First global germ war and 1960 April Revolution
By Yang Sung-chul
April 19 of this year marks the 60th anniversary of the April Revolution in the Republic of Korea. Students and citizens protested against President Syngman Rhee's 12-year-long authoritarian regime.
It was triggered by the fraudulent presidential election a month earlier. The police shot and killed 186 unarmed protesters on that day. Rhee stepped down and his regime collapsed on April 26.
The Korean people could have celebrated this anniversary, though we are still divided after 75 years as the last remnant of the Cold War. Then, we fought for freedom, justice and democracy. Now we have achieved them to a substantial degree.
The Economist Intelligence Unit's Democracy Index 2019 ranked South Korea, Japan, and the United States, 23rd, 24th, and 25th, respectively, under the category of “flawed democracy” while North Korea is ranked last at 168th.
South Korean democracy today did not spring up overnight. The April Revolution was only the start. The civilian Chang Myon government was overthrown by the military coup d'etat in May 1961.
The authoritarian military regimes continued for 31 years under Park Chung-hee for 18 years, Chun Doo-hwan for eight years, and Roh Tae-woo for five years.
During this period, a series of anti-military regime mass uprisings took place. They are notably the 1979 Busan-Masan Protest for Democracy, the May 18, 1980, Gwangju Democratization Movement, and the June 10 Democracy Movement of 1987.
We are now fighting the COVID-19 pandemic like virtually everyone around the world. I called it the “first global germ war.” This virus evolved to its current pathogenic state through natural selection in a non-human host and jumped from animals across the species barrier to humans, as did SARS by civets and MERS by camels. It is invisible like other viruses.
Only specialists can detect it under an electron microscope. They suspect that the host for this new virus is the pangolin, an armadillo-like mammal, sold in wet markets, probably including those in Wuhan, China.
Let me explain why I call the fight against this pandemic, the first global germ war. These are the reasons.
One, it triggered a global war on the virus. Unlike the two world wars and the Cold War of the last century, there is only one enemy ― COVID-19.
Two, it is borderless. It has spread to all five continents in less than three months, unprecedented in the history of the pandemics.
Three, it is blind to time, space, temperature, skin color, gender, age, social and political status, ideology, religion, wealth or poverty, and democracy or dictatorship.
Four, it threatens simultaneously the lives of the people of every nation on earth.
Five, it is a war against all the people in the world. The previous wars had been always fought between states or the alliance of several states against one another.
Finally, it is unique in its scope (215 countries on five continents), speed (two to three months), and number (2,084,599 infected, 134,674 deaths and 514,431 cured, as of April 16).
History is full of pandemics. They date back to the Dark Ages in Europe.
The plague swept across Europe in the 14th century and claimed 75 million to 200 million lives. But the deadliest pestilence in recent history was the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. One hypothesis on the origin of the Spanish flu offered by Dr. Robert Gallo, a virologist, poses that the great influenza pandemic during and after World War I started in a U.S. Army barracks in Kansas in March 1918.
This deadly disease spread to other camps by soldiers on their way to France. Some 670,000 Americans died, and the worldwide toll was estimated at 50 million. Unlike COVID-19, the 1918 pandemic was limited to a specific population and areas of the world.
What we urgently need now is a vaccine to effectively prevent the spread of this virus and medicine to cure the infected people. Coping successfully with this virus may also require changes in the existing political, military, economic, and social paradigms. We cannot fall back to the archaic ways of building walls between countries. That is the chauvinistic nostalgia of the bygone era.
We must turn our thinking 180 degrees in identifying our enemy and beating it completely. It is not another state, group of states, or various mutually hostile religious, ideological, and regional groups. Virus, global warming, poverty, illiteracy, inequality, chauvinism, revanchism, and others are our enemies. National self-isolation is not a solution but an anachronism.
We must launch a new globalism. We must be awakened from the illusion that our enemy is other humans or rival nations. Our enemy is here now ― COVID-19.
We can wipe it out together, not with the weapons of mass destruction, but with effective vaccine and medicine. If we can win this “one-enemy global germ war,” then, new global paradigms for a peaceful and mutually prosperous coexistence for the 21st century may commence.
I am the first one to admit that there is a vast gap between identifying enemies of humans and eradicating them. There is no great leap in nature, as there is none in human life and society. Still, work half begun is work half done.
Dr. Yang Sung-chul (sungchulyang39@hotmail.com) was the ambassador of the Republic of Korea to the United States and the author of "Revolution and Change: A Comparative Study of the April Student Revolution of 1960 and the May Military Coup d’état of 1961 in Korea" (Seoul: Korea University Press, 2015).