Chernobyl

"I had a dream... but it's gone" I'm sure everyone already knows how excellent this miniseries is so I'm going to instead take this opportunity to tell you something else you should also already know: Tankies are a waste of oxygen. Filter by negative reviews and you'll see them. Clutching their pearls and desperately throwing whataboutisms at the wall like pissbabies. Why? According to them, this is western propaganda formulated deviously to portray the totally epic and based Soviet Union as actually not that great. So here are some thoughts on that: • It's Western propaganda. I will concede that by some small measure, you could classify this as propaganda. So what? Does that make Soviet propaganda films like The Cranes Are Flying and Come and See less worthwhile? The answer is obviously not. If you only use the term 'propaganda' to be partisan in your criticism, it's completely meaningless. • It's historically innacurate. This is just plain wrong. By the standards of most historical media, it's actually remarkably true to the real events. There are some liberties taken for obvious reasons, ie Emily Watson's character and a number of smaller inaccuracies you'd find in pretty much any similar media. The funniest part is that - since so much of the politics surrounding the Chernobyl disaster are still censored and hidden even in post-Soviet Russia - the series has to rely partially on Soviet sources which are overly kind to the Soviets. • It's message is anti-communist Since I'm not low IQ enough to be an actual Marxist-Leninist this is a pretty laughable criticism to me personally - but I'll bite. Yes, the show is certainly critical of how the Soviet strain of collectivist politics allowed a corrupt political class to inadvertently allow a mass death event to unravel before their own eyes. However, you'd have be either completely pig-headed or actively dishonest if you think that the Soviet Central Committee are the main focus of the show's ire. If anything, the show is maybe a little over-eager to explain "hey guys isn't this eerily similar to how our Western governments are corrupt and slow to react to crises like global warming?" I know writers who use subtext and they're all cowards who work for HBO. The consistent, in-your-face message that Chernobyl delivers so powerfully is that incompetent and self-serving bureaucrats are always the ones who create disasters. Everyday, working class people are the ones who suffer and work to fix them - with their only reward being the knowledge they did the right thing for their country and this case, maybe an agonising death as well. Chernobyl goes to great pains to show the mothers, fathers, firefighters, soliders, nurses and a million other people who suffered unimaginable pain because they did their job, whilst their political elite bickered about who was gonna get the blame. If you watch this show and come away upset that your favourite regimes' party stooges were portrayed as selfish morons - I can only recommend that you sit down for some long overdue introspection.