Deadly Deception: General Electric, Nuclear Weapons and Our Environment

Having grown up in the Pacific Northwest, I would often hear about the Hanford Nuclear Plant contaminating the Columbia River. But I had no idea of the scope of it until I watched Debra Chasnoff's Academy Award-winning "Deadly Deception: General Electric, Nuclear Weapons and Our Environment". The documentary goes behind GE's happy commercials and exposes its role not only in building some of the most destructive weapons of all, but in contaminating a large portion of Washington state.

The point is, if you care about our planet, you owe it to yourself to watch this documentary (I saw it on YouTube). There's nothing innocent about what GE did. The damage that they've done to the area around Hanford will probably take decades if not centuries to clean up. As for GE's then-CEO Jack Welch - shown in a clip - he's now best known as a global warming denier (no surprise there).

Definitely see it.

This bold, guerrilla-style video documentary attacks the hypocrisy of General Electric by using the Corporation's own rosy TV commercials ("…we bring good things to light") in ironic juxtaposition with images of GE's nuclear weapons work and some of its consequences. Unknown to many people the monolithic corporation (owner of NBC and RCA, among other subsidiary companies) hides a few skeletons in its public relations closet, including the deliberate release in 1949 of lethal radiation from its Hartford, Washington nuclear plant, measuring 300 times more deadly than the later accident at Three Mile Island, and turning the pristine Columbia River into the most radioactive waterway in the world. It might be only left wing propaganda but, compared to the disinformation supplied by GE, the video is more accurately anti-propaganda. Seen with 'Nukie Takes a Valium', an animated short in which the technique is more successful than the message, and 'Manic Denial', a strident, self-congratulatory anti-nuke lecture in the form of a cartoon.

A powerful and brutal documentary like this saddens and angers viewers due to everything that is presented in it, while addressing the damaging scenario General Electric was responsible while manufacturing atomic bombs, missiles and warfare technology at the same time it cuts costs and pollute the American soil with nuclear waste leaving rural areas in a dire state of sickness and death. At the end of it all, it makes us question the value of human lives; the quest for profit as desired by companies; and the efforts of preserving one's life, culture and identity while creating tools that can end other human lives, but at the same time there's the loss of the lives the system wants to protect - it's totally counterproductive this arms race which started during Cold War and hasn't finished with its ending, as more and more nations also wanted to built new weapons of mass destruction.

A most deserving Academy Award was given to Debra Chasnoff, as her film is an unforgettable combative piece that stays with you for a long time, and there are many dramatic and horrific stories told that not even Hollywood could come up with recreating it or fantasizing about them. Beyond the environmental tragedy that caused cancer and deaths on several people in the state of Washington, it also goes on two other fronts, by exposing the policy enforced by GE while manufacturing weapons, telling that no harm was being done with their facilities, and Mrs. Chasnoff careful research presenting how the company was advertising itself on television with colorful, happy commercials of people smiling and enjoying their products (light-bulbs and refrigerators) and the director juxtaposes those images with the chaos left by the same company with alarming news - even a farmer saw that the Chernoby situation was handled better by the repressive Soviets than what happened in his own state.

The other front covered is the activists who made boycotts against GE, one of those small efforts that manage to bring some early results but it doesn't help to make companies pay for damages, change their environmental and institutional policies, neither make them bankrupt. But it never goes unnoticed and plenty of noise can be made.

And I insist to go back on those questions raised early on and the counter-production of it all in this thing we can life. I watched this film along with the recent feature documentary "The Conqueror: Hollywood Fallout" which covered the tragic deaths of celebrities and local people from a small area of Nevada that firstly was used during atomic bomb tests, and secondly became the filming location of the disastrous epic "The Conqueror".

Both were depressive rides into a period in American history that still lingers, and we wonder if the arms race, its development and how AEC and companies involved felt if it was worth the cause, worth the profit (as in some cases, the government had to give compensatory damages that can never bring back people, neither restaure nature as it was).

One has to be brought to some senses in shock and awe as hard-working citizens had their lives cut short by their own powers of be, and with regulations enforcement, costly procedures and ethics none of those lives would be lost. This isn't about creating a perfect world; it's about getting close to an ideal where the things that need to be done have to be done to favor a majority rather than shareholders and lobbysts. Here's an eye-opener film to give you all of those insights and more. 10/10.