Cannon Fodder

How often have we heard that the volunteer military uses the poor and uneducated in this country "cannon fodder" to fight its wars, because they have no other career choices open to them? The increasingly unstable Charles Rangell has a history of promoting this idea, and in 2004 even introduced a bill in Congress (along with 13 other Democrats) to reinstitute the Military Draft. Why?

Rep. Rangel (NY) and 13 other Democrats introduced the bill prior to
the war in Iraq. Rangel believes the all-voluntary military is an
unjust form of military conscription that draws primarily from the
economically disadvantaged. He also believes the U.S. would be more
cautious about going to war if everyone’s son or daughter had an
equal likelihood of being called upon to fight.

Here's other example of this kind of rhetoric:

It's no secret that the poor and minorities are overrepresented in the
military. How many children of the wealthy sign up to be put in harm's way so
they'll have money to go to college? How many rich kids join the military
because there hasn't been any work in their community for the last 20 years and
there's no sign of things changing anytime soon?

Or here:

According to the rhetoric of liberal Democrats who advocate conscription, a volunteer military effectively requires socially disadvantaged groups to die disproportionately for their country. The liberals correctly argue that poor minorities join the military in greater numbers because they have less economic opportunity in the civilian economy.

Or, here's the Arab News comments about Latinos in the US Military:

While officials praise the willingness of Mexican Americans and other Latinos, however, the strategy has been denounced by anti-war groups as a cynical exploitation of impoverished young men who are lined up to be little more than cannon fodder. “They are vulnerable economically. That’s why they are targeting them. That is who is going to provide them with the means to carry out future wars,” said Rick Jahnkow of the Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft.

In my search for articles with similar views, I found literally thousands.

Well, Mark Tapscott has the actual data, and unsurprisingly, it shows exactly the opposite of what the leftist, antiwar, and anti-US groups believe:

Check out the graphic above. Note the proportions of recruits from each of the five demographic quintiles, organized according to per capita income by zip code. The percentage of recruits from the poorest quintile is actually lower in 1999 and 2003 than the percentage for the richest quintile.

In fact, the percentage difference between the richest and poorest quintiles increases between 1999 and 2003! And the highest percentage is actually in the second richest quintile of recruits, followed by the richest quintile. It is no exaggeration to say America's most prosperous families bear the greatest share of the burden of fighting in America's defense.

Read it all. Another Leftist legend bites the dust.

Yet, where have you seen this information in the MSM? Nowhere.

The MSM and the Left have a vested interest in keeping alive the belief that Americans (especially Republicans) are racist and discriminate against the poor. In a previous post titled "Spare Me the Hysteria" , I argued that both the MSM and the Left are clinging desperately to the Marxist belief that the poor are the victims of deliberate oppression by the wealthy; and that the Democrats are the "Champions" of the oppressed, while the Republicans are the evil oppressors.

This is why the Left leaps joyfully at every opportunity to twist any event into an example of racism and how Bush, Republicans, and the Right are deliberately trying to kill poor people, while at the same time exploiting them. Their hysteria on this subject seems to know no bounds. Katrina was not just a natural disaster that happened to devastate New Orleans--it was to this crowd a blatant example of the Bush administration's racism! Thus a hurricane became Here yet another talking point for the antiwar; antimilitary robotsof the Left - who wouldn't recognize a real fact even if it hit them over the head with a protest sign.

What would the Left, the MSM, the Democrats do if they couldn't constantly play the racism and poverty cards in practically every situation?

The truth is that playing these cards is literally all they are capable of doing. They haven't had a new idea or original thought since sometime in the 60's, when, in one brief, fiery decade, they spewed forth every Socialist and Communist bromide that had been planted in their drug-numbed minds; and they haven't bothered to think about anything new since then.

That's why we are constantly deluged with comparisons to Vietnam quagmires and Watergate conspiracies and the evils of Capitalism. Marxism was ascendent in those glory days. From the perspective of the young, drugged intellectuals (who are now the old, burned-out, has-beens of academia; and the dried-up, and intellectually-deficient Democratsic one-trick ponies in Congress), Communism was the wave of the future.

How disappointed they all must have been when Communism was exposed for the social and economic fraud of the century! How carefully they averted their eyes from the corpses that their ideology churned out.

But still they cling to the class warfare template that explains the world to them and that keeps them pure and heroically helping the poor. They'd rather not acknowledge that they are compelled to promote the legends and myths to keep alive their dreams of power over others.

The real "cannon fodder" are not the brave men and women who volunteer to serve in the military; but are these gullible and unthinking automatons that continue to believe in the legends and myths of the Left. They were and are the useful idiots of Communism and Socialism and have added being the useful idiots for Islamofascism to their repetoire.

They consistently promote and enable the enemies of civilization; and can be counted on to protest the policies that will bring peace, justice and prosperity for all.