Lay off those war metaphors, world leaders. You could be the next casualty… | Simon Tisdall

The language of the battlefield is woefully out of place in a global pandemic and does nothing but breed fear
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It is always dangerous when facing a crisis to invoke war as an analogy. War is chaos. War, as Thomas Hobbes and those with personal experience know, is limitless death and destruction. By definition, it comprises uncontrollable, random events occurring in a vacuum when the laws and conventions that bind people and societies in peacetime no longer apply.

Politicians, scientific experts and commentators who now routinely resort to wartime metaphors, images and language to describe the battle against Covid-19 do so at their peril. And yet few heed the danger. "We are at war," the French president, Emmanuel Macron, declared repeatedly in a national address last week - ignoring the fact that any talk of war is inherently scary.