Caldicott Calls for Global Revolution
by Anna Edwards

As the closing speaker of the Twelfth Annual Women’s Studies Conference, Dr. Helen Caldicott, renowned physician, author and activist, challenged a captive audience to incite a “nurturing, caring, loving and respectful revolution” to protect and preserve the earth against an impending nuclear holocaust.

In an hour-long talk, Caldicott detailed the precarious status of the earth as the United States prepares for another war with Iraq. She stated that she had never seen a time as dangerous to the earth in her 60 years of life.

Caldicott recalled the horror of World War II combat and the United States’ devastating bombing campaign against Cambodia. She also discussed in detail the American weapons, and their horrendous effects, used in the recent “massacre” in Afghanistan.

“How dare America do something like that,” Caldicott asked, as she contemplated Iraqi women feeding and bathing their children; children who in the very near future may be maimed and killed by these weapons.

She stated plainly, “War is about killing and nothing else. It’s murder!” This is especially true, she posits, in America’s fight over oil in the Middle East. She stated that oil, not terrorism, is the key issue precipitating the Bush Administration’s push for an armed conflict in Iraq.

Caldicott is amazed by the United States’ “unbelievable arrogance,” which allows them to exploit the earth and its inhabitants in the name of “preserving our standard of living.” She asserted that the United States has become a “corporate culture that is truly wicked.”

Caldicott used a quote from Einstein to highlight this crisis. “The splitting of the atom changed everything save man’s mode of thinking. Thus, we drift towards unparalleled catastrophe.”

Caldicott concluded the only way we, as women, can stop this catastrophe, is by rising up right now. Without this loving, global revolution, “we’re not going to make it.”