No, we are not at war. Worse: the risk of permanent emergency
What the Covid-19 pandemic has caused around the world can be analyzed in different ways, but certainly one of the aspects least covered by the media is the impact on society in general and on state powers in a broad sense. If, as always, a mentality massively oriented towards considering rulers as the only architects of the destinies of ordinary people prevailed, something has really changed profoundly in the last two years. Today we learn that a virus commands. Accustomed to pouring oceans of ink on how international politics was changing the world, we have completely forgotten that throughout history, the world has been repeatedly shaken and deeply transformed by major unforeseen events such as wars, plagues, large famines. We of the present generation could well be said to have been very fortunate not to have directly experienced the world wars and to have, at most, learned from the newspapers and television what enormous upheavals the recent famines were causing in part. some continents, such as Africa, and a large part of the Indian peninsula, but, nevertheless, such national calamities have never affected the whole world.
The cursed virus (perhaps) escaped from Chinese laboratories a little over two years ago does not seem to have historical precedents by extension and by the severity of the social impact on the populations of the entire Earth. Even in the recurring major plagues, such as the cholera, yellow fever, Spanish epidemics of more recent times, despite a number of victims perhaps higher, to what is known, than those of the coronavirus , there were then countries, mostly isolated and not "contaminated" by the more advanced populations, who have not known any of this and the explanation is palpable: the very limited ability to travel and move at the time, absolutely incomparable to that of today. The fact is, however, that what we still see every day, at the end of 2021, has a very different social characteristic and has not yet been thoroughly studied by sociologists and political scientists. We are grappling with something that has not spared even the most remote oceanic islands and we can sadly see today that there is no nation, there is no national policy or board of rulers that has not had to face a subtle and powerful evil, against which no armament it is minimally effective and no domestic or foreign policy was really prepared to deal with it effectively and readily.
This seems to be the most prominent element in the current world panorama: unpreparedness, uncertainty, accelerated experimentation, recourse to procedures typical of a state of war without anyone having declared it, today seem institutionalized and socially accepted. Not even the two world wars, which, let us not forget, had a precursor phase of a few years, were perceived as something unknown, very serious, lethal and with an incredible horizontal propagation. In wartime there has always been some form of optimism, both at the state and individual level, for which it was thought that it would soon be over, with the victory of one of the warring parties and never as in wartime has there been an eye to the inevitable peace that would follow. Scholars of society have even classified war as something immanent and inherent in human nature or as a kind of cyclical perturbation of the state of relative calm among peoples, not to mention the more drastic conceptions, such as that of Von Clausewitz ( 1780-1831) who maintained that " war is nothing but the continuation of politics by other means ".
On the other hand, anyone who has lived a few years and has been able or wanted to open a history book has been able to have some idea and certainly there are many who consider generically not impossible a world war in the course of their existence. It should also be said that we know a lot about ancient or modern wars and that even a war in progress can be seen today from satellites and listened to live by the media. All this should lead to greater caution the too many who, simplistically, associate the current pandemic with a war. They are phenomena so different and not assimilable that they require a completely different mentality and countermeasures. Sadly, the comparison with war is used only to justify and digest coercive and restrictive measures of personal freedom that an eternal and tacitly renewable state of emergency would justify. And here lies the real vulnus inflicted on civil society.
What we are (more or less) facing today with war has very little to do and distinctly warlike methods can be ineffective or even counterproductive. On the other hand, at least in Italy, the desire for the "strong man", perhaps in uniform, is an old thing and now part of our folklore, only to cry out for the imminent coup d'état. We are like this: for years we have sputtered on uniforms and on the gray-green in general and today we melt in patriotic songs on the balconies (many of which are abusive) and we believe that a medal-winning general commander of the umpteenth task force will save us from the virus, giving us back our freedom to go back to punching in the stands of football, but without a mask, and to let our boys sweat on each other and get pissed in crowded nightclubs as if there was no tomorrow. To say that we want everything and the opposite of everything is little. War continues to be brought up to describe what is done (or not done) to fight the little monster in the shape of a mine (the only distant resemblance to the things of war).
Unfortunately for the aficionados of war comparisons, there will be no victorious or victorious alliance here. We will all come out defeated, and I do not mean that we will all die, on the contrary … but I fear that what has literally overwhelmed us, like a crazy steamroller, will lead us to declare, sooner or later, the end of the emergency, to return to a a normality that does not seem very simple, because it will provoke endless disputes at least at the legal and economic level. I see, above all, the difficulty of establishing when or what could hypothetically re-establish a state of national emergency, with relative compression of those individual freedoms that we have so much declaimed with the "most beautiful Constitution in the world" in hand. The fear is not entirely unfounded: and if it happens that the extended analogical reasoning is applied in the future, that of "how we recently imposed that and this for the common good, now we impose this other one on you, for the same reason "? May San Green Pass (Normal, Reinforced, Corrected, Upgraded or Space) help us! But we are risking a lot and by dint of improper comparisons and analogical reasoning who knows that another beautiful state of emergency between head and neck is not justified, just to reaffirm the principle that we are the most democratic country in the world.
The post No, we are not at war. Worse: the risk of a permanent emergency appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL https://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/no-non-siamo-in-guerra-peggio-il-rischio-dellemergenza-permanente/ on Mon, 13 Dec 2021 03:58:00 +0000.