Trench First ‘World War’ & Lockdown ‘First World’ War
That what we have experienced in the past two years is a form of world warfare is a fact that perhaps will appear sooner or later increasingly clear. It is quite trivial to acknowledge how, after all, since the first measures for the containment of SARS-COV-2 – a strain of coronavirus – there was a war to be declared against something, and the main leaders of the world, along with the information conglomerates, media-technologists, biopolitical potentates have done everything to ensure that it is fought by all means and all the personnel: civilian, medical and military (by now it is worthwhile to distinguish these).
This war has had its military tactics, its randomness, its armaments, its recruits, its dissidents, its technological advances and its nefarious experiments. If we were to compare it to a previous event, for months I have been reflecting on how the last two years have resembled the Great War of WW1- especially considering the collective enthusiasm of ‘it will all be over by Christmas’ – only to turn into a tactical genocide. The famous No Man’s Land, which delimited the infernal area between two fronts, militarized and covered with deadly dangers, is in many ways reminiscent of our lockdowns: our homes the trenches that offer miserable comfort and refuge, where everything – from bread, to pizza, at Disney + they become ridiculous palliatives that narcotize us – while outside there is emptiness, and constant and unknown danger. But here is the paradox: for many, this danger was even non-existent, especially for the little ones: what is the point of closing them at home, barricading the playground, if they cannot see those who are more fragile anyway? If in the first ‘World War’ no man’s land was really a tangle of barbed wire, mines, gases, mortars, snipers and rats – the no man’s land of the pandemic is … a ‘First World’ War , a war of First World. When it comes to the horrors of the plague, cholera, all the other terrible diseases that have infested the human son-in-law, children were being decimated (including the Spanish flu, where the average fatality was around 20 years). In ‘The Plague’ of Camus, as soon as the fictional port city is isolated, the police roam the streets to execute all dogs and cats they could find, potential (not even presumed) carriers of the bacterium. Can you imagine the SARS-COV-2 killing millions of children and the police shooting random pets in their head? Yet in another era and with another sense of civilization and collectivity, we have been able to manage it.
However, since this new coronavirus has been lenient, whose complications of the infection, it is worth remembering, is COVID-19 – although everyone now automatically associates the virus with intensive therapy – the governments still wanted to continue with their war-founding policies (the same ones that now horrify Putin’s political-military maneuvers, but at least consistent). If you don’t have to go around shooting beasts (but it happened, remember? We have millions of minks in intensive farms behind closed doors in 2020 to prevent a potential variant), the COVID police have reinvented themselves like a force of ‘moral’ order: it makes you feel guilty if you go out and about your business. At the same time, he would come knocking on your door if a neighbor doesn’t mind his own business and makes you feel guilty if you have friends over for dinner after 10. Morality has become the weapon that guides civic sense. But here, after a while, this same morality – especially the morale of the ‘troops’ turned out to be low, the ‘resilience’ to a minimum. Shutting down at home was no longer tolerable or justifiable. So, we invented the Super Green Pass – not the liberating Green Pass proposed by the EU to guarantee freedom of movement for all Schengen citizens – but a ‘reinforced’ one. The mandatory mask is not enough: it is only necessary to ‘remember’ that we are at war and we must suffer – but it is not enough to ‘track down’ those who do not suffer enough, the ‘dissidents’. Thanks to a QR code (QR = Quick Response – which is ironically also the name of the ‘Quick Response Units or’ Tactics’ in law enforcement and emergency response forces) everyone becomes potential carriers of evil, unless they have an identification document that proves ‘otherwise’. But in reality, this identification document does not prove anything: it is like having an identity card without personal data: it does not prove who you are. In the same way, the ‘Super’ Green Pass – enforced in Italy and France since Christmas – does not prove whether you are sick, healthy, a carrier, immunosuppressed, depressed-exasperated, anarchist-terrorist: it only proves that you have done what you have been asked. Leaving aside all the surveillance, control and docility implications, one may simply acknowledge that it is, quite simply, a uniform equivalent: once clean, ironed, with well-laced boots and an oiled gun – now a regularly updated, personalized, precise code.
Not only that, the Greenpass in general has created a brand new form of citizen consideration: not just the citizen-recruit, but the guilty citizen until proven otherwise. This approach is opposite to what the law implies, that anyone, whatever crime has been committed, is innocent until a judge proves guilty. One can be suspected, but not implicated. With the Green Pass, and the acceptance of being, anyone is guilty of not being vaccinated – or of having a fever, or worse still, of carrying SARS-COV-2; Unless it proves otherwise in front of the authorities: for all those who point laser guns to our foreheads, who check our masks, the phone screen, we are all guilty in this new world.
But when we talk about the meaning of the Green Pass, it is also important to remember the damages: if its benefits are certainly minimal, for many incomprehensible, the above mentioned ‘Super Green Pass’/vaccine pass is practically nil: and I don’t think there is any need to explain why (Note that no government has really explained what the benefits actually are – other than ‘softly’ inducing vaccination). But if we talk about damage, then we can only open the dance: but among the many gossip and insults, something is undeniable, to any citizen, recruit, enlightened, militant, anarchist: that the green pass has destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people around the world, their careers, their perception of their integrity, their social status. All these are aspects that can be criminally prosecuted: perhaps they are even war crimes, because they have caused more harm than the acceptable in any standard. During these 2 years there was cold and brutal disproportionality in every phases where global state forces were raised in order to stabilise meek submission.
(Photo: Collage CC images)
