Men of Fighting Age

There's a tired old trope doing the rounds again – "men of fighting age." It’s wheeled out by the far right every time a photo surfaces of a refugee who hasn’t visibly wept into a handkerchief or clutched a teddy bear. The implication? If they’re not old, pregnant, or six, they’re probably an invader. A threat. Cowards for fleeing instead of staying behind to... what? Take on the Taliban with a sharpened spade?

The daftness of it becomes clear the minute you apply it to history. Should Jewish men of fighting age have stayed in Nazi Germany to "fight" the Nazis? Using what – sarcasm and a broom handle? Maybe Vietnamese boat people should have turned their canoes around and wrestled the Viet Cong. Perhaps Rwandan Tutsis should have popped down to the machete shop and joined the melee.

It’s idiocy, dressed up as common sense.

People fleeing hellscapes aren’t skipping country for a jolly. These are families making impossible decisions. When a family scrapes together every penny to get one person out – they send the one most likely to survive the journey. That tends to be the young, the fit, the ones who can endure deserts, smugglers, detention centres, and rubber dinghies at night. It's not cowardice – it’s triage.

But nuance isn’t the far right’s strong suit. They see a bloke with stubble in a life vest and assume he’s on manoeuvres. Not fleeing a civil war. Not escaping conscription into some brutal militia. Not avoiding persecution because of his ethnicity, sexuality, or politics. Just a freeloading faker, here to claim benefits and ruin village fêtes.

It’s all projection, of course. The people bleating loudest about standing and fighting are the same ones who’d soil themselves if someone shouted "boo" in a Lidl car park. They mistake Twitter bravery for actual courage. And while they guffaw in the comments section, real people risk their lives for the slim chance of safety – and are met with sneers from those who’ve never known real danger in their lives.

Let’s call it what it is. "Men of fighting age" is just a dog-whistle for people too cowardly to say what they really mean – that they don’t want anyone who looks, prays, or sounds different.

And the truth? If the roles were reversed – if bombs were falling on Bognor – we’d be on those dinghies too. Sending the strongest first. Hoping they’d survive.

So stuff the trope. It’s not analysis. It’s cowardice dressed as courage, and it deserves nothing but ridicule.