Pope: World War III Fought With Crimes, Massacres, Destruction

During a visit Saturday to Italy's memorial honoring 100,000 soldiers killed in World War I, Pope Francis said that the current spate of crimes, massacres and destruction around the world could be considered a "piecemeal" World War III.  Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich made a similar statement in 2006.  

Pope Francis, Redipuglia Cemetery, Italy

"We’re in the early stages of what I would describe as the third World War," Gingrich said in an interview to NBC's Meet the Press, as he called on U.S. Congress to pass a law that would enable the United States to use all its resources to fight terrorism. His remarks elicited mixed reactions.

Dennis Showalter, professor of history at the Colorado College in Denver, said current ideological and armed conflicts, as well as terrorist attacks worldwide, constitute a major global crisis equivalent to a world war.

“One never wishes to overuse this world-war trope, but certainly we are dealing with a comprehensive crisis with a global dimension," said Showalter. "Its scope far exceeds the Israeli-Palestinian issue, and the question of Muslim acculturation in Europe. I think it’s comprehensive and I think it’s something that has deep historical roots.”

Showalter said that global war on terror actually has more characteristics of a world war than the first two world wars, which he likens to civil wars.

“Both World War I and World War II were essentially civil wars within Western civilization; World War I obviously. I mean, this was a case of states in societies with a very broad spectrum of common values, tearing each other apart.”

According to Showalter, one important characteristic of a world war is that it has an ideological dimension. He noted, for example, that the Nazis, the Communists, the Christian Democrats and others all fought for their worldviews. In that respect, he said, World War II was more of a global conflict than World War I.

“And I would say that the key to a true world war is global, universal involvement. And that involves communications technology. It involves transport technology and it involves what our French friends call mentalité. And I think in that context, this thing we are in now is at least as much of a global war as World War II.” 

Michael Ledeen, author of the book, The War Against the Terror Masters, defined the campaign against global terrorism as World War IV.  

“I call it [World War] Four because we had the two hot world wars and than we had the Cold War, which was also a world war. So that would be World War III for me. And this is the fourth [world war] because our Western civilization is under attack from violent jihadists all over the world: from South America to Asia, Indonesia and, of course, Western Europe and the Middle East, and the United States. So you can’t get much more global than that.”

But some scholars have rejected comparisons between world wars and war on terror. Alex Roland, a professor of military history at Duke University in North Carolina, said the two world wars were exceptional events, peculiar to the first half of the 20th century. One of their characteristics was the ability to determine the future of nations.

“Nazi Germany and the imperial Japan –- that is, Japan under the absolute control of the emperor -- their future was at stake and they both disappeared in the same way, for example, that in World War I, (Ottoman) Turkey disappeared," said Roland.

"So the fate of nations was at stake. It’s not at stake now in the so-called war on terrorism. This is just the most recent in a whole series of terroristic campaigns that have been made against advanced industrialized states in the 19th and 20th centuries and it is not to dismiss them as unimportant. Each one has been significant in its own way, but they don’t come any place near being world war.”

Roland said another characteristic of world wars is the unprecedented number of casualties – tens of millions of people. The Cold War, he says, was actually waged to prevent another world war.

“And the Cold War never resulted in a direct major exchange of weapons between the United States and the Soviet Union, but rather a whole series of proxy wars among their satellite states. But even those wars didn’t add up to anything like the scale of the world wars.”

Roland said a world conflict of that scale is not likely to happen in any foreseeable future. He notes that Americans often use the word “war” as a way to emphasize the gravity of an issue.

“We’ve had a war on cancer. We’ve had a war on poverty. It is part of the rhetoric of the United States in the 20th century to declare war on things. Franklin Roosevelt back in the depression, even before World War II, declared war on the depression and used explicitly military combatant language to indicate the height of the priority that he was giving to this as a national issue. And that’s what we’ve been doing ever since. But it’s all rhetoric.”

Meanwhile, Islamic State insurgents have taken large swaths of land in Iraq and Syria as they seek to carve their own state. The fate of at least two nations depends on whether they succeed in keeping the occupied territories or not.

Russia's annexation of Crimea and its involvement in eastern Ukraine has de facto changed Ukraine's border, and its continued involvement in eastern Ukraine may affect the country's ultimate fate. 

The death toll and destruction these and other conflicts are leaving in their wake, and the massive displacements of local populations bring to mind world war disasters. New conflicts cropping up while the old ones have not been solved do make the whole world seem to be at war.
 
Scholars and political analysts may not have a unified definition for the current conflicts in the world, but at least as far as terrorism, all agree it is a serious threat to humanity that must be defeated.

Al-Andalus, Islamic World in Medieval Spain

After crossing from North Africa in the early seven-hundreds, Muslims ruled in southern Spain for almost eight centuries, interacting with the populations they found there.  The golden age of al-Andalus has offered some lessons for a modern pluralist society. But do we learn from history?

Many medieval Spanish songs combine Jewish, Christian European and Arabic music traditions.  A convergence of three distinct cultures marked almost every aspect of life in Islamic Spain: from economy, technology, science and medicine to philosophy, literature, art and architecture.

Al-Andalus, Land of "Convivencia"
Al-Andalus, or Andalusia, originated in 711, when an army of Arabs and Berbers crossed the Straits of Gibraltar to depose Visigothic ruler Roderic.   Jews supported and welcomed Muslims in Spain because initially they prospered better under Islamic rule than Christian.   Osman bin Bakar, a scholar and author from Malaysia, says in contrast to the rest of Europe, at the time Andalusia was enlightened and tolerant.

“Andalusia was perhaps the only place in Europe then where followers of the three Abrahamic faiths - Muslims, Christian and Jews - lived together in relative peace to produce a common culture and civilization over such a long period of time,” says Bakar.

The fertile mixing of cultures on the Iberian peninsula was partly the result of a moderate kind of Islam practiced by the first ruling dynasty of the Umayyads. Their reign ended in the early years of the eleventh century. As the poetry from their time indicates, the Umayyads reveled in the pleasures of the body as well as the mind.  They also appreciated other cultures, for example, Greek philosophy and science, which they helped spread to the rest of Europe.

By the tenth century, Andalusia reached what was called a golden age in terms of cultural and political development, prosperity and power.  Its capital city of Cordoba had some 200-thousand houses, 600 mosques, 900 public baths, 50 hospitals, and lighted and paved streets. Libraries and research institutions spread rapidly in Muslim Spain, while the rest of Europe remained largely illiterate.

Cordoba, Spain

With Discord Comes Decline
But some analysts warn against idealizing Andalusian “convivencia,” Spanish term for religious and cultural tolerance of the era.  With time, liberators turned into conquerors.  Conversion to Islam was encouraged and sometimes compelled, and the Arabic language was dominant in all aspects of life.  Some philosophers were banned, their books burned.  Uprisings were answered with mass executions.  Jane Gerber, professor of history at the City University of New York, says by the 12th century, religious tolerance was on the wane.

“When we speak about the science of the 12th and 13th centuries, we are already talking about a period in which Jews no longer lived in the realm of Islam in Spain.  They had in fact been forced to flee or convert,”says Berger.

Significant changes began during the 11th century.  British historian Richard Fletcher says al-Andalus, once centrally ruled, became divided into smaller states, centered around cities such as Seville, Granada, Malaga and Cordoba:  “These little statelets of 11th century al-Andalus were individually small and vulnerable.  They could only survive among their predatory neighbors by adroit diplomacy and warfare.”

Fletcher says Christian rulers to the north of al-Andalus were willing to supply arms for cash, spurring political and business interaction on all levels and enabling individual rise to power: “The most famous Spaniard of all time, Rodrigo Diaz, known as El Cid, “the boss,” was a Castilian nobleman who became an exceptionally skillful and lucky mercenary soldier who sold his skills to a variety of pay masters, Christian and Muslim, and ended his career as the independent ruler of his own little principality of Valencia on the eastern Mediterranean coast of Spain.”

Divisions like these weakened Islamic rulers of Andalusia, paving the way for Christian forces to gain control of the peninsula in the 13th century.  Granada, last of the Muslim outposts, finally surrendered to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain in 1492.  Crusader nobles and clerics from the north, who helped local Christian rulers defeat their Muslim rivals, also put an end to multiculturalism.  Within three months of Granada’s fall, unconverted Jews were expelled and Islamic practices banned.  Fletcher notes that legend would soon turn El Cid into a Christian hero, a loyal Castilian patriot, who was supposed to have spent his life fighting to expel Muslims from Spain.

Lasting Legacy
The legacy of the golden age of al-Andalus is widespread and lasting: from advances in agriculture, science, medicine, astronomy, cartography and navigation to the beauty of architecture, music, poetry, silk weaving, ceramics and marble carving. Some Andalusian products are still today hallmarks of quality: Toledo steel, Cordoban leather, Granada silk and Seville oranges.

Malaysian scholar Osman bin Bakar says this golden age offers some important lessons: “Fraternization! For scientific progress, you have to have fraternization. And the other one is universalism. I think the [Andalusian] emphasis on the universal aspects of Islam should be imitated by Muslims today, rather than going to sectarian thinking. I think universalism is the way to scientific progress. And certainly internationalization and globalization of science.”

Analysts say the Islamic world flourished through contact and cooperation with other cultures.   Its creativity declined with the onset of ethnic and religious conflict.