{"id":13483,"date":"2020-04-14T11:29:12","date_gmt":"2020-04-14T10:29:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.worldpolicyconference.com\/?p=13483"},"modified":"2020-04-14T11:29:12","modified_gmt":"2020-04-14T10:29:12","slug":"the-coronavirus-inflicts-its-own-kind-of-terror","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.worldpolicyconference.com\/fr\/the-coronavirus-inflicts-its-own-kind-of-terror\/","title":{"rendered":"The coronavirus inflicts its own kind of terror"},"content":{"rendered":"

Particularly for Europe, which has experienced waves of terrorism that achieved some of the same results, the current plague has eerie echoes. But this virus has created a different terror because it is invisible, pervasive and has no clear conclusion.<\/h4>\n
By:\u00a0New York Times<\/a>\u00a0| Brussels |\u00a0Updated: April 7, 2020 8:02:24 am<\/div>\n

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Members of the Italian army and the Carabinieri load the coffins of coronavirus victims onto a truck in Bergamo, Italy, March 24, 2020. The virus generates much the same fear and anxiety caused by terrorism, but it demands a different response: staying alone. (Fabio Bucciarelli\/The New York Times)<\/span><\/p>\n

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Written by Steven Erlanger<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The\u00a0coronavirus<\/a>\u00a0has created its own form of terror. It has upended daily life, paralyzed the economy and divided people one from another. It has engendered fear of the stranger, of the unknown and unseen. It has emptied streets, restaurants and cafes. It has instilled a nearly universal agoraphobia. It has stopped air travel and closed borders.<\/p>\n

It has sown death in the thousands and filled hospitals with wartime surges, turning them into triage wards. People gird for the grocery store in mask and gloves, as if they were going into battle.<\/p>\n

Particularly for Europe, which has experienced waves of terrorism that achieved some of the same results, the current plague has eerie echoes. But this virus has created a different terror because it is invisible, pervasive and has no clear conclusion. It is inflicted by nature, not by human agency or in the name of ideology. And it has demanded a markedly different response.<\/p>\n

People run screaming from a terrorist\u2019s bomb and then join marches of solidarity and defiance. But when the all-clear finally sounds from the new coronavirus lockdown, people will emerge into the light like moles from their burrows.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople are more afraid of terrorism than of driving their car,\u201d said Peter R. Neumann, professor of security studies at King\u2019s College London and founder of the International Center for the Study of Radicalization. Many more people die from car accidents or falling in the bathtub than from terrorism, but people fear terrorism more because they cannot control it.<\/p>\n

While terrorism is about killing people, Neumann said, \u201cit\u2019s mostly about manipulating our ideas and calculations of interest.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Trotsky famously said, \u201cthe purpose of terror is to terrorize.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the terrorism of the coronavirus is all the more frightening not only because it is so widespread but also because it is impervious to any of the usual responses \u2014 surveillance, SWAT teams, double agents or persuasion.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not a human or ideological enemy, so it\u2019s not likely to be impressed by rhetoric or bluster,\u201d Neumann said. \u201cThe virus is something we don\u2019t know, we can\u2019t control, and so we\u2019re afraid of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

And for good reason \u2014 it has already killed more Americans than the nearly 3,000 who died on Sept. 11, 2001, and it will kill many times more.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is a difference between man-made and natural disasters,\u201d said Thomas Hegghammer, an expert on terrorism and senior research fellow at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment in Oslo, Norway. \u201cPeople are typically more afraid of man-made threats, even if they are less damaging.\u201d<\/p>\n

But this virus is likely to be different, he said. \u201cIt goes much deeper into society than terrorism, and it affects individuals on a much larger scale.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is a similar sense of helplessness, however, said Julianne Smith, a former security adviser to former Vice President Joe Biden and now at the German Marshall Fund. \u201cYou don\u2019t know when terrorism or the\u00a0pandemic<\/a>\u00a0will strike, so it invades your personal life. With terror, you worry about being in crowds and rallies and sporting events. It\u2019s the same with the virus \u2014 crowds spell danger.\u201d<\/p>\n

Part of what makes terrorism terrifying is its randomness, said Joshua A. Geltzer, former senior director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council and now a professor of law at Georgetown. \u201cTerrorists count on that randomness, and in a sense this virus behaves the same way,\u201d he said. \u201cIt has the capacity to make people think, \u2018It could be me.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

But to defeat the virus requires a different mentality, Geltzer argued. \u201cYou see the bomb at the Boston Marathon, so you wonder about going next year; it\u2019s a pretty direct impact,\u201d he said. \u201cBut the virus requires one greater step \u2014 to think collectively, so as not to burden others by spreading the virus\u201d and overwhelm the health system.<\/p>\n

And it requires a different sort of solidarity. After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, President\u00a0George W. Bush<\/a>\u00a0urged Americans \u201cto go about their lives, to fly on airplanes, to travel, to work.\u201d After both the Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan attacks of 2015, President Fran\u00e7ois Hollande did the same in France, leading marches and public demonstrations of public resilience and defiance.<\/p>\n

But in the face of the virus, with so many societies so clearly unprepared, resilience now is not to get on a plane, wrote Geltzer and Carrie F. Cordero, a former security official at the Justice Department and a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. \u201cTo be resilient now is to stay at home.\u201d<\/p>\n

So it is difficult for governments that learned to urge citizens to be calm in times of terrorism to now learn how to frighten them into acting for the common good. Rather than mobilization, this enemy demands stasis.<\/p>\n

People respond patriotically, and even viscerally, to the nature of the security response to terrorism, from the helicopters to the shootouts. But \u201cthere\u2019s nothing sexy or cool about staying at home, or ordering a company to produce face masks and gowns,\u201d Geltzer said. \u201cWe don\u2019t usually chant, \u2018USA! USA!\u2019 about home schooling.\u201d<\/p>\n

It will also be difficult for governments to adjust their security structures to deal with threats that do not respond to increased military spending and enhanced spying.<\/p>\n

For a long time, Neumann said, analysts who worked on \u201csofter\u201d threats, like health and climate, were considered secondary. \u201cHardcore security people laughed at that, but no one will doubt that now,\u201d he said. \u201cThere will be departments of health security and virologists hired by the CIA, and our idea of security will change.\u201d<\/p>\n

And there will be new threats afterward \u2014 worries about economic collapse, widespread debt, social upheavals. Many fear the effect of such low oil prices on Arab and Persian Gulf countries that need to pay salaries for civil servants and the military, let alone deal with subsidies on bread.<\/p>\n

But even the Islamic State group has warned its adherents that \u201cthe healthy should not enter the land of the epidemic and the afflicted should not exit from it,\u201d which may provide some respite.<\/p>\n

Hegghammer lived in Norway during the terrorist attacks there in July 2011 by Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 people to publicize his fear of Muslims and feminism. The response in Norway was collective solidarity and resolve and a widespread sense of \u201cdugnad,\u201d the Norwegian word for communal work, as individuals donate their labor for a common project.<\/p>\n

\u201cDugnad\u201d is being invoked again in the face of the virus, Hegghammer said, with the young aiding the elderly, and government and opposition working \u201calmost too closely together.\u201d<\/p>\n

The virus and the attacks carried out by Breivik \u201care being linked explicitly in the debate here,\u201d Hegghammer said. But it is being done in a critical way, to criticize how unprepared the government has been, both then and now, to deal with a major threat.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople say, \u2018We\u2019ve already been through this, so how can we be so unprepared?\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

In the aftermath, as with Breivik, there is likely to be a commission of inquiry in Norway, just as there will inevitably be one in the United States, too, as there was after Sept. 11, to see how the government failed and what can be done in the future.<\/p>\n

But unlike largely homogeneous Norway, the sprawling United States is deeply divided.<\/p>\n

Unlike Sept. 11, \u201cwhen a single set of events united the country in an instant in its grief, this is a slowly rolling crisis that affects different parts of the country and the society at different speeds,\u201d said Smith of the German Marshall Fund. \u201cSo we\u2019re not united as a country.\u201d<\/p>\n

Given the already deep political polarization in the United States, with partisan battles over science and facts, the virus is likely to have the same impact as the plague did in Athens during the Peloponnesian War, creating indifference to religion and law and bringing forward a more reckless set of politicians, said Kori Schake, director of the foreign and defense policy program at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.<\/p>\n

But ultimately, she added, the delayed response from the White House \u201cdelegitimizes the existing political leadership and practices of society.\u201d If the political consequences are severe enough, she said. they could lead to \u201c the end of the imperial presidency and a return to the kind of federal and congressional activism that the Founding Fathers designed our system for.\u201d<\/p>\n

The virus may be politically divisive, but \u201cit is also a reminder,\u201d Schake said, \u201cthat free societies thrive on norms of civic responsibility.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Read the article on The Indian Express<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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