Instead of Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey, there should be Deep Thoughts by Pope Francis who has taken to spewing these nonsensical Gandhisms in place of meaningfully grappling with the moral challenges of humanity. Gandhi, apart from being a malicious egotistical hypocrite, tended to frame his arguments in absolutist terms that if implemented would have eliminated mankind and certainly anything good and decent about it. (So you can see why leftists loved Gandhi so much.)

Here, while putatively commemorating the Holocaust, Pope Francis decided to link it to a Gandhist call to end all war.

Pope Francis recalled the extermination of millions of Jews in calling Wednesday for the upcoming Holocaust Day of Remembrance to reaffirm that war can never be justified and only benefits weapons makers.

Really, never?

WWII had nothing to actually do with the Holocaust and Allied leaders generally did not care about it and found it an annoying distraction, but nonetheless it was the military defeat of Germany that ended the Holocaust.

Nothing else would have.

How would Pope Francis propose to end an ongoing mass murder of millions?

“The remembrance and condemnation of that horrific extermination of millions of Jews and of other faiths, which occurred in the first half of the last century, help us all not to forget that the logic of hatred and violence can never be justified, because they deny our very humanity,” Francis said.

Violence is sometimes necessary. The Holocaust, if anything, is a reminder of that.

But there was Gandhi’s alternative.

“Hitler killed five million Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves in the sea from cliffs…. It would have aroused the world and the people of Germany…. As it is they succumbed anyway in their millions.”

Or to the British.

“I would like you to lay down the arms you have as being useless for saving you or humanity. You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions. Let them take possession of your beautiful island, with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these but neither your souls, nor your minds. If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourself man, woman and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them.”

There were plenty of people who glamorized this sort of simple-minded formula for letting monsters win while preserving some internal moral superiority.

This isn’t resistance, it’s surrender.

Francis said this year’s commemoration falls amid not only the war in Gaza but also in “tormented Ukraine” and called for prayers for the victims and for political leaders to “cherish human life by putting an end to wars.”

“Let us not forget: War is always a defeat, always,” he said. “The only ‘winner’ is the arms manufacturers.”

The only way to put an end to wars is to win them. War and violence are a part of mankind. They’re not going to vanish because everyone agrees that they’re bad. They’re needed as a counterbalance to war and violence.

There’s a reason that the Nazis aren’t still in Rome and a reason that these days Muslims are.