Pope Francis is Against War Unless It's War Initiated by Fascist Generals Attacking Peaceful Islanders by Surprise In Order to Play Into Nationalistic Prejudices

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Yesterday, the Pope posed with a "Dialogue for Malvinas" propaganda sign. The "Dialogue" movement is the latest attempt by anti-democratic South American nationalists to annex the Falkland Islands.

A Vatican spokesman said that nothing should be read into the gesture. The Pope gets handed things all the time by people, etc. etc.

Which of course we already knew – anti-fracking t-shirts, communist crucifixes...

But the incident reminded some of the Pope's well-known support for the Argentinian side in the Falkland's debate and his implicit endorsement of the war.

A year before he became Pope, at a Mass in Buenos Aires for the 30th anniversary of the Falkland's War, Archbishop Bergoglio told worshippers:

We come to pray for all who have fallen, sons of the homeland who went out to defend their mother, the homeland, and to reclaim what is theirs, that is of the homeland, and it was usurped.

In March of 2013, the Falkland Islands held a referendum on whether the inhabitants wished to remain a British territory. 1,513 out of 1,516 voted Yes.

Against that, Prime Minister David Cameron was asked what he thought of the newly elected Pope's views on the Falklands.

I don't agree with him - respectfully, obviously. 

There was a pretty extraordinarily clear referendum in the Falkland Islands and I think that is a message to everyone in the world that the people of these islands have chosen very clearly the future they want and that choice should be respected by everyone.

He then said the funniest thing this blogger is aware of Cameron ever saying:

As it were, the white smoke over the Falklands was pretty clear.

The Pope's words at the homily above, make interesting reading next to his more well-known statements about war, such as that it's a plot by weapons manufacturers or the natural result of international capitalism run amok:

We are discarding an entire generation to maintain an economic system that can't hold up any more, a system that to survive, must make war, as all great empires have done. But as a third world war can't be waged, they make regional wars...they produce and sell weapons, and with this, the balance sheets of the idolatrous economies, the great world economies that sacrifice man at the feet of the idol of money, are resolved...

The Pope has more recently said that war should be "forever rejected" and that it "never solves anything".

So he's against war unless it's war initiated by fascist generals attacking peaceful islanders by surprise in order to play Into nationalistic prejudices.

And please don't say he wasn't endorsing the Argentine attack: "sons of the homeland...defend their mother...reclaim what is theirs...it was usurped." That's the jingoist vocabulary that led to that short but nasty conflict that involved the deaths of close to a thousand human beings. Here's one of them:

Paratrooper Craig Jones was the last British soldier killed.

And he wasn't killed by capitalists.