The Covid-19 pandemic has been sometimes been referred to as a war.  President Donald Trump once referred to himself as a wartime president. But  despite more than 60,000 deaths, 30 million people out of work and armed protesters mobbing state capitols,  we are not really at war. If this were a narrative conflict plot line in a novel or a movie it would be man versus nature. War is a man versus man affair.

First off, we cannot take this war-like analogy literally because people start wars. According to Cambridge dictionary war is “armed fighting between two or more countries or groups.” Globally we have not stooped to that–at least not yet.

Pandemics on their own do not start wars or declare war.  Wars in most cases cause death and destruction, disease and pestilence, food shortages and a complete disruption of normal life as well as disruptions in business and other economic activities.

It is true that the Covid-19 has killed many around the globe, disrupted our daily lives and  our economic activities.  Unemployment is heading to an all new high. But what we are really talking about is attacking a virus with a war-like attitude. And right now our sheltered-in-place tactics are more of a siege mentality that is frustrating some.  The virus is like an attacking foe that surrounds the castle and everybody digs in. But when you look over the parapet you do not see a surrounding army. Some people, however,  have  left the castle and taken to the streets in protest to this strategy and the economic devastation it has wrought. This introduces a side conflict of man versus government to reopen business. I am not sure how this tactic of reopening business neutralizes the coronavirus’s effects of just plain old death. 

One thing that really hasn’t happened is a nationwide call to arms.  The call to arms has been left up to governors of individual states who are now starting to catch blow back for shutting down their states and how to reopen them.  A Wednesday night bowling alley league mentality seemes to have embraced us more than a logical then our nationwide coronavirus strategy.

In war one of the first things that is needed to rally the nation is to demonize your enemy not your comrades.  In most cases this is not too hard to do.  We fall into it very easily. Our enemy’s activities can easily paint them as worthy barbaric opponent that needs to be totally defeated.

For instance, on the build up to World War II  during the Sino-Japanese War in December of 1937, Japanese General Matsui Iwane decided to destroy the Chinese capitol Nanking in what would later be called the Massacre of Nanking or the Rape of Nanking. It was estimated that Japanese soldiers killed between 30,000 and 400,000 civilians and captured Chinese soldiers.  A huge discrepancy but who was really counting those killed at the time. Japanese troops even used some POWs for live human bayonet practice. After World War II General Iwane was tried, convicted and executed for war crimes. No one was ever convicted of a war crime for shutting down a beauty salon unless…

In December of 1938, a year after the Rape of Nanking,  in Germany, Nazi Stormtroopers would  lead parading Germans through the streets of Germany in Kristallnacht, destroying Jewish homes, business, hospitals and synagogues.  Thirty thousand men were arrested.  Sometimes an enemy is so easily demonized that it leaves no choice but to go to war. 

But how do you demonize a microscopic virus? Covid-19 is more akin to a science fiction novel like Michael Crichton’s  Andromeda Strain, hence the man versus nature conflict. In this book and film scientists are battling some sort of extraterrestrial microbe. The microbe was brought back from space by a military satellite.  The microbe gets loose and ends up killing all but two people in an Arizona town. This makes for a good story but it is also where the coronavirus becomes goofy with a variety off-the-wall cures and conspiracy theories. This leads us into good demonizing entertainment and alternative realities. This has us pointing fingers. A  juicy conspiracy theory needs a few grains of truth to fly around the “not me but you” circle of finger pointers.  With today’s talk radio and social media the theories have left the starting blocks and are racing down the track. We go from a virus escaping a Chinese biological lab and then on to a wet market and off into the realm of all sorts of batty beliefs of political exploration.

Theories and rampant speculation are good for ratings and inciting the lunatic fringe. However, they sow confusion and hamper true science.  One thing is sure, the coronavirus is the perfect stealth attacker.  It stalks unaware humans much like the cloaked alien visitor that returns to Earth to hunt humans. Arnold Schwarzenegger battled this bad guy in the movie Predator.

Since we cannot see the coronavirus it is hard to demonize it, let alone fight it. It is easier to turn our demons loose on human organizations  rather than the virus itself. Here is where the conspiracy theories come in. Some have tagged the World Health Organization or the Chinese as demons because the WHO is an over-funded United Nations organization and China because the virus originated there in some bat cave labrotory. But no matter what is said,  it is the virus not the WHO or China causing the deaths.

One thing is certain the virus has been almost as lethal as the Japanese army was in Nanking. Here in the US the virus in about three months has killed more than 50,000 people with the death toll steadily moving upward.  This is a horrific death toll has surpassed the total of combat deaths America suffered in Vietnam.  Most Americans who lived through the Vietnam War remember the weekly death counts given on Friday night newscast.  The worst week in Vietnam was February 11-17th during the Tet Offensive: 543 Americans were killed. According to The Washington Post those figures pale to the 12,392 Americans that died from the coronavirus between April 6 – 12. That is an average of more than 1,700 Americans dying in one day.  And this count is just for the United States, forget Italy and Spain.

We have long surpassed the total American combat death level during the Vietnam War. I mention combat deaths because killing in war is a physical exercise. The coronavirus seems to kill with ease.  The Vietnam War for Americans started with the Marines landing in Danang in March of 1965 followed with a steady escalation of millions of soldiers coming in and out of Vietnam until it ended with the last combat troops leaving Vietnam in March of 1973. According to the United States Archives 47,000 military personnel were killed in combat in Vietnam. And this does not include Vietnamese deaths. What took eight years of war the coronavirus is did in several months. The Vietnam War was an open-ended war with no real light at the end of the tunnel. There is speculation as to when we will flatten out the coronavirus death curve, a home for Christmas belief.   However,  fears of a fall and winter assault in fall leave us wondering are we in for a viral Battle of the Bulge. It leaves us wondering when will this come to pass.

What frustrated military planners in the Vietnam War was the inability to knock out key installations vital to the war effort. One government official likened the coronavirus as the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. There are some similarities, I guess. But the Covid-19 does not have a command-and-control center planning its next assault. If the virus is trying to win a war, attacking one of our main front line installations is a strategic imperative as was Pearl Harbor in World War II.  This was what the Japanese had hoped for at Pearl Harbor.

Destroying or controlling key facilities is essential in war. The coronavirus is incapable of this. All it really needs is a human host to control. However, it is assaulting our hospitals and degrading our medical personal. This will weaken our defenses and lead us open to unchecked attacks. The movie Independence Day had attacking aliens taking control of orbiting communication satellites to attack Earth. Once the satellites were captured it was like cracking an egg open for frying. Ironically, in that movie it was technological virus that brought the aliens down. Our problem is that it will take some time to come up with a vaccine for the virus. The only defense is to hunker down like Londoners spending the night in the Tube during the Blitz.

Fortunately, the coronavirus has spared us the wanton wholesale destruction that war brings. When we wake up in the morning there is no disbelief of coming up from a night of sheltering-in-place as if we were coming up from the air raid shelter and seeing the rubble that was once our neighborhood destroyed from last night’s bombing.

But here is an alternative theory.  Maybe Donald Trump is a wartime leader and maybe this is a life or death struggle between man and nature.  Maybe this is war. The coronavirus is just one of nature’s weapons waging a war along with killer hurricanes and raging wildfires.  This is not a geopolitical, economic or cultural war.  It could be a war of revenge.

Just maybe this is one phase of nature’s counter attack for 30,000 years of human assault on the Earth.  Maybe it is payback for hunting species to extinction for feathered hats or shoes; pumping millions of gallons of toxic chemicals into rivers and oceans for plastic bags; dumping millions of tons of garbage into landfills and polluting the skies with carbon and other carcinogenic pollutants and greenhouse gases for a two-SUV garage; or leaving floating islands of plastic bottles to circle the oceans for a million years.  Maybe this is nature’s way of telling us to cool it for a while, stay at home, and give the Earth a few months to catch its breath.

https://www.archives.gov/research/military/vietnam-war/casualty-statisticshttps://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/04/16/coronavirus-leading-cause-death/?arc404=true