The Pope is travelling. Again. The Pope is speaking. Again. The Pope is clueless. Again. What else is new? Well, this time the Pope is spectacularly clueless… or is there something else going on?
The Mexican newspaper Milenio - Mexico reports about Pope’s travel to the “Holy Land” in its article “Peace cannot be bought nor sold: Pope”. Or to be more precise, about the many inconsistent, incongruent, meaningless, disingenuous and downright stupid comments the Pope has made so far during the first day of the trip… but we are getting ahead of ourselves.
SYRIA
The gist of the verbal diatribe gyrates around war, or to be more specific, around the Syrian war. As such, we need to study this conflict in order to understand the background of Pope’s comments.
In a nutshell, the Syrian war is a conflict between the Ba'ath government (and its supporters) and the rest of the people. The sequence of events went more-or-less like this:
- People are fed-up of dictators
- People complaint during the so-called “Arab spring”
- Government replied with violence and many protesters died
- Protest becomes nation-wide
- Government deploys military who start killing people
- People rise as an armed opposition
- Governments get into the game
- Hezbollah, Russia and Iran support Syrian government
- Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and US support the insurgents
- Support is expressed as weapons
- The fight is also a divide between religious/ethical groups (Alawite/Sunni)
- There is widespread imprisonment and torture (particularly on the government side)
These are the fact and they are undisputed. If you would like to know the whole story, go to Wikipedia and search for “Syrian civil war”.
THE POPE
Gestures and contracts
The following statements exemplify some of the Pope’s most obtuse comments:
“Peace cannot be bought nor sold; it is a question of gestures.”
Where do we even begin with this one? Peace cannot be bought nor sold? Seriously? The root of all armed conflict is the fact that some people are able to impose their will onto other people. They can do so because there is an enabler present: the government. Governments can do so because they have the money to buy the weapons and train the people to force their will onto others. In other words, armed conflicts are inherently financial issues. Philosophically speaking, this happens because politicians can disregard contracts because Contracts Are The Key To Coexistence. As such, peace is indeed very much and by definition an issue of buying and selling; it is the denial of this process that creates wars. Epic failure of reasoning.
Oh, and also, WTF has “gestures” got to do with it? What is even the meaning of “gestures” in peace? If we show the Pope “the finger” will we be starting a holy war? We sincerely doubt it. What if we do so repeatedly? Neither. What kind of “gesture” would it take for the Pope to go to war? We suspect none. Then, by definition, the concept of peace as “gesture” is meaningless. But hey! The Pope is in the business of sounding great, not making sense. But then the clarification came.
“[Peace] it’s a gift [which we] must build through small and big gestures in our daily life”
The only problem in this thinking is that governments (and therefore politicians) are by definition in the business of prohibiting things and controlling people. The reason for countries to exist is to prevent people from doing things that they want to do, allegedly for the “greater good”. For people to be free and be able to freely exercise their right to contract (hence living in peace) there must not be an authority preventing them from so doing by the use of force and the threat of violence. At this level, gestures are totally, completely, and utterly irrelevant. Yet another epic failure of reasoning.
Greed
The Pope then proceeded to enlighten us with their wisdom.
“Hatred and greed for money are… the causes of war”
No. Hatred and greed are normal human emotions. We can no more turn hatred and greed off than we can stop breathing. Trying to somehow rain-in or control greed and hatred is positively stupid. It’s like suggesting that because we don’t like rain, we should turn it off at source. Ridiculous!
Hatred is usually a negative emotion that must be controlled simply because if we don’t, it goes against the contracts we have with other people. These contracts are the ones that keep us in coexistence. Breaching them simply implies acting against our own self-interest, because coexistence would not be possible; this is, a lose-lose game.
Which brings us to greed. At the most basic, greed is what gets civilization going. Without greed there is no free market and without it, there is no increase of standards of living. Let us be clear; by advocating against greed the Pope is advocating for your continuing diminishing of your standards of living. He is advocating for the demise of the entire human civilization, which is based on physical needs before it can even address so-called spiritual needs. Epic failure of reasoning.
Yet again, the Pope is in the business of sounding good, not making sense.
But then, he goes with the denouncements:
“[The Pope] accused all those who profit with conflict and manufacture and sell weapons”
Let’s pause a second on this one because this is a really strange statement. What the Pope is saying is that one-sided weapon transactions are to be blamed for wars. How exactly can one has a one-sided transaction if by definition all transactions require two sides? If a person manufactures lemonade but there is nobody buying, how exactly is this person profiting? The answer is, of course, the person is not! This is one of the most ridiculously stupid and nonsensical sentences we have ever heard (and we have heard a lot). A pure one-sided economic transaction! OK…
The truth is, of course, that manufacturers and sellers of weapons are not to blame. Technology is and has always been neutral (morally and practically speaking). Will war break out if we purchase a tank? No. Will war break out if we hire mercenaries to “protect” our home? No. Will war break out if we purchase a nuclear weapon? No.
What will initiate a war is our willingness to use of those weapons. Until such a moment when we decide to use those weapons, they are not weapons, they are simply technological junk. They may have been expensive and they may be threatening, but if we don’t use them, they are essentially a gigantic waste of money.
There root of the problem is not the fact that there are manufactures and sellers of weapons, but that there are politicians that have the money (government) and the willingness to use them. Epic reasoning failure.
Concomitantly, the solution is simple: remove governments and wars go away. Politicians have neither money nor power to use weapons if a state does not exist. The great enabler of all wars is the state which provides the means, and the politicians, which exercise their will to fight.
Blaming weapon manufacturers and sellers is ridiculous!
Little help here
The Pope continued his denouncement by asking for help.
“I address the international community not to ignore the human emergency in Jordan [because of the] elevated number of refugees, so that it may continue and increment their support and help”
In other words, the Pope is asking for politicians to donate money and food to prevent the massive amount of displaced Syrian people from dying of exposure and famine. This is, of course, an empty request. Politicians are vote maximizers and as such the first question they will ask is how sending money and food to Jordan will increase their votes. Well, it won’t therefore they won’t; at least not beyond a token gift which will amount to almost nothing.
Meanwhile, it is relevant to ask how will the Pope’s church help? Well, the Pope has an answer for that too:
“I renew my vehement call to peace in Syria”
So… nothing? Not a cent? That’s right! Do as I say, not as I do.
But that’s OK. The Pope is in the business of saving souls, not people. Oh, BTW, this was also the Inquisition’s motto when they were torturing and burning people in the middle ages… but we digress…
A long war
Later on, the Pope continued teaching us about the realities of war by expressing that:
The Syrian conflict has “lasted too much time”
Oh. We see. It would seem that in the catholic doctrine there is a limit to the amount of time a war can last. It would seem that there are religious rules and regulations at to the duration of wars. We really can’t wait to hear the moral justifications and calculations to determine how long a war can go on before it becomes “unjust”. Alas, something tells us this information won’t be forthcoming any time soon. Shame. It would have made for a juicy article.
An example
As an example of tolerance, the Pope was accompanied by a rabbi and a Muslim professor throughout the first leg of his tour. In addition, the Vatican added Arabic to their collection of languages.
Yes! That will really help. A gesture of tolerance. Forget the fact that states are the enablers of war and that politicians are the decision makers. Forget the lack of freedom. Forget, forget, forget. An empty gesture will do. Of course. Silly us.
THE ANALYSIS
So far all of Pope’s actions seem consistent and coherent with religion actions, this is, ignore reality and preach the impossible. Deny, deny and then deny some more.
Within this context, it is impossible for religious leaders to look like gigantic and epic reasoning failures. But is it so or is there something else?
Consider this. The Jesuit order was designed as a paramilitary order. Its founder was a soldier. They seek the best and brightest of all people to server the Pope. That’s right, the Jesuit order does not answer to any church’s hierarchy but to the Pope directly. The Jesuits were and are the theological storm troops of the Vatican. Wherever there is theological dissent they are sent in to “fix” the problem. But this is not it; they are far, far more than that. The Jesuit order has the mandate to spread throughout the world but not with the intention of converting it (they leave such mundane tasks to other orders) but with the intention of apprising the Pope of current events. In other words, the Jesuits are a gigantic religious intelligence operation answering only to the Pope. In such task, they are fabulously efficient as they cannot be otherwise.
Essentially the Jesuits are the best spies in the world. They are fiercely dedicated, morally superior, highly intelligent, well placed and operating under a fantastic cover (spiritual affairs). Furthermore, Jesuits provide the highly sought HUMINT not SIGINT.
HUMINT: is the acronym for Human Intelligence.
SIGING: is the acronym for Signals Intelligence.
The difference is crucial. SIGING can tell you what the enemy is doing (message intercepts, spy satellites, etc), but it cannot tell you what the enemy intends to do. For that, you need HUMINT.
But hold on because it gets better. It so happens that the Pope is a Jesuit. It is not only the absolute ruler of the Vatican (the only such ruler in the world), but it is part and head of the biggest private intelligence organization in the world!
As such it is ridiculous to believe that the Pope is not well informed regarding world events. Of course he is! He just chooses not to use this information, presumably because of religious issues.
In other words, the Pope could be a very effective and efficient agent for change, as it was proved during the cold war when John Paul II supported Solidarity in Poland, which, arguably, triggered the end of the USSR and satellite countries.
Yet, he chooses not to be. He chooses not to help people get rid of their political oppression. He chooses not to be an agent for freedom and a better human life. He chooses to play the politics of religion and as such he is reaping the fruit of his labor: irrelevance.
CONCLUSION
The Pope, as any other religious leader, seems clueless and disconnected from reality, although there are very strong indications that this is a deliberate choice. It is unclear as to the motives of such epically failing choice, but an educated guess would indicate that it is simply due to religious doctrine. In this sense, such a doctrine does not provide any help to humanity and only fosters the continuation (not the evolution) of political thinking. As such, it is then only reasonable to expect people from ignoring religions ever more intently. What’s the point of having a religion if it does not act in the best physical interest of people? There isn’t one.
Religion is a personal choice but physical needs must be addressed first. Coexistence comes before religion because if we cannot coexist then there will be nobody left to have religion. The problem is that all religions keep telling us it is “our way or the highway” and this is the single largest epic failure of all of them.
Note: please see the Glossary if you are unfamiliar with certain words.
