Clive Irving - America's Chernobyl
Indeed, climate change can be seen like a
slow motion version of Chernobyl on a far larger scale - a runaway failure of
control over forces of enormous energy with the entire planet at risk. In
responding to it the White House has come to resemble a kind of bastard
combination of deregulated capitalism and Soviet-style perversion of language,
an American version of the politburo.
HBO’s Chernobyl is terrifying and engrossing drama but its creator, Craig Mazin, also intended it to be a modern parable. He says he was motivated partly to present it as a riposte to the global war on truth. Actually, it can be seen as more than that. It serves as a salutary warning of the global war on scientific truth. The villain of the story is not a single character but the collective Soviet system of governance. George Orwell nailed the essence of this style of totalitarianism when he wrote, “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
In Mazin’s narrative
there are two kinds of casualties. As the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear
plant unspools, some of the lead players are radiated into a mass of pustules.
But the first casualty on screen is truth – delivered in the opening scene when
the saint and martyr of the story, Valery Legasov, played with perfect pitch by
Jared Harris, utters the thematic message: “What is the cost of lies? Can we no
longer recognize the truth at all?”
Later in Moscow the
assembled apparatchiks, seated before their leader Mikhail Gorbachev, do their
best to swat away Legasov’s warning that if they don’t get their act together
fast a vast swath of Central Europe will be rendered uninhabitable for 100 years. Gorbachev, viewed by
history as the decisive mortician of the Soviet Union, is portrayed here as
surprisingly irresolute. You sense that he might well be asking, like Henry II,
“will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”
I found some of these
scenes riskily close to Armando Iannucci’s masterful parody The Death
of Stalin where the politburo reaches levels of self-abasement worthy
of Mitch McConnell. But Mazin is deadly serious in setting up Legasov as a
whistleblower who will eventually be crushed and rendered into a nonperson as
the system closes ranks. And that’s where Chernobyl - not
as drama but as parable - misleads and misfires. It lulls us into the false
comfort of believing that only a system as decayed as Russia’s could so
ruthlessly treat scientific truth as a disobliging heresy, even when millions
of lives could be at risk by suppressing it.
To see it that way in
Trump’s America would be the ultimate hypocrisy. The Trump administration is
engaged in an attack on scientific truth every bit as brazen as anything in the
history of the Soviet Union as it sweeps aside all warnings about the
consequences of climate change. Indeed, climate change
can be seen like a slow motion version of Chernobyl on a far larger scale - a
runaway failure of control over forces of enormous energy with the entire
planet at risk. In responding to it the White House has come to resemble a kind
of bastard combination of deregulated capitalism and Soviet-style perversion of
language, an American version of the politburo... read more:
