Thursday, March 28, AD 2024 12:49pm

PopeWatch: Merchants of Death Redux

VATICAN-POPE-AUDIENCE

 

 

Pope Francis returned yet again to something he says frequently:  that evil arms merchants are behind wars:

Many powerful people don’t want peace because they live off war,” the Pontiff said as he met with pupils from Rome’s primary schools in the Nervi Audience Hall.

Talking to children during the audience organized by the Peace Factory Foundation, he explained that every war has the arms industry behind it.

“This is serious. Some powerful people make their living with the production of arms and sell them to one country for them to use against another country,” the Pope was cited by AGI news agency as saying.

The head of the Catholic Church labeled the arms trade “the industry of death, the greed that harms us all, the desire to have more money.”

“The economic system orbits around money and not men, women,” he told 7,000 kids present at the audience.

Despite the fact that wars “lose lives, health, education,” they are being waged to defend money and make even more profit, the Pope said.

Go here to read the rest.  It was appropriate that the Pope was addressing kids when he said this, because his belief is a childish fable without a shred of evidence to support it.  It was a popular belief back in the thirties, and no doubt the Pope grew up hearing it.  It remains a popular belief in some sectors of the Left, and the Pope on many issues is definitely a man of the Left.  The sad fact of course is that wars have quite a few causes, and that arms merchants, except as sources of weaponry, figure in very few of them.  For example, the war over the Falklands in 1982.  The Falkland Islands are basically worthless, but Argentinians have been taught for generations that they are the Malvinas Islands and that they belong to Argentina.  Thus when the Argentinian junta moved to seize the islands from Great Britain, all sectors of Argentinian public opinion overwhelmingly supported the move.  The ensuing Argentinian humiliating defeat at the hands of the ghost of the British Empire helped speed up the return to civilian rule in Argentina as the military junta was now treated with contempt by  the Argentine public for the loss.

The Pope’s reference to the bogey-man of arms merchants as an explanation for wars leaves us with two distressing alternatives:  he knows better but blames arms merchants for some Machiavellian purpose, or he does not know better and blames arms merchants because he is simply bone ignorant and impervious to contrary evidence.  PopeWatch would prefer the Machiavellian interpretation but fears that the latter explanation is the correct one.

Update:  Apparently the Pope believes that merchants of death are behind all wars unless Argentinian interests are at stake:

 

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Don L
Don L
Wednesday, May 13, AD 2015 3:55am

Well now, this certainly explains WWII’s Pearl Harbor and the invasion of Poland and our profit centered response…..

Father of seven
Father of seven
Wednesday, May 13, AD 2015 4:28am

Not to fear. His global warming encyclical will right the ship of his credibility.

Art Deco
Wednesday, May 13, AD 2015 6:13am

The Pope’s reference to the bogey-man of arms merchants as an explanation for wars leaves us with two distressing alternatives: he knows better but blames arms merchants for some Machiavellian purpose, or he does not know better and blames arms merchants because he is simply bone ignorant and impervious to contrary evidence.

For 1100 years the papacy was responsible for temporal government in central Italy. Not a good deal for the Church, one suspects, but it did inhibit the Pope from adhering to certain stupidities.

T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Wednesday, May 13, AD 2015 6:16am

Has he said anything worthwhile? That is counter-factual. The only people that “buy” any of the rubbish are democrats, myseducated dupes overpopulating college campuses and six-year-olds.
.

Phillip
Phillip
Wednesday, May 13, AD 2015 6:18am

“Well now, this certainly explains WWII’s Pearl Harbor and the invasion of Poland and our profit centered response…..”

It also explains Stalin’s invasion of Finland and Poland. Who knew?

Tom
Tom
Wednesday, May 13, AD 2015 7:27am

Don, he obviously meant only *other* people’s wars are the result of money-grubbing gun runners, not Argentina’s. The Malvinas war was self-evidently about patriotism and the Motherland.

Mary De Voe
Wednesday, May 13, AD 2015 11:49am

Wars are caused by the lack of good principles, caused by the lack of God in our lives. Guns are not evil. The devil is evil.

Kyle Miller
Kyle Miller
Wednesday, May 13, AD 2015 12:12pm

Maybe the Pope was overly persuaded by the movie “Lord of War.”

Art Deco
Wednesday, May 13, AD 2015 12:22pm

And, this just in, the Vatican has ‘recognized’ the ‘State of Palestine’. I’m thinking maybe the Pope wants Desmond Tutu’s gig at “The Elders”. Tutu and Jimmy Carter can’t keep at it forever.

Anzlyne
Anzlyne
Wednesday, May 13, AD 2015 2:59pm

Wow that Nicholas Cage clip gave me the creeps. just seemed like the devil talking: “the secret to survival – never go to war…esp with yourselves…”
A friend watched a PBS show about the holocaust and was understandably moved… He asks “where was God!!”
My son said: In the war effort against the evil– in the paratroopers, in the soldiers and sailors, in the nations who fought back
In the people at home who supported the war effort… in the gentile moms in Europe who hid Jewish kids…

Penguins Fan
Penguins Fan
Wednesday, May 13, AD 2015 3:04pm

Once again Pope Francis opens his mouth and spouts off about a subject which he knows nothing about.

Thoughts of his resignation and return to Buenos Aires do make me smile.

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