The dangers of the war metaphor in fighting the Covid Crisis

The metaphor of the invisible enemy; the Churchillian posing of leaders like Boris Johnson; Trump presenting himself as a war time President; and the new rhetoric about heroes have become part of the way many people speak about the Covid 19 crisis. But we have to stop. This is not a war; Covid 19 is not an enemy power. It’s a disease – a virus. It isn’t interested in building or destroying Empires. It makes no calculations about cost/gain ratios. It has no industrial-military complex to use. There is nothing rational; or planned or even irrational and unplanned about where it attacks, who it strikes down and who escapes. There can’t be – because its not even technically alive!

The war metaphor; on the surface; looks like it makes sense. Lots of people are being injured and lots of people are dying. There needs to be a massive mobilisation within our communities to fight back. Ordinary people are being asked to make enormous sacrifices – their freedoms; their livelihoods and in many cases their lives.

But there’s a terrible danger lurking in this apparently harmless metaphor. And its exactly those sacrifices that ordinary people are being asked to make which should alert us to it.

The working class have always paid the highest price for the ruling class’s wars. Its us who provide the frontline cannon fodder; us who provide the medical staff who patch up the wounded and carry away the dead; us who fill the factories turned over to wartime production; us who are thrown back onto the scrap heap when “normalcy” returns; and us who take the brunt of wartime rationing and shortages.

And so its also us who are asked to make the glorious sacrifices for our nations good. Us, who get to be un-named heroes for a few seconds. Us whose families get the letters edged in black and the posthumous medals for bravery – when we’d much prefer a real living loved one to a dead hero.

This has come home to me recently in trying to argue for what seems to me to be a very basic demand – schools should close and stay closed. If there’s a need to run a skeleton staff for the most vulnerable and the children of emergency workers – then there has to be through-going provision of cleaning; PPE and a salary loading to recognise that these people are going well beyond the requirements of their job.

I have sat in amazement as the barrage of emails came in. People telling me that it’s our job, why should we get paid more? People telling me that PPE should be saved for the healthcare heroes. People implying I might be somewhat selfish in not wanting to “do my bit” – presumably for the “war effort”.

Let’s look at these ideas closer. Let’s start with the basic call for PPE. Right across the globe right now essential workers – and that now means the folk who work the checkout at the supermarket; the people who drive the trams, buses and trains; the rubbish collectors; the pharmacists and their assistants and retail staff; as well as health care workers right in the thick of it – have been demanding better protection for themselves. And well they should – they’ve been catching the disease in alarming numbers and dying in alarming numbers too. Amazon workers have struck; Coles workers have threatened to walk off and in multiple places around the globe those health care heroes have walked off the job too – because without proper PPE, they can’t save anyone’s life – not even their own.

For teachers (and childcare workers and anyone else who is trying to keep some semblance of normalcy for the nation’s children) to ask for appropriate PPE is not selfish; its not taking it away from anyone else who needs it – it’s a basic demand to keep people – those children included – safe. But the war time rhetoric means that rather than people being able to acknowledge that a public service can’t take place unless it can take place safely – they are lining up to make the ultimate sacrifice!

The same goes for demanding proper pay. I’ve been told that at a time when lots of people are suffering job losses and pay cuts – that its terribly selfish to want extra pay. But what this fails to recognise is that those of us who now find ourselves essential are also often some of the most poorly paid. That’s certainly true for all the supermarket workers; but its also true in education and in healthcare. Child care workers are at the bottom of education pay ladder – and yet suddenly their services become vital to the running of society. It’s only if you buy into the “war-footing” rhetoric that you’d be able to argue that they should not be being properly recompensed for the huge risk they are placing themselves and their families in.

As for “doing my bit”. That’s probably the argument that makes me the angriest – and the one that the war metaphor is most responsible for. I wouldn’t enlist to fight and die in an imperialist war; and I won’t be signing up to die for a crisis caused by the capitalist classes failure to take WHO advice seriously. Add to that its failure to maintain a health system that could cope with such a crisis. Its failure to have a proper stock of PPE. Its failure to fund research sufficiently. Its failure to house the population safely. Its failure to prevent violence against women and children in their homes and in society. The list goes on. The working class didn’t cause this crisis. And damned if we’re going to pay for it.

The thing the do-gooders and those with a matyr complex miss – is that its workers demanding safe and properly paid working conditions who are actually the ones really “doing their bit”. By demanding proper hand sanitiser, gloves and masks – workers in food distribution are protecting all of us from virus transmission. By demanding that schools and child care centres close; we’re actually doing our bit to protect not just ourselves and our families, but our students and their families too. By demanding proper pay and loadings where we’re doing extra; we’re protecting the future of our jobs and our economy and in fact taking the steps which will build a better world out of the chaos this virus has created.

A final word on the concept of the hero. I am in awe of the men and women working in hospitals and other healthcare roles right now. And I think that words like brave absolutely apply to them. But those workers themselves have been very clear. They are afraid. They are anxious. They are exhausted. When we start to use the war rhetoric of heroes – we miss the humanity and we allow ourselves to justify their sacrifice as glorious and necessary. What health care workers need isn’t praise, applause or empty phrases of thanks – they need massive funding; the urgent manufacture of PPE, ventilators and other medical equipment; they need extra staff so they can have shifts that don’t exhaust them; they need new hospitals built immediately; they need free, safe accommodation if they want to isolate from their families. These real, practical needs are the ones that are covered up by the glorious sacrifice rhetoric that comes with the war metaphor.

In Homer’s epic, The Odyssey, Odysseus travels to the underworld and there meets the shade of the great hero Achilles. Achilles had a choice – a long, happy but inglorious life or a brief shining moment of glory and an early death. He chose the latter. But asked by Odysseus whether he made the right choice he replies, chillingly – that he’d rather be the slave of the poorest man on earth than be a king in Hades.

No one really wants to be a hero – they want to do their job and go home safe and well to their families. Let’s leave behind the empty rhetoric about invisible enemies and war-time resilience. Let’s build a better world out of the chaos that that the ruling class have lead us into – rather than being taken in by their empty weasel words.

System Bolaget

As some of you will already know from the title - I am in Sweden. For those of you thinking my typos have just got a little out of control - the System Bolaget are the state run liquor stores in Sweden. Yes, that's right folks, the Swedish state firmly controls the distribution of hard liquor. You cannot buy booze to take away from anywhere else. And they close early on a Saturday afternoon. In fact there are few things more frightening than the across town dash to the nearest System Bolaget - not quite sure if you'll make it. Last time I made such a dash I ended up in a line with other desperate, middle class people who could see the time ticking and weren't sure we were going to even get into the shop on time.
Once in, there's more desperation. The nicer, central city shops don't look that different to a bottle store anywhere else on the planet - except there's no advertising. Just informative signs telling you "red wine", "white wine"...And there's lots of people with big shopping baskets knowing this is the last chance before Monday morning to stock up.
The sight of other reasonably well-dressed middle aged people trying to estimate whether they need one, two or five bottles of red to get through the rest of the weekend is a little ... sobering.
And that's the nice, modern stores. In the outer suburbs you will still be confronted with locked cabinets displaying the goods and the need to front up to the counter to ask the sales assistant to go into the back room for you. Brown paper bags and shameful look as you leave are optional.
Of course you can still stock up on alcoholic beverages at your local supermarket - so long as they are under 3.5% . But the principle remains. The state controls anything stronger and you don't get to buy it after 3pm Saturday.
What's it all about you ask?
Revenue is certainly part of the answer. But I think the bigger answer is ideological. Swedish Social Democracy made peace with the ruling class. It even let the King stay on - he's allowed to chair a committee or two and have some palaces. Part of the price of that peace is massive social control and subtle "policing". And the key way this is done is through the friendly face of paternalism. System Bolaget are just one of the more obvious forms of paternalism. The "Nordic model" for sex work is another.
Having to go to a special shop to buy the hard stuff (in my case two half bottles of French wine) is more than just a charming piece of Swedish oddness -in fact it's not charming at all. There's something deeply creepy about that level of state interference in your life.

What's there to see in Novosibirsk

In Listvyanka a French man told me there was nothing to see in Novosibirsk. He was wrong!

The capital of Siberia is built on the Ob river. It really only began when in 1895 when the trans Siberian railway made it that far. Before then there had been a way station on the trans Siberian track. And before that, much like the rest of Siberia it was taiga, tundra and a lot of mosquitoes. 

The city only got it's present name in the 1950s, but it had been built to be grand. The opera house is the biggest in Russia...a massive concrete dome which dominates the central square. The Lenin statue is huge -a fabulous piece of socialist (not quite) realist sculpture. 

In Siberia no one seems to have noticed that the Soviet era is over.

And nowhere is this more evident than the Museum of the CCCP. My host had recommended this museum as "hands on" and the only thing the eccentric curator could say in English was "you can touch everything". And I did!

Each room has a theme...a child's schoolroom...with books, toys, posters. The office of an important official, with road maps, copies of the complete works of Lenin, a living room - with packaging, household goods, a covetable teaset. 

Propaganda posters and busts of Lenin as far as the eye can see. And a few pictures of Uncle Joe (Stalin that is) as well. 

It was a little overwhelming. I squealed when I found the front page of Pravda announcing perestroika. All this history and politics, alive and real and tangible.

Tangible because it is the artefacts of people's lived experience. Magazines, albums of popular music, fashionable clothes, children's books, curling irons, kitchen equipment, stereos, video games. The things of everyday life. 

To say I would travel to the middle of Siberia again just to revisit this museum is not an overstatement. I could have spent all day looking through the albums, reading children's exercise books, poring over knitting patterns. And next time, with more Russian, I will. 

The French man then was wrong. There are hundreds of things to see in Novosibirsk...and many of them are to be found in a little museum, run by two very eccentric men in a side street off Lenin square. 

Trains through Siberia.

Siberia is big. This should be obvious. But the body and the mind don't really understand how big until they travel through it. Slowly.
I have been using my nerdy train handbook and the nerdy calculation table for working out just how slowly. And for the last five hours we haven't gone much over 60km. I could drive to Novosibirsk faster. Except I probably couldn't because Russian driving is special and particular.
The aim appears to be to wait till one can't see if there is on-coming traffic, especially if this also happens to be a blind corner or the brow of a hill or both. Then one speeds up till the front of the van is virtually on the bumper of the car being passed. Next, a deft manoeuvre out into what is hopefully open road and a roar of speed. The most exciting part is not re-entering the correct lane until the last possible moment. One must achieve re-entry at the point where a fiery death is almost inevitable in a head-on with a truck.
Now I don't mind living a little dangerously, but I will leave the driving to the experts.
Trains, albeit slow ones, it is.
Siberia is tundra and taiga. Wide open spaces then birch forest so tight it's like the trees are hugging - a monumental group hug for hundreds of square kilometres.
And it is unbelievably lovely. As the sun sinks, long shadows stretch out between the birch, hills roll gently away, the long summer grass sways and the endless sky blushes slightly.
But there's an awful lot of it.
Siberia has long been where Russia has sent it's exiles or where they have sent themselves. It's a land for people who don't want to be disturbed or who are too disturbing to have near.
Little villages fringe the railway line...wooden houses that don't look like they have changed much in the last century : each with a garden overflowing now it's summer with vegetables and flowers.
Russians appear to love flowers. There is a flower shop in almost every apartment complex I have passed. Given in parts of Siberia the ground doesn't unfreeze till July and is frozen again by November, I guess I can see why a bit of bright life might feel a necessity.
The sky is clear over Siberia tonight. There's a sliver of a moon and the only other light is the occasional headlight from a long distance truck on the Irkutsk to Moscow highway. I don't think I mind too much that we are rolling along at 50 km.

Olkhon Islabd

It's a little hard to maintain my signature cynicism somewhere as genuinely lovely as Olkhon Island. But I will try.
Getting here is interesting. My driver, Sergey, who I think used to be a paratrooper, quickly steered his large van off the road and onto what appeared to be a track. Of course I use the word road very loosely. A cleared stretch of bumpy dirt comes closer.
It soon became obvious why Sergey had made this initially troubling decision. The nasty little animal track was smoother than the made road.
We bumped along it for sometime with Sergey making disapproving noises at other drivers and driving at a speed that seemed a touch reckless. But between moments of horror and stretches of discomfort, we would top a rise and below us would spread a vista of water, rocks, forest - the wild beauty of the island. Sergey would take his hands off the wheel, and gesture expansively. I would agree that it was marvellous, hoping quick affirmation would return his hands firmly to the wheel and the tyres to connection with the track.
But once here all discomfort is quickly forgotten. There are long Sandy beaches, fringed with pine forest and with water which varies from intense sapphire blue to sparkling jewel green. There are little rocky bays, soaring cliffs, the gentle sound of waves. And a whole lot of Shamanism.
Think poles tied with coloured ribbons, trees with coloured ribbons, rocks with coloured ribbons. Today I even saw a young man in the regalia, including bells sewn to everything. The effect ruined only slightly by his baseball cap and selfie taking.
Beaches here come with portable Banya - the Russian sauna. Stand around long enough and you will get to witness that great Russian tradition...overweight, middle aged women in bikinis running from banya to the freezing water of the lake and back. This edifying sight did not encourage me to try either activity or buy a bikini.
Standing above the action is a charming cafe, wherein I purchased a delicious pot of sea blackthorn tea. Sea blackthorn is a tiny yellow fruit, a hip I think, from a fairly rare plant. It has a sour, citrus flavour. It's fabulous. What I didn't know was that it is also a fiendishly powerful diuretic.
Sometime around the time I was wading in the ankle achingly cold water of the lake, it occurred to me that I needed to answer nature's call. But there is no shelter, no convenient bush, not even a largish rock. Just sand, space and a lot of sunburnt Russians. Really, bright red, painfully skin cancer causing sunburn. But that's another story.
I make it about half way back to my guesthouse and then I realise, it's just not going to work. I give in. I stand on a bare hillside, looking at one of the most spectacular views I have seen recently, and just let nature take her course.
A little piece of a hillside in one of Shamanism's most sacred places will now forever have a little of my genetic material.

Forest fires

Were blogger to allow me to post photos of the wonderful scenery around Lake Baikal, you would be as underwhelmed as I am. Not because it isn't marvellous, I have seen travel photos before - it's spectacular. But right now, with air quality in the red "Danger, danger Will Rodger's" zone and a thick smoke haze over everything, it's a little hard to see the attraction, or indeed see (or breathe!).
There is considerable irony in me travelling thousands of kilometres from Australia to find myself on the edges of one of the planet's largest forest fires. Apparently a chunk of Siberia the size of Belgium is burning and while Mr Putin has sent the army in, no one appears to be doing much. No monsoon buckets sweeping over Lake Baikal. Though that could be a good thing, a couple of accidental Baikal seals in the mix could make that forest fire a lot worse.
Let me explain. Baikal is home to a huge number of species found nowhere else. This includes a small fish apparently 80% fat. I have eaten said fish, and can attest it was melt in the mouth fish fatty goodness. The tour guide could not believe I ate not one (she suggests people at least try it) but six!
Another weird species is the Baikal seal. The world's only fresh water seal they were apparently cut off in the lake from their migration back to the sea and have adapted. To eating the 80% fat fish it would seem. Because these are not sleek, elegant seals. No, they look like someone has inserted a bicycle pump and turned them into little seal blimps. Incredibly cute, but so over inflated I was afraid the two I saw in the aquarium might pop!
So I can see why the monsoon buckets aren't in operation, one or two seals on a forest fire and the thing would have enough fat fuel to burn indefinitely!

Things you really shouldn't put in your mouth

Marmot. Yep. Marmot. Large, furry rat like creatures. Actually a type of ground squirrel. Herodotus apparently claims that they collect gold dust in their burrows. He could be right.
I won't go into the exact details of how I came to consume what is apparently an endangered species, for obvious reasons.
I'd also like to reassure you all that stories of the black plague are much exaggerated. And that was raw marmot. I can assure you, what I ate was anything but raw!
Which leads us to the step by step guide for catching, cooking and consuming your marmot.
First you will need the right terrain - high, bare, rocky outcrops deep in the Mongolian steppe are best.
Then you will need an ancient, wooden rifle, with a stand made from what looks like two random sticks and a state of the art snipers sight. You'll also need a slightly over-excited semi nomadic horse herder to wield said weapon. No ladies need apply. In outback Mongolia hunting is men's work!
Once your herder returns with the marmot, the real fun begins.
Marmots are quite cute frolicking among the rocks. Their little paws and oversized bellies are still quite sweet, even when the head shot has categorically sent it over the rainbow bridge.
The next step is the tricky one...skinning the marmot. But this is not any old skinning...no...this involves removing the skin and all the flesh and leaving just the spinal cord, while keeping the skin completely whole - cute little paws and all.
If you are finding this hard to imagine, let me assure you, it was no easier to believe while watching!
Somewhere in the middle of the skinning comes the nasty process of removing the intestines. No creatures intestines smell good. At best they are greeney grey sausages of nasty. But something about that marmot diet of plant roots and gold dust means their intestines are particularly icky. So icky only the herder and I managed to stick around. Even the dog ran away whimpering. So did the other Mongolians.
Now, you should have a marmot bag, complete with most of the flesh. And a nasty looking bowl of marmot innards...heart, lungs, liver, kidneys ... other bits I didn't recognise but which should generally be on the inside not the outside.
While all this skinning and messing about with the slimy insides has been happening, the wise marmot chef will have already prepared a hot fire and filled it with rocks. The wise marmot chef will also have brought a tool for extracting said rocks once heated. I was not with wise chefs.
You see, the next part of the process involves shoving rocks glowing red from the fire into the recesses of the the de-skeletoned carcass. But my companions only had an ancient adjustable spanner -which didn't really adjust and two sticks they were trying to use like oversized chopsticks. In the near dark. As it began to rain.
At one point I think someone actually tried picking up the stones with their hands. This was a mistake. The process made even more complex because as well as trying to force red hot rocks into your marmot, you also have to stuff in the goopey remnants in the offal bowl. Everything except the liver...special treatment for that! At the same time you have to make sure not too much steam escapes, that you don't give yourself third degree burns and you don't lose any of the precious innards.
Finally, if all goes well, and despite a poor start and much agitated shouting in Mongolian it appeared to in my case, you should end up with something that looks very like a marmot. Minus the head of course. I suspect there are easier ways of sealing the neck than your driver spending half an hour in a tool box on the top of the van, to find a single piece of rusty wire. Nonetheless, it seemed to suffice.
But then you ask, is this enough? Will the hot rocks really cook the little critter from the inside out?
And of course the answer is no! There is yet another step in this process.
Using that ancient Mongolian tool, the butane blowtorch, the marmot carcass has to be thoroughly scorched and scraped. And I mean thoroughly. A solid forty five minutes of searing blowtorch action and scorched fur scraping went into the production of my first marmot. Burned marmot fur, if you are wondering, smells only slightly better than marmot intestine.
Of course while waiting for your marmot to be fully seared, there is another delicacy to whet your appetite. Marmot liver, wrapped in caul fat, shoved on a stick and barbecued in the open flames till the outside is as burned as the marmot carcass.
The surprise is that it's delicious. Try and forget everything you have seen, forget that it might have plague, forget burned protein causes cancer - and just focus on that liver cooked in its own animal fat.
But the main show is yet to come.
Once your herder has decided the marmot is toasted to perfection it gets opened up. Imagine a giant, swollen, seared balloon, complete with its own little paws and tail. Then imagine it sliced down the middle. Rather than deflate it opens up like a big, marmoty bowl. And in the bowl is the marmot juice. This you pour out into a shared bowl and pass round. And what does essence of marmot taste like? Well, to be honest, like marmite. Delicious, meaty, rich marmite. No wonder the little critters are endangered.
Finally, there's the contents of the marmot bag and then the bag itself. Those contents, seared, steamed, unidentified bits of marmot innards anyone? I passed on that. I also passed on grabbing the hot rocks out of the marmot for "a hot stone massage". Given the toughened outdoor men who had tried picking up rocks were now squealing and throwing these "massage tools" about I decided trying to treat serious burns in the wilderness was a step too far for my cultural immersion.
The actual marmot carcass gets cut up last, into large strips. It then you see that the inside of a marmot is mainly fat. Thick white chewy fat. Now I like a bit of bacon rind. Don't mind the skin off a chicken. Used to enjoy pork belly before I gave up the flesh of the pig. But marmot fat is a step too far for me. I politely nibbled some unidentified meat lumps off of a great strip of fat, and yes, they were tasty but by then I had more than enough marmot for one lifetime.
I am assured that actually your strips of marmot fat are best consumed two or three days later, when "softer". I am wondering if in the summer, with no refrigeration, "softer" might be a euphemism.
Of course I have forgotten, there is another gift your marmot carcass can give you - knuckle bones! Apparently the only other ones like them come from wolves. If you really want the full experience you need to digest your marmot while watching someone expert with a knife extract the tiny, perfect knuckle bones from seared marmot paws.