If I had some bread, I would have a peanut butter and bread sandwich, if I had some peanut butter.

I got a book in the late seventies, a book of interpretations of selected quatrains of Nastrodamus.   I lent it to a friend, who lent it to a friend, who “lost it in a move”.  I don’t remember the author’s name, nor do I remember the title of the book. 

If I had the author’s name, I would have a unique book of prophecy, it I had a title.

I have tried to find that book for years, but to no avail.  I would recognize it by content, but not by author or title.  I regret that terribly because this author made at least one indisputable prediction that has come to pass, and several predictions that I see possibly taking form today.

Don’t hang up yet.  Disclaimer: Prophets, and their acolytes, that fit prophecy to events after the fact are charlatans and ingoramuses.  That describes all of the seers I am aware of over the last century.

This author interpreted, but he did not claim to be gifted with vision.  He predicted in this book, written in the early seventies, that Communism in Russia would collapse and die a peaceful death.  Anyone that believed that in those days was laughed out of town.  Everyone thought the battle between Democracy and Communism would culminate in a nuclear exchange and the Third World War – and probably the annihilation of the human species.  But his prediction was spot on.

So if you will bear with me, I will reconstruct from my memory some of the highlights of his interpretations of several hundred of Nostradamus’ quatrains.  I will couch them in my own terms out of necessity.  The meaning and story line that he developed stuck with me, but that will have to do for lack of the book to reference.

o         Communism will crumble with barely a whimper.  (Done deal)

o         Two brothers, twin mountains will fall into the sea.  (Could be 9/11 – done deal?  This one was also trumpeted from the rooftops, after the fact of course.)

o         The Third World War will have commenced without people realizing it.  (Our “leaders” are now saying as much about the “War on Islamic Terrorism”.)

o         Latin America will turn away from America and welcome China for a certain time until it comes to understand where its true interests lie. (Caesar Chavez in Argentina and his leftist allies coming to power in most of the rest of Latin America.  China is very active in the region and being greeted with open arms by much of that leadership.)

o         Following a rapprochement between the Eagle and the Bear, the Bear will turn away and again go its own way for a time. (This has been playing out according to script.  Bush "saw into Putin’s soul".  Warm and Fuzzies between the nations. But gradually Putin has been locking Russia’s nascent Democracy up and is now working at cross-purposes on the international scene in places like Iran.)

o         The Power of the Crescent will rise up in the Middle East and sweep outward with great success. (Is Bush’s Bully war in Iraq igniting this movement?  Civil war in Iraq seems to already be in progress, and there is absolutely no way that our troops aren’t going to get embroiled in it.  We are being sucked inexorably into the vortex of the Crescent.)

Timeline today:  The following interpretations have not emerged visibly as yet.  They seem as of now as far-fetched as Communism dieing in its sleep did in the Seventies.  Keep that perspective in mind as events onfold:

o         North Africa will fall to the invaders, then Spain, Italy and the rest of the Mediterranean countries.
o         The forces of the Crescent will gain strength and adherents in the conquered lands, and push into Europe.  (The Muslim Islamic population in Europe, especially France but even England, is large and volatile.  One could see a fifth column of significant proportions if the religious crusades by the Crescent forces boiled out of Africa.)

o         Germany will be neutralized somehow and be ineffective in fighting the invaders of the Crescent.  (Germany has a significant Muslim population, much of it Turkish workers that have decided to stay on.)

o         Battles rage from Southern France toward Paris as the Forces of the Crescent enjoy victory after victory.

o         A nuclear air-burst set off by the forces of the crescent to incinerate the path before them backfires and causes damage and great causalities in their midst.

o         One or more cities in Europe, but the south of France in particular, are turned into a desert. (Nuclear wasteland?)

o         The plague is loosed on the populations of European cities. (Biological Chemical warfare against vulnerable civilian populations.)

o         The Allied forces facing the Crescent do not use nuclear weapons. (Home territory, collateral damage?  Global Warming, pollution concerns among rational people?  Rational people want a future for themselves and their children.  Fundamentalists of any stripe tend not to care about this existence.  It’s all about the next life, so why bother, why pull your best punches?)

o         Biological warfare is not used at this time by the allies. (Harder to use against dynamic troop formations than static civilian targets.  As with Nuclear detonations, concern for collateral damage on friendly territory might be a consideration.  The Crescent fundamentalists have no such compunction.)

o         Parts of England are flooded and the British Government goes into exile in Canada.  (Global warming, glaciers and ice caps melting and raising ocean levels?  It could happen, as the standup comedienne Judy Tanuda used to say.)

o         A Scottish leader betrays the Allies to the forces of the Crescent.

o         The Eagle and Bear will come to understand that they are brothers and join forces against the forces of the Crescent sweeping across the European and Eurasian continents.

o         The “Harvey” straights over the top of the world will become a lifeline for the allies.  (I have never found that waterway on the map, but I may have recalled the name wrong.  It makes sense from a strategic point of view because it would be out of effective reach to the forces of the Crescent without a powerful submarine and air force.  And global warming, which is coming on fast, may make a heretofore undiscovered passageway free of ice by that time.)

o         A nuclear Airburst in the New England area ignites a huge conflagration that threatens New City.  (It is pretty much commonly accepted by the Nostradamus nuts that he was talking about New York City which sits at a latitude that he identified accurately.)

o         The defenders of New City successfully defend against the arrows for a time, but then are overwhelmed.  (ICBM rocket attack ultimately overwhelms limited Anti-ICBM forces that have been put in place.)

o         A 100 million man army will cross the Euphrates River.  (The author thought that had to be China, the only nation that could mount a 100 mega-man army successfully and march it across the Eurasian land mass to control the oilfields – Genghis Khan in a tank.  The Chinese military is being modernized and built up at an alarming rate, in case you hadn’t noticed.)

o         A black squadron of aircraft intervenes in China to assist some movement there. (Stealth aircraft didn’t exist at the time of this book's publishing, and they weren’t even envisioned in any public discussions in the seventies.  Uncanny?)

o         Biological weapons take the Chinese out of the war in no time flat once they are employed because of the high population density and underlying poor infrastructure strained by the war effort.

o         The tide of battle in the European theater turns in favor of the Allies as the religious frenzy driven impetus diminishes in the Crescent forces.

o         A heat ray is employed by the allies that allow them to stand off at a great distance and incinerate the cities and forces of the Crescent.

o         The forces of the Crescent are vanquished and hostilities cease without retribution because too much horror has already been visited upon humanity.

And the healing and rebuilding commence and ushers in a thousand years of stability and peace.

I share this with you because I was so impressed with this author’s interpretations.  You of course can take it or leave it, but I am more and more a believer as world events unfold.