Friends, Nostradamus was interested in celestial portents as prophecy. Writing from the mid-1550s, he had accurately foreseen events and assassinations of royalty that did »»]]>

Friends,
Nostradamus was interested in celestial portents as prophecy. Writing from the mid-1550s, he had accurately foreseen events and assassinations of royalty that did take place under the visitation of a great comet over religious civil war ravaged France in the year 1577. Farther forward into the future, he described the passage of the Moon’s shadow over Flanders and the spot where Jesus Christ was crucified around the time of the new Millennium and how this would usher in earthshaking events both literal and metaphorical. On August 11, 1999, a total eclipse did begin in S. England. The Moon shadow crossed the English Channel passing over Flanders, Greece, Turkey, Jerusalem (the site of Christ’s crucifixion) and finally moved out into space after shading the State of Gujarat, India. In the weeks to follow Greece, then Turkey suffered large-scale earthquakes. Nearly 50,000 reported killed in Turkey alone. In early 2001, Gujarat may have lost upwards of 100,000 buried by a monster quake. After the eclipse of 1999 came American history’s significant course change in 2000 with the Bush era, and then the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. The world under the malefic influence of both has forever altered world destiny.

On July 21-22, 2009, the world will pass under the largest moon shadow eclipse and darken the skies in the widest swath, directly witnessed by the most people in history. It just so happens that the total eclipse will begin casting a shadow close to where Nostradamus’ eclipse of August 11, 1999 ended in Gujarat. The new shadow first touches down on the Gulf of Khambhat off western India around dawn of 22 July, Indian Time. The gulf cuts into the Gujarati landmass slightly east of where the August 11, 1999 eclipse shadow passed beyond earth.

The upcoming eclipse resumes where the last ended. It passes rapidly eastward over the crowded Ganges valley overshadowing Nepal, Northern Bangladesh, eastern Tibet, then draws a line across Burma finally transiting the densely populous heartland of China overtopping several of its largest cities and industrial centers. Chief among them are the 20 million dwellers of Shanghai before it ventures across the vast surface of the Pacific Ocean up to a point north of Tahiti.

This eclipse happens when the new Moon is unusually close to the earth, just a few hours after its perigee; therefore, the maximum time some of the hundreds of millions of people will experience eclipse totality will approach six minutes! Such a long totality will not be experienced again for over a century (in 2132). The Moon being 8 percent larger than the Sun at perigee will cast a monster shadow 258 km (161 miles wide.)

This is a significant celestial event possibly referenced in the following prophecy. It was written in 1555, indexed as Century 3 Quatrain 34 by Nostradamus:

Quand le deffaut du Soleil lors sera
Sur le plain iour le monstre sera veu:
Tout autrement on l’interpretera,
Chert  n’a garde nul n’y aura pourueu.

When the eclipse of the Sun then will be
The divine omen will be seen in the plain daylight:
Quite otherwise will one interpret it,
High price unguarded, none will have provided for it.

Back in 1997, I documented the following interpretation alluding to this prophecy describing the 11 August 1999 eclipse:

“A total eclipse will occur over England, France, Eastern Europe, and Turkey on 11 August 1999. It may be the same one mentioned in the [Epistle to Henry II] and in other quatrains that herald either Armageddon or a new millennium of peace. One cannot rule out that this monstre is some kind of extraterrestrial contact that signals doomsday for many of our spiritual dogmas and nationalistic ideas by proving once and for all that we are not alone in the cosmos. The solar eclipse expected in 2034 could be a divine omen of future economic collapse induced by the dog days of the greenhouse effect.

“Quatrain Indexing Date: ‘Q34′ = 2034, when a total eclipse is expected on 20 March, just prior to the sun’s transit from Pisces to Aries (the sign of wars, droughts, heat, or magical transformation).”

Nostradamus: The Complete Prophecies, p. 251.

I do not yet rule out the indexing as a possible dated code for economic collapse from ecological pressures in relatively far off 2034. Intuition still points to ecological stresses as the ultimate cause of civilization’s takedown on all levels in my visions. Still, I am wondering now if the umbra of this upcoming eclipse touching the Earth’s surface almost exactly where the 11 August 1999 eclipse had lifted off into space makes this new event “part two” of Nostradamus’ celestial portent for earthquakes — natural as well as social and economic. The fact that it comes right in the middle of the biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression also has me pause in foreboding.

In Predictions for 2009, I wrote in detail how the efforts of the Obama Administration to end this Great Recession would stagnate by year’s end and that the efforts made to stimulate the economy might lead to a greater crisis of inflationary depression by the end of 2010 into 2011. The “divine omen” of the great eclipse of 2009 may be overlooked as nothing more than an astronomical show of historic proportions in that the greatest number of human beings will enjoy it first hand.

Caution my occult heart and attend. The passing of the shadow of the 11 August 1999 eclipse could have forewarned of natural and civil upheavals. Is there something portentous overshadowing the economies and seismic regions of the two rising Asian economic superpowers in the months and years after part two of the great Nostradamus eclipse on 21-22 July 2009, if that indeed is what it is?

Will this eclipse over Burma mark a change in its government, an end to the totalitarian regime, or does it herald the end of life of Burma’s last champion for democracy, Aung San Suu Kyi, who now languishes in jail? What seismic economic and natural disaster does the eclipse’s shadow herald when it passes over China’s financial capital, Shanghai?

When the eclipse of the Sun then will be
The divine omen will be seen in the plain daylight:
Quite otherwise will one interpret it,
High price unguarded, none will have provided for it.

The high price of worldwide inflation, that none, not even Obama’s administration, or the Communists in China, or the technocrats of India have provided for or anticipated properly may be the subject of Nostradamus’ celestial portent.

Prepare for something big and unexpected after 21 July 2009. Earth changes. Earth shaking financial changes.

John Hogue

(16 July 2009)

Read more about the coming threat of an inflationary depression HERE.

Friends, Of the four elections most critical to the inclination of the future in the year 2009, »»]]>

The return of Hindu Nationalism? (The BJP Party flag).

Friends,
Of the four elections most critical to the inclination of the future in the year 2009, the fourth presented at the conclusion of this series may be the most significant and it is next, in May.

The terrorist attacks of a Pakistani-based jihad commandos calling themselves the Deccan Mujahadeen intended to set more than fires in iconic hotels, train stations and mow down hundreds of civilians across the Mumbai financial district back in November of last year. They wanted — indeed, they need — India to politically move to the right and fundamentalist orange Hindu-supremist intolerance. Radicals need to radicalize their enemies to make them more like themselves, ready to clash, to struggle.

The shooting up of Mumbai, especially centers crowded by many foreigners and foreign business people was a direct stab at Prime Minister Mahmohan Singh’s free market sympathetic Congress Party platform. They want him and his party to lose in May. They need a Hindu Nationalist regime like the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party, AKA Indian People’s Party) back in power, one that will twist impatiently the arm and threaten a weak Pakistani government to hand over terrorist leaders it has in custody and shut down their training camps. The Deccan Mujahadeen need an Islamic apocalypse like the one that came so close to taking place back in the first months of 2002 after the last al-Qaeda inspired commando raid out of Pakistani bases nearly saw commandos break into Indian Parliament, guns crackling and grenade splinters crashing and slicing.

The terrorists tried inciting the then Hindu Fundamentalist BJP government of Shri Atal Vajpayee into a boarder war with Pakistan. Letting slip nuclear weapons was an option openly entertained and popularly supported by mobs from the streets of Islamabad to New Delhi. If not by the grace of a pausing hand of Vajpayee, the button to launch nuclear war would have been pushed before the prevailing winds of the monsoon rains might blow the fallout back on India. War came very close as my own sources in Indian strongly contend — so close that certainly the Western press, so self obsessed at the time with the trauma of its own terror attacks on 11 September 2001, failed to tell you just how close the world came to a regional nuclear war from April through May 2002.

Islamic terrorists want to set in place through gut wrenching goading of their Mumbai attacks last November, a popular reaction that places into power the same kind of Hindu nationalist government that might launch nuclear war, sacrifice Pakistan to martyrdom, radicalize a billion Muslims and force the US and NATO out of Afghanistan. Nuclear war would fulfill the dream of terrorists like Usama bin Laden: reestablish with the nuclear annihilation of moderates in Pakistan a radical Islamic Caliphate in Afghanistan and what is left of Pakistan, turn their black flags West and in the Islamic version of the apocalypse, march on Jerusalem. (A comprehensive prophetic account foreseen by the Prophet Muhammad and Nostradamus of this Jihad crusade can be read in Chapter Eight, Black Flags of Our Martyrs Spreading West in Nostradamus: The War with  Iran, see  Nostradamus Iran.)

Newsweek reporters countenanced a less horrific future scenario after the coming May elections in late February. They predict a populist Harijan (or put less euphemistically, a woman of the lowest, Untouchable Hindu caste) named Mayawati might become the next prime minister and turn India inward back to the Gandian cotton-weaving wheel.

It sounds nice to Gandians, troglytes and cow hugging Hindus in dhotis, but India cannot turn back the wheel of economic engagement with the world. If she is indeed elected it will not be a coalition that will last long. New elections will be called.

Either way, if Prime Minister Singh cannot survive these challenges, the terrorists at least get a muddled Indian government that may not be able to mount a war on Pakistan.

My sense at this moment is that a fundamentalist coalition will carry Singh out of office. That would then delay a showdown with Pakistan after the monsoon is over, in October.

John Hogue
(16 April 2009)

2009 is the year when the consequences of botched and rushed partitions of India and Palestine in 1947 come home to either diplomatic breakthrough or war. A full accounting of what could happen can be found in Predictions for 2009.

Friends, I have some 666 trivia for you. The motto for the US Army Sniper School is a misspelling of Julius »»]]>

Logo of Bihar State, India.

Friends,
I have some 666 trivia for you. The motto for the US Army Sniper School is a misspelling of Julius Caesar’s famous Latin declaration “Veni, vidi vici” (I came, I saw, I conquered). Abbreviate the snipers’ motto “Vini vidi vici” and “Vi, vi, vi” in Latin equals Roman numerals for 666. Oooooh!

One reader took a crime of projection against an innocent number 666 a step deeper bemoaning the sorry fate of one of humanity’s most powerful, beautiful and now stained as evil symbols.

JAMES:
[What happened to 666] is similar to how a swastika symbol is viewed. Most people cringe when they see one, thinking Nazi this or that. They don’t realize it has [a Native American] origin — a different meaning. My dad has an old Indian blanket with the so-called swastika symbols on it. People have got to wake up!

HOGUE:
The poor number 666 is just a number, but the greater misfortune befalls the Swastika. It is one of the oldest and most universal symbols from pre-history. Svastika in Sanskrit, literally translated, means “that which is associated with well-being.” It is an auspicious symbol or lucky charm used all over the world. You can find it on the hilt of Viking swords or on a blanket or rock art of ancient Meso and Native Americans. You find it on Buddhist temples from Japan all the way to Burma and on Hindu, Jain or Tantric temples in India.

Even madmen like Hitler can have good taste in powerful magic symbols for good luck and therefore leave everyone after his violent passing with a bad taste for the Swastika.

Hitler mutates the swastika’s magical luck, takes the more aggressive, right facing form and tilts it out of balance, turning it into a destructively powerful symbol, upraised to thrust its hooked crosses down. The kind of lucky charm a demon might make to seal a pact with you wherein one has initially miraculous luck in war and conquest. Yet, there is a heavy karmic bill to pay. Hitler used this symbol to overtake most of continental Europe in three years only to bring down on himself and his people the Occult Law of Reverse Effect.

Swastika luck became anti-luck. A magically good run of fortune in war turns in the blizzards and bloodshed before Moscow in late 1941. Luck suddenly ran out for Hitler and every decision thereafter seemed to bring him a string of military disasters. In three years’ time, he and his empire are thoroughly and utterly destroyed. Such is the consequence of wielding magic without a conscious soul and guiding hand. Remember it, those of you who dabble in magic.

John Hogue
(14 April 2009)

More:

Nostradamus predictions

Nostradamus and a Future Nuclear War Lost by a Country symbolized by “Three Lions”

Friends, Flames vomited orange clouds billowing like ghosts of »»]]>

Nostradamus and a Future Nuclear War
Lost by a Country symbolized by “Three Lions”

Friends,
Flames vomited orange clouds billowing like ghosts of Hari Krishna swamis released from the funerary pyre that had become the southwestern roof of Mumbai’s Hotel Taj Mahal, on Midnight, 27 November. A floodlight illuminated the delicate Maratha-style cupola atop the great tiled dome. The scotoma glare transported me to scry shapes of statuary out of overexposed hoary white floodlit pillars. The pillars had morphed into the statues of lions that at any moment could collapse in the suttee of terrorist lit firestorms. The smoke and flame threatening dome and cupola was the end result of jihadists running amok through the hotel halls, setting off gasoline bombs with grenades, pounding on hotel room doors searching for Western hostages, among them my friends. These jihadists played a deadly game of hide and “seeking” death and seventy-seven virgins in “Osama-bin-lying” paradise.

Above the curtain of fire smoke feeding a lungi veil of orange night skies, and bathed in floodlight, the pillars had become in my inner eye the white stone gathering of lions in tight circle atop the dome. These animal totems of the modern Indian State, stood on haunches at rest, in my reverie, forepaws straight, defiantly mute as if unmoved by the gunshots and explosions. Heraldry in stone looked down “en passant” at hunkering members of the world press agencies of TV networks, giving their sing-songy, fire and smoke singed South Asian accented reports, somewhat breathless with fear yet literate. The cadence of their account often interrupted by echoes of bullet ricochets on the stone expanses at their feet, or drowned out when the flash and thunder sticks of Indian Army sniper rifles atop the nearby Gates of India Monument tore the air overhead.

The vision lions in white lights above the fray reminded me of Nostradamus’ prophecy about India basing its animal totem of three lions on that of their British colonial masters. I introduced my readers to this interpretation in writings published 12 years ago, and retuned to the concept in my Mahatma Gandhi’s Prophecy bulletin of 31 December 2001.

Indian scholars wished to remind me each time I published the following interpretation that there are “four” lions in their animal totem tableau; however, as the picture above shows, one’s point of view only sees three lions at a time. A vision, be it mine or Nostradamus’ would see the same.

The following quatrain from Century 7 of Nostradamus’ prophecies was written in 1556 and could hint what Gandhi’s final Indo-Pakistani war in his prophecy might look like:

***

The prophet Nostradamus may have foreseen its outcome in Century 7 Quatrain 16. If the leaders of India and Pakistan could read this following warning, perhaps they would pause and reflect before they pass over the Line of Control, and send history out of control.

Entree profonde par la grand Royne faicte
Rendra le lieu puissant inaccessible:
L’armee des troys lyons sera deffaite,
Faisant dedans cas hideux & terrible.

The deep entry made by the great queen
Will render the place powerful and inaccessible:
The army of the three lions will be defeated,
Causing within a hideous and terrible event.

In 1996 I wrote the following interpretation for this quatrain in Nostradamus: The Complete Prophecies:

“In 1985, Indira Gandhi, the Prime Minister of India, was gunned down by Sikh separatists who had infiltrated her bodyguards. The murder was in retaliation for her ordering the Indian Army’s bloody attack of Khalistani guerrillas holding out within the holiest shrine of the Sikhs, the Golden Temple in Amritsar. The ‘great queen’ could be Mrs. Gandhi or her granddaughter, Priyanka, who is being groomed for power by the Congress Party. The army of ‘three lions’ is the Indian Army, (the Republic of India has ‘three lions’ huddled together in its federal device). If Nostradamus is not alluding to this incident, perhaps, he is implying some future defeat of a descendant of Gandhi in a war over Jammu-Kashmir and the Punjab. The final line could describe a breakdown of Indian society in the wake of sectarian violence after the defeat. Or perhaps ‘within’ something worse. Maybe our prophet is warning of a plague from ‘within,’ in other words, a radiation scourge caused by a nuclear disaster at the atomic plant near Mumbai (Bombay), or from a nuclear bush war with Pakistan sometime between 1996 to 2026.”

Exerpt from:
Mahatma Gandhi’s Prophecy, 31 December 2001
Quoting from pp. 510-511 of “Nostrdamus: The Complete Prophecies”

***

On the Winter Solstice, and exactly 4 years before the most accurate prophecy ancient clock, the “Long Count” of the Mayan Calender, runs out of time — to what apocalyptic end, either of doom or revelation, is not certain — the Trident-Oberoi and Taj Mahal hotels in Mumbai reopened for business. The dead terrorists and their victims have been buried or burned on pyres, the blood in the halls of hotels washed clean. The fa??üade of normalcy in traumatized Mumbai hides the seething passion for revenge and a reckonning with Pakistan. The cool Indian winter months might suppress these nationalist passions, but come mid-February, when the subtropical heat rises, what will come as a consequence of the following issues laid before the government of Pakistan by that of India on the Winter Solstice?

The surviving terrorist prisoner is using the last weapon left to him well. His tongue spits out rapid-fire evidence of extensive rogue Pakistani involvement in the training of his person with tacit support of some Pakistani military and government elements. He and his squad of attackers are a handful of hundreds of other terrorists, trained in camps in Pakistan, poised for future attacks on Westerners in India and even the West. As Mumbai hotels celebrated their opening in defiance of that terror, New Delhi demands its opposites in Islamabad do something, and soon, to control its militant proxies and militants operating inside Pakistan.

Islamabad, so far, has done nothing.

When the air starts getting hot and sultry in the sub-continent, and if Pakistan remains recalcitrant about its own home grown terror camps, India’s air force and paratroopers may lay fire upon them, before flame trees and jacaranda’s of the hot season bloom.

We will be on the brink of an Indo-Pakistani military confrontation when punitive attack happens. Part Six will show just how much a confrontation of the near future in 2009 may look more like a crisis from the near past back in 2001-2002.

John Hogue
(29 December 2008)

A gathering of Forces at the Razor’s Edge Of Gandhi’s Fourth and Nuclear War?

Friends, The crisis »»]]>

The scene of an Indian-Pakistani border clash from 1999

A gathering of Forces at the Razor’s Edge
Of Gandhi’s Fourth and Nuclear War?

Friends,
The crisis begins. One that could overshadow all others coming in the New Year of 2009.

Today (26 December 2008), Associated press reports Pakistani troops are heading for the border with India. The 20,000 men of the 14th Infantry Division have moved to forward positions between the towns of Kasur and Sialkot along the disputed militarized border frontier dividing Kashmir known as the Line of Control. Intelligence reports describe large Pakistani units previously fighting al-Qaeda and Taliban terrorists are pulling out of West Pakistani tribal regions heading east in preparation to man the Indo-Pakistani line. Two strategic goals of the Mumbai terrorist attacks have been fulfilled: 1.) Renew a crisis between India and Pakistan; and, 2.) Relieve the military pressure brought to bear on al-Qaeda and Taliban centers of operation in Western Pakistan along the border of Afghanistan.

Usama bin Laden, one of Nostradamus’ chief candidates for what he calls Mabus, the Third Antichrist, is the dean of global jihadist terrorism. He has trained those who trained Pakistani terrorist commandos who inflicted death and chaos in the heart of Mumbai’s financial district in November. Though he does not, indeed needs not, directly overlord or even plan these attacks, he is responsible for the evil vision and training of those who do.

A great destruction of people and animals, as Nostradamus predicted may be Usama bin Laden’s intent. It will include the martyrdom of Pakistan in a nuclear war with infidel Hindu-dominated India that is intended to unite and radicalize one-sixth of the world’s people who are Muslim to wage jihad.

The nukes and rumors of nukes being stockpiled in South Asia since the late 1980s has compelled hot headed hawks in the governments of India and Pakistan to rush to the brink of war a number of times yet so far they dare not cross that apocalyptic line. I was in India during one of those rushes to that line. It was in the first half of 1990. I reflected upon those days eleven years later in what was written below in December 2001, framing them in childhood memories of the closest time the world came to doomsday:

***

During the Cuban Missile Crisis I watched loved ones peer into soft October skies waiting for Armageddon to fly on contrails of missiles and B-52 bombers. The tension I experienced in India reminded me of those thirteen frightening days from my childhood. I walked in the Indian valleys in the shadow of immanent nuclear death. That feeling returns to me now eleven years later [December 2001] as I watch developments in this newest crisis. I feel India and Pakistan moving inexorably towards the dark frontiers of a fourth war [forseen by Mahatma Gandhi] on the tank treads of mobile ballistic missile launchers.

A FOURTH ‚Äö?Ñ?Æ AND NUCLEAR ‚Äö?Ñ?Æ WAR?

In mid-December 2001, eight terrorists identified as members of the Kashmiri insurgent organizations of Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e Tayyaba, stormed the Indian Parliament in New Delhi. All eight men were killed along with six Indian security servicemen in a failed attempt to annihilate the political leadership of India. Soon afterwards large contingents of the 1.3-million-man Indian army and six-hundred-thousand-man Pakistani army began moving into position facing each other in the winter fastness of Kashmir along the disputed Line of Control. Farther south you see them park their tanks and set up their mortars and artillery along the partition line drawn 54 years before, dividing the heavily populated regions of Punjab. They position their anti-aircraft batteries and mobile ballistic missile launchers behind dunes in the deserts along the western edge of Rajasthan. They prepare dugouts for over a million soldiers down along an invisible line, drawn on the maps of politicians, across the Himilayan fastness of Kashmir all the way down to the salt marshes of the Rann of Kutch along the Arabian Sea.

And there those million men of India, and a half-million men of Pakistan, wait; hopeful for a diplomatic solution.

On Friday, 21 December [2001], the Indian High Commissioner to Pakistan, Vijay K. Nambiar, promptly left the Pakistani capital declaring a diplomatic impasse. He had learned that Pakistan would not immediately arrest all leaders and members of Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e Tayyaba organizations and dismantle their training camps in the Pakistani occupied portion of Kashmir.

Given the new and darker world we live in after terrorists harbored by rogue nations crashed hijacked jets into New York’s skyline and the US Capital, India feels within its rights to demand of Pakistan what America demanded of Taliban ruled Afghanistan: a) arrest all terrorists within their borders; b) close down and destroy their training camps; c) seize and destroy their weapons; and, d) face a full scale military retaliation if there is no compliance to every demand.

What indeed would Americans demand of Pakistan if they where in India’s place? If terrorists from camps in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir had sprayed the US Capitol Building with grenades and machine guns in an attempt to slaughter the US Senate and US House of Representatives, what would the United States do?

By adopting the Bush terrorism doctrine, India could soon launch an attack on terrorist camps in Pakistani territory but this time, the fourth war foreseen by Gandhi could go nuclear. Current estimates place Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal at 8 to 20 atomic bombs, each with a destructive force similar to those used by the United States in their nuclear attack on Japan in 1945. India may have anywhere from 25 to 40 similarly destructive atomic weapons in its arsenal.

When Gandhi and Jinnah debated the partition of India, there were 340 million people in the balance. Fifty-four years and an explosion of population later, Gandhi’s warning of a fourth and catastrophic war places up to 1.2 billion South Asians in the balance. In the worst case scenario, history’s first nuclear “bush” war could extinguish far more people than all those lost in both world wars of the 20th century. The death toll could be in the hundreds of millions.

Exerpt from:
Mahatma Gandhi’s Prophecy, 31 December 2001

***

The descriptions above, written exactly seven years ago, sound like today’s news. New terrorist attacks out of Pakistan on India, this time Mumbai, compel Indian leaders to demand the extradition of culprits and the dismantling of camps. It only seems the names of these leaders and organizations have changed. Now, starting with today, begins the military buildup along the border, the ramp up of tensions that could lead us weeks or months away from the brinksmanship of nuclear conflict in South Asia, like before, if this time India moves to punitive attacks on terror camps inside Pakistan.

A report released in May 2002 entitled Disarmament Diplomacy: News Review РIndia and Pakistan Camped on Brink of War over Kashmir estimated a worst-case scenario death toll far lower than my estimate. The defense agency report calculated an initial 8-12 million deaths in a nuclear exchange.¬† Millions more later would succumb to radiation poisoning which they did not wish to specify.

“That’s the worst-case scenario,” said an unamed Defense Department official, commenting on the paper, “If we have correctly guessed the number of weapons each side has, and their targets, and presuming they’re all ground bursts versus air bursts… The fatalities if they were air bursts would be slightly smaller by maybe a million, but…that’s still a very significant number…”

The report doesn’t factor in collteral death tolls from disease and famine caused by the destruction of urban Indian and Pakistani urban centers. Maybe a million? The tone of the study almost makes the unthinkable, sound possible. The possible is a view military hawks on both sides of the Line of Control push as sustainable. This mindset is immune to the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) that kept the Soviets and the Americans from fighting a nuclear war for nearly a half-a-century during the Cold War.

In Part Five of Mumbai 9/11, we ask the prophet Nostradamus for his take on a future Indo-Pakistani nuclear war. He may have described it over four centuries before it may happen.

John Hogue
(26 December 2008)

Friends Mahatma Gandhi is not often remembered as a prophet. Nor would he wish to »»]]>

Reenactment of the assassination of Gandhi, done with figurines.

Mahatma Gandhi’s Prophecy

Friends
Mahatma Gandhi is not often remembered as a prophet. Nor would he wish to be regarded as one, especially the prophet of South Asia’s doom.

“The Partition of India will be the cause of four wars with Pakistan!”

He made this declaration in 1947, before the Partition of India transpired. Before a Hindu fundamentalist gunned him down in 1948. They ironically blamed Gandhi for the mayhem of partition he had tried so desperately, even prophetically, to prevent. I’m sure Gandhi hoped against hope that an augured caveat of four future wars sprouting from proposed partition would motivate the Muslim League of Ali Jinnah and his own Congress Party to forbear slicing up the sub-continent into religiously nationalistic enclaves whose very polarizing existence would, he believed, bring a string of military catastrophes that need not be.

We resume the historical account I wrote for my HogueProphecy Bulletin “Mahatma Gandhi’s Prophecy” (31 December 2001) describing how first three of the predicted four wars came about:

***

Gandhi lived to see the first Indo-Pakistani war erupt in the mountains of Jammu-Kashmir at the close of 1947. This disputed Himalayan kingdom ruled by a Hindu Maharaja before the partition of India had a predominantly Muslim population. Both India and Pakistan claimed it. After the Maharaja had ceded Kashmir to India, he requested military help as mobile columns of Pakistani troops and armed Pathan tribesmen invaded through the Himalayan passes heading for the Kashmiri capital of Srinagar. Indian forces checked their lightning strike and United Nations intervention resulted in the battle line becoming the de facto new border between Indian and Pakistani Kashmir known to this day as the Line of Control. The first war resulted in roughly two-thirds of Kashmir remaining in Indian hands. Pakistan would demand of India that she let the people of Kashmir hold a special plebiscite to decide whether to incorporate into India or not. India would delay the Kashmiri plebiscite for decades. In 1960, Communist China signed a friendship pact with Pakistan and seized a large portion of Indian-held Kashmir two years later in a surprise offensive

In 1965, India and Pakistan fought a second and much larger war over dominion of Kashmir across the frontiers of West Pakistan. India sent 900,000 troops in a crushing, three-pronged offensive against the Pakistani defenses on the approaches to Lahore. Over 450 Pakistani tanks were destroyed. A UN cease-fire forestalled the intervention of Communist China on the side of Pakistan.

A third and even bloodier Indo-Pakistani conflict came six years later in 1971. A civil war in East Pakistan between Muslim Bengali insurgents (tacitly supported and armed by India) and an occupying army of mainly West Pakistanis escalated into a wider war with India. It started when the wholesale round up and massacre of hundreds of thousands of suspected Bengali civilians by West Pakistani soldiers caused ten million refugees to flood into India and overwhelm its emergency food resources. US President Richard Nixon declared that India’s support of Bengali insurgents was an attempt to destabilize Pakistan ‚Äö?Ñ?Æ a US client state during the Cold War‚Äö?Ñ?Æ and he cut off India’s American credit. Pakistani jets promptly bombed Indian airfields in Kashmir. The Indian army entered the war on the side of the insurgents. In twelve days they successfully shattered Pakistani forces on two fronts and captured an entire Pakistani army of 90,000 men in East Pakistan. East Pakistan became the new country of Bangladesh.

Pakistan had not only lost the war but lost half of its population and two-thirds of its export economy. The army and economy were on the verge of collapse. Pakistan stressed its economy further trying to catch up with India in a nuclear arms race obtaining nuclear weapons capability at the close of the 1980s. Around the same time, it also supplied arms and safe havens for Kashmiri insurgents to wage a decade-long civil war in Jammu-Kashmir. Border clashes across the Line of Control were frequent throughout the 1990s.

I was traveling through India in the spring of 1990 when the two countries nearly fulfilled Gandhi’s prophecy and fought a fourth war. Rumors abounded in the Indian press that India was contemplating a preemptive blitzkrieg strike to take out Pakistan’s nuclear program before they could make deliverable nuclear weapons. However, a report from Indian spies in Pakistan made an ominous discovery. They saw new bomb racks on the wings of Pakistani jet bombers large enough to load atomic weapons. Was Pakistan bluffing? Could they really deliver their nuclear payloads? The Indian government ordered their conventional forces to stand down.

Excerpt from:
Mahatma Gandhi’s Prophecy, 31 December 2001

***

There had been frequent border incidents throughout the rest of the 1990s, the worst being prompted by a future dictator of Pakistan in May 1999, General Pervez Musharraf, in a sharp action atop a mountainous section just south of the Siachen Glacier near the town of Kargil on Line of Control dividing Kashmir. Given the account just presented of the last three wars, the border clash, known as the Kargil War (May-July 1999), doesn’t count as Gandhi’s fourth war, as some of you might want to believe. Gandhi’s fourth war will not be some local battle, no matter how intense, fought in one sector in Kashmir. It must be a war not in one sector of the Indo-Pakistani border, but along all sectors. There must be deep incursions by air launched by the Pakistani and Indian air forces. There must be naval confrontations at sea.

A full-scale war didn’t erupt from the Kargil clash because of mountain blasts of a different level of magnitude had happened a year before. Pakistan successfully detonated their first atomic weapons tests deep inside the craggy wall of a Baluchistani mountain range shaking dust off its cliffs in five successful attempts. The largest of these unleashed a 5.0 earthquake unloading a blast yield in the belly of the mountain of 12 kilotons. India responded with its own televised underground tests in the Rajasthani Desert. (India had tested its first atom bomb back in 1974.)

Border clashes and shelling would remain frequent occurances after the tests up to and beyond the Kargil battle and all the way to present day. Indeed, small arms fire and limited shelling  along the Line of Control has increased since July 2008.

The last major standoff of millions of Indian and Pakistani troops came in late 2001 with no full-scale war. Apparently, no one on either side now dares push conventional conflict to the extremes of the past.

If they did — if India “does” in the near future to punish Pakistan for the Mumbai terror attacks — Gandhi’s fourth war could go nuclear.

John Hogue
(19 December 2008)

Friends History repeats itself with fatal intent in terrorist attacks on Mumbai last week. I fear »»]]>

The Tale of Two Nuclear Crises: Past and Future

Friends
History repeats itself with fatal intent in terrorist attacks on Mumbai last week. I fear they are strategically aimed to accomplish what was tried nearly seven years ago but failed only by the grace of a momentary pause of human reflection before pushing the button of nuclear war.

On 13 December 2001, five al-Qaeda backed jihadists from Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad terrorist groups operating from mountain bases in the Pakistani-held part of Kashmir, infiltrated India and stormed it’s parliament building compound in New Delhi. Their goal was a suicide mission to decapitate the Indian government in enfilade of AK-47 bullets and by blasts of suicide body bombs that would enrage India enough to start a nuclear war with Pakistan.

Indian security forces checked their charge at Parliament’s threshold, killing all five terrorists. Five policemen, a Parliament security guard, and a gardener were also killed, and 18 others injured. No parliamentarian was killed, however, the damage was done to tenuous Indo-Pakistani relations. Few in the West who at that time, reeled from 9/11 al-Qaeda terrorist strikes on the US just three months earlier, understood or even cared to understand how far more dangerous were the consequences of this terror attack on India. It was clear to me, at least, having spent much time in and out of South Asia since 1980 that Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad were trying to goad India into a border standoff with Pakistan — both being nuclear powers. Their aim was part of Usama bin Laden’s grand strategy to destabilize the region with an Indo-Pakistani military crisis that might lead to a nuclear war. Millions in Pakistan would be sacrificed for global Jihad. Dozens of millions of non-Muslim Indians would be killed as well. Terrorist organizations in the western Pakistani mountains and in Kashmir, up-wind of the fallout and devastated cities would be free to flourish and metastasize in the post-war chaos.

The attack of five terrorists on Indian Parliament was far more serious than any hijacked jet taking down the World Trade Center or crashing into the Western wall of the Pentagon in Washington DC.

The Indo-Pakistani standoff from December 2001 to June 2002 remains at the time of this writing the most potentially dangerous military crisis of this troubled opening decade of the 21st century. Indeed, it remains the closest humanity came since the Cuban Missile Crisis to suffering a nuclear war. The human masses on both sides worked up to a feverish nationalistic state were keen for it. Vast demonstrations in Indian and Pakistani cities lobbied their legislators hard for a nuclear edged stab at the other irritant. Only the “nay” vote of the then Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee prevented a nuclear punitive strike during the final weeks of the South Indian dry season. India’s military leadership pushed hard for a decision before the Monsoon rains came. Flooded mountain passes would inhibit a full-scale conventional invasion of Pakistani held parts of Kashmir after Indian jets unloaded the atom bombs and a few dozen Agni missiles bearing nuclear warheads fell on Pakistani cities and military bases. Tempers run hot in the 40-degrees Celsius dog days of June before bracing Monsoonal rains cool passions as well as temperatures.

Dial destiny forward. Here we are again, potentially a few weeks or months from a new terrorist triggered nuclear crisis.

On the night of 26 November 2008, well-armed and well-trained Islamic terrorists based in Pakistan infiltrate and strike several high-profile targets in Mumbai’s financial district. Explosions thudded along the Mazagaon docks where terrorist commandos in zodiac rafts disembarked from the hijacked fishing trawler Kuber. They had seized it in international waters after sailing out of Karachi, Pakistan, 38-hours earlier, in a smaller boat undetected by the Indian Navy. They killed the crew of four and forced the captain to set a course for Mumbai waters. They killed him too, once he brought the Kuber to anchor a few miles off Mumbai’s shoreline.

The terrorist commandos landed and fanned out through the streets. Two cut down Indian police, stealing their rover, launching into a spree of drive-by strafing of crowds in busy downtown Mumbai streets. In the late evening hours of 26 November 2008, gunmen sprayed bullets into stampeding crowds of thousands in the sprawling Shivaji Railway Terminus. The wounded brought to Cama Hospital were drilled again by bullets and grenade shrapnel. Mumbai’s downtown police headquarters was hit. Heavily armed terrorists broke into a Chabad house, a Jewish outreach center run by Chabad-Lubavitch orthodox Jews, shooting down a young rabbi and his wife along with five hostages. Bollywood Cinema crowds coming out of theaters were hit. Bullets and grenades sprayed the fallen dead with the food of life in popular Leopold’s cafe. The premier hotels of downtown where most western tourists and business people converge, the Oberoi and iconic Taj Mahal, were set ablaze, wherein terror stalked smoke filled halls and the dark warrens and rabbit hole rooms as hunters of jihad looked for their hiding prey.

The hell of Mumbai’s 9/11 attacks lasted the bulk of three days before Indian paramilitary and Indian Army commando Special Forces in what they would call Operation Black Tornado silenced the last terrorist. White and brown, Muslim or meditator had been coldly and indiscriminately slaughtered and wounded by the hundreds. The death toll is up to 188, with at least 33 foreign nationals and just under 300 seriously wounded or injured. Some of the dazed survivors I saw by chance on a BBC photo being gently ushered by police out of the smoking ruins of the Oberoi are personal friends of mine and fellow travelers on the path meditation.

I currently seek to know who else of my friends and acquaintances was there among the living or under the tarps for the dead.

One terrorist survived to tell his tale to Indian Intelligence Officers, and I dare say he’s using his words as the one weapon left remaining in his possession. His unsheathed and sharpened tongue readily willing to relay evidence of a Pakistani source of his attack could bring on a new military crisis between India and Pakistan. Not only were these men of Jihad well trained in weapons and commando-style operations in the Pakistani terror camps, but they were also trained to play a psych-war game, if surviving, explaining in detail to those in India, just how involved Pakistan was in their plans to hit Mumbai. Beware the tongue of terrorism for it will fan passions of Hindu fundamentalists on the streets and in Parliament to a new war fever pitch once again.

The interrogated has so far not hit his target. Both Pakistani and Indian military spokesmen officially deny seeing any troop reinforcements detected from their opposite along the Line of Control — the militarized no-man’s land dividing Indian-held from Pakistani-held disputed Kashmir. For now, the nuclear nationalism is on the rise only in the streets and not in the trenches along the mountainous Hindu Kush or in the parliaments of Islamabad and New Delhi.

Another scenario is looming. The Indian government demands Pakistan seek and destroy those terrorist camps at once and hand over to Indian justice a list of high-profile terrorist leaders it has incarcerated responsible for ordering previous attacks on Indian soil. If Pakistan does not comply the Indian government says it will “leave all options on the table” for a retaliatory response.

In Part Two of Mumbai 9/11, we will return to points I made in an article written on 31 December 2001 concerning the four Indo-Pakistani wars predicted by Mahatma Gandhi. There’s just one war left to fight. It could be coming soon. It is the one Gandhi feared would be the end of South Asia.

John Hogue
(05 December 2008)