Third World War?

All right, let’s not exaggerate – but some of our public figures are acting as if this were the most terrible thing to have hit the planet since the Second World War. With the best will in the world, I find it very hard to agree.

Perhaps it’s a good thing that news reports are no longer overstuffed with Brexit, on which very little has been said since the Covid-19 (a.k.a. coronavirus) crisis erupted in the developed world (= Western Europe and English-speaking North America, but still scarcely in Japan or Australasia, or parts of the world other than China, South Korea and Iran) a month ago. The fact that the two main Brexit negotiators, the UK’s David Frost and the EU’s Michel Barnier, have both tested positive for the virus, may be ironic – but no more than that. So have the British PM Boris Johnson and heir to the throne Prince Charles, as well as various athletes, actors and politicians around the world. But frankly, who cares – as we should all know, viruses and bacteria are no respecters of persons, and a royal or celebrity cough is no better (or worse) than anyone else’s. No-one famous has actually died – and, once again, who cares.

The ‘lockdowns’ (an aggressive military term that has sadly become part of everyday language) of whole cities, regions or countries are already doing a great deal to disrupt socioeconomic life, and will almost certainly do even greater damage to some of the world’s hitherto most prosperous countries than any virus short of Ebola could possibly do. In this case, as far as I can see, the ‘cure’ will be worse than the disease. We seem headed for bankruptcies of both large and small businesses, mass unemployment, and all manner of social unrest – from physical attacks on Asian-looking people (who supposedly ‘started all this’) to muggings, firebombings and worse. Europe’s populist politicians have kept remarkably quiet in the last few weeks, but are surely biding their time – ready as ever to clamour that ‘establishment’ politicians are not doing enough to protect ‘our people’, and above all ‘our children’ (who, for once, appear very unlikely to contract the virus in any serious or even apparent form – it is not even certain that they can contract it but still pass it on). Grist to the populist mill – and these people seize any chance they can get, for that is the essence of populism, and fascism (which to my mind are one and the same thing).

Despite the (again essentially populist) saying ‘there are lies, damned lies, and statistics’, which implies that ‘figures’ are to be distrusted almost on principle, I’ve spent the last few days looking at a daily-updated map of the world published by the French-Belgian public broadcaster RTBF (which obtains the figures from the respected US Johns Hopkins university). It shows the rates of infection, death and recovery from the virus in almost every one of the world’s countries. What is remarkable is the variation, even among close neighbours, and within whole continents. Friends have suggested the variation is due to ‘under-reporting’ or ‘under-testing’, but in my opinion these objections fail to account for much of the variation – other than outright lying by governments, both would surely only suggest the threat is even less than it seems, for it would mean that very many people are getting the disease in such a mild form that they don’t even notice it, let alone bother to seek medical advice, or – like me so far – have no symptoms at all. I know that if I do have the virus without symptoms I can still pass it on, and am doing my damnedest to keep clear of other people – but then again, I’ve been doing little else for the past decade, and there are limits to what more I can do. If I did get it, the last thing I would do is go anywhere near a hospital (where the chance of infection with flesh-devouring bacteria and other super-bugs is so much greater) – I’d simply ride it out, and take my chances, such as they are.

‘STAY AT HOME!’ is the facile rallying cry. But for me that presents almost insurmountable problems:

1. I live alone, as I have done for most of my life – I don’t even have a pet for company, as I did until nearly 20 years ago.
2. I live in a small and not very well-lit or ventilated basement apartment with no outside areas – essentially a glorified bedroom with a spacious bathroom (so sit on the toilet?). If I were to spend the whole day there, I could do little else but lie on my bed or sofa (without much daylight) 24/7 and ponder about what to do with the rest of my life. That way lies suicide – no, not maudlin, just realistic.
3. Watch television, and keep up with the news? Listen to music? Do my translation work from home? Not an option for me, since I have no television, music equipment or even Internet or a smartphone – all deliberate choices, which I don’t plan to reverse (and probably now even couldn’t, since the relevant shops are also shut). And since I require the Internet for my work as a freelance translator, and e-mail for contact with clients, I can’t work from home, as the authorities so glibly suggest we all can easily do. In the 67 years of my life I have never once experienced such a complete shutdown of social life, or anything remotely resembling it. I depended on bars and restaurants for their ever-available wifi to continue working and remain in contact with other people, and had no reason to think this would end so abruptly, and on such a wide scale. But now all such places are suddenly closed down, on the blithe assumption that we all have alternatives – family, friends and neighbours.
4. Note that all this is meant to protect such ‘vulnerable’ people as me, given my age. Well, I don’t feel in the least protected, and would not mind if I did get the virus, for the chances of dying from it are very small, and there are far nastier things I could get at my age, such as Alzheimer’s, or a non-fatal stroke. But no, we’re all assumed to want to survive at all costs – whereas I don’t. God forbid I should live to the age of 75, let alone 80 or worse.
5. As for family, friends and neighbours, I haven’t had any real family for most of my life (both my parents died in the 1980s, in countries where I haven’t lived since 1975, and I was an only child and have no partner or children). My true friends can be counted on the fingers of one hand, do not live close by, and are of much the same age as I am – and the last thing I would want to do is impose on them, as if that would now even be wise. And as for neighbours, I hardly know them, and am glad to keep it that way. In short, I’ve been ‘self-isolating’ for years, with or without a virus.
6. But now the one thing that was helping me survive – wifi in dozens of bars and restaurants, in various countries – has abruptly been taken from me, for what are to my mind dubious reasons. I’d briefly thought of fleeing across the nearby border into Germany, and maybe even booking into a B&B there ‘for the duration’ (another wartime term!) – but things are now no better there, and if borders close I could get stranded there till god-knows-when (see China).

When Holland’s bars and restaurants were ordered to close a week ago, I decided to rely on the few places whose wifi code was stored in my computer’s memory (no-one else around to ask) and sit outside on the terrace, where the chairs and tables were still in place. But then the city council ordered bars and restaurants to make their terraces inaccessible, as people flouting the ‘social distancing’ rules were tending to gather there. Not wanting to get places I regularly patronised into trouble, I have retired to a public bench where I can still just catch the wifi signal from one of them, and so continue to work and communicate. No table, so not very practical – and if the weather ever turns bad, as it did the other day (unseasonably cold, with light showers of sleety hail just before April), I’m in trouble. Two days ago someone parked his van in front of me and angrily gestured that I shouldn’t be there (in one of the most isolated places in the city!) and should go home at once. I shrugged as if I had no idea what he meant, and he drove off – but I was afraid he’d call the police on me. Apparently he didn’t, or else they told him I wasn’t doing anything wrong – which is true. As I keep saying, let them arrest me and take me off to prison, where the risk of infection is of course far greater for all concerned.

I wonder if people in Britain, Holland, Switzerland or Slovenia (the four countries I know best, and almost certainly the only ones I will ever have lived in) felt the same way when the Second World War broke out there. Switzerland remained neutral from Day One – but its contacts with all its surrounding neighbours (all occupied by the Nazis and their allies) were severely curtailed, and the country did briefly prepare for invasion, with army units withdrawing into a number of Alpine ‘redoubts’ (known in French as la redoute nationale). Britain came into the war in 1939, Holland a year later, and Slovenia a year after that. Yet social intercourse in all four countries went on – there was no need for ‘social distancing’. Quite the contrary, in fact – sexual intercourse experienced a boost that would eventually lead to the sexual revolution of the 1960s, and female and even gay liberation. All to the good!

Now, instead, we’re being told to shun each other like the plague – hardly a way to build up immunity against a new virus. And one of the most socially advanced countries in the world, Sweden, has decided to avoid the ‘total lockdown’ approach. To be sure, it now has more coronavirus deaths (nearly 200) than its neighbours – but it also has the highest population of them all (over 10 million, twice as many as the rest).

I’m hoping we’ll find that, as so often, the Swedish approach is the best. It’s what many Russian reformers wanted when the Soviet Union began to collapse – and they knew very well why they wanted that rather than anything else.