Trust the State?

I recently watched the HBO mini-series Chernobyl. I don’t normally watch anything from them, but this one was worth the time. It chronicles the events leading up and the couple years following the disaster at Chernobyl’s #4 reactor in the spring of 1986.

Watch the clip below and see if you see any similarities between the official narrative then, versus the official narrative now.

The series is in five episodes, each exploring a different stage of the crisis. In the first episode we get a foundation for the disaster. The power plant workers who are in the know, are ignored by their superiors and the whole apparatus is ran by party bosses who are not only unfamiliar with how their job should be performed, but are woefully incompetent. Their main concerns are chances for promotion and protecting the party’s image, rather than doing an adequate job.

Choosing to believe their own lies, the party apparatus sends men and women to their deaths based not on science or even a simple accounting of the previous hours events. Instead their actions are driven by the need to save face and maintain interparty standing. Finally towards the end of the episode, the competent actors meet the pragmatic members of the party, the ones who know in their gut things aren’t right.

Later in the series, the true heroes begin to emerge. The firemen that received a lethal dose trying to put out a fire they were told was simply a roof fire. The citizen scientists who risked imprisonment for simply being honest about what happened and having to push the state to take the appropriate action. The Coal miners who dug the access tunnels under the reactor, forced to work naked because the party refused to provide them with fans to cool the tunnel. These were all people who did what they must not because of money or glory, but because the people needed them.

As the series wrapped up, it was eerie to see how much of today’s bureaucratic morass in the west resembles that of the former soviet union. So much so, it is as if the same architect drew up the plans.

Leadership at all levels obsessed with maintaining their status or bucking for promotion, despite displaying gross incompetence. Policies based not in what is best for society as a whole, but instead on maintaining power at all costs. An entire political construct built solely on lies, by people who not only were comfortable with the lies, but who had been telling them so long they no longer knew what the truth was.

In the final episode comes the accounting, the final act with the truth laid bare for all to see. As Valery Legasov said “every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth, sooner or later that debt is paid. Though once I would fear the cost of truth, now I only fear the cost of lies”

The cost of lies is nearly always paid by the suffering of the innocent. How much will the lies of today, cost us tomorrow?