“We are at war”: The military rhetoric of COVID-19 in cross-cultural perspective of discourses

Abstract

At the outburst of the COVID-19 pandemic and all throughout its continuation in 2020 and 2021, the metaphor of ‘war' has been one of the most pervasive and recurrent globally. As an international, cross-cultural group of scholars and practitioners, we will analyze critically the communicative strategies enacted and the political agenda that they have meant to serve in Italy, Bulgaria, and Ukraine discussing both the cultural differences and the cross-cultural similarities of such a discourse that has been shaping the perception of our factual reality during the pandemic. Expressions like ‘We are at war', ‘Our heroes are fighting at the forefront', ‘We will win this war' and the like contributed to create symbolical cross-cultural responses that, by playing on emotions such as fear, uncertainty and, in some cases, national pride, contributed to the creation of a new state of reality, that of the “new normality”, calling for specific actions and behaviors. However, the war metaphor assumed different hues according to the country in which it was disseminated, up to the actual appointment of generals as governmental spoke-persons or organizers of the vaccine logistics, often combined with the construction and the mediatization of the archetypical hero fighting against the virus/enemy. To analyze how, all throughout 2020 and 2021, the military rhetoric was implemented and disseminated as the dominant discourse, we draw on Media Representations of the Real, on Rhetoric Studies on Manipulation, on Political Discourse, on Critical Discourse Studies, and on Susan Sontag's fundamental essay Illness as Metaphor. We discuss such rhetorical strategies as they originated from a discussion within our collective project in other words, an online dictionary that, besides critically analyzing contextualized keywords that (re)produce different forms of Otherness, offers creative proposals to reverse such narratives, and can be used as a free resource in different social and educational contexts (www.iowdictionary.org).

‘We are all in the same boat’: a qualitative cross-sectional analysis of COVID-19 pandemic imagery in scientific literature and its use for people working in the German healthcare sector

“…overcoming obstacles and learning from it versus individual powerlessness in the face of such an immense event. This also expands on previous findings that showed that, while metaphors of war and fighting are the most prevalent ( 23 ), they are not necessarily the most helpful, particularly when in the metaphors fighting is more associated with helplessness and uncertainty instead of meaning and sense of mission ( 16 ).…”

“…Linguistic imagery (e.g., metaphors, similes, personifications) was widely used in professional ( 14 – 17 ), political ( 18 – 20 ), and media ( 18 , 21 , 22 ) communication to describe the COVID-19 virus and the difficulties associated with a global pandemic. Imagery relating to struggle and war (e.g., physicians as warriors, virus as enemy) were particularly prevalent ( 14 , 18 , 20 , 23 – 25 ). However, other imagery regarding transformative processes, e.g., “People who have suffered through the crisis are different, than they were before” ( 17 ), but also fear and uncertainties, e.g., “It’s like cancer.…”

Commentary: How to have agency in a pandemic

“…This was particularly evident during the pandemic when, for many, such as the Bulgarian conspiracy theorists discussed by Giorgis et al, the orientation was almost completely toward institutional structures—the machinations of a power hungry government and the scientific establishment—making resistance seem the only form of action available to them to enact agency. This particular orientation toward structure as chiefly institutional (and possibly authoritarian) was no doubt exasperated by the willingness of many governments to use the pandemic to stifle dissent and expand state powers, often under the banner of waging “war” on the virus (Giorgis et al, 2023 ). Many others, however, oriented more toward relational and environmental dimensions of structure, focusing more on their responsibilities toward friends and family members and the threat of the virus itself, mostly accepting the restrictions imposed by institutions and governments as necessary and reserving their ire for uncooperative fellow citizens who did not follow the rules.…”

“…One thinks, for example, of the dramatic ways the participants in the study by Wilding et al describe their emotions as seemingly independent entities that seem to “creep up on them” and pull them in different directions, or of the complex and sometimes contradictory emotions the diarists in Robinson et al express about regulations, or of the way the international students in Cowie et al “feel” the city of Edinburgh differently during lockdown. One also thinks of the way affect can be deployed by others to undermine agency by generating fear or hatred, such as when metaphors of war or labels such as “China virus” become prominent features of the discursive environment (Kania, 2022 ; Giorgis et al, 2023 ).…”

“…Robinson et al ( 2023 ), for example, examine how agency the loss of agency was lexically and grammatically encoded in the way people talked about regulation; Wilding et al ( 2023 ) show how older adults in isolation negotiated their loss of agency through their use of metaphors, and Cowie et al ( 2022 ) describe the ways people coped with the disrupted relationship between structure and agency that came from forced immobility through the production of chronotopic discourse. In others, attention to the issue of agency is more implicit, though no less central, Tragel and Pikksaar ( 2022 ), for instance, focusing on how relationships of authority and solidarity were constructed in regulatory discourses about mask wearing, Bafort et al ( 2023 ) addressing mediatized debates about personal freedom and privacy associated with COVID-19 telephone contact tracing, Kania ( 2022 ) discussing how practices of naming COVID-19 in media discourse revealed underlying ideological projects to assign responsibility for the pandemic to radicalized others, Giorgis et al ( 2023 ) documenting the ways metaphors of warfare used by the governments functioned both as calls to action and constraints on agency in different countries, and Banga and Bellinzona ( 2023 ) exploring how municipal spaces became arenas in which negotiations among regulatory and transgressive discourses played out. In all of these treatments of the pandemic, discourse is presented as the primary means through which agency was claimed and constrained, power was exercised and resisted, and responsibility was assigned and denied.…”