The language of war and Covid
Invoking war analogies during a health crisis can help galvanise the public into action. It can also cast shame on patients struggling to recover from illness, while inciting racial hostility towards vulnerable groups.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
In the early, panic-stricken days of the pandemic, Prime Minister Boris Johnson offered a stark message to the British public: “We must act like any wartime government...this enemy can be deadly, but it is also beatable.” His statement was clear: despite the challenges presented by the virus, better days were ahead. His speech also underlined what many other governments around the world were doing, or rather saying, to unite an increasingly divided public. The prime minister was using war as a metaphor to illustrate the severity and danger of Covid-19.
Political leaders and journalists have a long history of framing health crises as battles and conflicts. When the Spanish Flu first hit England in 1918, a British newspaper named the Salford Reporter invoked the language of war to identify the virus as the “new foe” while the Daily Mail advised readers to ready their “defenses”. In a speech addressed to the American Foundation for AIDS research in 1987, President Ronald Reagan announced that America was in “a battle against disease”. And in 2015, as cases of Ebola continued to fall in West Africa, President Barack Obama promised to shift the “focus from fighting the epidemic to now extinguishing it.”
Wartime metaphors and imagery are not only used during global pandemics, but throughout our lives. The teeming hallways of hospitals are often compared to the front lines of warzones. We refer to patients who have recovered from cancer as survivors. And those who pass away from the illness, we’re told, have lost their battles. Every day, we’re informed of wars waged against hate speech, fake news or obesity while learning about government strategies and tactics to overcome these struggles.
This approach to framing health crises has played an important role in emphasising the severity of the current pandemic. An example of this was when the Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, adopted militaristic language to convey the gravity of Covid’s impact on New York’s healthcare system: “The soldiers in this fight are our healthcare professionals. It’s the doctors, it’s the nurses, it’s the people who are working in the hospitals, it’s the aids.” Though some may have been sceptical about the degree of danger posed by Covid-19 during the early months of 2020, the vivid descriptions of healthcare staff as ‘soldiers’, tirelessly working on the ‘frontlines’, arguably helped to elicit a greater understanding of the magnitude of the situation.
Not only does war terminology stress the immensity of health crises, it also establishes the public as a collective unit as opposed to separate individuals. While many experienced isolation - both literally and figuratively - during 2020, the camaraderie inherent to the language of war allowed for a shared sense of community, especially in the first months of lockdown when the closest we could get to family and friends was on screen. Though we were stuck in our cramped rooms, away from the rest of the world, we were reminded that “we have the resolve and resources to win this fight.”
Using metaphors, more generally, can galvanise people into action. In a study investigating the intrinsic persuasive qualities of metaphors, Aaron M. Scherer and a team of researchers compared texts that used metaphors to liken the flu to a ‘beast’ or an ‘army’, to texts that omitted them. The group found that texts imbued with metaphors were more successful in compelling readers to take action against the spread of the flu and accept the vaccine. With Covid-19, governments have often adopted war terminology to commend the public’s willingness to fulfill their ‘duty’ and ‘honour’ their country, by staying indoors and practising social distancing: delineating citizens as active and valuable players in the war against the pandemic rather than passive bystanders. This militaristic language, akin to that of the soldier’s responsibility, has proven effective (in most cases) in establishing a growing eagerness to comply with government restrictions. The idea that we would be breaching our national obligations by meeting with friends or failing to wear a mask was a powerful and effective wake-up call.
But for all the community building associated with war-time imagery comes in equal measure, a set of drawbacks. According to Rose K. Henricks, war analogies, especially when referring to cancer, can make patients struggling to recuperate from the disease feel “guilty” and “that they could have fought harder”. Often, we hear that patients who have died of cancer ‘lost their battle’ or couldn’t ‘fight any longer.’ The implication of this language, Hendricks argues, is that patients may have suffered from a lack of resolve or strength to recover and were ultimately ‘defeated.’ As Elena Semino notes, while war metaphors in the context of cancer or Covid can be “empowering” for those who have recovered, it can also be problematic for those struggling to overcome the illness especially when they’re compared to ‘survivors.’ This was particularly evident when the media deemed Donald Trump and Boris Johnson “too strong to be beaten” after the two politicians convalesced after contracting coronavirus. Such a statement, according to Semino, infers that recovering from coronavirus stems from having a ‘tough character’, rather than socio-economic issues like access to medical care, financial support or biological reasons such as the the genetic makeup of an individual. This rhetoric can perpetuate a sense of guilt and shame amongst ailing patients who may feel like they lack the personal strength to overcome disease.
War metaphors and imagery can also frame health crises as insurmountable, sometimes causing patients suffering from an illness to feel discouraged and fatalistic. The language of war often evokes images of gruelling battles, bloodshed and persisting hardship. For patients suffering from cancer, the psychological effects of terminology like “cancer veterans” may stifle any hopes they have of recovering quickly.
In the case of the pandemic, militaristic terminology may be underpinning the so-called Covid-19 fatigue; the shared feeling of burnout amongst the public whose hopes of returning to normality have been dampened by the myriad articles focused on the ‘year’s long battle with Covid.’ The media’s use of war metaphors have arguably played into this growing sense of lethargy and despair surrounding the likelihood of returning to a pre-coronavirus world. With headlines like “We’re losing the war on the coronavirus” and “Covid-19 Shaping Up to Be Battle for Years”, it’s hardly surprising that more than a third of young people in the UK are feeling concerned about the future.
Using the language of war to identify health crises as “invisible enemies” can also entertain public shaming and racial discrimination towards minority groups. Lucy Taska, a professor at Macquarie Business School in Sydney, suggests that labelling Covid as the “enemy” has exacerbated pre-existing racial hostilities towards China which has led to a surge in episodes of hate speech and violence. “The panic and psychological impact of epidemics can manifest itself through societal divisiveness, while also raising social tensions as frustrations are taken out on a ‘visible enemy’.” Taska notes that cases of racism in the media including the French newspaper that used a photo of a Chinese woman with the title “Yellow Peril?” echo previous examples of the ascription of diseases to particular ethnic and racial groups. According to Taska, the media’s framing of H1N1 - which spread to the United States via Mexico - as a war fought against an invisible enemy, antagonised Mexican immigrants, inciting racist comments that targeted the group as “disease vectors.”
And while the comparisons made between doctors and soldiers convey the moral responsibilities that healthcare workers face, it also implies that they signed on to their jobs with the knowledge that on any given day, they, too, could end up bedridden and reliant on a ventilator. While nurses and doctors are expected to treat the wounded and witness the consequences of human brutality, the burdens thrust onto them during the pandemic to risk working in under-equipped environments or to select which patients should be taken off life support extend far beyond the requirements of their profession. As we hear of governments ‘enlisting’ nurses or ‘recruiting’ hospital staff, the message underlying this militaristic terminology could suggest that governments expect the workers to go into ‘battle’ against Covid-19, even if it means risking their lives.
Metaphors form an integral part of language. As writer Hélène Schumacher notes, they “make the unfamiliar familiar.” Framing Covid using battle metaphors has helped shape the public’s understanding of the pandemic while galvanising those who may feel powerless to take action. Yet, war terminology has also cast guilt and shame on patients suffering from illness and has proven, throughout history, to be a vehicle for racism and xenophobia against vulnerable groups. While the language of war can invoke a sense of camaraderie and community, it can also ignite divisiveness and conflict. With the media’s fixation on allies and adversaries, invaders and spreaders, the unity that so many of us are looking for in the midst of physical isolation, seems somewhat hampered by the animosity of military language. Rather than using analogies of war to describe the colossal ‘battle’ that confronts the world in 2021, perhaps the President of Bavaria’s suggestion that “we’re not over the mountain yet” is the Covid metaphor we’ve all been searching for.
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