Economic precarity pushed working-class men to enlist during the pandemic
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. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 248
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- SEED: Angle: the pandemic-era Army recruitment boom as a symptom of state predation on economically abandoned working-class communities.