Friday, March 11, 2016

On Fukushima's Anniversary


Last night I told my husband that George Orwell was right. We are living in a world resembling Orwell's 1984.

Newspeak, in particular, is everywhere one looks.

Everyday I look at the headlines and read selected stories from the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, the Mainichi and select other Japanese newspapers (Asahi Shimbun free this month!)

Deliberate propaganda infuses reporting, especially in the arenas of economic "recovery" after the 2007-2008 financial crisis and the public health and ecological consequences of industrial catastrophes ranging from the Fukushima crisis to the BP oil spill.

For example, on March 8, 2016 USA Today propagandized with the front-page headline, "Weekly Wages May be Rising Faster than Believed," suggesting that individuals in the bottom half of the workforce are experiencing improved working conditions.

This type of headline is designed to obscure the growing impoverishment of the bottom half (actually 80 percent) of the US workforce, a trend that is well documented, particularly for millennials.

Likewise, the first paragraph of an article in the WSJ on Fukushima reads reassuringly, inviting readers to believe the plant is under control and no longer spewing radioactive particles and gasses into the atmosphere and ocean:
Mayumi Negishi and Eric Pfanner, "Japan Grapples with Fukushima Cleanup: Five Years Later, Concrete Covers Toxic Dust, But Hardest Challenges Remain." The Wall Street Journal, March 10, 2016, A11

Japan--the radioactive rubble has been cleared. Poured concrete has covered the toxic dust. And many workers have traded hazmat suits for surgical masks.... inside the razor-wire fence, the visual scars have mostly healed and an uneasy clam has returned....

Of course this is entirely propaganda. I have documented at my blog that last week there were fire trucks parked at the Futaba intersection while the plant spewed steam. Emissions are down somewhat over the last few days but the belching demon under the plant has merely quieted temporarily and his breath is still visible on the cams:




But Orwell understood that propaganda combined with REPRESSIVE APPARATUSES such as militarized policing, widespread surveillance, and routine physical subjugation of the body (in the myriad checkpoints at airports, public events, and even schools) condition citizens for submission.

Asking questions and/or challenging dominant narratives risk drawing unwanted attention from the repressive apparatuses.

Free speech prevails, for now, but is likely headed the direction of habeas corpus. Besides, free speech has no impact if people fear exercising it.

We have seen how easily the right to free speech is violated in Japan, with the implementation in 2015 of the nation's state secrets law.

In my academic and blog writings I've tried to chronicle the collapse of eco-systems and the growing dispossession of citizens who believed they were guaranteed liberal rights by their constitutions and governmental infrastructures.

Chronicling collapse and growing inequality and charting the full ascendancy of the financial-energy-military complexes has been a time consuming, but relatively straight-forward task given the facts and trajectories that belie newspeak propaganda.

What has been most disconcerting is the ways that established infrastructures in the media, healthcare, and university education collaborate with this growing dispossession by failing to challenge newspeak narratives that deny the catastrophic consequences of our current trajectories.

The cracks in newspeak narratives are obvious, but who will speak truth to power when public apathy and institutional capture prevail?

On Fukushima's anniversary I ponder an increasingly radioactive planet afflicted with externalizing, sociopathic complexes, raging wars and disposable people everywhere one looks....


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4 comments:

  1. At a more naive age we might have though our 'leaders' would take charge and do the best that could be done with the mess that should never have happened. I suppose this is one of the times when we have to talk about intelligence and the fact that political leaders are often not very smart. And when they are all too often they are psychopaths. And finally intelligence can be very selective and apply in some areas and not in others. Beyond that there is feeling which is fairly stunted in a lot people. 'Yes, we know this herbicide is destroying nature, but so what?' Or, 'By the time the radiation is that severe I will be dead.' And so on. It is true that most people have chosen to consider Fukushima a thing of the past like Chernobyl -- which likewise isn't. It helps to assign problems in the Pacific to the unknown, a mystery disease, etc. And when people on the West Coast have problems it will be just 'one of those things'. This could, I suppose, go on indefinitely until hardly anyone is still living anywhere. Or Jesus comes back for the Christians or the Aliens from outer space arrive with a solution.

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    1. This is my fear, that things will just get worse and worse until we either kill ourselves in "all out war" or we reach a situation like that described in Children of Men, widespread health, reproductive and eco-system failures; displaced people crowding, creation of "camps"; etc.

      Seems like that is already starting to happen.

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  2. Weez, William, Majia please don't give up. Your loved ones need you! I know it is hard to write about this stuff. I appreciate what you all share.

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    1. Thank you and thank you all for your comments. I feel that we are helping chronicle the descent, with many others, with the hope that someone enough awareness and personal actions will turn the tide.

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