Andrew Denton made this speech on June 6 at the world premiere of ‘Helen’s War’, a documentary on the life and times of Australian anti-nuclear campaigner Dr Helen Caldicott.

 

A few months ago I read the obituary of a Russian public servant called Valerie Mitrokhin, a file clerk in the KGB at the height of the Soviet Empire. He was a trusted man, one of the faceless bureaucrats so central to Stalin’s totalitarian dream who served his country faithfully for many years.

But as he served, Valerie began to think about the horror of the tyrannical regime whose daily excesses were stored so neatly in the sea of files it was his job to keep orderly. So Valerie decided to do something about it. Every night, this quiet, anonymous man, would take one file from the KGB’s filing cabinets, put it under his greatcoat, and smuggle it out of the office, past the guards, to be hidden at his home. If he’d been found out, of course, he would have been shot.

Every night he did this. For 20 years. So that, when he did eventually flee to the West, where he ended up living under an assumed identity in London until his death earlier this year, he brought with him such a wealth of material that many KGB operations were stopped dead in their tracks and countless lives were saved.

And it reminded me that, no matter how huge and fearful a machine may be, there is always a weak link, a gap in the fence, and always someone determined and motivated enough to go through it. Always.

Which brings us to Helen Caldicott.

Or should I say, the hateful, ungrateful, harmful, hysterical, irrelevant, shrill, fossilised crackpot and left-wing twit, Helen Caldicott – just some of the free character appraisals she has received in various arms of the media lately.

Or should I say, instead, Dr Helen Caldicott. For Dr. she is – a paediatrician – and never let us forget it. Nor should she.

Because there is something about the appellation “Dr” that immediately has you marked out as a beacon of wisdom and humanity. How else can one explain the fact that Dr. Henry Kissinger has not yet been strung up by his heels and used as a human pi�ata by the good citizens of the Third World? Or that Dr. Geoffrey Edelsten was ever seriously considered as a doctor? Or that Dr. John Hewson was ever seriously considered? Period.

No, Helen has got the Dr. thing all worked out. She’s smart enough to know that it makes people think that she’s smart – and that she cares about them. Lucky for them, she is and she does.

Like many an impressionable early-twentysomething, I was galvanised in the early ’80s by the likes of Dr. Helen Caldicott to do something about the state of Mutually Assured Destruction to which the world had been consigned. I marched in rallies. I handed out How-To-Vote cards for Peter Garrett. I attended Palm Sunday gatherings in the hope of a nuclear free world and also, maybe, of finding someone who would have sex with me. How little I knew. And I did something even more radical and committed. I wrote poetry. Here is a sample:

Undertakers Overture

We’re overpaid and overfed, we’re oversexed (I’ve heard it said) We overact and over-reach, we over-use our soap and bleach We overspend and over-drink … then vomit over kitchen sinks And now I find – the bitterest pill – we’re under threats of overkill From overseas, just overnight (in what might be an oversight), A squadron flying overhead can nuke us til we’re overdead.

It was powerful stuff and I waited for it to take effect on the military-industrial complex. Nothing happened. I couldn’t believe it. This was some of my best verse. Disillusioned, knowing I had given it my all, I left nuclear disarmament to others, safe in the knowledge that it was only a matter of time.

Skip forward 20 years to June of last year and Helen Caldicott – Dr. Helen Caldicott – appeared as a guest on Enough Rope.

There was a fair argument against talking to Helen. She was from another time. The Cold War was long since over. She was a lost soul spruiking a won cause. In many ways, a trivia-question-in-waiting. Or so it seemed.

How little I knew. Her appearance on the show electrified our studio audience. We got a mountain of viewing mail as well. And all because of radical statements like these:

“We’re all capable of denying evil. We’ve got to get in touch with our humanity and not follow orders if the orders are going to kill people. We’ve got to stop killing people or we’ll blow up the earth.”

It was amazing. Not that somebody was saying such stuff, but that saying it should be considered so amazing. Who would have thought that advocating a world where we don’t all have to die an agonizing death of melted eyeballs and seared flesh is considered radical?

Not everyone loved Helen, of course. Some thought that she was a mad, screeching prophet of doom. And there’s a little bit in that. One of the most revealing scenes in the film you’re about to see is a good old fashioned barney between the film-maker, Anna, and her subject, Helen, after Anna suggests that Helen’s shrillness is a real turn-off. It doesn’t quite reach Jerry Springer proportions, but it’s a willing exchange.

And there is something about Helen’s zealotry which doesn’t always wash. As she tried to persuade me on Enough Rope last year that the White House and Pentagon are full of cold-eyed, money-making ideologues who care nothing for the future of their children, I remember thinking, “too dramatic”. The cold-eyed, money-making ideologue bit I buy. But not caring for the future of your children? Flawed they may be, but these are humans we’re talking about here, not robots. It’s not as if Terminator is an official of the United States Govt, I though to myself. How little I knew.

There is also something about Helen’s optimism which borders sometimes on naivety. In the film, you’ll see Helen sending an email to the Pope with the words, “Off it goes to the Pope and he can save the world.” I’m sorry Helen, but if there’s one thing that won’t ever save this world it’s organised religion and the all-too-human leaders who claim to interpret God’s word for our betterment.

But it’s this faith in human nature that ultimately redeems Helen’s excesses. And in that, she reminds me of another great humanist, Spike Milligan, a man whose love and despair for the human race fought equally for control of his brain, and who, like Helen, was easily dismissed by those whom he offended with his clear-eyed honesty as “mad”. Spike once brilliantly said, “Blessed are the cracked, for they let in the light.”

Indeed so. Not that I think, for one second, that Helen is mad. She just makes other people feel that way. But if, at times, she does appear to be over-the-top, I don’t think it’s because she’s unhinged. I think that so few voices are prepared to join hers in protest that she has to shout more and more loudly to be heard over the din of apathy. That she has the energy to keep doing so is an inspiration in itself.

And that’s why I’m here today. Because it is too easy to dismiss the Helen Caldicott’s of this world as mad. I can hear them now – the Piers Ackerman’s and Miranda Devines and Andrew Bolts – all sharpening their Mont Blancs.

And they’ll throw up a thousand justifications and case studies and facts, And most will be well-intentioned. And many will be right. Yes they will. But the thing is: They can be right a thousand times. Helen only needs to be right once and we’re all going to pay a terrible price.

So ask yourself this: What are the chances of Helen being right? To which the answer is: 100% and, to prove it, I will invoke a discovery I have made called the Ackerman Principle, which states that “Piers Ackerman’s argument that a nuclear disaster will never happen because we can trust human beings is negated by the fact that Piers Ackerman is a human being”.

In other words: Any system whose weakest link is human fallibility is doomed to failure.

Now the usual pack of right-wing bullyboys and girls can write Helen off as mad – in that strange way they have of writing off anyone as mad who thinks peace might be nice – but she shouldn’t have to stand alone while they, with their vast numerical superiority, ridicule her out of existence.

So I am happy to stand here beside her and declare:

Any woman who dedicates her life to saying “We can end nuclear war in 5 years. I know how to do it” will always have my support because think that’s a damned good idea.

And if you want to call me mad, too, I don’t mind because I am. And if you are, too, I’d like you to stick your head out of your window tonight and yell: “I’m mad as Helen and I’m not going to take it any more!”

To finish, let us go to another mad person, who lived on the fringes yet drove straight to the heart, the poet, Walt Whitman, who once said: “Behold, I do not give lectures or a little charity. When I give I give myself.”

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Helen Caldicott and ‘Helen’s War’.