„…for fear is a tame beast.“
Watching HBO’s Chernobyl and subsequent media makes me realise there are two reasons humanity is somewhat doomed to never learn from its mistakes. One is arrogance facing the possibility of black swan events (this time we know, we are prepared, we have thought of every possibility). The other is human nature and the human condition as expressed through its unability to shed primal drives (such as submitting to the pecking order, humans innate respect for authority as shown in the Milgram experiment and finally its need to romanticise the banality of evil – as shown in the mini series).
The message of this excellent piece of docu-fiction still is ideological in nature: every image saying „this was bound to happen in a totalitarian state like the former USSR / soviet system“. And even though Craig Mazin and Johan Renck do a hell of a job in linking it to current events in Trump America – the tag line being „the cost of lies“, it still defers the culpability to the other (the post-factual right as it where). Nothing could be further from the truth…