Pope Francis calls Paris attacks piece of a ‘piecemeal World War III’
Certainly the Islamic State’s aspiration is to wage a Third World War. As is characteristic of Islamic extremists, they seem unable to perceive how far their capabilities fall short of their goals. They are like small dogs trying to kill a grizzly bear.
But it’s a pretty stupid grizzly bear.
Stupid and very, very sleepy.
It’s not one small dog, it’s many, but the don’t attack in pack.
The bear does a somewhat adequate job of taking out the individual dogs as they attack, but that doesn’t help the overall problem.
This, frankly, expresses my gravest fear about the outcome of all this terrorist activity by Islamic extremists: a full-on religious war, with Islam on one side and Christians, Jews and (eventually) Hindus on the other. Buddhists might sit it out, with some relatively minor exceptions.
My hope is that the worldwide growth of secularism will continue to gain strength, using among other influences these atrocities as fuel, and such a war will die before breaking out, due to lack of interest.
I’ve heard the Cold War was a de-facto Third World War. This would be World War Four.
I’ve lived in a Buddhist society for decades. As I never tire of pointing out, you can forget that “peaceful Buddhist” malarkey.
He said, according to the opening post, a “piecemeal WWIII”. I seriously doubt he’d want to see the real thing.
Look folks, real war looks like 1 July 1916, the First day of the Battle of the Somme. Over 19,000 British troops died in that one day, and about 31,000 more were wounded. Add in German and French losses and that one day killed 30,000 people and wounded 70,000 more.
That’s what war looks like…and all three countries bore that loss and continued the war for over two more years.
I doubt that if you add all the terrorist acts against Western populations over the past 40 years together (even throwing in Israel as a Western nation), you’d be hard pressed to equal that one day.
If Islam is trying to kill off Western Civilization, they are going about it very deliberately…very deliberately indeed.
What I’m trying to say is that we’ve absorbed a lot worse and are still standing…and will continue to do so.
IMHO as always. YMMV.
Actually, Thailand was one of the exceptions I was thinking of. But there are a lot of other kinds of Buddhists in the world, I believe.
And I wouldn’t turn my back on a single one of them if they were pissed off at me.
I thought the War on Terror was supposed to be the de-facto Fourth World War. Either way His Holiness is being melodramatic (and I’ve have thought some kind of reverse Crusade would be a better analogy).
They have declared war on the west and have now for years. Our political leaders don’t want to acknowledge this.
They will put up with multiple repeats of Paris tragedies.
This is sort of wrapped into that. Otherwise, okay, so we’re up to World War Five.
I’m worried about the fact that powerful countries are being drawn into the area. These powers all want to defeat ISIS and other extremist groups, but don’t agree on what the region should be like once this goal is achieved (assuming it actually is achieved). If things go badly, we could have Russia fighting France and the U.S. in the Middle East.
so true
WW3? Its all of us (the rest of the world) against them (ISIS), right?
Seems like it’d be a short war
Since we’re not using “sticks and stones” I’m pretty sure WW3 hasn’t happened yet.