Chernobyl prayer

The word Svitlana Aleksiyevich in the dialogue she conducted with the translator on the occasion of the Arabic translation of the book. To everyone who will read this book... I feel very happy with the release of the Arabic translation of my book "Chernobyl Prayer," because the issue of Chernobyl is the issue of the whole world. I heard, when the disaster was still in its early days, that people said, all over the world: this can only happen with you, careless Russians, while no one would have thought to describe the Japanese in such terms when the Fukushima reactor disaster occurred. Humans are helpless before technology, which they themselves invented, foremost among which is nuclear energy technology. Our insistence on continuing down this path only means that we are determined to commit suicide. And this matter should not only concern European countries; the whole world should be engaged with it, in Latin America, South Africa, they still believe in nuclear energy, just as we did thirty or forty years ago. But we understood that there is no distinction between military nuclear and peaceful nuclear—they are all the same thing. I hope everyone understands this. I see that the greatest threat to humans is humans themselves. That time, when humans built their relationship with nature based on power, from the throne of God, has indeed gone forever. Chernobyl made us look towards immortality... perhaps we could call that the rehearsal for the end of the world. Maybe we will all perish—this is not fantasy. Perhaps our wonderful world—full of forests, rivers, animals—will perish. My most painful memories of Chernobyl are the scenes of humans leaving the contaminated villages, while abandoning the animals—those that soldiers shot at and then buried in biological graves. When the soldiers entered the villages, the animals followed their sounds, came out to meet them, perhaps feeling happy about the return of human voices... They did not yet know that humans had betrayed them.