Guest Post by Hardscrabble Farmer

In the Spring of 1986 the Soviet Union was in a slow motion collapse. No one in the US intelligence agencies predicted it, the military was taken completely by surprise and no apologies were ever made for the thirty year, multi-trillion dollar oversight. It’s political and social institutions were Potemkin villages kept alive by little more than inertia yet on the outside everything appeared normal, and if not healthy, at least it seemed monolithic in it’s outward appearance.

The structural rot that had taken hold after the death of Stalin had become the central pillar of Eastern European civilization and the foundation upon which it was built- the blood of tens of millions of murdered citizens- softened the ground further, leading to it’s eventual implosion five short years later. On the 26th of April a failed experiment at a nuclear power plant in the Ukraine initiated a slow and steady series of system failures, leading to a full blown meltdown that forced the evacuation of tens of thousands of inhabitants from the exclusion zone.

Most Americans recall the event as a catastrophic ecological disaster that threatened- at that time- to spread radioactive particles across wide swaths of Europe, poisoning the groundwater that fed the Dnieper River, leading directly to the Black Sea. No one was certain in the aftermath of the extent of the damage, nor of the ability of the Soviet system to respond truthfully to international inquiries. It was assumed throughout the Free and Democratic nations of the West that the USSR was incapable of sharing anything that would reflect poorly on their ability to govern.

The Cold War was still in full force and despite offers from the NATO alliance including the US to render aid, the Soviet Union remained steadfast in it’s commitment to face any political exigency. What happened in Chernobyl, stayed in Chernobyl, except for the radioactivity. That spread out across the Earth like a funeral shroud, unchecked by Marxist dogma.

The United States has entered it’s terminal phase and most of it’s citizens are as blithely unaware of this reality as they were of the impending dissolution of the Soviet system in the late 1980’s. On the surface each one projects it’s hegemony and influence far beyond their limitations through a combination of propaganda and threats. Both systems were thoroughly corrupted, perhaps from their inception, but certainly and absolutely as they neared their nadir, yet both systems affected a nonchalance that soon- very soon, every knee would bend before their majesty and morally superior aspirations.

For the USSR it was based upon the trite concept that everyone should share equally of the labors of others when no such possibility ever existed during mankind’s reign over the Earth. In America it was the equally vapid and hollow claim that all men are created equal when no such thing had ever been so at any time, nor could it ever be possible. To base an entire National mythos on pure sophistry is a guarantee of failure and yet their remains an eternal optimism rooted in these fanciful phrases that distorted and diffused before our eyes.

The elites always managed somehow, regardless of the system and it’s ideals, to rise above equality and find a toehold in a neo-aristocracy, where rather than blood-ties, loyalties were developed in the institutions and secret societies; Ivy League universities, Intelligence agencies, International banking cartels, Media conglomerates and Corporate boardrooms. The differences between the Politburo under Gorbachev and the current Congress are most noticeable in attire and decor rather than in behavior and outcomes.

In America today here is a complete symbiosis between the organs of information- the MSM- and the political parties and their apparatchiks, and it is used solely for the control of the populations and the promotion of The Narrative rather than as a means of explaining the events of the day. Much in the same way that the Soviet Union new organizations Pravda (Truth) and Izvestia (News) were able to control information to such a degree that the people of the USSR joked that “there is no truth in Pravda and no news in Izvestia”, the current state of media in America is summed up in the equally derogatory slur. “Fake News”.

The populations are keenly aware that they are being misled, but are powerless- in their minds- to do anything about it. The problem of course isn’t that the populations fail to believe the lies, but that the elites of both systems have chosen falsehoods as their basic premise for rule. Any system predicated upon falsehoods cannot survive the exposure of those lies when reality comes knocking.

The current HBO series Chernobyl is a compelling examination of the personal experiences of those brave, and cowardly citizens and officers of the dying USSR who either rose to the challenge or deliberately impeded the process in the aftermath of the nuclear meltdown. While minor party officials clung desperately to the fiction they had been operating under for their entire lifetime, passing the blame for their failures or deliberately ignoring physical reality in order to keep up appearances of competency, simple soldiers and civilian volunteers freely gave their lives in order to save those of their fellow man.

It is both heart wrenching and exasperating to watch the honorable men and women of the Ukraine work night and day to mitigate a disaster they had no part in causing while those responsible for the faulty engineering and inadequate training sought only to promote themselves by concealing the full scope of the disaster. In this series, whether unintentionally or not, it becomes quite clear what a population can expect when forced to submit to the venal and obsequious for political gain and just how similar our current situation is today.

The unwinding tale of Russian collusion, with all of it’s reeking details rooted in pure fiction, have done nothing to resolve the deeper issues that cause the greatest amount of suffering for the population. It has, in fact, rent the fabric of an already frayed body politic, driving the divide further apart than at any other time since the War Between the States. It is clear that these animosities and resentments are being deliberately stoked by a compliant press in order to sow division so that no one might notice the wholesale plunder of the American people by a small cohort of deeply corrupted and morally bankrupt criminals who care nothing for the country they are employed to serve.

Like their counterparts in the Soviet era they live lives completely detached from the populations they pretend to champion and in fact work tirelessly to strip from them the last vestiges of their God-given rights under the pretext of keeping them safe. They know neither shame nor guilt and their avarice is second only to their venality making them equally corrupt and unrepentant.

Several years ago I became acquainted with the FedEx driver who serves our region. I recognized his Russian accent and one afternoon while exchanging hellos it was revealed that he had served in a Soviet Airborne unit. I told him that I too was a former paratrooper and as we traded stories it was revealed that we had crossed paths, in October of 1983 on the island of Grenada. My squad had secured the campus in St. Georges and after rescuing several dozen American med school students that had been trapped in their dorm for several days, we moved on the Soviet Embassy to protect the ambassador until transportation could be arranged.

The FedEx drive had been assigned as a guard for the facility and I was on the other side of the fence, rifles pointed in both directions. Both of us traded enough details to assure each other that we’d both been in that same place at that same time, and over time we became fairly good friends. I can say without reservation that the two of us share far more in common than I do with anyone currently serving in Washington D.C. and that he shares the same sentiments about his former country and the politicians who ran things. Soldiers, workers, farmers, citizens, regardless of their homeland are more or less similar in their beliefs and behaviors than the politicians and mandarins who serve them in the citadels of power.

Commoners, the comrade class in the USSR and the Deplorables of flyover country, are the ones who grease the wheels of civilization and keep it functioning. They are more than satisfactory as cannon fodder and as dependents of The State, but in the eyes of the ruling classes they are disposable. In the aftermath of the explosions at Chernobyl nearly three quarters of a million souls were used like donkeys to rid the world of the radioactive debris, to tunnel underneath the core itself to prevent further contamination of the water table and to relocate their fellow citizens, often against their will while the heads of state continued to spin their fantasies of a controlled situation.

And that is our present situation today in America, where our betters have sold us out to foreign interests, undermined our history and culture in order to usher in a utopian fantasy that they neither believe in, nor practice while we suffer in a simmering silence, filled with righteous indignation, on the verge of a meltdown of equal proportions to that of April 26th, 1986.

It would be impossible to predict exactly what set of circumstance will lead us to our own moment of complete and undeniable political collapse, where tanks surround the Capitol rather than the Kremlin, but it approaches, slouching towards Gomorrah. The disaster of Chernobyl may have appeared on the surface to have been a failure of engineering, poor training and scientific ineptitude, but it was more the direct result of a failed political system built on paranoia, rooted in lies, and nursed at the twin teats of corruption and degeneracy.

Our own system is far worse today, having grown to enormous size and influence globally, while practicing callous indifference to it’s own citizenry in every form, and endlessly lashing out with organized violence across the face of the Earth in the name of Freedom and Democracy. The hypocrisy required to maintain such a ideological system has strained what little is left that still holds us together. Whatever triggers our own dissolution is yet to be revealed, but it is coming and when it does there will be a reckoning not unlike the one experienced by the Supreme Soviet that saw it’s entire premise swept away in the blink of an eye while the world turned away, indifferent to the loss.

Chernobyl was an event that never need have happened and at every step along the route to that ecological and political debacle there was room to correct and repair the structural damage that led to its inevitable outcome. And just like today, there was no one left with the moral compass to correct the failures when they were still possible, creating something less than Destiny and more of a reckoning well earned.



The corrupt establishment will do anything to suppress sites like the Burning Platform from revealing the truth. The corporate media does this by demonetizing sites like mine by blackballing the site from advertising revenue. If you get value from this site, please keep it running with a donation. [Jim Quinn - PO Box 1520 Kulpsville, PA 19443] or Paypal -----------------------------------------------------The corrupt establishment will do anything to suppress sites like the Burning Platform from revealing the truth. The corporate media does this by demonetizing sites like mine by blackballing the site from advertising revenue. If you get value from this site, please keep it running with a donation. [Jim Quinn - PO Box 1520 Kulpsville, PA 19443] or Paypal