So gesehen ist die Revolution eine moderne Version dessen, was in der Antike als Opfer galt.
—Terry Eagleton, Opfer.
Yesterday I read yet another politician comparing the pandemic to war. It seems quite a poor analogy, but today in reading a review of Eagleton’s book I got to thinking that if a society’s struggle against death by pandemic is likened to war, would those killed by the pandemic necessarily then not be seen as fallen soldiers? In war the soldiers are never to have died in vain. Decades after their death soldiers are immortalized, their deaths never murder, never accident, but always sacrifice, fraught with meaning. What meaning however is here to be found in the deaths of tens of thousands of elderly men and women choking to death in nursing homes? What have these brave warriors offered their lives in sacrifice for?