Could “Chernobyl Denial” be a thing in Russia? | DailyKos

2 years ago 215

The Russian army invaded Ukraine and among the places they occupied, for awhile anyway, was the site of the worst nuclear disaster in history, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.

Not only did the Russian army take Chernobyl, they had their soldiers dig into the soil for foxholes and defensive lines in an area known as “the red forest”. The Red Forest is one of the most radioactive places on Earth. The soil is full of radioactive isotopes which can quickly lead to sickness or even death in a short time.

Digging into the ground stirs up radioactive contaminated dust which gets into the occupiers’ noses, mouths, throats and lungs. Radioactive dust gets into stomachs and intestines via being swallowed from the air and from dust settling on food and water.

Therefore it was not surprising to anyone with even a middle-school science knowledge that Russian soldiers became sick or worse within a few weeks of the invasion thus leading to an abandonment of the red forest and Chernobyl.

Thus the question here, why did the Russian Army occupy such a provenly dangerous area?

One likely reason is that Russian Army leaders, i.e. Putin cronies and Generals, do not care about the lives of the average solders and considered them acceptable losses for Mother Russia and the glory of Czar Vlad.

I propose another reason beyond mere indifference to death, Chernobyl Denialists.

I did a bit of quick googling and I discovered that there are indeed Chernobyl denialists. They don’t typically deny that anything happened at Chernobyl, but rather they claim that the negative health effects of the radioactivity have been exaggerated. They claim that there were few or zero actual deaths resulting from the Chernobyl accident. They claim that if even if there was once a problem, the problem has passed and there is currently little to no problems with going into the Chernobyl exclusion zone. Of course, I doubt many such deniers willingly were among those digging and encamped in the Red Forest.

What are the motives for Chernobyl denial? There are the economic motives of having a large section of land blocked off from use of it’s resources. There are the usual antigovernmental, deep-state, shadowy forces conspiracy hypotheses common to groups like Q and others throughout human history. There are those who are pro-nuclear power who deny Chernobyl was serious in order to deflect from the risks of nuclear power, although to be clear, Chernobyl was a very old, obsolete, and dangerous design and it was stupidly mismanaged and not representative of the latest generation designs for nuclear power plants.

Back to the Russian Invasion and the sick and dying soldiers. I propose that there may well be a group of Chernobyl denialists among Putin cronies and Generals who saw no problem with sending in their troops to the Red Forest around Chernobyl. Quite possibly, even now, they remain denialists even in spite of the busloads of sick and dying troops coming out. Perhaps they are cooking up conspiracies about how the US poisoned the troops or that the sick troops did something to themselves because they are cowards who didn’t want to fight. Consider how anti-vax COVID-19 deniers in the USA are reacting to the reality of mass sickness and death from the ongoing pandemic.

All IMHO.

#jtg