I am a salesman.  I have been a salesman for more than 20 years.  I have been thrown out of banks in the City of London, and off stands in exhibitions in South Africa and Germany, but I have never been punched.  I was once mugged by an old man (really).  It is unthinkable in the animal world, that the male of a species can visit 50 countries and not be attacked, either by another animal who wants to eat him (ignore mosquitoes and bacteria and viruses and parasites) or by other males of the same species.  The only similarity is with domesticated animals, cats and dogs, as predators, and herbivores.  Which implies that man is a domesticated animal in the same way.

On the other hand, I have paid tax.  I have paid airport tax, VAT, income tax in four countries, parking charges, motorway and road and bridge tolls, religious contributions and solidarity taxes, charity contributions for the Red Cross.

I once saw a bombing run in the Bardenas Reales, a national park in Spain, used by NATO air forces to practice for missions in Afghanistan and Iraq.  I sat on a rock and watched, in the silence, totally alone.

I saw first a small flash, 10 km away across the desert, about as big as the flame on a cigarette lighter on the opposite side of a football stadium.  I wondered what it was.  It was followed a few seconds later by a tiny puff, like the smoker exhaling his first lungful of smoke.  It looked so peaceful.  More seconds passed.  “Brr-ra-ronn-crack”, no louder than that of a few sticks drying, warming up in the morning sun.  I still didn’t understand what was happening. 

Then, I heard a plane, overhead, very high, 10 000 metres.  And then I understood.  An Afghan village, its old men, the women, the children, a few goats, had been destroyed, wiped out, murdered.  Only a few boys with the main herd of livestock on the hill, and the mujaheddin, mobile, nervous, never in one place for long, would have survived.  This was paid for with my taxes. 

In 2002, I left Britain to avoid paying taxes to such a murderous regime.  But the more I thought about taxation, the more I realised that tax is inextricably linked to murder, to death, to human suffering.  At the same time, I discovered that tax was the basis for many of the world’s great fortunes, a precursor of economic empires as well as the destructor of declining dynasties.  The fascinating story of tax history has rarely been linked to the rest of the world’s history.

Many of the themes that are developed in the book are necessary in order to understand how tax systems work.  History is betrayed by dualism, the typical history of the victors, or the survivors.  Both have their psychological, maybe psychiatric, problems of interpretation.  But to provide a logical explanation of taxation requires the coverage of psychology.

Guilt is rarely managed in thrillers: murder in AgathaChristie stories happens with no more than a scream from an emotional woman.  The trauma is ignored, both physical and psychological, of the onlookers and the participants.   Hollywood focuses on the visibly-obvious suffering of the deceased, unable to communicate the actual emotions and feelings, the smell, the sounds.

I tried to kill a rabbit once.  I had seen my pencil-thin, 5’ great-aunt kill a rabbit, with a karate-chop to the back of the neck, something she had probably done all her life.  It looked simple enough.  When my dog trapped one with myxomatosis, I thought to put it out of its misery.  I hit it, hard.  Hit it again.  It just looked at me.  “Why are you doing this to me ?” its gummy eyes said.  “I am already suffering and you are making me suffer more.”  I tried kicking it.  In the end, I left it in the field dying miserably alone.  I believe that I felt worse than the rabbit, as many torturers, in psychotherapy, claim.