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World Youth Day and the France Attacks, or why it’s important that Francis got the ‘piecemeal third world war’ from Korea

World Youth Day and the France Attacks, or why it’s important that Francis got the ‘piecemeal third world war’ from Korea

Last updated on: August 1, 2016 at 8:41 pm by Justin Tse

World Youth Day and the France Attacks, or why it’s important that Francis got the ‘piecemeal third world war’ from Korea 2016-08-01T20:41:30-07:00 Justin Tse

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Entrance of Auschwitz - by Dnalor 01 (Eingangstor_des_KZ_Auschwitz_Arbeit_macht_frei_2007.jpg) [CC BY-SA 3.0 AT (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/at/deed.en)], via Wikimedia Commons

Entrance of Auschwitz – by Dnalor 01 (Eingangstor_des_KZ_Auschwitz_Arbeit_macht_frei_2007.jpg) [CC BY-SA 3.0 AT (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/at/deed.en)], via Wikimedia Commons

There has been quite a bit of debate both over whether Francis has exaggerated the case about a ‘piecemeal third world war’ as well as why he seems to placate some authoritarian governments engaging in this war, such as his uneven record of commenting on Russia invading Ukraine. But this too is still not the point.

As Artur Rosman reminds us, Francis’s visit to Auschwitz radically deconstructs the entire narrative about the Second World War, the Holocaust, and the cruelty of the camps being over:

I don’t want to make you sad, but I must speak the truth. Cruelty did not end at Auschwitz, at Birkenau: today too, people are tortured; many prisoners are tortured at once, to make them speak… It is terrible! Today there are men and women in overcrowded prisons; they live – I’m sorry – like animals. Today there is this cruelty. We say: yes, we saw the cruelty of seventy years ago, how people were put to death by being shot, or hanged, or with gas. But today in many places in the world, where there is war, the same thing is happening. (Greetings by the Holy Father to the Faithful from the Window of the Archbishop’s House in Kraków, 29 July 2016).

So too, Francis reminds us in his in-flight briefing while leaving Kraków that he has never relented on calling the Armenian genocide a genocide, much to the Turkish government’s chagrin: ‘When I had to say something that I didn’t like to Turkey, but of which I was sure, I said it, with the consequences that you all know.’ He was much more explicit when he spoke in Armenia just last month (which was after the Turkish government went into a tizzy over the g-word last year): ‘Sadly, that tragedy, that genocide, was the first of the deplorable series of catastrophes of the past century, made possible by twisted racial, ideological or religious aims that darkened the minds of the tormentors even to the point of planning the annihilation of entire peoples.’

There is something, then, that relates the ‘piecemeal third world war’ to both Auschwitz and the Armenian Genocide. What is it?

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