National Post (National Edition)
What crises tell us about regimes
THE MONEY HAS TO COME FROM SOMEWHERE. — KELLY McPARLAND
The world is afloat with rumours, theories, conspiracies and other twisted thinking about the coronavirus that first appeared in Wuhan, China, and is now spreading to neighbouring countries and has even reached North America.
One of the more pernicious claims is that anyone who points the finger for the pandemic at China is a racist. Coronavirus did not start in Iceland, and there is no point in pretending that anyone who mentions the word “China” in discussing the disease is engaging in racist behaviour.
Another theory is that the coronavirus will have the same effect on the dictatorship of Xi Jinping that Chernobyl, which occurred in 1987, had on the collapse of the Soviet Union just two years later.
That is also wrong. There is, however, one factor that threads together natural and man-made disasters that occur in dictatorships with those that take place in democracies. And that factor is how dictatorships handle these disasters as opposed to how they have been handled by democracies.
Let’s take four examples: the meltdown at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station in Dauphin County, Pa., in late March 1979; the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan on March 11, 2011; the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown that began on April 26, 1986; and the current coronavirus pandemic.
Three Mile Island occurred when one of the reactors in the complex suffered a partial meltdown and socalled safety systems failed to prevent radiation leaks into the atmosphere. The operators of the reactor failed to react to the meltdown partially because they had not trained to respond to such a situation and partly because they simply did not understand what was happening.
The escape of radioactive gases and radioactive iodine caused a minor uptick in nuclear-related diseases in the immediate area of the reactor complex but the only real long-term damage was to the nuclear industry itself, which virtually ceased to operate generators in the United States in the years following.
Three Mile Island was extensively covered by the media almost as soon as anyone was aware of the accident. TV crews kept a close watch on the event for days. Legislators asked penetrating questions about the construction of the plant, and government investigators spent months on inquiries about what happened and how it could be prevented in future.
In Japan in 2011, an earthquake and a tsunami hit the Fukushima reactor complex on the east coast of the country. The tsunami overflowed the retaining wall that was supposed to protect the emergency generators that might have flooded the reactors with sea water. Those generators were supposed to provide the coolant that would be necessary if anything went wrong with the reactors. The damage to the reactor complex was extensive and much radiation was released into the atmosphere. Over 150,000 residents living in a 20-mile radius of the disaster were evacuated. It will take decades for the area to be decontaminated at tremendous cost. But so far almost no nuclear disease after-effects have been discerned.
Here too, as in Three Mile Island, news of the disaster spread very quickly and the Japanese and international media took up watch as the disaster unfolded. A year later the Japanese Diet (parliament) determined that the accident should have been foreseeable and that the plant operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company, had failed to take proper action at the time of the incident.
Chernobyl was the worst nuclear accident ever. The immediate reaction of the Soviet government was to cover up. Everyone in the vicinity of Chernobyl was aware of the dire consequences of the reactor explosion but Moscow did its very best to suppress news of the disaster. Its ruse was quickly uncovered as a nuclear cloud drifted over parts of northern Europe. Today no one knows how many people died as a result of the disaster; estimates run from 4,000 to 16,000.
And then there is the coronavirus and the Chinese government’s efforts from the time the virus was identified to cover up its nature and extent. And who knows if we will ever know how the pandemic began and how it initially spread?
Dictatorships are perfect. Nothing in them ever goes wrong. And when it does, the first impulse of the government is self-preservation by lying and coverup. In democracies, disasters happen, of course, but for the most part in the full glare of publicity and the promise of full investigation afterward.
WHO KNOWS IF WE WILL EVER KNOW HOW THE PANDEMIC BEGAN.