The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (officially the Vladimir Lenin Nuclear Power Plant) in Ukraine lies just outside the abandoned town of Pripyat, about sixty miles north of Kyiv and ten miles from the southern border of Belarus.  It is the site of the catastrophic 1986 nuclear accident that took the lives of hundreds from acute radiation syndrome, left unknown thousands with cancer, and poisoned the surrounding environment.  It cost nearly a hundred billion dollars to contain, required over a half-million recovery workers to decontaminate the area, and killed or disabled a third of the Russians, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Latvians, Estonians, and others involved in that cleanup.  Those workers, as well as the surrounding populations, have all experienced increased rates of miscarriages, cancer, and life-threatening ailments.  Had so many not sacrificed themselves to contain the fallout, however, Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and much of Germany could have become uninhabitable for more than a century.

Chernobyl is back in the news because Russian troops have taken control of the area during their invasion of Ukraine.  The International Atomic Energy Agency and European nations throughout the continent are understandably nervous about this predicament, but this essay is not about those concerns.  It is about the lessons Western governments should have learned from that nearly apocalyptic event but instead ignored during the last two years of COVID mania.  

As details concerning the Chernobyl disaster became available after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the West reached the inescapable conclusion that the tragedy could have occurred only in a closed-off socialist system in which the State preserves its authority by maintaining a false image of always being correct and never being wrong.  The lessons were clear:

(1) When "science" must be State-sanctioned, then the objectivity required to foresee and correct problems disappears. 

(2) When dissent and conflicting analysis are treated as "misinformation" or "disinformation," then truth is routinely treated as a lie.  

(3) When concerns for national security and a culture of official State secrets dominate all government operations, then censorship of facts and viewpoints prevents timely problem-solving. 

Institutional lies have life-and-death consequences.  The Chernobyl nuclear explosion was both a consequence of government lies and a blaring warning against closed socialist systems, "official truths," and State-controlled censorship.  Still, the West disregarded all of this during COVID and followed the Soviets' example.

HBO aired a five-part miniseries on Chernobyl in 2019, and the well-done effort to catalog the fateful events leading up to the nuclear blast masterfully exposes how State lies and State secrets lead to profound human tragedy.  As the series moves back and forth from conversations among engineers at the power plant to high-level discussions among political apparatchiks advising Soviet president Gorbachev, nearly everyone involved is incapable of processing the overwhelming evidence that a nuclear explosion had occurred because doing so would mean that the "system" had failed horrendously.  It was easier to embrace the lie that everything was fine than to acknowledge that the Soviet model was capable of error.  

When a dissenting scientist repeatedly expresses his belief that a reactor meltdown and explosion has occurred, the power plant's director calls his analysis "disgraceful."  "I understand you've been saying dangerous things," he scolds the professor, before accusing him of spreading outright "disinformation."  At another point during the series, as the team on the ground struggles to dispose of radioactive graphite, only to learn that the Soviet government has intentionally lied about the seriousness of the incident to the Germans providing equipment inadequate for the monumental task at hand, an exasperated party member (who already knows he will one day die from exposure) sardonically moans, "The official position of the State is that a global nuclear catastrophe is not possible in the Soviet Union."  

It is impossible to watch this show, released over six months before people first heard about COVID, without concluding that it was a remarkably prescient description of Western governments' reactions to the pandemic.  What has been the most terrifying aspect of these last two years of unconscionable lockdowns, mandates, maskings, and forced injections?  It was not the COVID-19 virus or the illness and death it has caused.  It was Western governments' near-unanimous declarations that the State is always correct in its assessments of scientific problems and that the application of force against citizens is justified.  

When the pandemic was beginning and health officials declared cloth masks ineffective, State science was above reproach.  When health authorities changed their minds months later and declared cloth masks mandatory, State science was still above reproach.  Now that once again the weight of evidence has proved that masks did next to nothing to mediate the spread of disease, the State science has flipped but still claims a record of infallibility.  More and more evidence is proving that lockdowns and reckless government spending did nothing but destroy small businesses, family savings, and national economies.  Still, those who resisted house arrest, financial destitution, or other State-ordered threats to liberty were labeled criminals or worse, domestic terrorists.  Just as with Chernobyl, protecting the authority of the State by hiding its (often ridiculous) lies has been more important than saving actual lives.

When dissenting scientists repeatedly tried to warn about the harm lockdowns would have on childhood development, timely cancer treatment, drug, and alcohol dependency, and rates of suicide, their concerns were dismissed as contrary to the mission of the State.  When dissenting scientists questioned the need for widespread dissemination of synthetic mRNA "vaccines" when evidence for the enduring effectiveness of natural immunity was increasingly strong, they were labeled "anti-vaxxers" and "science deniers" deserving of scorn.  When dissenting scientists warned about using mRNA "vaccines" without first performing critical long-term studies on their potential side-effects, they were de-platformed from government-controlled social media, censored on YouTube and Facebook, and scrubbed from internet search engines.  Yet an awful lot of what has been labeled as "misinformation" or "disinformation" by the West's state-corporate globalist cartel these last two years has proven to be either likely or one hundred percent true.  For those COVID- or "vaccine"-related issues that remain uncertain, the CDC, the FDA, or individual pharmaceutical companies have taken it upon themselves to hide or bury the information from public view.  Still to this day, the question of whether COVID-19 was developed in a Chinese lab funded by American taxpayers has been shrouded by Intelligence Community obfuscation.  Were there any doubt before, it is indisputable that state secrets — Soviet or Western — always come before public health.

Nothing the West has done in response to COVID distinguishes it from the Soviets' handling of the preventable Chernobyl tragedy.  After brute force was used against citizens from Australia and New Zealand to Austria and Democrat-controlled cities in the U.S., Canada's recent "emergency" declaration and bank account confiscation against protesting citizens proved just how Sovietized the West has become.  The worst part is that everything done against us has been repeatedly defended as for our own good. 

As an old communist in the Chernobyl miniseries exclaims before a rousing ovation: "The State tells us it wants to prevent a panic.  Listen well!  It's true, when the people see the police, they will be afraid.  But it is my experience that when the people ask questions that are not in their own best interest, they should simply be told to keep their minds on their labor and leave matters of the State to the State.  We seal off the city.  No one leaves.  And cut the phone lines.  Contain the spread of misinformation.  That is how we keep the people from undermining the fruits of their own labor." 

Tell me that doesn't sound just like Justin Trudeau, Jacinda Ardern, or Joe Biden.

Image: ChristianIS via Pixabay, Pixabay License.