On Thursday evening, President Joe Biden delivered his first primetime address from the White House. Unsurprisingly, much of the speech was dedicated to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, during which Biden oscillated between optimism and warnings of what may follow if people failed to follow his administration’s “guidance.”
Throughout the speech, Biden described the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic — and the resulting policy decisions — as a “war.”
“I know it’s been hard. I truly know. As I’ve told you before, I carry a card in my pocket with the number of Americans who have died from COVID to date. It’s on the back of my schedule. As of now, total deaths in America, 527,726. That’s more deaths than in World War I, World War II, the Vietnam War and 9/11 combined,” Biden stated.
“That’s why I’m using every power I have as the president of the United States to put us on a war footing to get the job done. Sounds like hyperbole, but I mean it, a war footing. And thank god we’re making some real progress now. In my first full day in office, I outlined for you a comprehensive strategy to beat this pandemic. We’ve spent every day since attempting to carry it out,” Biden said later.
Finally, Biden added that “It’s truly a national effort, just like we saw during World War II.”
Biden is not the only politician to make a clear and concerted effort to redress efforts regarding the COVID-19 pandemic in the context of an ongoing military conflict.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo used such language repeatedly, with one such example being “The soldiers in this fight are our health care professionals. It’s the doctors, it’s the nurses, it’s the people who are working in the hospitals, it’s the aids. They are the soldiers who are fighting this battle for us.”
The United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Gutiérrez also made this comparison during the G20 summit on COVID-19, saying “We are at war with a virus – and not winning it. …This war needs a war-time plan to fight it.”
China’s President Xi Jinping has called for a “people’s war” against COVID-19, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that every citizen who complied with lockdown mandates “was a soldier in this fight,” and French President Emmanuel Macron announced as his country prepared to shut down, “We are at war.”
The fact is, however, we’re not at war. Wars are military conflicts fought between people, and not an effort between people and a virus. While it may achieve its short-term emotional goals, such language has two potential outcomes which will further damage our society, both home and abroad.
The first is that it normalizes war, pitching almost any competitive or pressured situation as synonymous with that of physical and violent conflict.
The second is that it justifies the actions we resort to during war, which usually come in the form of unprecedented power for those “in charge.”
In many ways, both of these potential outcomes are already part of our lives. Unless we maintain perspective and context, we will not only forget what true war is, but allow politicians to use such a false classification to evade responsibility while simultaneously absorbing more unadulterated power, until we can’t even remember what freedom feels like anymore.
Ian Haworth is an Editor and Writer for The Daily Wire. Follow him on Twitter at @ighaworth.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.