"Anywhere from two to 2,000 people near the plant were reported to have been killed by causes ranging from the initial blast to lethal radiation," Time magazine reported immediately following 1986's nuclear power plant disaster at Chernobyl, Ukraine in the USSR. Five years later, USA Today contended that up to 10,000 people had died. About a decade after that, the BBC pointed to an estimate of 15,000 deaths. This week, a UN commission of 100 scientists placed the death toll at 56. Environmentalists, anti-Communists, and media sensationalists all had motive to inflate the enormity of the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe. No nuclear power plants have been built in Europe or North America since. The event gave a black eye to Mikhail Gorbachev's government, reinforcing the point that, despite the youthful makeover at the top, this was the same old Soviet Union. And, like the fabrications surrounding the current tragedy, Chernobyl myths sold newspapers. The lesson? Don't believe everything you read--unless I write it.
I was watching AMC (American Movie Classics) the other day, and they were advertising a series of movies they were going to air as films that had somehow "changed" the world. The used "Fatal Attraction" as the film that ended adultery, which of course, it didn't. It also cited "The China Syndrome" as the movie that killed the future of nuke plants in the U.S.
While I'm not certain this was the case either, the film cerainly didn't aid the cause of the generation of electricity through clean, renewable nuclear power. But just as its opponents fabricated the extent of the Chernobyl disaster, the film's creators fabricated a disaster that patently impossible. Isn't it interesting that so many Liberal causes require their proponents to lie in order to further their pet projects? The percentage of gays in the country at 10% versus 1.5%, the number of homeless at an impossible 3,000,000, the "fact" that guns in homes are more likely to be used against the home's occupants: all fabrications with no basis in reality. All designed to obfuscate and avoid dealing in reality.
I've always agreed with the statement that facts to Liberals are like kryptonite (green kryptonite, that is!) to Superman. The Chernobyl facts are simply one more example.
