DEMOCRACY CAN BEAT NUCLEAR POWER

DEMOCRACY CAN BEAT NUKES

Andrew McKillop

June 2011

Even the constitutionality of holding a referendum where the people are allowed to say Yes or No to nuclear power was “controversial” in Italy. The world nuclear industry, and its faithful well-paid buffoon-like apologists such as James Lovelock, Al Gore, James Hansen or Stewart Brand worked hard to make the very subject of any democratic questioning of nuclear power, or thingS like open and full public referendums on nuclear power seem anti-progress or even anti-democratic.

In their elitist mentality, peeping out from their writings and speeches, we are told that any decision on a subject as important as clean, safe and cheap nuclear power cannot be left to the dolts, far below in the crowd of halfwit voters !

In the case of Italy, a decision by the Consitutional Court was needed to make the referendum possible.

Its 13 January 2011 decision was the culmination of a process which started in April 2010 when the centrist political party Italia dei Valori (Italy of Values) made the referendum proposal.

A petition by the party successfully gathered the 500,000 signatures of Italian voters needed for the referendum to proceed through the Italian legislative system, hindered and slowed at all times by Berlusconi’s main Forza Italia party and its far right-wing nuclear-loving allies. The proposal however could not be stopped. It went to the Constitutional Court for final ruling, and the court’s decision set the timeframe for holding this referendum: between 15 April and 15 June, 2011. 

The exact date was to be set, and announced by the president of Italy, on advice from none other than Silvio Berlusconi and his Council of Ministers. Berlusconi of course chose the last date possible, counting on “brainless voters” forgetting all about Fukushima within a few weeks after the disaster.

He did not choose midnight on 15th June, but the 13th of June and was unlucky in his bet on the stupidity of average voters, this time around and in this attempt, like his other recent attempts to cling on to power, avoid prosecution, privatize national assets and favour inequality, exclusion and poverty among a straight majority of Italians – what Berlusconi calls “the middle class way”

NO WAY OUT FOR NUCLEAR BOOMERS

Since 2007 and the rise to power of France’s Nicolas Sarkozy and his Italian guitar-playing top model wife Carla Bruni, French overtures to Italy’s Berlusconi with the aim of selling nuclear power plants to Italy were warmly welcomed. Each time the high-level nuclear sales circus from France arrived, Berlusconi’s near-monopoly TV stations and newspaper gave these tours headline billing and day-long cover. 

As late as the weeks preceding the 13th June refendum, Berlusconi gave interviews explaining his sincere convictions that, with the aid of France, Italy could be dragged out of the “stone age” into the oil-saving and clean climate Happy Land of nuclear power that people enjoy in France and Japan – the two most nuclear intensive countries of the planet.

Unfortunately for Berlusconi. Italy had already chosen to phase out nuclear power in a 1987 public referendum, triggered by Chernobyl, and has not operated a single nuclear power plant since 1990. The previous refendum was not so massively decisive, perhaps, but the popular and democratic answer to the question Yes or No to nuclear power was clear as far back as 1987.

The 13th June 2011 referendum result was not clear, but totally massive: like Berlusconi’s two other pet themes put to voters in the two-day referendum, nuclear defeat was total. Berlusconi quickly admitted complete defeat in the referendum on returning to nuclear power, water privatization and immunity from prosecution for himself “Il Cavaliere”, the Leader Berlusconi, on a string of penal and other charges stacking up in Italian courts.

No votes in the 13th June referendum were around 95 percent of all votes cast.

NUCLEAR POWER HATES DEMOCRACY

Sadly for Berlusconi and other elitist lovers of nuclear power like the well-paid herd of nuclear apologists and hucksters treading the talk circuit, nuclear Japan is itself now shifting hard and fast away from accepting the Doomsday threat of nuclear power plants – at the democratic and popular level if not yet among its wavering elites. In June 2011 to date, opinion polls on nuclear power in Japan show as many as 75 percent of persons want a nuclear exit strategy like German and Swiss popular and democratic decisions to quit nuclear power. 

Even in the bastion of nuclear brainwashed and supine public opinion – France – as many as 62 percent of poll respondents now say they want out of the so-called and supposed “nuclear no alternative”.

This democratic danger is now the greatest danger for the parasitic nuclear elites and their apologists, the nuclear snakeoil peddlers – proudly peddling cancer doses for all, massive environmental destruction from open-cast uranium mining in “faraway lands” in Africa and Central Asia, and lying about the unlimited costs of nuclear dependence in a rapidly nearing future, when hundreds of ageing ractors will have to be dismantled and decommissioned. At public cost, of course.

THE REAL WAY OUT: TO PRISON

The nuclear elites and their paid apologists are in no way innocently promoting an unfortunately dangerous and regrettably uneconomic source of electric power, gurgling about their “concern” that we have climate change and oil dependence. They are peddling unlimited risk to getting cancer, and destruction of the environment not for decades – but centuries ahead. They do this for their personal profit and kudos.

This is criminal.

As we know from action by the International War Crime tribunal, the defence plea of criminals that they “didnt know” when they were committing crimes against humanity is not receivable or acceptable, and does not work. Ignorance of the damage, destruction and loss caused by criminal negligence, or worse – active intent to do harm for personal profit and prestige – is no defense in criminal proceedings.

Nuclear power is a crime against humanity, against future generations and against the environment.

Damage and death from nuclear power will continue for decades or centuries after the final closure of plants. These facts are known, yet until recently it was still possible for nuclear elites and their paid hacks to ride high in the media, be treated with respect, taken seriously, and given well-paid jobs.

Further democratic action will we can hope soon move to criminalizing the action of the nuclear elites and their propagandists, disseminating outright lies in the more corrupt sections of national press and media outlets of the so-called democratic countries. 

Crime against humanity, both in the present and future generations is the first charge against nuclear crime. The highly corrupt action of nuclear corporations in sourcing, producing and trading uranium from African and Central Asian countries, able to be called “blood uranium”, may also be added to the criminal charges against nuclear criminals.

Nuclear apologists and hacks have already, very predictably, compared mass anti-nuclear protests in Germany to “Nazi rallies of the 1930s”. The intrinsic and basic aggression and criminality of the parasitic nuclear elites and their apologists will in fact, almost certainly generate mass street action against their unsafe and unacceptable energy source. Where the nuclear criminals are openly and nakedly supported and shielded by corrupt politicians and civil servants, these persons also expose themselves to popular and spontanous action by the public, able to become violent.

* ** *Andrew McKillop 2010 mail: xtran9 at gmail .com* ** *