In Voices from Chernobyl , Svetlana Alexievich reveals the human consequences of the nuclear disaster that occurred on April 26, 1986. The explosion that destroyed the reactor at that power plant forced thousands of Belarusians to abandon their homes and animals. They marched as if they were fleeing a war. But there was no such. The testimonies collected by Alexiévich delve into the bewilderment of a people who had spent their lives preparing for a conventional war and suddenly found themselves with an enemy that they could not see, hear or shoot their weapons.
From one day to the next, the radiation had changed the relationship of this terra incognita with its surroundings. It was not easy to assimilate it; Outside, a spring sun was shining, the river was crystal clear and the apples were always peeking out of the forest. It hurt to feel so much dread towards that familiar and everyday world, in which everything seemed to be in its place. Alexievich goes on to confess that they surely would have adapted better to a situation of atomic warfare, as had happened in Hiroshima. This, which at first glance might seem cynical, is illuminating. Not only does it allow us to understand that homo sovieticus was enlisted for this during the cold war, but also to recognize with it that in times of emergency "everything we know about the horrors and fears has more to do with the war."
Alexievich is not mistaken; If the concepts of war and catastrophe are confused, it is because history has been built from an endless story of battles and leaders. Yesterday, as today, war is constituted as a parameter of horror. The particles that are currently dispersing and frightening the planet are others, but the information published about the coronavirus crisis is also infested with warlike terms and parables. It is reported in “the line of combat” or from a “besieged city”. Casualties are obsessively counted and there is talk of "explosion", "common enemy" or "battlefront". We tend to label doctors as “heroes” - starting with Wuhan's ophthalmologist who tried to alert us to this new virus that ended up killing him - who face a reality that requires narrating as tragedy.
No one has paid and tried to get more out of the epic story than the leaders. One after another, they end up playing the war drums and summoning us to this colossal battle. There are the seven times that Emmanuel Macron repeated "we are at war" during a televised speech in France or the departure of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on his Twitter account: "some have not yet realized it, but the Third has already begun World War".
I think, impossible to avoid, Trump. How on March 18, after having publicly underestimated the danger of the epidemic since its outbreak, he put himself at the forefront of the crisis cabinet to declare with his grandiose grandstanding: "I am a president in time of war", "this is a war, with an invisible enemy ”. In an election year, I doubt that this new threat ends up displacing migrants from the ethno-nationalist perspective. The apology of the wall will be adjusted to face a "foreign virus". It should come as little surprise that the migrant's body, as a vehicle, recovers the prominence of a xenophobic discourse that revolves around defending and containing an external agent that contaminates and imbalances the health of the social body. Scientists are not certain that viruses are living things, Trump does.
But if this pandemic has finished revealing anything, it is the stubborn will of the border of multiple national States that try to face an eminently global problem, with local measures and strategies. It is not surprising how, in the face of the spread of Covid-19, neighboring countries have implemented health policies at different speeds or diametrically opposed. Outrage the pettiness shown in hoarding and snatching respirators, masks, and other medical supplies. The logic of destroying the toilet paper in maturity: that everyone calculate and take care of their own shit. It is already known, when band-aid neoliberalism appeals to the sovereignty of a strong and walled state.
We citizens have also struggled to recognize global interdependence. We react late to the pain and needs of others. The virus had to reach Spain or Italy, countries that are closer to us or more familiar, to begin to affect us. It was not only that the bat soup was far from us, but that it invited fiction. It all started as a Chinese tale. Few weeks have passed since then. Long enough to recognize that our lives have been left in brackets and yesterday's world - Stefan Zweig dixit - has been expropriated from us.
In Necropolitics , Achille Mbembe points out that it is increasingly rare for war to take place between two sovereign States. Soldiers are not mobilized to confront other soldiers, but to oppose civilians. Understanding this displacement is key in times of the coronavirus: wars have changed and civilians have become the majority target. Metaphors are not innocent. When declaring war on a microscopic aggressor, the population is panicked, shocked and paralyzed.
Like any emotion, fear is not inherently bad. Ultimately, it is a mechanism that alerts us to potential danger. The problem is its political instrumentalization. In full protection, one should ask: what precedent can our deprivation, isolation and demobilization set in the space of politics?
In the face of the pandemic, the confinement that was decreed in Wuhan to curb contagion has spread and replicated across the globe. An authoritarian management is taken as an example that, among other things, hid the truth. Giorgio Agamben has warned for years how in contemporary societies the state of exception has become the norm. Today that model that suspends and eats basic civil liberties is openly presented. In our eyes, democratic states have appealed to legal mechanisms that threaten their own nature and principles by instituting - they temporarily assure us - forced isolation, monitoring any movement and militarizing public space.
The silence with which we have accepted the confinement seems to prove Agamben right. The way to subject our freedom to the desire for security goes beyond survival and civic behavior. The exception is no longer exceptional and has been installed in our head. In the era of the algorithm, voices are being added that, under the pretext of contagion, demand to emulate even more the Chinese or Korean model. They are ready to convince us of the advantages of delivering our personal data for more efficient technological and digital control. Total. One wonders what Foucault would think of these docile bodies, of these observatory cities, of this great confinement caused by a new plague that projects a series of disciplinary devices in which life is reduced to its simplest dimension.
This kind of Stockholm syndrome begins to arrive in Mexico. Some publicly ask when the state of emergency will be declared for our own security. As if militarization had not been present in a large part of the national territory since Felipe Calderón declared war on drug trafficking. As if the denunciations for the violation of human rights had not grown exponentially since the military carried out police functions for which they were not prepared. As if there were no areas in which there is already a de facto curfew, not declared but self-imposed, by millions of women and men who avoid leaving the house at nightfall.
Obviously, I do not appeal to social Darwinism, nor do I pretend to ignore the WHO prescriptions. I listen to virologists with stubborn enlightened faith - like so many others I have been home for weeks without visiting my parents and will stand in line for that vaccine - and the unscientific discourse of subjects like Bolsonaro irritates me as irresponsible. What I think is that we need to think critically about the consequences that the politics of distance and the greater control of bodies will have on public life. Like all crises, this one will also pass, but the way we relate, the space in which we appear and inscribe our history together with others will be degraded to unbearable minimums without action and political imagination.
Why not think that the deep vulnerability that we feel these days in the face of a virus that does not discriminate - we finally know we are exposed, linked and conditioned by other bodies - can revolutionize affects that bring us closer to the other. Restlessness, mourning or outrage can also lead to new forms of solidarity and political sensitivity. We will need narratives that, like Svetlana Alexievich's, reveal the omitted story and capture the pain of ordinary people in the face of illness and loss. Perhaps then we will no longer allow an economic model that commercializes health, encourages inequality and cuts resources for scientific research. Perhaps then we will defend the right to have universal, robust and effective health systems.
Enrique Díaz Álvarez is a writer and professor at the Faculty of Political Sciences at UNAM.
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