The Pandemic is not a War
United States militarism is such that we can’t seem to experience any conflict without resorting to the language of warfare. It is ingrained in us as a culture to the extent that many of us don’t even second guess assertions that we are “at war with coronavirus.”
The concerted government-media propaganda tack of framing every real, manufactured, or perceived conflict, from the war on abortion rights, to the war on drugs, or the war on Christmas, is rooted in the jingoistic mentality to drive everyone into picking a side, enforcing an “us vs them” mentality. The way the terminology crosses the bounds of political ideology shows how rooted the language of war is in the American consciousness, but in using the language of war, we’re neglecting to acknowledge the realities of war, and distorting the reality of our current situation.
To begin with, wars are about killing. However one wants to romanticize it, war comes down to our people killing their people, and their people killing ours, keeping score by the death toll and which side gives in first. If we’re going to look at the US response to COVID-19 like a war, by that basic metric we’ve already lost. All we have to count are the dead bodies of our own people. There’s no counting the dead viruses. Should we count the number of people who recover from the virus as victories? In the language of war, would those people be counted as soldiers injured but not killed? Or are all those affected by the virus regarded as civilians, collateral damage, those killed or injured in a campaign?
If COVID-19 is the enemy army, it would follow that healthcare workers are the soldiers fighting it, in the parlance of war-speak. That is of course a perversion of who healthcare workers are and the core tenet of their job. The central purpose of a healthcare worker is preserving life, keeping people alive. Whatever else a soldier might do, whether they even actually participate in combat, let alone kill, the core of their purpose, the focus of their training, and the meaning of the word “soldier,” is that it is their job to kill. Do soldiers sometimes have to protect people and keep them alive? Sure. Do healthcare workers fight to kill illness? Sort of, but that’s reaching. Drawing comparisons between healthcare professionals and soldiers is perverse, and under minor scrutiny falls apart as an analogy. It’s a stupid comparison which exists only because of our societal mouthpieces predilection to, or incapability not to, frame life and death events, or any instance of conflict, in the contexts of war.
Calling the pandemic a war and treating healthcare workers like soldiers is also a cynical framing device which preemptively excuses mass-deaths as being unavoidable. It’s expected that people die in wars. Dying in war is what soldiers do. Such phrasing and allusions are meant to imply and instill in the public mind that the deaths that’ve come and those that will follow are all eventualities, that they’re to be expected and there’s nothing that could’ve been done about it. In reality, the almost one-hundred-thousand deaths of COVID-19 in this country so far and all those to come were preventable. It was the failure of leadership that lost the “war” they’re trying to sell, before it even started.
Fighting the COVID-19 pandemic is not the same as fighting a war. Drawing such comparisons is stupid and potentially dangerous, but also revealing.
Whatever federal (as well as some state and local) government officials say, about how seriously they’re taking the pandemic, equating it to a war, they show otherwise with their actions. At least, they sure don’t treat it like leaders hoping to win a war, but those determined to profit from it. When a country is at war, attacked by a foreign aggressor, one might expect that their leaders would do all in their power to defend those on the front lines. This would mean arming and providing for soldiers defending the nation’s territorial sovereignty, and providing care and security for the civilians caught up in the conflict. That the federal government hasn’t broken their spine bending over backwards to provide for the security of all healthcare workers, all people, in this country, and have even withheld or stolen needed supplies and funds is, if we’re analogizing this pandemic to a war, the same as abandoning and leaving for dead soldiers and civilians in the midst of conflict.
Most telling is that in addition to their reluctance to invest in the response to the pandemic, they’ve chosen instead to hand out huge cash windfalls to corporations and already rich individuals, the wealthiest and most capable of coping with the crisis without such assistance. Perhaps the problem is that our leaders really are in actuality treating this like a war, but the problem is they’re doing so in the same way they’ve treated the majority of our country’s unjustified and unjust wars.
Whether in our affirmed, if not legally sanctioned, wars, where we have troops on the ground in active conflict, or in our many sponsored and often clandestine wars, all around the world, from the Middle-East to south Asia, from Central America to Africa, our leaders show where their priorities lie. From their actions we can infer that paramount among their intentions is not to end a conflict peacefully. While there are sometimes humanitarian efforts made, if in service of a propagandist agenda, more commonly, the actions of our military, at the discretion of our government, are acts of war. Whether dropping bombs or making bargains with warlords, there is not a peaceful objective in mind, if for no more complicated reason than that the actions of war cannot result in peace.
Prolonging war and spurning peace is not counterintuitive to those orchestrating or leading the war effort, because their objective is one more straightforward than the fanciful notion of achieving peace through making war: making profit. When Presidents or senators or generals talk about “America’s interests,” they don’t mean peace and democracy. Nor are they talking about the interests of the majority of US citizens. America’s interests, the cause of its many wars, are hegemonic financial and military superiority, the latter used to enforce the former. It’s about making deals, getting bargains, crushing the competition: making money.
Our government doesn’t give our healthcare workers and the population, or soldiers and civilians, all the resources they need, because they are not the priority. They are not the priority because their performance, let alone their wellbeing, or their happiness, does not directly translate to profits. The government is happy to spend money on the industries that profit in the time of a war or a pandemic, for the profits they’ll recoup for their support, but not on people. People are not a valuable investment to them.
Something that healthcare workers and soldiers do have in common is that they’re both given rhetorical praise, hollow lip service paid in place of real respect and just compensation. Healthcare workers and soldiers are called heroes, and thanked for their service, then effectively forgotten. And, like military veterans, the healthcare workers who survive this experience will come out of it badly traumatized. And just like vets, they’ll find that the government and industry leaders don’t care about what mental, emotional, or physical damage they’ll live with for the rest of their lives, not enough to pay for adequate treatment and compensation. The same for all essential workers. It’s more profitable to call someone a hero than it is to treat them like one.