From: dave@ratmandu.esd.sgi.com (dave "who can do? ratmandu!" ratcliffe)
Subject: Dr Rosalie Bertell @ World Women's Congress for a Healthy Planet,11/91
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Summary: we must demand the elimination of this whole secret military system
Originator: daemon@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Keywords: radioactivity, cancer, leukemia, poison, sickness, death, militarism
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc.
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 1992 15:17:18 GMT


  Excerpts from Oral Testimony (given in full 75 lines below) of Dr. Rosalie
  Bertell before the Saturday Tribunal Session of the World Women's Congress 
  for a Healthy Planet held in Miami last November on our military economy:

        We have had a massive brain-drain into the production of
     biological, atomic and chemical warfare agents.  This is the
     secretive part of our society.  We have a civil society and we try to
     solve all our problems in the civil society.  But we have a runaway,
     rampant militaristic sector which is secret, and which is causing the
     majority of the problems. . . .
        Our universities would not teach nuclear physics or nuclear
     engineering if the only jobs were producing weapons of mass
     destruction.  So there *has to be,* from the military viewpoint, some
     commercial, legitimating industries, or they cannot get the support
     of ordinary people. . . . 
        You probably have not heard of the effect in the atmosphere of
     nuclear weapon testing.  Even nine space shots of nuclear bombs set
     off in the upper atmosphere and also leaked to space, to outer space,
     by the U.S.  It is the only country that ever set off the so-called
     "rainbow test" which set fire to the Van Allen belts--the outer
     magnetic force of the earth--that dumped radioactive material at the
     magnetic North Pole, and has polluted very much of the Arctic.
        You probably have not heard of chemical-release modules in the
     space program that are set up that dump things like berilium and
     radioactive materials into the upper atmosphere *just* to see where
     they go.
        You probably have not heard of secret shuttle shots that
     deliberately cause holes in the ionisphere.
        These are what are destroying our earth and we're being told that
     it's under-arm deodorant.  [much applause]  That's the truth.  It's
     ludicrous and I'm glad we can laugh because if we don't laugh we'll
     cry.  It's our earth;  it's all we have.  It's our air, it's our
     water, it's our food, it's babies, it's the future.  And it has been
     seriously damaged and seriously jeopardized, which is why we are here.
       . . . the way we unmask the wolf in sheep's clothing is to find if
     they bring us poison;  to find if they bring us sickness;  to find if
     they bring us death.  And we must uncover it.  And we must demand
     accountability and destruction and elimination of this whole secret
     military system which destroys our earth and its livability.

  A clear sign of decline in our culture is the consistent lack of attention,
  given in major media, to the issues and long-term costs arising from the 
  continued promulgation of "our" plutonium economy.  Continued creation of
  man-made high-level and low-level radioactive waste, with half-lives ranging
  up to 240,000 years, consigns all future generations to the task of EVERY 
  GENERATION repackaging the waste being generated in our lifetime alone.  
  Present-day mythologies of creating "permanent" and "safe" nuclear waste 
  disposal facilities are pie-in-the-sky intellectual masturbation by 
  unaccountable "experts" fronting for nuclear industry moguls who have hidden
  behind "national security" balderdash ever since the Manhattan Project--
  itself something Congress was never told about, much less consulted on--
  commenced.  Those of us who are able to leverage our own awarenesses out 
  ahead of the Denial Fog don't-worry,-trust-the-experts cloud all of us are 
  daily subjected to, MUST use all our wits and creative energies to reverse 
  this death-producing annihilation agenda of plutonium/tritum/thorium/radon 
  gas/cesium 137/iodine 131/radiactive lead, bismuth, polonium/et.al-induced 
  death of all life on earth sacrified on the altar of the god of profit and 
  "control."  We MUST break this death-producing cycle for our 
  great-grandchildren's great grandchildren's sake.              --ratitor

   _________________________________________________________________________   
                Oral Testimony of Rosalie Bertell, Ph.D., GNSH
                  World Women's Congress for a Healthy Planet
                              Miami, Florida, USA
                 Saturday, November 9, 1991, Tribunal Session

   Doctor Rosalie Bertell is the President of the International Institute of
   Concern for Public Health, in Toronto, Canada.  She is a Doctor of 
   Biometrics, and a researcher on cancer, leukemia, and mortality among 
   people exposed to nuclear power plants.  Dr. Bertell electrified the 
   audience with her quiet recitation of military assault on the environment  
   from supersonic flights to nuclear testing.



        What I would like to try to do this morning is both contribute to
     the macro analysis of what has been happening to us and at the same
     time capture what we can do on the grassroots level to move the
     sanity agenda.  I think much of our environmental degradation, or
     much of the escalation of it, has occurred since World War II.
        It's rather mind-boggling to realize that in that period of time,
     between 70,000 and 100,000 new toxic chemicals have been dumped into
     our air and water and land.  It's also mind-boggling to realize that
     the majority of these were deliberately created to kill the earth and
     to do mass destruction of people.  They come to us from the military
     sector.
        We have had a massive brain-drain into the production of
     biological, atomic and chemical warfare agents.  This is the
     secretive part of our society.  We have a civil society and we try to
     solve all our problems in the civil society.  But we have a runaway,
     rampant militaristic sector which is secret, and which is causing the
     majority of the problems.
        I would like to turn the spotlight on this militaristic sector and
     I would like to make a connection in terms of the multinational
     corporations, to say that they work in both sectors.  They create
     these military horrors, and at the same time they try to find
     spinoffs for commercial consumption which they then push on the
     unsuspecting public to cheapen the price for the military.  This has
     occurred in many sectors.
        The most obvious is the nuclear and this has involved the uranium
     mining and milling on the area of the indigenous people in Australia,
     in Namibia, in Zaire, in the native land of North and South America.
     This production of uranium would *not take place*, if the only
     outcome were nuclear bombs.  But there is a myth out there that there
     is a "peaceful atom," and this industry is foisted on people for the
     little civilian, commercial payoff in terms of electricity which is
     also extremely polluting.
        Our universities would not teach nuclear physics or nuclear
     engineering if the only jobs were producing weapons of mass
     destruction.  So there *has to be,* from the military viewpoint, some
     commercial, legitimating industries, or they cannot get the support
     of ordinary people.
        Now these are wolves in sheep's clothing.  The pesticides,
     herbicides, defoliants used to kill the jungle in Vietnam so that you
     could *see* the enemy--so that you could fight in a jungle--have been
     sold all over the world to destroy agriculture as if they were
     wonderful new products of our culture.  Again, they are wolves in
     sheep's clothing and how can we recognize them?
        I would like to point out an area that you might not have heard of
     because the nuclear industry in particular is the solution to every
     problem you have.  In the seventies they were the solution to the
     OPEC oil crises.  They were also the solution to acid rain problem.
     And right now they are the solution to the greenhouse effect.
        However you have probably not heard of the effect on the
     atmosphere of supersonic flight--this is almost all military.
     There's a few commercial sources, but most originates from the
     military.
        You probably have not heard of the effect in the atmosphere of
     nuclear weapon testing.  Even nine space shots of nuclear bombs set
     off in the upper atmosphere and also leaked to space, to outer space,
     by the U.S.  It is the only country that ever set off the so-called
     "rainbow test" which set fire to the Van Allen belts--the outer
     magnetic force of the earth--that dumped radioactive material at the
     magnetic North Pole, and has polluted very much of the Arctic.
        You probably have not heard of chemical-release modules in the
     space program that are set up that dump things like berilium and
     radioactive materials into the upper atmosphere *just* to see where
     they go.
        You probably have not heard of secret shuttle shots that
     deliberately cause holes in the ionisphere.
        These are what are destroying our earth and we're being told that
     it's under-arm deodorant.  [much applause]  That's the truth.  It's
     ludicrous and I'm glad we can laugh because if we don't laugh we'll
     cry.  It's our earth;  it's all we have.  It's our air, it's our
     water, it's our food, it's babies, it's the future.  And it has been
     seriously damaged and seriously jeopardized, which is why we are
     here.
        I like the analogy of the bathtub;  I'd like to put the plug in
     because we can't keep running the water and having it run out.  The
     plug is the military.  We have to deal with that.
        We have already heard that there are two analyses--there are
     probably as many as there are people in this room but there seem to
     be two analyses of our situation and of the way to form the global
     village.
        I think one analysis says that that global village has to be based
     on justice, equitable distribution of goods and service, and
     cooperative agreements between the nations.  I would go further and
     say that that analysis says that there are no nations in the world
     that deserve the punishment that was meted out to Iraq.  The only
     purpose of such a war is to buy us a peace negotiation and a biased
     peace negotiation will set the foundation for the next war, and
     that's what's going on now.
        The alternative view of the world is the view that it can only be
     gotten together through violence.  This new world order promised by
     President Bush is a violent world order.  It is kept in line by war
     and by "structural accommodation" or whatever they want to call it.
     It's economic war or physical war.
        I want to speak to what we see as a result of this because it's
     only through what we see that we are able to detect the phoney from
     the real.  I come out of my own background as a cancer research
     scientist, one who has worked with reproductive problems--birth
     defects, still births, spontaneous abortions, so-called jellyfish
     babies in the Marshall islands--these are hyditetiform [sp?] molds;
     they are blighted pregnancies;  it is fetal material that becomes a
     tumor instead of a baby.  It never develops.  It's a runaway growth
     in a woman's uterus which is delivered after seven or eight months--
     just a living blob of tissue.  Women had never seen such things
     before.
        From the point-of-view of economic and military warfare, only
     certain health affects are counted.  They're literally considered
     health "costs," and a health cost means there is money involved.  And
     you will find very gross statements such as "Embryonic and fetal
     wastage is of no concern either to the individual or society."  It
     does not cost money.  You will find gross statements regarding
     cancers and the dominant cancers caused by radiation.  More will be
     caused in women than in men because women have high-risk breast and
     uterine tissue.  But cancer such as non-invasive uterine cancer, or
     breast cancer, or skin cancer, or thyroid cancer, has a very low cost
     because you don't usually die from it.  Therefore it is devalued.  It
     does not enter into our concerns.  It does not enter into the
     risk/benefit tradeoff.
        I think women are going to have to take the initiative and women's
     groups are going to have to take the initiative to look at their own
     nation and to begin to issue report cards.  To begin to say "Are we
     going in the right direction or are we deteriorating, and if we are
     deteriorating, why?"  So one of the things that we're calling for,
     for political action, is to begin to critically rate our own nations
     in terms of five things:

          * one is the health of the natural environment;

          * the second thing we'd like to look at is the health of the
            value-system which is motivating and driving our nation;

          * the third thing is the health of the political system and
            the participatory nature of our nations--what kind of
            marks would they get?

          * the fourth is the health of resource distribution, and the
            households of our nation;

           * and the last and fifth is the health of our human
            development systems.

     And I think the things we care about fall into all five categories.
     There will be a workshop on Monday afternoon which will elaborate on
     all of this.  And I must thank Eva Nordland from Norway for pulling
     together the report card system and giving it life and bringing it to
     this conference.
        I must ask women to find out about this and please help us.
     Because the way we unmask the wolf in sheep's clothing is to find if
     they bring us poison;  to find if they bring us sickness;  to find if
     they bring us death.  And we must uncover it.  And we must demand
     accountability and destruction and elimination of this whole secret
     military system which destroys our earth and its livability.  Thank
     you.



     To find out more, please contact:

         The International Institute of Concern For Public Health
         830 Bathurst Street
         Toronto, Canada     M5R3G1
         416/533-7351


         Women's Environmental Development Organization (WEDO)
         845 Third Avenue, 15th floor
         New York, NY  10022
         212/759-7982


--
                                              daveus rattus   

                                    yer friendly neighborhood ratman

                                KOYAANISQATSI

    ko.yaa.nis.qatsi (from the Hopi Language)  n.  1. crazy life.  2. life
        in turmoil.  3. life out of balance.  4. life disintegrating.  
          5. a state of life that calls for another way of living.



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