? What can the show The Last of Us teach us about the ways that air can be used in modern warfare? Now, if you are a fan of The Last of Us and you have not seen the last of season two, please skip this video.
Spoiler alert: in the last season of The Last of Us, we learned that the virus at the center of the plot, cordyceps, spreads not only by being bitten by somebody who is infected or coming into contact with bodily fluids, but also through the air; the virus is revealed to have always been airborne.  That means that in the show, the threat to your survival becomes not only other individuals who are infected with cordyceps, but suddenly the very milieu in which you find yourself. Now, this depiction of air in The Last of Us is a really good way of thinking about the history of warfare, and especially the way in which the discovery that air can be weaponized transformed modern warfare in the 20th century.
Now in our episode on air, we talk about the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, who wrote a book called Terror from the Air, where he argues that the start of the 20th century didn't happen as we might assume on January 1st, 1900, but rather, the 20th century began on April 22nd, 1915. And that's the date when German soldiers unleashed the first large scale chemical attack on Western forces, especially French and Canadian troops that were stationed on the border of Belgium as a way of trying to break down the western front. So they released chlorine gas as a way of destroying the bodily functions of the Western soldiers.
And that according to Sloterdijk is the moment that the milieu, the environment became recruited or conscripted into modern warfare, which led to a change in the way in which war is carried out, where war no longer meant direct attacks on the physical body of the enemy, but rather it became a matter of destabilizing the environment that the other person needs to live, and in particular, to breathe. Now, this is a really fascinating way of thinking about how once air becomes weaponized, it changes our very relationship to our own life. Because of course, traditionally we think of air as the element of freedom. It's the element in which we move. It's the element that allows us to breathe and allows us to function. So it's the precondition for the most basic form of human life. But because it's so central to us, the moment it's weaponized, it means that freedom and that survival can be taken away from us in an act of violence.