Economic precarity and pandemic hardship pushed working-class Muslims toward military enlistment

Evidence

This was the world we lived in, where the demand for war was only outpaced by the supply of those willing to be fed into its ravenous belly. Fresh meat, fresh fodder for an imperial appetite without limits. There were few jobs for a man his age. The cost of college had skyrocketed and the prospects of making a living wage without an undergraduate degree had plummeted, particularly in a pandemic-stricken world that hardly “ended the War on Terror” or the “9/11 era,” and especially for Muslims and working-class men like John and that young boy, ready to feed himself to the war and its wolves in Washington. The War on Terror, called the “forever war” by some, had no end in sight, and there was not a vaccine that could end it. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 248

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s notes on how surplus populations are funneled into conflict as cheap labor — parallels Milgrom’s analysis of labor markets but at imperial scale.