Chernobyl

We have just commemorated a sad anniversary: 20 years since Chernobyl exploded. I remember like yesterday those days of anxiety when our media were relaying official information claiming that the radio-active pollution had stopped right at the frontiers of [NAME_COUNTRY] (replace with whichever name of European country you want). Of course, for those of us who were following the news in several countries, the inconsistencies were blatant and I remember how they amplified my feeling of insecurity. Remember how all national governments were trying to sound reassuring to "their" citizens? Common folk, uneducated people, we all knew that there was no reason in the world why an ecological disaster would stop at the borders set by humans: pollution needs no passport to "travel". It knows no frontiers. Yet, the official truth was served by established media organizations. Precisely those who plot with the political establishment to limit the freedom of speech on the web. I wonder why... don't you?

An article of protest at the cover-up published in 1986 has been reissued just yesterday on Agoravox and if you speak French, it is definitely worth reading. It is an account of the painful personal experience of a French scientist who scrambled to have a coherent picture amid conflicting reports and incompatible units of measure of radiations and their effects on human health. Above all it shows how citizens feel when governments are cheating with the complicity of established media organizations. And its call for open confrontation of facts when such emergencies are involved is an invitation which we citizens can now accept thanks to the power of the web.