The Chernobyl Netflix Series Is A Political Propaganda
The Chernobyl TV show has nothing to do with the real event. It portrays nuclear energy as evil, Russia as the Satan, men as incompetent and close-minded loonies and women as bright heroes that save the day. Propaganda has taken a new form. It has become our entertainment and sadly... our education. I won't even touch on the science since it is also misleading.
Considering how the entertainment industry has evolved there is nothing much to be done. The show seems to be astonishing from an artistic and entertaining perspective so inevitably most people won't question what they see any further. Messages are received at face value based on emotion. Most viewers never read about the real events of Chernobyl. The series is their first source. There is new way for education in town and it is not as pretty as we think it is.
Next time most viewers have to vote between nuclear and renewable energy they will be inclined to scorn something that was exaggerated on TV and scared the living shit out of them. They will see Russia as evil and stubborn. They will look down on men in leadership positions and promote women for a better tomorrow.
That wasn't my takeaway. I thought it was very well done. Maybe what we take away from the series depends on the perspective we go into it with.
What I saw this series attacking was not the Soviet Union nor the concept of nuclear power. Rather, it attempted to highlight what happens when you entrust a process in which details are important to an organizational structure whose inherent nature involves an endless attempt to get truth to bow to ideology.
This flaw in bureaucracy is not inherent to the Soviet system. It is what all bureaucracies do, whether we are talking about our own political bureaucracy or the bureaucracies that run our businesses, or our medical system, or the research that determines our perspective on climate change.
But details are important. To everything. And putting our hands over our ears in response to details that do not conform to our political ideology eventually destroys us all.
That's why Legasov's "quotes" ( I know these are not quotes from the real Legasov) echo in our heads, or at least should:
"The truth doesn’t care about our needs or wants. It doesn’t care about our governments, our ideologies, our religions. It will lie in wait, for all time."
"When the truth offends, we lie and lie until we cannot even remember it's there. But it is still there."
These quotes could be used in a documentary about the 2008 financial crisis and more broadly to discuss the entire concept of fiat money and central banking and the process of financialization -- to discuss what destroying the informational content of supply and demand and wealth and value does to a system which depends on all of these to maintain balance and healthy productivity.
They could be used in a documentary about the catastrophic decision to attack Iraq over non-existent WMD or more broadly to discuss the concept of empire and what chasing it does to a nation.
They could be used to describe a scientistic mindset hell-bent on replacing the balance of nature with the dictatorship of chemicals no matter how badly it thins ecological buffers and eventually destroys the ecology along with ourselves.
And it could also describe a political system gone off the rails as it turns its powers of investigation against its own citizen politicians and attempts to stifle free speech and necessary discourse in favor of the brain dead monotony of political correctness.
The flaws in the concept of Communism, Socialism, and Fascism are all the same -- they defer to central control, which means they ignore feedback as a mechanism of steering a system.
The opposite end of the spectrum is freedom, which allows feedback to steer a system unhindered. This conversation desperately needs to happen in our society because we are losing the big picture, which is why we have Antifa running around beating up people whose political ideas they disagree with in the name of protecting us from a system that beats up people whose political ideas we disagree with. Insanity -- but that's how you can smell approaching totalitarianism.
I applaud your analysis and I agree but the series steers far from reality. Luckily the Russians are planning the own movie do we can see where the conflict arises.
I didn't know that but look forward to watching it!
Russia does suck to be tbh. But I'm also Finnish, so I have reasons to hate Russia.