Quel Tchernobyl ?

Quel Tchernobyl ?

Le dimanche 20 juin 2010, Hervé Kempf, dans Truthout.org, parle, à propos de la catastrophe du Golfe du Mexique, d’un “American Tchernobyl”.

«An uncontrollable industrial catastrophe, a worm-eaten system controlled by a rigid nomenklatura, a dynamic leader who wants to change things: doesn't that remind you of something? Yes, of course: Chernobyl, the Soviet Communist Party, Gorbachev.

»Let's recall the 1980s: during that era, people knew that the USSR was doing poorly, but who would have bet a franc or a dollar on its rapid collapse? Still less so, given that the country had found an appealing and modern leader. From the outset, Gorbachev committed to vigorous reforms (glasnost and perestroika) even as he changed the USSR's foreign policy through detente with Ronald Reagan.

»And then Chernobyl exploded. The catastrophe revealed the system's fragility. In 1989, the Berlin Wall crumbled; in 1991, the USSR was dissolved. Russia entered a decade of hard economic recession.

»People today know that the United States isn't doing well, but who would bet a Euro or a Yuan on that country's rapid collapse? Still less so, given that the country has elected an appealing and modern leader. From the outset, he committed to vigorous reforms (the stimulus and the healthcare law) even as he acknowledged that the United States could no longer run everything in the world.

»And then Deepwater Horizon exploded... The unstoppable gushing of oil provoked is proving to be a historic environmental catastrophe. It simultaneously demonstrates the incompetence of big private companies and (after a first failure during Hurricane Katrina, in 2005) the state's inability to master the situation.

»Like Chernobyl, Deepwater Horizon derives its meaning from its context – that of a society dominated by a capitalist oligarchy that rejects any in-depth change in spite of the financial disaster for which it is responsible. Wall Street remains as solidly attached to its privileges, as were Soviet dignitaries…»

• L’idée d’un “Tchernobyl américain” (américaniste) avait été émise très tôt après la catastrophe Deepwater Horizon, le 3 mai 2010 sur WSWS.org.

«While references are now being made to “Obama’s Katrina,” another comparison is perhaps more telling: Chernobyl. The meltdown of the nuclear reactor in 1985 poisoned a large swath of Ukraine and Belarus and caused an estimated 50,000 deaths. The event showed that, beneath claims of economic prosperity and military strength, the Stalinist regime in the USSR had become petrified and hollow. The initial response of the Stalinist bureaucracy was to conceal and minimize the extent of the disaster. Only with time did its scale reach a broader consciousness. In the process, it exposed the bureaucracy’s incompetence and indifference to the fate of the population.

»For American capitalism, the past three decades have been a period of putrefaction—socially, economically, culturally, and politically. The United States has clung to its position as the world’s dominant military power, but its internal rot has only deepened.

»In the name of “getting government off your back” and unleashing the power of the free market, corporate America was given license to plunder, while the social infrastructure of the country deteriorated drastically—a fact that was revealed most dramatically in the failure of the levees in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina in 2005…»

• Nous-mêmes avions repris et développé cette idée d’un “Tchernobyl américain”, le 31 mai 2010, mais sans élaborer plus avant à propos de cette analogie.

«La tournure politique, sinon philosophique de cette crise, malgré l’absence d’éléments directement politiques et philosophiques, est quasiment instantanée. On ne peut imaginer une réunion plus convaincante de tous les facteurs du système engendrant la crise de civilisation que nous connaissons : les USA et leur American Dream poisseux de pétrole, l’“anglo-saxonisme”, le corporate power, la paralysie du politique et l’incompétence de la bureaucratie, le choix de la thermodynamique et la destruction de l’environnement. C’en est à un point où l’on se demanderait si, plutôt que d’être “le Katrina d’Obama” (ou une “crise des otages” à-la-Carter), cette catastrophe ne pourrait prétendre à devenir, si les circonstances s’y prêtaient, “le Tchernobyl du système de l’idéal de puissance”. (L’un n’empêchant pas l’autre, d’ailleurs, “le Katrina d’Obama” se trouvant à l’intérieur du “Tchernobyl du système de l’idéal de puissance”.)»

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