Related:

Fuck me...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster

I'm one of today's lucky 10,000 for Bhopal. Horrific.

Yeah I like the sentiment, but no Chernobyl absolutely did not have such a small effect. Minimizing these things, especially when so well known, just fucks up our position. Reality denial isn't an effective way to advocate or to make people aware of the horrors of capitalism. All it does is train the average person to assume left wing points are childishly exaggerated. This is, in part, why capitalist propaganda is so easy.

Here we just accept the official number and ignore all other effects. If we took the same path with the Bhopaal disaster, we'd have to ignore all the non-fatal poisonings and believe uncritically the official instant death count of just over 2,200 ignoring any deaths to come afterwards. That would be stupid

Chernobyl was a terrible disaster that harmed an absurd amount of people, de-homed thousands, and damaged the ecosystem of the wider area. Its effects and danger are still present to this day and could have been much, much worse if not for the work of those who fixed the massive fuck up.

Both the Bhopal disaster and the Chernobyl disaster were bred by incompetence, corruption, and a general failure to care for the worker and the general population.

Now, if we were to keep a leaderboard, capitalism wins by many miles in the awfulness department. That's the note we should take, that's the drum we should beat.

It wasn't socialism that caused Chernobyl. If the workers, those who built and conceived of the soviet nuclear reactors, were in charge they would have put in the safe guards they advocated for well before this disaster. They were not allowed to and the consequence was a meltdown. That's why we should give the power to the worker. The Bhopal disaster? Capital was the determiner for who had power, and those in power caused the disaster. It was the fault of capitalism as capitalism was allowed to build Union Carbide with little in its way.

Edit: Changed Russian to soviet, re-aranged paragraphs, added clarity

The other one I like to compare is: in the decades that the Berlin Wall - the ultimate symbol of eeeevil gommunist authoritian totalitarianism - existed, fewer people were killed attempting to cross the wall than were murdered by a single US bomb that landed on a girls’ school in Iran in a single day.

I do not know the number of Palestinians that have been murdered by the IOF just for approaching the intentionally vague “yellow line” since the “ceasefire” months ago, but I’m certain it’s higher than the Berlin Wall fatalities.

When people think of a stereotypical ghoulish corporation that would melt their workers into glue after they collapsed from working 50 years in a mine for scrip they are thinking about Union Carbide.

Those are very conservative numbers for Union Carbide.

I knew about Bhopal, but I didn't know it was Union Carbide. Fun fact: Union Carbide ran the Oak Ridge enrichment site for the Manhattan project. They also created the largest American industrial disaster with the Hawk's Nest tunnel disaster. It killed over 700 miners from silicosis by ignoring safety practices. They were bought by Dow Chemicals in 2001. I guess Dow didn't like the competition in the "be a horrible chemical company" market.

Bhopal was in the news for a while. It was the lead story on the nightly news for at least a week. I think nuclear accidents have more staying power due to fear of the unknown. The movie The China Syndrome came out a few years before and many thought they were witnessing the end of the world.

Union Carbide Productions

Awesome 90s underground rock

We remember

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JNkpkkulKcg&ra=m

I guess I'm one of the few.

in the end estimated 50-60.000 people died from cancer related to Chernobyl.

TIL Chernobyl has been re categorised as an oopsie

I mean, I feel like it's at least in part because one of the two still has an exclusion zone today...

Reading up on it though, Bhopal definitely should have one

I feel like this is a bit of an apples to oranges comparison. You should compare Chernobyl to Fukushima and 3 mile island. All of these accidents involved gross incompetence, but the incompetence at Chernobyl was the grossest for any large nuclear disaster in history.

It's because of the potential. Had Chernobyl gone extra wrong (eg had the people in charge there not responded correctly), millions could be hurt, and not just in the Soviet Union. It also dominated the news for months in Europe, with the memory of having to throw away certain homegrown vegetables due to radiation being engraved into the collective consciousness.

Additionally the Bhopal catastrophe happened to Indians and people in the West generally care little for them, due to racism and distance.

Obligatory, there’s a Behind the Bastards about this, a pretty good one

As someone who was alive and nearly a legal adult at this time, I can say that the Bhopal disaster was widely reported on by mainstream media. It's not all that well-remembered today, but neither would Chernobyl be if not for that miniseries and the memes it generated. It's less the result of capitalist propaganda and more the result of our innate apathy towards what happens to brown people halfway around the world.

I learned about that on the Discovery Channel… but okay.

Everyone working with the seveso directive in the EU/EEA. Its widely more know than the poster give credit for among the technical side of the regulators

Chernobyl is remembered because it had real political effects.

Chernobyl could be argued to be worse, at least from a theory perspective, because in an idealized Soviet/Communist system where the working classes are actually looking out for worker interests, the plant operators would have known about RBMK reactor flaws (and probably also would have built a containment building like Western reactors have) which likely would have prevented the disaster. At some point there was some breakdown for whatever reason that prevented this. On the other hand, at Bhopal, there was essentially no hope of worker control at all because it's built within a capitalist system. Profit at the expense of lives is the expected outcome in this system.

tl;dr, it would be nice to see Communists et. al. hold their societies to a higher standard than simply not being as statistically bad as capitalism