Who Died for Whose Way of Life

President Bush, in justifying his polices in the Persian Gulf, said we must go to war to preserve our way of life. With the war in the Gulf officially concluded, it behooves us to ask who faced injury and death, and for what way of life their own lives were risked. An honest look will reveal that blacks bore a disproportionately heavy burden of the fighting in a war to sustain a society whose ills fall disproportionately on them. There are lessons to be learned here about the biased distributions of hardships and benefits in capitalist economies.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website

Archaeology · Arms race · Development economics · Economic history · Economics · Gulf war · Political economy · Political science · Race (biology) · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Employment and Welfare Studies · Gender Studies · History