But actually it does work that way, which is precisely why Pope Francis speaks on a meta level when discussing this subject. The U.S. Department of Defense kills people all over the world, but it’s a huge, huge network of people, and so therefore no single individual is to blame for what the group does. It’s this same set-up which makes DoD so effective, in fact, and similar setups have been devised by the Air Force to facilitate drone killings for this reason. Long-distance, impersonal killing thus becomes psychologically easy. It’s comparable to a large corporation which has been caught doing something illegal: the corporation receives a fine and a legal conviction, but because the blame is spread among a large number of people no one individual really feels anything. The CEO might step down or whatever, but then it’s back to business-as-usual. This is how the Pentagon operates, as well, and in fact this is how the entire United States works. (The Nick Turse book I linked to twice does a good job explaining this.) So what exactly is the Pope supposed to say? Is he going to bluntly spell out the plain truth and say that each and every American bears responsibility for the arms trade? No, because he’s gentler than that, and he doesn’t want alienate half of the North American continent by spelling it out. Also, bear in mind that Francis can hardly even open his mouth without offending some group of people somewhere. And that’s not because he says dumb things, that’s because he says honest things. So that was my only real intention. I was trying to defend Francis because I believe he’s right. Bear in mind, too, that I have a relative who used to work in the highest echelons of the Pentagon, I have several family members who worked for many decades in the Pentagon-connected aerospace industry in Southern California, and also in White Sands and places like that, I have other relatives who have worked at Nasa for decades, and also a couple of my closest friends are engineers at Boeing here in Seattle. All of these individuals are exceptionally good people, but it doesn’t change the fact that they participate in something essentially Satanic. Humans are contradictory beings who are able to easily ignore what they don’t want to think about, and like Tom said, the rest of us have to pay our taxes or else we go to prison. Will God forgive us? Who knows. We’re all implicated in this.
