The politics of HBO's "Chernobyl"

The Daily Caller, behind an absurd demand for subscription, is claiming liberals hate the series while conservatives love it.

The show damns socialism, they say, and not without reason, though the point is disputed just what it damns, and so the left hate it and the right love it.

And yet Vox has published a string of well-deserved positive reviews.

The Guardian, too, loved it by the end, as have lots of other people on the left.

Indeed, so far as I know, nobody outside the post-Soviet, post-socialist Russian state, Putin's Russian nationalist state, has published a review of the series that was negative in net.

Though some on the right have taken occasion to crow, and on the left to deflect.

The HBO series was actually very popular and highly regarded among Russians, but the Putinists are reacting out of stupid offended nationalism, much like the Japanese denying comfort women were slaves, denying the atrocity of Nanking, denying any number of war crimes, and even insisting on celebrating hanged war criminals at patriotic Shinto monuments.

Much like our Southerners and their GOP enablers, celebrating people who fought a war to destroy the Union, to kill the idea that "all men are created equal", to deepen and perpetuate racism in order to commit the South to African slavery forever.

That is to say, the only known folks to damn the series have done so out of the sort of idiot right wing nationalism that mimics the crime-family moms who aid and abet their criminal children, denying they are criminals or excusing their crimes when denial is impossible, because and only because "blood is thicker than water".

The truth is the exact opposite of what the Daily Caller has claimed.

The Russian state, btw, is retaliating with a ludicrous series blaming the CIA for the disaster.

As for the discrepancies between actual history and the events in the series, everybody knows about them because the people who made the series have been yakking about them from the first moments, again and again insisting the series is not and dramatically could not be an entirely accurate rehearsal of who did what, and pointing specifically toward the very same departures from fact to which Russians out to defend the Reds have pointed with an absurd filip of "gotcha".

Not every Russian, not even every Russian personally involved, sees it that way, however.

And this Post story should rebut the lies of surviving Soviet officials whitewashing their and their party's role.

And it is worth remembering that Putin and many others in today's Russian society were themselves officials of the Soviet state.

Even today, many of them, starting with the Big Man, are far from pleased to hear criticism of the Soviet state, feeling correctly they are all of them in varying degrees personally implicated in its crimes and disasters.