"MAD-deningly Unthinkable", two years ago, was a cautionary tale I wrote about the possible rekindling of humanity's greatest fear of a nuclear war where "MAD" stood for Mutually Assured Destruction. For decades it was what reassured world leaders, politicians, military strategists, even philosophers that WWIII will be avoided because none of the nations who will engage in it will survive. But what does that really mean?
It is not even a valid point of re-assurance because for MAD to work, everybody (from all opposing sides) should be convinced that each other's capability is exactly equal in magnitude and infallibly effective in every measure that no one side can survive. But we know that all it will take is for one or the other to believe that they have a winnable position through miscalculation, misinformation, self delusion, fueled by a misplaced sense of national pride or misguided national hatred towards the other side; just a few that can cause the perceived balance to tip disastrously. The news cycle, currently in today's geopolitical turmoil, does seem like a daily refrain constantly stoking that fear.
So, we have that and the history of humanity from which we are supposed to learn from but which we ignore or neglect to acknowledge. Either history is a poor teacher or man is a horrible student. If real events in history are not worth the pages they are written on, what are we left with to rely on to help us navigate through and prepare for a future that is yet to come?
The future. We can skip the so-called "think tank" projections, game theory probabilities, even artificial intelligence-aided scenarios because they are still based on human calculations and human parameters that we cannot trust. What are we left with? Nostradamus, Jeanne Dixon, doomsday prophets..?
It appears then that many attempts by us to govern or assemble a sustainable order for all of humanity to live peacefully with one another have failed throughout our history. From the time of the Magna Carta to all peace treaties that were signed and torn asunder to the Geneva Convention to the League of Nations to the United Nations, failure was a constant end to achieving eternal peace. Where else can we turn?
What we have not included from the first paragraph at the start of this musing (above) are the words from those who espouse predictions from the different points of view beyond what can be naturally explained - from the realm of faith-based or religious (if you will) prophecies. We might as well, since so much has already been tried but which has failed to live up to sustainable peace and harmony.
Referring to the first paragraph again, we may now include the religious leaders who were and still remain much less optimistic of the prospect of man-made solutions because ancient prophets have foretold the eventual end of the world from a different perspective.
Of late, we see and hear of the Middle East as the powder keg that can no longer be ignored that once lit could very well be the beginning of the world's real existential threat never once seen or experienced, except as depicted in Biblical prophecy. Has the fuse already been laid out? Is there hope it can still be defused? Or, is there little we can do?
What different contexts can we then extract from a never tried source before?
The two major faith-based sources that were written from ancient times were the Quran and the Holy Bible subscribed to respectively by Islam and the combined designation that we know as those belonging to the Judeo/Christian faith. Both written references are considered by their respective adherents as divinely inspired and direct messages from God.
It is critically important to note that, "The Quran assumes the reader's familiarity with major narratives recounted in the Biblical and apocryphal scriptures". Furthermore, "The Quran contains references to more than fifty people and events also found in the Bible". The Quran was written centuries after the Holy Bible was already in use by the faithful who switched from believers in multiple-god-worship to monotheism - the belief in one God.
Most, if not all, who read this will be from the Judeo/Christian faith so we will focus only on the perspectives from the Bible (Old and New Testaments). The contents of the Bible may be divided into historical events, moral and ethical prescriptions for righteousness and piety, the Gospels (New Testament) that pertain to the Messianic teachings, His life, and eventual return for the final battle between good and evil, prophecies of events yet to come.
It will take a very long foray into historical and Biblical research to get into the nitty gritty of how this leads into making the Middle East as the center for much of what is predicted to be an all out conflict to end all wars. We will take a short cut because, for one, I am not a Biblical scholar, and two, neither is the reader. There is a short version from countless Biblical scholars whose conclusions on the validity of the predictions I leave to the reader to assess. Let's just take the following that scholars use as proof.
1) Before 1948, there was no state of Israel but its establishment was prophesied in the Old Testament Book of Ezekiel, “For I will take you from the nations, gather you from all the lands and bring you into your own land” (Ezek. 36:24). Thus followed one extraordinary migration of Jews after the war (WWII) when in 1948 the state of Israel was created. They came from almost every patch of Europe, the U.S., Great Britain and from refugee camps everywhere.
2. Jacob was renamed Israel by God. Out of that lineage were the 12 tribes that spread from the time of the exodus from Egypt into the desert then followed by centuries of migration to places farther away that later became what is now known as Europe. Only a portion of those tribes kept practicing what is now the Jewish faith to retain their identities as such. The rest are what historians would later refer to, rightly or wrongly, as the lost tribes of Israel. But they have kept their affinity to the Bible for their faith so that even after centuries of migration and assimilation and the spread of Christianity, these people adhered to what is now known as the Judeo/Christian faith that retained the Holy Bible central to their beliefs and for spiritual guidance.
Centuries later the constant movement through either migration on their own or banishment through political persecutions, many went to settle lands of Scandinavia, later crossing the channel to settle westerly into what is now known as the British Isles. From there came the settlement of the New World, later to be called America. Biblical scholars, not all but some, proclaim that the creation of the British Empire and later that of the USA is fulfilment of the prophecy that was God's promise to Abraham, "Also God said to him: “I am God Almighty. Be fruitful and multiply; a nation and a company of nations shall proceed from you, and kings shall come from your body. (Genesis 35:11)
The same scholars claim that "a nation and a company of nations" refer to what would become the British (commonwealth) Empire and the United States, that helped liberate Europe that saved the Jewish survivors and kept its iron clad support of Israel even today. Farfetched? Debatable? Believers in it cite the rapid growth in terms of political, military and economic prominence of Great Britain and the USA as nothing short of miraculous in the time frame and scope that they occurred.
This takes as to today.
Megiddo from the title of this musing refers to the Biblical prophecy that is a real geographical location "as the site of the final battle between the forces of good and evil at the end of time, known as Armageddon. (Revelation 16:16). The word is mentioned only once. Today it is believed that, "Armageddon comes from Har Megiddo—Hebrew for the “mound” or “mountain” (har) of Megiddo".
Presently, it is a kibbutz in Northern Israel, created in 1949.
3. "You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come" (Matthew 24:6). From today it will still take a long time before Armageddon.
It will perhaps take a decade or more before Megiddo becomes the central point of conflict. That is how long it will take for the conditions to happen before the final war. Meanwhile, regional conflicts and rumors of conflicts will continue. Anti Semitism will continue to escalate here and abroad (particularly, Europe).
Germany will once again become a military power and so will Japan. Why? In Europe, NATO will continue to be under pressure from Russia which will impose real economic blackmail through the oil and gas supply to western Europe and the constant threat of the use of nuclear arms. Germany will use its technology and economic leadership to re-arm. Japan is concerned about China's military and economic power in the region, so it too will re-arm. Both countries have in their constitution that prohibits them from re-armament, except for civil defense. That prohibition will be waived by conditions that will make re-armament a necessity.
One crucial thing to watch is the alignment between Russia, China and Iran. Oil - Middle East oil - will play a key role.
All of these shall come to pass first. But not sooner than a few years from now or at least a decade or two. At that point, other things will happen. Food will become a major issue for much of the world population, recurrence of health threats (regional or worldwide pandemic) will re-immerge and there will be turmoil in governments from many areas of the world.
Britain and the U.S. will by then be perceived to have weakened from within - cultural divisions, moral degradations, political turmoil and economic hardships, perceived erosion of their military - that will result in the other nations to miscalculate and misinterpret as to embolden them into the unthinkable.
That is how we will get to the end before eternal peace can begin.
Now, we can ignore all of the above. We can treat this as nothing more than a thesis. Of course, it will also mean continuing with what had gone on for millennia; let history continue to be unlearned; let the future unfold purely from human machinations. We can take that position. Actually, we have done that exactly for all the centuries that have already elapsed. As such, it will have to take a catastrophic event for humanity to learn its final lesson with or without spiritual or faith-based introspection. The question then is, "Are we ever going to learn on our own and only through our efforts without supernatural intervention?"
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