Conscription by Poverty: The Rich Man’s War and the Poor Man’s Blood
By fifteen, I already knew two things: I didn’t want to shovel cow shit for the rest of my life, and poverty was its own kind of prison.
I’d been working off the books at kennels and farms, and my biggest fear wasn’t failure. It was ending up in prison if I didn’t get out.
One day, me and my best mate, Richard Hanney, skived off school and caught a bus into Swansea. The plan was to speak to the RAF recruiter. But fate, or perhaps one lazy recruiter, had other ideas. We walked into the Army careers office instead. What happened next was the moment a single conversation and a bit of teenage impatience changed the course of my entire life.
The Unwitting Recruit
When I walked into that office, I wasn’t thinking about geopolitics or class. I just wanted out. Out of school, out of Trapp, out of poverty. Looking back, I see I was just another statistic in a story that’s been running for centuries.
It’s not an accident. It’s a policy. A quiet, cynical system with a name: conscription by poverty.
Groups like ForcesWatch have shown what the Army never admits out loud. Recruitment campaigns deliberately target the poor. The adverts about “belonging” and “opportunity” flood the North, the Midlands and Wales, areas stripped of jobs and hope. They know exactly what they’re doing.
It isn’t a “choice” when it’s the only door that’s open. It’s not patriotism, it’s desperation, dressed up as duty.
The Great Racket
As Michael Moore once said, “rich men’s wars are fought by the poor.” Even 2,000 years ago, Plutarch wrote that
“the poor go to war, to fight and die for the delights and riches of others.”
Nothing has changed.
The kid who signs up gains a wage, a bed, and maybe a trade. The people who profit are the ones who never set foot on a battlefield.
It’s the oldest racket going. Politicians take donations from arms dealers. Then they vote to start wars those same companies will supply. Stock prices soar. CEOs cash in.
And who fights those wars?
Not their sons and daughters. Ours.
The poor have the least to gain and everything to lose. They don’t own shares in Lockheed Martin or BAE Systems. They don’t get fat government contracts to “rebuild” the countries they helped bomb. They get a modest wage and, if they’re lucky, a flight home in one piece.
The Great Betrayal
And what happens when the soldiers, sailors, and airmen are no longer useful? When they’re broken in body or mind?
They’re thrown on the scrap heap.
Look at Veterans Affairs in the US. It’s a scandal that never ends. A decade after the Phoenix revelations, where veterans literally died waiting for appointments while managers cooked the books, the system’s still a bureaucratic nightmare of delayed and denied care.
Britain isn’t much better. Veterans wait months, sometimes over a year, for mental health treatment. While they wait, an average of one takes their own life every week.
It’s the final betrayal. The same country that convinced them to risk their lives for “freedom” makes them fight another war, this time against paperwork and neglect, just to see a doctor.
In America, the veteran suicide rate is more than 1.5 times higher than the general population. Thirty thousand sleep rough every night. They’re “heroes” when it’s time for a football match, but forgotten by Monday morning.
The Hypocrisy of “Patriots”
Here’s the final insult. The loudest, most flag-waving patriots, the ones who can’t wait to send other people’s children to war, have never been anywhere near one themselves.
Take Donald Trump. His rich father helped him dodge the Vietnam draft five times, including once for a mysterious case of “bone spurs.”
Years later, he compared his playboy lifestyle during the 1980s AIDS crisis to fighting in Vietnam, claiming that dating women was his “personal battlefield.” He actually called women’s vaginas “potential landmines.”
Tell that to the lads who’ve lost limbs to real landmines in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan or Northern Ireland.
Not a single member of his family has served in over 150 years. His grandfather, Friedrich Trump, was even expelled from Bavaria for dodging military service.
He’s not alone. Clinton and Obama, never served. But Trump’s sheer hypocrisy, the bragging, the mockery of POWs and Gold Star families, is in a league of its own.
The System
I was lucky. I came home in one piece. Many don’t. Some never come home at all.
The truth is simple: The rich start the wars. The corporations profit from them. The poor fight and die in them.
And when those poor kids come back broken, the same government that recruited them says there’s no money for their care.
There’s always money for the next war, never for the last one’s casualties.
They call it patriotism.
I call it what it is: a racket paid for in blood.