Civilisation of catastrophe
signandsight: Chernobyl: the unreadable sign
“Chernobyl changed space, but politicians still talk about things in terms of today, there, nearby, foreign. It’s so strange. What does near or far mean when the cloud was hanging over Europe on the second day and over China on the fourth? Even a country that doesn’t build reactors will be hit by the fallout from another country. Chernobyl also changed time. Radionuclides take hundreds of thousands of years to degrade. This is too much for the human imagination. And yet the politicians are deliberately calculating the victim numbers lower than they are. In Belarus alone, two liquidators die every day. They have dozens of diseases: kidney failure, infarcts. Children have radioactive levels that are way above the norm. Chernobyl has only just begun…
We are changing - from a civilisation of fear to a civilisation of catastrophes. Progress has become dangerous, for both humankind and nature … We cannot read the sign of Chernobyl - it’s a foreign text. None of the great writers has dealt with this subject, nor has any philosopher. Chernobyl lies beyond the boundaries of culture.”
Thanks Erik - and feel better soon!