We are at war. This might seem a bold and somewhat bizarre statement. And it will probably come as something of a surprise to people, after all, there’s been no overt signs of conflict; no exchange of gunfire, no bombings, no troop movements, no deployment of any task force, there’s not even been any declaration of war.
But then, this is not a war in the conventional sense, because this is not what is termed in military parlance, a kinetic war. There are no bombs being dropped. There are no bullets being fired. There are no standing armies fighting each other. There are no warships in the seas. There are no helicopters, or fighter planes in the skies. Put simply, this is unconventional warfare.
So what then is this war that I’m talking about? I have claimed that we are at war, but what is the evidence for such a claim? Moreover, if the war is not being fought in the cities, or in the countryside or at sea, or in the skies, where is the war actually taking place?
My answer to this is, everywhere. It’s happening all around us.
How can that be? How can we possibly be in the midst of a war and not know about it?
My response would be to repeat that this is unconventional warfare. It is therefore not what we might expect war to look like. It follows that because there are no signs of what we would usually associate with war, we are not in any way inclined to think of it as warfare. To our ordinary way of thinking, it simply doesn’t fall into that category.
By way of illustration there are reports of remote tribes who on seeing a plane for the first time, did not know what it was. Having had no previous experience of planes, they had no language for it, no terms of reference. They struggled to define it and make sense of it. Suffice to say, something akin to this phenomena is in operation now.
So again the question would be where is the war taking place?
The war is being fought in the media – we see it in our TV screens, on our computers and on our smart phones.
However, this is not the TV war like the Vietnam war was – where skirmishes were broadcast by the TV stations and seen by the public back home – a long way from the actual fighting.
This is of an altogether very different category.
More specifically, the war is being fought in our minds and it’s being fought for control of our minds. In this respect, it could be described as psychological warfare. In this war, words are the weapons.
All this might seem far-fetched, but all that needs to be done is to hold what I have presented here up to reality to see if it is an accurate representation of the way things are.
We are bombarded with messages, are we not? We are warned about “fake news”, “disinformation” and “misinformation”. We have so called “fact checkers” claiming to sort truth from fiction.
As for the battle grounds, they are the hot topics of the day – the issues that are at the forefront of the news in the media. We just have to look at one such hot topic, the COVID pandemi
