US Declared ‘War’ on Coronavirus … Because All Its Other Wars Have Worked Out So Well

The coronavirus epidemic had scarcely arrived on US shores when the Trump administration declared “war” on it, in the grand tradition of the ‘War on Cancer’ or the ‘War on Drugs’. But these invisible wars don’t end well.

President Donald Trump declared war on the “invisible enemy” – Covid-19 – last month, pivoting on a dime from downplaying the pandemic to doing his best Churchill impression. The surgeon general and other officials have referred to the coronavirus outbreak as another Pearl Harbor. The struggle against the coronavirus, Americans have been told in no uncertain terms, is a war – but on whom?

This is hardly the first time Americans have seen their country go to war against an invisible foe. Washington’s insistence on declaring war against intangible enemies has given rise to the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs, even the War on Cancer – all ruinously expensive enterprises that have left the issues they were meant to fight stronger than ever. Income inequality has soared since the ‘War on Poverty’ was declared in 1964, while the nation’s prisons (and cemeteries) are bursting with victims of the War on Drugs. And cancer is not just the number-two cause of death in the US – it’s also a leading cause of bankruptcy, the cost of treatment pushed skyward by the billions dumped into the ‘War on Cancer’.

Perhaps the most catastrophic failure has been the War on Terror, which attempted to marry ideological struggle with actual combat and set the Middle East on fire in the process. No one would mistake the drone pilots lighting up Afghan wedding parties for the men who put their lives on the line to storm the beaches of Normandy. But that hasn’t stopped the US military from trying to channel that righteousness, to the point of bringing back World War II-era uniforms. 

The problem with declaring war on the intangible is that mission creep is inevitable without a concrete enemy. The War on Drugs ended up targeting drug users, while the War on Poverty ultimately victimized poor people. The War on Terror wasn’t satisfied with merely declaring war on terrorists, so it took out the entire Iraqi and Libyan governments, and tried to do the same to Syria.

Now, trigger-happy congressmen like South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham are trying to reorient the War on Coronavirus to become a War on China, urging the Trump administration to cancel US debt held by Beijing and hinting that the Communist Party must be “severely punished” for allegedly covering up what half of Washington insists on calling the “Chinese virus.” Lawyers and even small businesses are trying to sue China, while scapegoating pundits fan the flames of jingoism around the country.

Even if Trump manages to rein in his attack dogs, the War on Coronavirus is already turning into a war on America’s poor. With millions of newly unemployed Americans stuck at home, told they’re “not essential,” suicides – already epidemic in the US – are beginning to rise further, outpacing coronavirus deaths in some places. Millions more risk being evicted when their states’ temporary eviction bans expire in two months. CNN’s Chris Cuomo may liken sitting on the couch binge-watching Netflix to wading ashore at Dunkirk, but that’s cold comfort to those who’ve already fallen in “combat.”

With over half of every discretionary budget dollar going to feed the military beast, it’s easy to see why American governments see every struggle in terms of war. But war always disproportionately affects the poor and vulnerable. The War on Coronavirus will be no different. When all the Trump administration has is a hammer, everything might look like a nail, but there’s nothing stopping the president from trading in that same defective hammer for more useful tools.


By Helen Buyniski
Source: RT

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2 Comments

  1. The official mainstream “wars” on this or that have thus been “wars” on the unsuspecting public: to keep them misinformed and misguided. The “war on coronavirus” is no different.

    Let’s take the “war on cancer” as an example…

    If the public were to scrutinize what the medical industry and its government pawns are telling them about the ‘war on cancer’ instead of blindly believing what they’re saying, they’d find that the cancer industry and the cancer charities have been dismissing, ignoring, and obfuscating the true causes of cancer while mostly putting the blame for cancer on the individual, denying or dismissing the serious harms from orthodox cancer treatments and chemical toxicants, and resorting to deceptive cancer statistics to “educate” (think: mislead) the public that their way of treatment is actually successful (read this well referenced scholarly article’s afterword on the war on cancer: do a search engine query for “A Mammogram Letter The British Medical Journal Censored” by Rolf Hefti, a published author of the Orthomolecular Medicine News organization, and scroll down to the afterword that addresses the fraudulent ‘war on cancer’).

    The “war” on anything is almost always one big fraud, whether it is actual military war, the war on drugs, the war on poverty, or the war on cancer, because huge corporate interests are the leading motive for these “wars” instead of their officially advocated missions.

    The orthodox cancer establishment has been saying a cure for cancer “is just around the corner” and “we’re winning the war on cancer” for decades. It’s all hype and lies (read Dr. Guy Faguet’s ‘War on cancer,” Dr. Sam Epstein’s work, or Clifton Leaf’s book, or Siefried’s work on this bogus ‘war’).

    Since the war on cancer began orthodox medicine hasn’t progressed in their basic highly profitable therapies: it still uses primarily and almost exclusively highly toxic, deadly things like radiation, chemo, surgery, and drugs that have killed millions of people instead of the disease.

    As long as the official “war on cancer” is a HUGE BUSINESS based on expensive TREATMENTS (INTERVENTIONS) of a disease instead of its PREVENTION, logically, they will never find a cure for cancer. The upcoming moonshot-war on cancer inventions, too, will include industry-profitable gene therapies of cancer treatment that are right in line with the erroneous working model of mechanistic reductionism of allopathic medicine. The lucrative game of the medical business is to endlessly “look for” a cure but not “find” a cure. Practically all resources in the phony ‘war on cancer’ are poured into treating cancer but almost none in the prevention of the disease. It’s proof positive that big money and a total lack of ethics rule the official medical establishment. It’s just like with any bogus official “war” (‘war on drugs’, ‘war on terrorism’, etc) — it’s not about winning these wars but to primarily prolong them because behind any of these fraudulent “war” rackets of the criminal establishment is a Big Business, such as the massive cancer industry. The very profitable TREATMENT focus of conventional medicine, instead of a PREVENTION focus which these official medical quacks (or rather crooks) can hardly make any money off, is a major reason why today 1 of 2 men and 1 in 3 women can expect a cancer diagnosis at some point in their lifetimes” yet that rate was multiple times lower 5 decades ago when the phony ‘war on cancer’ began (1 in about 16). That fact alone proves we are NOT winning the war on cancer.

    At the same time, this same orthodox cancer cartel has been suppressing and squashing a number of very effective and beneficial alternative cancer approaches. You probably guessed why: effective, safe, inexpensive cancer therapies are cutting into the astronomical profits of the medical mafia’s lucrative treatments. That longstanding decadent activity is part of the fraud of the war on cancer.

    What the medical establishment “informs” the public about is about as truthful as what the political establishment keeps telling them. Not to forget, the corporate media (the mainstream fake news media) is a willing tool to spread these distortions, lies, and the scam of the war on cancer.

    Does anyone really think it’s a coincidence that double Nobel laureate Linus Pauling called the ‘war on cancer’ a fraud? If anyone looks closer they’ll come to the same conclusion. But…politics and self-serving interests of the conventional medical cartel, and their allied corporate media, keep the real truth far away from the public at large. Or people’s own denial or indifference of the real truth.

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