The Revenge of the Germs
The radical novelty of this crisis lies in the fact that it brings together these two dimensions and that , in order to understand it , it is necessary to grasp these two key concepts in a panoramic way .
At the beginning of the nineteenth century , looking at the Napoleonic adventure and extrapolating from it , Carl Von Clausewitz forged the idea of “ Total ” war to designate an extreme type of conflict where a belligerent mobilizes all its resources to annihilate an adversary who is himself ready to eradicate it , as the two world wars would become a terrible demonstration of . At the end of the twentieth century , Harvard professor Theodore Levitt popularized the concept of “ globalization ” to characterize the interactive integration of individuals , corporations , governments , and businesses into a single world economy that gradually shaped a single global village . Both expressions have remained . At the beginning of 2020 , they collided and now , under the effect of a hitherto unknown acceleration , take on a completely different meaning .
Total , global : such is the unprecedented crisis that is hitting all the faces of the Earth entirely and simultaneously .
This crisis is neither military nor economic , neither industrial nor financial , neither social nor political . It is all of these things at the same time . It is first and foremost a health and medical crisis .
Above all , it is both individual and collective . We are all experiencing it , everywhere and at the same time , in all its aspects : personal , family , business , national , and international .
This crisis overwhelms our consensual amnesias . The pandemic of 1918 , known as the “ Spanish flu ” or “ Annamitis fever ”— although it seems to have originated in Kansas — caused more deaths than the Great War , but its memory was drowned in that of the hell in the trenches . The stock market crashes of 1929 or 2008 showed the chaos that the race to financialization could lead to , but once contained , they faded from our memory to take the rank of accidents that had been controlled .
Why our astonishment at the appearance of the coronavirus ? Because we chose oblivion . Because we did not take the time to prepare . However , apart from the Spanish flu of 1918 , since the Russian flu of 1889 , the Asian flu of 1956 , the Hong Kong flu of 1968 , or the H1N1 of 2009 , we have not lacked alerts or high quality scientific studies to alarm us . Without success .
Even more serious , since Charles Delorme , the French physician of kings who invented the beak mask in 1619 to fight the plague , but who struggled to convince the authorities to adopt it , or the Hungarian doctor Ignace Semmelweis , who explained in 1850 to medical luminaries in Vienna the hygienic imperative of washing hands to counter contagion ( but who was the laughing stock of these mandarins ), we have regressed rather than evolved . It took Louis Pasteur for things
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