and the Worst Years Ever,

Was 2020 the worst year ever? The National Post puts a silly question to a serious test by stacking 2020 up against other years of plague, war, genocide and human misery, all to answer the unusually urgent question of what makes a bad year the worst.

If 2020 had an animal mascot, it was the Murder Hornet. Murder Hornets were a big part of why 2020 seemed so bad. They popped up on most people’s radar around May, after the initial shock of the pandemic had passed. They arrived like a punchline. Headlines about them were everywhere. They sounded like some plague on Egypt in Exodus. Not that they were particularly threatening to people. Mostly they are a threat to honeybees. They just seemed to fit the mood though. Their name was good insect marketing, but it is not their proper name.

To bug professionals, Murder Hornets are actually Asian giant hornets, or Japanese giant hornets, and as such they are also prime examples of a long- standing pattern of nomenclature for bad things, a key ingredient of bad years.

“Africanized” killer bees swarming into America from the south were another notable case that once caught public attention. North American invasions of pests as diverse as carp and fungus have been tagged as “Asian.” Federally regulated invasive species in Canada include Chinese yam, Syrian bean- caper and South African ragwort.

People tend to blame other countries and continents for the nastiness of the natural world, and this is one of the ways in which bad years get remembered: as someone else’s fault, far away.

Hence, the China Virus, the Wuhan Flu. The Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-19, which started in America, was variously known in other countries as the German Flu, the French Flu, the Brazilian Flu, and others. But what stuck is the Spanish Flu, largely because Spain was neutral in the Great War, seen as a mixing place, but also because its press reports on the outbreak were uncensored, making it seem worse there than in other places, although it was not.

To the righteous annoyance of Spaniards, this name lasted, and gave way to assigning moral blame for communicable disease, the same stigmatizing impulse that would later show up in the AIDS pandemic. To this day, an estimated 500 million cases and 50 million deaths are assigned to the Spanish Flu.

Spread initially among soldiers, the Spanish Flu pandemic was also occurring during the worst warfare the world had ever known, in which an estimated 40 million civilians and soldiers died before the Armistice in November, when the virus was at the peak of its second wave.

As a bad year, 1919 projects a legacy through history because the Great War remained fundamentally unresolved, despite grand visions at peace treaty negotiations in Versailles.

It was a bad year for the astonishing scale of death alone, arguably the Worst Year Ever, at least until Germany went to war again.