on incomes above $10,000). Federal income tax expired in 1872 and would not be implemented again until 1894.
So how did the U.S. pay its army to terrorize and remove native tribes out west during the latter half of the 19th century? The Winchester Repeating Arms company wasn’t such a powerful Washington lobby in its time, was it? And Dwight Eisenhower had not yet been born to warn about a Military Industrial Complex. There was simply no income tax in the Treasury in order to raid the Treasury to terrorize innocent life. So how did 100,000 soldiers get fed, clothed, and paid to raid villages and make tobacco pouches out of indigenous testicles? We know that the people’s income tax paid for My Lai, “Shock and Awe”, and yesterday’s pulverization of little girls in Saturday school—but who footed the bill for the Indian Wars—which individuals and/or institutions? I don’t think it was just tariffs and federal excise taxes.
This would be a good research project for an economic historian. He or she might discover some more dirt on Rockefeller and Vanderbilt, if that were possible.
Total war psychopath and genocide advocate, William Tecumseh Sherman, became General of the U.S. Army soon after the Civil War. He updated the Army Field manual and sent it to his fellow brass in the Western theater.
It has been updated several times since, losing its color and embellishment, to the following document used overwhelmingly in the present time by two nations of planet earth—the United States and Israel:
Drop 2000 lb. bombs on the children of a pretend enemy
I happen to possess the last original field manual. Soldier boys were just braver maniacs back in those days. Today, administrators just need to push buttons in Qatar and Tel Aviv to blow babies out of their high chairs in Rafah and Tehran. No more testicle toss or skull souvenirs for the psychotic warmongers of yesteryear.
