35th Anniversary of If You Love This Planet

Al Gore’s new climate change documentary, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, opened this summer.

The documentary, a follow-up to his 2006 effort titled An Inconvenient Truth, updates and details the danger facing the planet today from rising seas, warming temperatures and extreme weather.

Yet despite the urgency Gore expresses in both documentaries, he doesn’t seem to be sparking much in the way of mass public concern or outcry.

That wasn’t the case 35 years ago, when another documentary about the threat of global extinction was released.

Called If You Love This Planet and produced by Canada’s National Film Board, the 26-minute documentary featured Australian pediatrician and anti-war activist Dr. Helen Caldicott giving a lecture to university students about the dangers of nuclear war.

Appearing as it did during a height of cold war tension, Caldicott’s plain and passionate presentation caught the attention of a public genuinely fearful for the future of the planet.

“We are all children of the atomic age,” she stated in the documentary, which was interspersed with footage of atomic explosions and gruesome images of the burns and other injuries suffered by victims at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Nuclear war, she stated, would be an “extermination.” People would be killed by the explosion, and also by buildings collapsing on them, burns, suffocation and by flying glass and debris.

Survivors of the blasts would have to deal with disease, plagues and epidemics, along with lack of food and clean water.

A month after the explosions, she said, 90 percent of Americans, Canadians, Europeans and Russians would be dead.

The expressions on the faces of students in her audience said it all: Shock, worry, sadness, concern.

If You Love This Planet got an unexpected boost from the U.S. Department of Justice, which declared it "foreign political propaganda" and suppressed it in that country.

In 1983, when it won an Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject, producer Terre Nash thanked the Reagan administration for the publicity generated by efforts to ban the film.

Here in Canada, the CBC initially decided against showing the documentary, claiming it lacked balance. But it broadcast it after it won the Oscar.

If You Love This Planet had a huge effect on the peace movement in North America and Europe—and in Winnipeg. As many as 20,000 people participated in peace marches in the city in the early 1980s.

It also helped create and galvanize action by religious groups as people of faith came together to call for an end to nuclear proliferation.

Caldicott herself was invited to speak to the sixth assembly of the World Council of Churches assembly in Vancouver in 1983. “Nuclear war is the single most urgent problem facing the human family today,” she told the assembly.

The documentary led to the creation in 1984 of Project Peacemakers, the well-known inter-church Winnipeg peace organization.

Project Peacemakers closed in 2016, but for 32 years it was a key voice for peace and justice in the city.

Today the threat of nuclear war is on the back burner, despite recent sabre rattling between Donald Trump and North Korea. Now it’s climate change that is seen as the major threat.

But unlike with Caldicott 35 years ago, the issue doesn’t seem to be generating the same mass public response.

And why is that? One reason is that climate change, unlike nuclear war in the 1980s, doesn’t seem like an imminent danger.

Back then, we really did worry that the world could end soon. Today, however, climate change is seen by many as a problem in the future, perhaps many decades or even further away.

Looking back, it’s hard to say whether all those marches, protests and letters to politicians made any real difference. But it certainly made those of us who did the marching and protesting and writing feel better; we were doing something.

And for that, we have Helen Caldicott to thank. Through her passion for nuclear disarmament, she convinced many millions of us that “if you love this planet . . . you will realize that you are going to have to change the priorities of your life.”

From the Sept. 2 Winnipeg Free Press. If You Love This Planet can be viewed on YouTube.

A Great and Holy War: The Role of Religion in World War One

The Great War a “thoroughly religious event."

April 9 is the 100^th anniversary of the battle of Vimy Ridge, which has taken on mythic status in Canada. Lots has been written about the war of which it was a small part—from political, military, social and psychological perspectives. Not as much has been written about the role religion played in the conflict. In 2014, on the centennial of the start of the Great War, I wrote the following column.

Volumes have been written about the Great War, covering that epochal event from many different angles. One angle that hasn’t received as much attention, though, is religion.

That gap is being filled by Philip Jenkins, author of the new book The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade.

According to Jenkins, a history professor at Baylor University in Texas, it is impossible to fully comprehend the First World War without acknowledging the role religion played in creating and sustaining it.

Religion, he writes, is central to "understanding the war, to understanding why people went to war, what they hoped to achieve through war, and why they stayed at war."

The War, he notes, was a “thoroughly religious event in the sense that overwhelmingly Christian nations fought each other in what many viewed as a holy war, a spiritual conflict.”

In the book, Jenkins shows how religion was used by politicians and the military on both sides to justify and support the conflict, using the language holy war, crusade, martyrdom, apocalypse and Armageddon.

The War, he says, was framed by belligerents on both sides “in thoroughly Christian terms. Each nation saw itself as playing a predestined role that was divinely inspired, and those self-concepts contributed mightily to the outbreak of war.”

The Russians, for example, viewed Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm as the Antichrist. Germans equated Britain with the great whore of Babylon in the book of Revelation. And English bishops informed their countrymen that they were God's “predestined instruments to save the Christian civilization of Europe.”

Clergy on all sides baptized the struggle, Jenkins says, becoming “vocal, even fanatical, advocates,” preaching “sophisticated arguments for holy warfare.”

That would include the Anglican bishop of London, who said in 1915: 

“Everyone that loves freedom and honour . . . are banded in a great crusade—we cannot deny it—to kill Germans; to kill them, not for the sake of killing, but to save the world; to kill the good as well as the bad, to kill the young as well as the old . . . to kill them lest the civilisation of the world itself be killed.”

Or the chaplain to the Speaker of the British House of Commons, who proclaimed that "to kill Germans is a divine service in the fullest acceptance of the word."

In Germany, people felt the same way—but from the other side.

As Roger Chickering notes in his book Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914-18, “no sector of the population was more ardent a supporter of the war than the German Protestant Church. The fact that France was Catholic and Russia Orthodox supported the belief that Germany was fighting in the name of true—Protestant—Christianity, and that the triumph of Germany corresponded to the designs of God.”

Statements like those feel uncomfortable for 21^st century ears. They sound more like what we are accustomed to hearing today from Islamic jihadists in Iraq or Afghanistan. But sentiments like these were regularly shared from pulpits in the warring nations, including Canada, in an effort to keep support for the war—and enlistments in the various armies—high.

In addition to shaping the War, religion was also shaped by it. The War triggered "a global religious revolution," Jenkins says, and in the process "drew the world's religious map as we know it today."

This redrawing of the map included the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the end of the last Caliphate, which led to the “assertive, self-confident, and aggressively sectarian” form of Islam we know today.

The end of the War witnessed the destruction of the Orthodox Church in Russia. And it also led to the creation of the state of Israel—an action that continues to reverberates even now.

On a personal level, the War caused many to doubt their faith and question the church. After such a calamity, who could believe in a loving and generous God anymore?

As Jeremy Paxman notes in his book, Great Britain’s Great War, soldiers on both sides found their beliefs tested. 

“What room was there for religion when those made in God's image were being blown to pieces all around? How could Hell be any worse than what they were living through?” he writes.

As the world marks the start of the Great War, and as Canada marks the centennial of the battle of Vimy Ridge, Jenkins’ book is a timely reminder of how often religion is recruited to justify and support war—of “how easily ideas of the church militarist emerge in times of crisis.”

It is also a reminder to Christians, in particular, that it wasn’t so long ago that the fanatical religious fervour we usually associate with Islamic extremists today could be heard, loud and clear, from many church pulpits across this land.