No War But Class War!

Trump, like President George W. Bush, received a medical deferment for alleged bone spurs to avoid enlistment in the Vietnam War. This is suffice to say, another example of the rich using their bourgeois entitlement to avoid having to personally participate in the wars they start.

And this is part of the problem with the sanctimonious response to Trump’s admittedly petty remarks. The truth is Trump is only saying out loud what most of the capitalist elite and the bourgeoisie really think about the American war dead. Indeed, they do consider veterans and those killed in the United States’ imperial wars — people drawn primarily from the poor and working class — “losers” and “suckers.” If the elites truly cared at all about the working-class Americans drawn into the military via the largely unacknowledged economic draft the country has maintained for decades, they would not risk their lives in wars for empire and conquest in the first place.

“The master class has always declared the wars. The subject class has always fought the battles,” Eugene V. Debs declared during his famous anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio, on June 18, 1918. “The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose — especially their lives.