What is the cost of lies (that nations tell)?

Chernobyl was easily one of the most impressive shows I have watched in a long long time. It owed its brilliance to some intense acting and almost perfect storytelling by the makers. Of course, as I dug deeper, my respect for the makers only grew as I realized how much attention to detail was paid to present every little scenario in the show as accurately as possible. It’s without a doubt a difficult watch and that’s how it’s supposed to be. It’s clearly not a show to entertain but to startle. At its heart, Chernobyl raises questions, and a lot of them. Here I wish to engage with one of them.

The biggest question that Chernobyl left me with was whose truth is it, anyway? Actually, I happened to watch the show after reading this rather bizarre bit of news that in response to the HBO miniseries, Russia is going to produce its own version of the story where it will implicate the Americans for their alleged involvement in the accident. This news piece piqued my interest and ultimately compelled me to give the show a dekko. After watching it, I realized what miffed the Russians so much. The show brilliantly uncovers the entire structures of lies and secrecy and arrogance of the Soviet administration that made Chernobyl an unmitigated disaster. It’s pretty much an arrow shot aiming at the heart of Russian pride. Or at least that’s where it strikes even in 2019, irrespective of its original intended purpose.

It was while thinking about this unfortunate aftermath of the show that my mind stumbled upon the question – Whose truth is it anyway? The Chernobyl disaster is actually a small fragment of the entire thought process here, but a vital starting point. In an ideal world, whatever transpired on that night, we should have come to know about it from the Soviet Govt. itself simply because it happened in their backyard and their people were responsible for and saw it happen in front of their eyes. But that’s not how it panned out. The world was presented a wishy-washy account of the incident by the Soviet administration, which also was only necessitated because other countries detected radiation in their air and there was an explanation to be provided. Had it not been for the air, or could the air be caged, we possibly might have never come to know of whatever little we were given a peep into. The burial of truth, in this case, was a small price for national pride, a pride that transcended the need for truth given the tense political context of the Cold War.

A good three decades down the line, a 300 minute TV series brings the world’s attention on the incident back and uncovers the lies, or at least that’s what it claims. But wait! am I to really believe the account of the incident narrated to me by a TV show produced in a country that was the Soviet Union’s Cold War enemy?the Can’t it possibly be propaganda in the garb of entertainment? Of course, one can say, that it’s not the state’s (US) version of the events and is just a television show. But anyone saying that might need to read up about the use of Hollywood as a propaganda tool during the Cold War. From Bugs Bunny to James Bond, there has always been much more than what meets the eye. In fact, a part of me believes that the brilliant use of mass media during and after the Cold War allowed the US to claim a much bigger victory than they achieved at the end of the Cold War. But that’s a discussion for some other day.

And that’s what brings me to my predicament – Whose truth should I believe in? Is there any truth at all? Is there a possibility that beyond lies and propaganda, there is an aspect of the Chernobyl story that has been conveniently ignored by both sides for it benefits neither’s narrative? As mentioned earlier, Chernobyl and the layers of mystery surrounding the incident help as merely a starting point into this investigation. There are so many events in the history of the world that we possibly know nothing about. Or whatever we do know is actually from a version of truth far away from reality. After all, as Chernobyl the show, told us that the politics of Nationalism (or statecraft) necessitates obfuscation of truth for the greater good. And since for most truths, we go by what the official account says, our quest for knowledge, we would thus realize, stands on thin ice. In fact, it won’t be wrong to say that whatever we know is actually what someone out there wants us to know.

The end of Cold war and the lifting of the Iron Curtain from the Communist world also brought us face to face with the reality that much of the history of nation-states has also been a history of cover-ups and lies, most often for political reasons. It’s not something we didn’t know but the fall of Communism allowed the West to show the extent to which people were kept at dark about what their governments were doing. But trusting that discourse ‘without verifying’ would be reading the victor’s account of conquest, which is known to glorify the winning side at the expense of the losers.

This Matrix of propaganda that our history has lived through makes it difficult for a neutral to believe anything at all. In fact, it’s not far-fetched to say that we might be living in our own little Matrix, after all. In the 2000 movie Matrix, on asked by Neo about what is the Matrix, Morpheus responds by saying "The Matrix is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth." The truths that governments across the world hides from its peoples or the network of lies that this obfuscation results in can pretty well be the illusion that Morpheus warned Neo about in the Matrix. This illusion of knowledge that this network of lies create and the sense of control on our lives that we seem to derive from this illusion is quite possibly the Matrix of our times.