Chernobyl killed just 31 ppl thx to competent disaster management. A far more appropriate (but less ideologically convenient) comparison is India’s Bhopal Disaster, which claimed 4-16k lives when US company Union Carbide ignored safety procedures and poisoned an entire city. 🧵
The Bhopal disaster was the deadliest industrial accident in history and, like the East Palestine derailment, completely preventable.
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
And yet it’s Chernobyl, not Bhopal, that immediately comes to mind, for several reasons:
1) Anticommunism
2) American corporations don’t want ppl to associate them with mass death
2) The victims were a colonized people whose suffering Westerners have long been trained to ignore
1) Anticommunism
2) American corporations don’t want ppl to associate them with mass death
2) The victims were a colonized people whose suffering Westerners have long been trained to ignore
While American corporations poison people in Ohio, the US military routinely poisons its own service members, their families and local communities from Camp Lejeune to occupied Hawaiʻi and Okinawa.
The US military’s wanton negligence kills and poisons thousands even as it purports to be defending Americans. What it is actually defending is the foreign interests of American corporations like Norfolk Southern and Union Carbide.
Like any abuser, the imperialist USA always accuses its victims of its own crimes. Expect an upsurge of news coverage (propaganda) about environmental issues in countries which challenge American corporate interests, such as China, Venezuela, and Bolivia.
Also look for these bad actors to attempt to shift the blame onto individual workers. In the case of Norfolk Southern, unionized workers last year threatened to strike because of the company’s dangerous, negligent profit-maximizing practices, ones not unlike those in Bhopal.
US imperialism - the marriage of monopoly capital and militarism - is the greatest threat to our planet. Despite what they would have you believe, they can be beaten. Successful strategy will require labor struggles and anti-imperialism, which is why both have been so demonized.
Imperialists work hard to obscure what imperialism really is, promoting definitions which absolve them of culpability. If the connection btw corporate capitalism and US militarism is unclear to you, Michael Parenti’s work is great place to start learning.
outrun.substack.com
outrun.substack.com
If you have the means, please check out and support @SDRHMutualAid, a local mutual aid group working to protect Oʻahu’s water supply from further contamination and provide clean water to many of the 93,000 people poisoned by the Navy in 2021-2022.
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