Pope Francis and the Third World War
In the far-off year 2014, the sun shone, Barack Obama was President of the United States, The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies was released, and the top-selling song of the year was named "Happy." And the Pope of the Catholic Church announced the beginning of the Third World War.
Amid the ever-repeated excitement of such scintillating mass-media events that year, few people in America noted or marked the centenary of World War I. While in Britain and France, this war is still clearly remembered--if nothing else for its devastating toll on the population and landscape--in America it has always been a forgotten war, a mere footnote on the path to World War II and global dominance. Still, events were held, here and there, most in Europe and a few in America, and to one of them the recently-elected Pope Francis came. While a South American by birth, he is also the descendant of Italian immigrants, who no doubt passed on some of the legacy and legend of the Great War to him. And so, in September, he visited a cemetery where soldiers from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, that great rival of united Italy, were buried, and mourned the dead, and prayed for them, and said a few words in reflection on the conflict in which they died, as Popes have done for many decades now in regular succession.
In doing so, however, Francis, as he so often does, went off script, and began reflecting on contemporary events. "Perhaps," he mused, "one can speak of a third world war, one fought piecemeal."
This is, so far as can be told, the first time Francis mentioned the concept, only a little over a year after his election. He has since used the phrase and concept of "a third world war fought piecemeal" over and over again, dozens if not hundreds of times, mentioning it with greater and greater frequency as time has gone on and the world has grown more unstable.
Many things could be said about Pope Francis, for good and for ill, in many different dimensions. I hope to eventually write more about him and his significance.
The point of this essay, however, is to say that about this, at least, he is right, and has been since 2014. Something fundamental has changed, and the world has begun to look back to and recapitulate the horrors of the 20th century. And this must be understood, and stopped, while there is still time.
The Beginning and the End
Looking backward in the aftermath of the Trump Presidency and the Pandemic, the early 2010s appear to most Americans as a nostalgic, almost idyllic time, a time of confidence and prosperity, albeit mixed with excess and decadence. As presented in mass media and that offshoot of mass media we call the economy, this was undoubtedly the case. Pope Francis' comments in 2014, though they made some modest international headlines, were to most Americans at best alarmist, at worst absurd and practically incomprehensible. Today, in 2023, in a time of alarmism and despair, many people can see the sense of saying that we were on the verge of, or perhaps already engaged in, a new world war. But what sense could it possibly make to speak of such things in 2014?
One of the central paradoxes of the age of global hyper-connection is how short and localized memories and consciousness have grown. 2014 was less than ten years ago, but in terms of media cycles of panic and rage, it might as well be a thousand years past.
Looking back after 2016, after 2020, after 2023, the events of 2014 seem distant and peaceful. In reality, 2014 was one of the most violent and unstable years since World War Two, and a bellwether of things to come. If it did not appear so to many, even at the time, it is in part because of, again, how paradoxically self-contained and self-focused American consciousness has grown in the age of global hyperconnection. For America, 2014 was a year like any other, perhaps with a few more unpleasant news stories about less fortunate parts of the globe. In true perspective, though, 2014 was the beginning of the end of the American Empire.
This Pope Francis, a septuagenarian from Argentina residing in a European capital at the heart of a global ecclesiastical network, saw clearly: and events have more than proven him right.
For those who have forgotten: 2014 saw a revolution in Ukraine to overthrow a Russian-puppeted leader, after which Russia invaded, annexed Crimaea, and plunged the East of Ukraine into a never-ending military quagmire. ISIS rampaged across Iraq, making a mockery of the American-backed regime, slaughtering Christians and Yazidis and declaring a new Caliphate. Modi, a lifelong member of a Hindu Nationalist paramilitary organization who had for years been banned from the US for his role in massacres of Muslims, was elected Prime Minister of India. Michael Brown was shot by police officers in Ferguson, kicking off regional and national and eventually global protests. Terrorists began a campaign of terror against Christians in Nigeria. And the Syrian Civil War and Arab Spring had already been spinning violently out of control for more than a year, plunging Europe and the Middle East into the greatest migration crisis since the World Wars. And, in short, everywhere one looked, the global political and legal and moral order established after World War Two by the American Empire was showing itself utterly powerless to prevent war and ethnic cleansing and even genocide.
I had, I think, a kind of premonition of all this, which I often think back on. I was in Crete, in Heraklea, in January of 2012. I had at the time heard only a few rumblings of unrest, rebellion, massacres, and civil war in Syria, and was intrigued to learn that, as far away as Crete, there was due to be a protest of Syrian Sunni refugees against their government at the local embassy. As I watched, a crowd gathered, there was shouting, chanting, and a little boy wrapped in the Syrian flag with a microphone wept and led the crowd in patriotic songs in Arabic.
I did not know then what this small event presaged; the return of mass ethnic and religious violence to the Middle East, not only not prevented but actively aided and abetted by the US. I did not realize what was at stake; but Pope Francis did, and one of his first major acts as Pope was to hold a global day of prayer for peace in Syria, an act that by all accounts convinced the President of United States not to, as planned, begin massive bombing aimed at regime change in the nation.
Still, this war, and all the others, spun out year after year, despite and because of America's global power and action and inaction. Everything that has taken place since then has been based on this fundamental reality, and turned on this pivot.
Nostalgia and Anti-Nostalgia
One of the many oddities that attach themselves to the exceedingly odd phenomenon of the human race is that each generation is, unavoidably, educated and trained and therefore to a very large extent molded and formed and inspired by the generations before it.
It is thus profoundly not the case that nostalgia is a thing proper only to the old or the middle-aged; or that people cannot be nostalgic for things they have never experienced. In fact, one might go so far as to say that a certain kind of nostalgic desire for things you have never known, things experienced by parents or grandparents or total strangers, told to you or portrayed in media, is normatively one of the defining features of childhood and adolescence. Children want to grow up, but have never done so; and they inevitably form all their ideas of what growing up consists of from the grown-up people they encounter.
Far from being intrinsic carriers of the novel and the original and the never-before-seen, children and youth are just as commonly, if not more so, carriers of archaism. Genuine novelty and originality is more often the fruit of mature reflection and middle-aged ennui and dissatisfaction than youthful energy and self-satisfaction. Much of what is seen as youthful novelty is rather the result of the inevitable gap between what young people have actually known and experienced and what they are trying to imitate. When a teenaged Bob Dylan tries to slavishly and nostalgically imitate the folk and R&B music of decades before, music produced by people in almost every way totally unlike him, the result is something strange, off-putting, and in that limited and valuable sense new.
This is a digression, but an important one for understanding the essential and overriding peril of our times. This peril consists in the horrifying fact that, with the inevitable passing of the generations, we have reached a point where nearly everyone is nostalgic for the 20th century and the period of the World Wars.
Again, note: this danger does not emanate from allegedly backward-looking old age, but from allegedly progressive youth. It comes precisely from the fact that, with the passing of time, the generations that actually knew and lived through the World Wars are all but gone. These generations were profoundly not nostalgic for the World Wars--precisely because they had lived through them. In fact, from all that I have heard and read and seen on many fronts, from many sources, most people who lived through the World Wars simply preferred to never talk of them at all, so that the World Wars were for the most of the world a profound break in historical and ancestral memory.
The Baby Boomers, born in World War Two's aftermath, were thus denied the typical sort of nostalgic memory of the lives lived by their parents and grandparents to imitate and emulate. Perhaps because of this, they mythologized these experiences more than any generation before them, dubbing those who fought WWII the "Greatest Generation," viewing their exploits, their labors, even their profound suffering and trauma through a gauze-tinted cloth of incomprehensible heroism and glory. Still, while the Baby Boomers could never imagine themselves doing and living through what their parents had during WWII, they could, at least see the effects of that war in their own parents--and often, reasonably, dislike what they saw. This was less and less true of each proceeding generation, however, and so, naturally but paradoxically, each successive generation has drunk deeper from the wellspring of World War II nostalgia, precisely because virtually all "memories" of it were in fact shaped, not even by their parents' recollections and reconstructions of what their own parents had not told them, but by movies and television.
This nostalgia is of a very odd sort. In popular imagination and psyche, the World Wars have been seen as the contrast, the backdrop, almost the direct alternative, to the world of conspicuous consumption and exponential economic growth that arrived after them. There is some sense in this; after all, this world of conspicuous consumption was, at least in America, the direct result of World War II and the technological and industrial growth and plunder produced by it, and was promised as such to the American people during the war itself. In the last few years, I had the chance to read a small number of National Geographic magazines from World War II, and was amazed to see that essentially all the articles and the ads were focused on promising that, in the aftermath of the war, the technology and production and global power currently being directed towards destruction would instead be expended totally on consumer leisure: ads promising that new synthetic rubber would be used to make consumer cars, new communications technology for new consumer entertainments, that new global power would make possible visiting and enjoying distant places full of exotic and willing women, that new airplanes would be used to travel to those places, that new guns and bombs and tanks would be used to maintain eternal peace and dominance in them, new government-sponsored corporations used to exploit their resources for the benefit of the folks back home.
Hence, as this age of individual technological consumer leisure has expanded and reached its peak and fallen again, whenever people have grown dissatisfied with it, with its failure to live up to its promises or, worse, its actually living up to its promises and the horrifying results thereof, they have always looked back with nostalgia on what they saw as its precise opposite: the brutal, mass-disciplined, mass-conscripted society of the World Wars, the absolute collective unity of a whole people sacrificing and suffering and killing in a total war for a single cause.
It is for this reason, I believe, more than anything else, more than capitalism or socialism or fascism or racism or inflation or social atomization or populism or "the new nationalism" or the pandemic or "the new normal" or Biden or Trump or anything else, that we are now in real and increasing danger of actually getting our wish. The Third World War, if it comes, will come by popular demand.
The Papacy in an Age of Barbarism
In such an environment, then, it is very necessary to state one thing, and hold to it, with absolute clarity: that the 20th century, and in particular the World Wars, were, from any reasonable historical perspective whatsoever, the most monstrous and barbaric period in the history of the human race.
It feels very strange to say this so baldly--strange and almost sacrilegious. And why is that? Why is it that it seems profane to say that an era in which nearly one hundred million were killed all over the world, most civilians, was barbaric?
The problem, I think, is in large part a moral one. To say that a particular era or civilization or culture or crisis was on the whole evil is not to deny that moral goodness or even sanctity or heroism existed in it; in fact, given that the measure of moral heroism and heroic sanctity is precisely the difficulty of its exercise, the two claims are more nearly correlatives than antinomies. Without grasping the full moral depravity of, say, the Atlantic slave trade, it is much harder to measure the moral accomplishment of those who opposed it or sought to lessen its effects or who finally succeeded in abolishing it.
This is not, however, how modern people, especially Americans, think. For us, moral goodness is normatively external and uncomplicated and harmonious. A good soldier fights necessarily in a good war with a good cause and universally good actions, in such a way that to attack any aspect of any of these is to entirely deny the whole. If we assert, say, that the American use of mass terror bombing in World War Two to reduce European and Japanese cities to rubble was morally evil or even just monstrously destructive, we are (by this understanding) thereby necessarily denying that there was any goodness in the cause of the Allies at all, any heroism in its soldiers, any meritorious suffering in its people. In fact, given how much American assertions of moral goodness in World War Two are based almost entirely on the evil of its enemies, in popular understanding to assert the immorality or barbarism of any American action is practically tantamount to asserting the moral goodness of Naziism.
As a matter of fact, my view of the basic causes of the Allies in the World Wars is to an extent more positive than most. Popular understanding separates the two wars far too much, to an almost bizarre extent. World War I is seen as a mere absurdist conflagration in which both sides were more or less evil and to blame, while World War II is the holy war of good versus evil. In fact, in both wars, the German Empire was the clear aggressor and ideological architect of the wars themselves, as well as at least the instigator and innovator and worst practitioner of the humanitarian disasters and crimes against humanity associated with the wars. In basic conception, in both wars, the cause of preventing German dominance of Europe and the world was a just one.
Still, as important as these particular evaluations may be, there is likewise a need to be able to take an overall evaluation of the period as a whole, of the defining ideas and activities and imitative phenomena shared in, to at least some degree, by both sides. And taken in that way, the result is simply and overwhelmingly moral horror and barbarism.
The era of the World Wars was an era in which humanity was divided as it had literally never been divided before into absolute, unbridgeable divisions of culture and race and language and ethnicity, divisions defined by mass hatred and mass ideology and mass violence. This was an era of mass warfare, when for the first time entire populations all around the world were mobilized and conscripted and disciplined and molded and propagandized into soldiers and industrial workers whose entire existence was defined by the imperative to kill and destroy. This was an era of deliberate violence by soldiers against civilians on a scale never before seen, massacres and expulsions and exterminations and the deliberate destruction of whole towns and cities and residential neighborhoods and farmland and infrastructure. This was an era of state terrorism, when the active policy of warfare dictated the mass demoralization of the enemy by random violence and starvation and disease. This was an era in which rape and sexual violence was deliberately used as a tool of warfare and carried out on a scale never before imagined, actively encouraged or passively allowed by military or governmental authorities. This was an era not just of a single genocide, the Holocaust, but of an almost infinite variety of genocidal crimes small and large, perpetrated not just by militaries and governments but even by civilians, local populations all over the world suddenly turning against their next-door neighbors, fighting for dominance and driving out or murdering the losers: Czechs against Germans, Germans against Poles, Poles against Ukrainians, Serbs against Croats, Hindus against Muslims, Jews against Arabs, Germans against Jews, Turks against Armenians, Greeks against Turks, Americans against Japanese, Japanese against Koreans, all over the world.
As a historian, it is emphatically necessary to assert, against late-20th-century benightedness, that all of this is really and truly novel and singular in human history. Human history, despite the characterization of modern progressives, is emphatically not merely a single stretch of mass genocidal violence. Such crimes and conflicts had existed before, to vastly varying degrees at different periods; essentially non-existent at certain periods and in certain cultures, extraordinarily rare in most, endemic only in a very few times of crisis. Never before, though, had the world seen such a universal outpouring of moral and material violence; and hopefully, the world will never see anything like it again.
Understanding this is essential to many things, but essential among other things to making sense of the Catholic Church and the Papacy in the 20th century. The Papacy was practically the only European institution to have any kind of proportional reaction to the World Wars. For the most part, that reaction was simply one of horror, combined with a strong desire to repeatedly emphasize and declare, to mostly deaf ears, the universal human moral truths all but forgotten during that time: the unity of the human race, the dignity of the human person, the need for justice and sanctity in human acts.
Benedict XV was not in most ways a heroic or even enormously perceptive man, but his unrestrained horror and sorrow at the butchery of the first World War is one of the strongest notes of simple humanity from that era. Pius XI, in the years before WWII, would sit by the window and read reports and weep openly, even as he did his very best to appeal from falling Europe to the rising "third world," evangelizing Africa and building up a native Church everywhere he could to outweigh the coming destruction. Pius XII's activities in WWII have been covered by wholly unmerited slander (about which I hope to write more at some point), but made him perhaps the only morally mature and heroic political actor in that period. Reading the Papal documents from the 20th century, one cannot but be impressed by the genuine moral clarity and grandeur of the Church's stance, the contrast between Church and world; but also distressed by the Church's utter inability to keep the horror from unfolding everywhere, even among her own children.
Almost more so, one cannot understand the post-WWII Papacy and the post-Vatican-2 Papacy without understanding how much of Papal teaching and activity has been based on a reaction against the World Wars and an emphatic desire to ensure that it would never, never happen again. "Never again!" has been the literal refrain of every Pope from Paul VI onwards, both the relatively progressive and the relatively conservative. Whatever their cultural or theological viewpoint, every Pope since the mid-20th century has seen the urgent need of racing as far away from the era of the World Wars as possible, of barricading it with encyclicals and condemnations and idealistic hopes and utopian dreams and international institutions and new liturgies and teachings and vestments and documents and synods and anything else they could find.
Most of what seems merely clumsy about the Church of the latter half of the 20th century, overly interested in leaving behind the past and embracing the novel and the progressive, can only be understood in the light of this overwhelming horror and the overwhelming imperative behind it. Put very crudely, in the view of the Papacy and the Catholic hierarchy, Catholics have been free to be nostalgic about every era of the Church, from the early Church to the High Middle Ages to early modernity to the 1960s, except the period of the early to mid 20th century. Everything from this era has been covered in shame, whitewashed off of walls and hurried out of bookstores and buried in storage closets and shoved into parish basements--lest it should return, and bring the horrors with it.
One can certainly doubt the prudence of this approach: but I have no patience for any perspective that does not at least see the rationale. The Popes failed to prevent the first two World Wars; they have done all they could, at least all they could think of, to prevent the third one.
The Return of Genocide
And yet...as Pope Francis has said, here we are again.
The note of the World Wars is once again all around us--not, as yet, in the literal sense of a whole world given up to total war, but in its primary, overriding moral notes.
These notes are many and various, but among them are (1) a peculiar nostalgic desire for war and mass collective unity and action and violence as such, (2) an overwhelming, restless impatience for solutions other than immediate and violent ones, (3) a personalized collective fear willing to countenance anything in defense of oneself and one's group, (4) the general growth of absolute, individualistic, polarized group-identities defined in negative terms by hatred and opposition to other groups, and (5) the masked but increasingly open desire for genocide.
This last may seem most extreme and even paradoxical, but it is in fact the summation in itself of all the above. Genocide, defined even according to its international legal definition as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group," was the mark of the 20th century as such, just as industrial capitalism was of the 19th, and just as a certain idea of Empire defined the ancient world.
The ancient world was by modern standards exceptionally warlike, constantly pitting people against people in conflicts that at times involved impressively thorough, almost modern mobilizations and massacres and enslavements. Yet the goal of these efforts was not genocide as such, the destruction of one people by another, but rather Empire, the dominance and command and exploitation of one people over another, of one people over many. The benefits that came from this arrangement for both the ruling people and collaborationist elites in the subject peoples, in plunder and slaves and soldiers and officials and commerce and taxes and luxury goods and gold and silver and food in enormous abundance, defined the imagination and desires of these eras of the world. In the end, if not inevitably, at least rather logically, this resulted in the formation of truly mass Empires, Rome and Persia and China, encompassing huge parts of the world and numerous peoples and bringing the benefits of Empire to them all, including a great deal of (relative) peace, a peace built on dominion.
The defining feature of the 20th century, however, was not so much desire as fear, a fear rooted in a pervasive and growing inability to understand or grapple with the problem of human difference as such. By the 20th century, industrialization, nationalization, secularization, colonialism, and revolution had disrupted communities everywhere, atomizing and individualizing and homogenizing people as never before. Yet in this new world of more or less liberal secular nations, it was discovered, paradoxically that the remaining differences between religious groups, linguistic groups, ethnic groups, national groups, even individuals, could no longer be reconciled or defused sufficiently either in understanding, through philosophy and religion, or in practice, through Imperial dominance or political institutions or diplomatic arrangements. Both cause and result of this problem, science and evolutionary-biological philosophy was simultaneously engaged in an obsessive quest to essentialize and schematize and absolutize human difference as never before, classifying each and every group as its own quasi-biological species necessarily engaged in a brutal struggle with all others for survival. At the same time, proliferating technological and economic power made even small differences practically dangerous as they had never been before. Insurgencies and rebellions could use new military technology to undermine entire Empires; terrorism by anarchists or radicals could threaten anyone, at any time, and could not be prevented by any amount of security measures; labor unions and strikes could cripple in a moment the economic systems on which millions depended for their power and survival; and a small, new, culturally insignificant nation like Prussia could, through sheer determined military discipline alone, bring a great power like France to its knees.
Hence was born the inevitable logic of genocide. Given the inability to come to grips with or understand or reconcile or defuse human differences and prevent them from having explosive and violent consequences, given the inevitable failure of both security and political-diplomatic solutions to these problems, and especially given the proliferating fear and hatred caused by this failure, the problem as such was gradually, but definitely, reformulated. The problem was not as such a political or religious or social problem, amenable to conversion or understanding or institutions or laws or systems. The problem was simply the existence of certain groups of people, or at the very least their existence with any power or influence or ability to threaten. And the sole, obvious solution to the problem posed in these terms is and always will be genocide.
It is Happening Again
Looking around me today, the same thing is self-evidently happening everywhere one looks. As I write this, Israel and Palestine are engaged in a conflict that, while relatively localized, is at the same time the most obviously and essentially genocidal seen in the last century.
In the rhetoric of not only Hamas and many anti-Israel groups of the Arab world, but also and increasingly parts of anti-Israel groups in the West, the problem as such is more and more simply and obviously the Jews as such, or at least, the existence of Jews with the actual "Zionist" and Western and "colonial" and post-Holocaust characteristics and beliefs and fears and loyalties that most Jews in fact possess, or at the very least the presence of Jews in the Middle East with economic and military and governmental power. Whatever the abstract and practical problems of Jewish supremacy and ethnic nationalism and imperialism and colonization, the collapse or abolition of the State of Israel would have as its utterly predictable result the genocide or mass ethnic cleansing of Israelis.
On the other hand, the modern state of Israel's status as a Jewish nation has been for many decades accompanied by, or rather grounded in, the mass displacement and dispossession and control of Palestinians: and the government of Israel has in recent decades worked consistently at reducing Palestinians to utter powerlessness and leaderlessness and subjecting them to an extreme modern technological security state. Now, though, that security state has, predictably, failed. As a mere matter of historical fact, no security state has ever succeeded in achieving security rather than decreasing it in any but the most trivial cases.
In the aftermath of this failure, in both rhetoric and action, Israel has proceeded in such a way to make clear that their problem, as such, is the mere existence of Palestinians in Gaza, or at least Palestinians with any government or military or infrastructure or water or food or fuel or power over their lives and bodies and selves and hence any ability to threaten Israelis at all. Cutting off all food and power and water to a population of over two million civilians as a collective punishment for people declared to be "subhuman animals," expelling a million people from their homes at the threat of death, and carrying out mass terror bombing of civilian urban areas, are all actions that hearken back to the worst moral evils of the World Wars.
Understand: I do not make these statements at all lightly; my direct ancestors were murdered in the Holocaust, and I am thus extremely sensitive to the dangers of Anti-Semitism. This, though, is precisely the point: that the Holocaust was the result precisely of the proliferation of genocidal intent and moral logical everywhere in the Europe of the 20th century, and hence the very worst thing imaginable for the Jewish people, a tiny minority religion and people with a single beleaguered state in the Middle East, is the return of this period and this logic.
The Israel-Palestine situation, while particularly clear and egregious, is very far from the only such situation in the world right now. As Pope Francis has pointed out, over the past decade, genocide has returned nearly everywhere one looks. The Russia-Ukraine conflict, a war between peoples who for many centuries were largely members of a single state, is now defined by the utter denial by both sides of the possibility of co-existence. Russia has from the very beginning of this war in 2014 declared that it is existentially threatened as such by the mere fact of Ukraine's existence as its own nation and people with an independent government and ties to Europe and the military capacity to defend itself; and increasingly, at least in rhetoric, the nationalist wartime Ukrainian government has declared that it can never be safe, and hence can never stop fighting, so long as Russia exists as an independent power with its present government and present sense of national cultural identity and a military capable of threatening Ukraine's security. In Ethiopia, a weak centralizing national government in recent years openly aimed at the elimination of one of its major ethnic groups, and openly murdered and massacred and raped the people of Tigray. The Yemeni people have been starved and terrorized with impunity by Saudi Arabia for years now, and counting. The Uighurs have been interned and abused in China. Muslims and other minorities in India have been massacred in great numbers, and continue to be lynched daily. And so on and so forth, multiplying unimaginably over the past ten years.
Why has this happened?
Put simply, the logic and ideology of secularist modernity is that differences cannot be reconciled in any genuine way, but only defused by complex institutional and procedural mechanisms. Yet the unstated assumption and basis of all such systems is that they can only operate from a position of absolute power and hegemony. Put simply, liberalism can only deal with difference given the fact of some kind of liberal political and military and cultural and economic hegemony. Since World War Two, America has played this role for the world. America has been the global hegemon, not just militarily, where it could fight on advantageous terms against the entire rest of the world, but just as crucially economically, where every nation and people and local elite has invested in American dollars and been invested in and owned by American finance, and culturally, where American freedom and prosperity and moral authority has been proclaimed to every small boy in every nation by McDonalds and comic books and movies and television and local leaders alike.
The American Empire is still, in material terms, unimaginably strong; despite the hopeful prognostications of its enemies, it is not going anywhere any time. America will still be the economic power-house of the world for the foreseeable future; it will still be all but military undefeatable; it will still be the center of all culture and advertising and pornography and political and social understanding. Putin and Kim Jong Un both listen to American music and watch American sports and movies; and no doubt the same is true for the members of Hamas.
Yet America, for better or for worse, is no longer simply and uncomplicatedly the global hegemon. It is still the strongest, but it is no longer untouchable, unquestionable, undeniable. Governments and peoples and individuals alike have realized that it can be militarily defied, as ISIS and the Taliban did, that it can be economically challenged, as China has done, that it can be culturally and morally rejected, as many groups throughout the Middle East and Russia and the world have done. Most basically, America, and the post-World-War institutions and rules it underwrote, has lost a great share of its legitimacy in the eyes of the rest of the world, its moral force, its unquestionability, its universality. During the Tigray genocide in Ethiopia, by many reports, soldiers raping and murdering and burning crops would taunt their victims with the simple question "Do you think the Americans will save you?"
At its height, the unspoken assumption of both sides would be yes: that America would, in some way, enforce its will, for better or worse, but in some basic way for the good, on the world, including the soldiers looting and burning in an African nation. Now, that confidence has passed away, and neither civilians nor soldiers nor politicians expect justice to come to them from America.
I have no love for American hegemony and American Empire; it was in some respects, moral and cultural and social and economic, more destructive even than the World Wars. Yet simply by being the global hegemon, America has for the last eighty years prevented many, many horrible things from happening, and above all else prevented the World Wars from returning.
If we are to prevent them now, however, we will not be able to rely on it so simply.
Francis and the War
Pope Francis saw something in 2014 that few others saw; but what he saw he saw rightly. A Third World War of a sort has in fact broken out, fought piecemeal precisely because, unlike the World War I and II, it has come as the result of the fracturing and downfall of global hegemony, and not regional or Imperial rivalry. The World Wars affected the whole world because the European powers had, through colonialism and imperialism, divided up the world between themselves. When they turned against each other, the result was World War.
Our current predicament is different. For the past eighty years, the world has been united and solidified and interconnected by a single global hegemony; and now that global hegemony is fracturing and falling to pieces. The result is difficult to predict, but will certainly not be as simple as the first two world wars. The coming conflicts of the 21st century will not be easily dividable into one global side versus another, one global cause against another, one ideology against another; they will be, rather, defined by polarities, one group against another against another in dizzying profusion all over the world.
Yet I truly believe that the most important factors shaping the century to come will be moral ones. The desire for a return of the World Wars, and the moral and imaginative inability to conceive of any solution or reconciliation of difference other than that of the World Wars, are the greatest factors threatening the world today.
Just like the Popes a century before, Francis has not put his faith in the Empires and powers of this world, but in God and the moral conscience of man. He clearly believes, as I do, that the essential struggle is moral and spiritual, that the essential threats are moral and spiritual and that, if these these threats can be recognized and checked, then the 21st century can be saved, and turn out entirely differently from the 20th century after all.
Because the simple truth, which must be repeated again and again in the face of every imaginable situation and provocation, is that genocide is neither natural nor inevitable nor a genuine solution to the problem of human conflict and difference. There are ways to reconcile human difference and conflict, both in thought and in reality (though not without some ethic of right and wrong, true and false); more to the point, there are numerous ways, limited common grounds and uncomfortable compromises and diplomatic in-betweens and live-and-let-lives and distant collaborations and even non-violent conflicts, to deal with human difference without mass violence and genocide. And the path of viewing the mere existence of people and peoples as the problem to be solved, the path of mass fear and mass security-states and mass violence, can never completely "solve" or end any conflict, but usually rather exacerbates and worsens human relations and conflicts and renders them more absolute and more violent and more unsolvable.
Still, it is a tall order for humankind alone to achieve. Thus, Francis has quite logically put his faith, as the Popes of the 20th century did, in the Virgin Mary, and in particular in Our Lady of Fatima, the great Marian emblem of the World Wars and the Cold War. By consecrating Russia and Ukraine to Mary, and taking every opportunity to call upon the Virgin's help, he has done his best to summon, not just the moral forces of mankind, but also the spiritual power of God. I will not conceal my own belief that he is right to do so; and that in that lies the greatest hope of all.
Pray for us, oh Holy Mother of God.
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