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How the World Ends According to Nostradamus - Video học tiếng Anh
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How the World Ends According to Nostradamus
How the World Ends According to Nostradamus
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Hi, this is Josh, and today we’re explaining how the world ends… according to Nostradamus
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Born at the beginning of the 16th century, Michel de Nostredame, better known as Nostradamus,
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lived in an age of constant war and disease. The bubonic plague killed his first wife and
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two young children. At the time, he was working as an apothecary, selling plague
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remedies - which can’t have been any good. So, he turned to his other great love:
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astrology, predicting marriages, outbreaks of disease, usurpers
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of European thrones. You name it, he saw it. Some called him evil. Others said he was mad.
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In an era where claiming visions could get you tortured or executed, that mattered.
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But with Catherine de' Medici - wife of King Henry II of France - as one of his clients,
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his head remained firmly attached to his shoulders. In an era when death came
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without warning, demand for his supposed psychic powers and horoscopes made him a
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favorite of the French nobility. But he didn’t stop at predicting
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next month or a few years down the line. Depending on your reading of his works,
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he might have envisioned everything from Adolf Hitler to 9/11 to JFK’s unfortunate day in Dallas.
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And that’s where things start to get uncomfortable.
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It goes without saying that the Catholic church wasn’t his biggest fan, but with a Royal
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endorsement, he was effectively untouchable. Even after he might have predicted
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the King’s very grizzly death. On June 20th, 1559, King Henry was
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on top of the world. He’d recently signed a peace treaty with his enemies, the Habsburgs of Austria,
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and his daughter, Elizabeth, had gotten married to King Philip II of Spain.
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To celebrate, he staged a weekend of jousting - with himself as the star
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attraction. Wearing the colors of his mistress, the 40-year-old king rode headlong into combat
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against a much younger soldier. And he immediately regretted it.
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The soldier’s lance shattered, and a piece of wood splintered off and pierced Henry’s eye and brain.
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The injury became infected, spread to the brain, and Henry died in agony from sepsis 10 days later.
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Ten days. Had Nostradamus predicted it?
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One of his quatrains, a short four-line prophecy, warned that
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a “young lion will overcome an older one.” Sure, he said it would be on a “field of
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combat,” not a joust… but it’s close enough. But the best part is Nostradamus predicted
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that the young soldier would pierce the older man’s “eyes through a golden cage” – maybe
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armor. He also said that, “two wounds made one” – eye and brain equals sepsis.
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He called it a “cruel death,” and 10 days in agony certainly was.
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Convincing? Maybe. Coincidence? Possibly. But we’re just getting started.
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Nostradamus might have predicted the 1572 St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, when Paris was
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effectively turned into a killing field. Thousands were murdered in the streets and their homes. Up
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to 30,000 could have been killed in total after the fighting spread out of the city.
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These were the days of the French Wars of Religion. The Catholics versus the
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Protestant Huguenots. On the day it all kicked off, Paris was packed with
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Protestant nobles attending the wedding of Catherine de’ Medici’s daughter, Marguerite,
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to the Protestant King Henry of Navarre. What started as targeted assassinations
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of Huguenot leaders quickly spiraled into a mass slaughter.
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And word on the street was that Queen Catherine was behind it all.
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Again, Nostradamus might have predicted it. He wrote of a “great city…plunged into
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sudden confusion.” Check. “Night-time slaughter,
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the innocent struck down.” Check. “The royal power will be blamed.” Double check.
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And “faith betrayed.” Check. That’s a lot of boxes ticked for one massacre.
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The one thing he didn’t see was that one of the Protestants who survived the massacre
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was Gabriel de Montgomery, a Scottish-French nobleman. This was the soldier, now much older,
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who’d injured and effectively killed Henry in the joust. Nostradamus didn’t make the connection,
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So if Nostradamus was any good at his job, what massive event would he have predicted?
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Here’s a clue. The Enlightenment, heads on pikes, angry, bread-deprived peasants?
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That’s right, the French Revolution. This wasn’t the death of a king. It
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was the collapse of an entire system. 10 years of mayhem and madness and
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political change that started with the Storming of the Bastille in 1789.
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Nostradamus might well have seen it in his visions. Here’s his quatrain:
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“From the enslaved populace, songs, chants and demands,
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While princes and lords are held captive in prisons;
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These will in the future be taken as divine prayers
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By headless idiots.” Enslaved peasants and enlightenment
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intellectuals certainly liked singing songs. La Marseillaise was one of their favorites.
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As for chants, the Revolution was full of them. And princes and lords in prisons?
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The jails were bursting with nobility. As for the “headless idiots,” it may have
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been a scathing critique of the Revolution’s chaos - where collective madness took hold, and many
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revolutionaries quite literally lost their heads. And who emerged through the smoke
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of the Revolution? Napoleon, of course. So,
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what did Nostradamus have to say about him? Quite a lot, it turned out.
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He wrote: “PAU, NAY, LORON will be more of fire than blood,
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He will roam the seas in praise, refusing the crown.”
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You don’t need to play with the letters of PAU, NAY, LORON for
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long to get something close to Napoleon. Napoleon did indeed become a great leader,
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but it wasn’t his bloodline that made him top dog. It was his fire!
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Roaming the seas was his forte, and absolutely, he refused the crown. There were plenty of
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monarchists during Napoleon’s reign, biding their time. But while he was busy turning foreign armies
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into the dust, they could only stand back in fear as Napoleon received “praise” from his people.
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But there was more. Nostradamus also talked about, “An Emperor will be born near Italy,
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who will cost the empire dearly.” Napoleon was born Corsica, an island off
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the coast of Italy. It might have been annexed by France, but culturally, it was Italian.
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Did Napoleon cost the empire dearly? Well, his military sojourns around
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Europe cost millions of lives and a lot of cash. Some argue his conquests
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ultimately hurt France’s geopolitical position as a superpower. But we’ll let you decide.
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Just so you know, Nostradamus never claimed to be a mystic. Educated in math and astrology,
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he said he was merely a learned interpreter of celestial patterns - not a sorcerer.
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He called it “judicial astrology.” In an era that burned accused witches
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and believed villagers flew on broomsticks, openly claiming visions from another realm
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could’ve left him crushed in Spanish boots or having his toes held to the flames.
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That’s the reason he could get away with this next vision. He wrote:
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“The kingdoms will be shaken by sudden uprising, The people will overthrow ancient rule;
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Law will fail, order broken, And the great will fall from their seats.”
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This should be straightforward. The French Revolution didn’t just
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change the lay of the land in France. It had repercussions far and wide. The old order had
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been kings and queens that ruled over peasants who didn’t get much say in…well, anything. Their
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“sudden uprising” did overthrow the “ancient rule,” while law and order broke down.
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The Enlightenment, with its focus on the rights of man, changed the face of the entire Western
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world. All over Europe, in the German states, Austria, and Italy, in what would become the USA,
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revolutions exploded. The great leaders did indeed “fall from their seats.”
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But revolution wasn’t the only force reshaping the world.
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Technology. Peasants flooded into cities,
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where machines began producing goods faster than ever before. This Industrial
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Revolution began in England - and spread fast. Nostradamus might have been talking about the
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urban decay that followed when he wrote: The poor man’s cry will go unheard,
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While the rich will grow harder still; Cities will be filled with lamentation,
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And order will fail.” The poor suffered, and the
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rich grew colder toward the new working class. Cities swelled into slums, and unrest followed.
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In another quatrain, Nostradamus talked about cities being filled with the scourges of “famine
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within plague,” and “people put out by steel.” Was he seeing outbreaks of smallpox, typhus,
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and tuberculosis? And were “people put out by steel” the deadly crackdowns on protestors?
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Then the industrial powers went to war. And they brought their machines with them.
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So, did Nostradamus predict WWI? He talked about "wars stirred up
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anew" saying after a period of peace, there would be “battles in the sky.”
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Could that mean the airplanes - something no one had ever fought with before?
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He added to that, “Noise, song, battle, fighting in the sky perceived.
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And one will hear brute beasts talking.” Fighting in the sky, the beasts talking, was maybe
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the sound of guns. When Nostradamus was alive, no one fought in the sky. He also wrote that the
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“world shrinks.” And with airplanes, it did. Another part of the quatrain talks about a
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“Pig half-man.” A pilot wearing a mask would have looked exactly like that
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Ok. Adolf Hitler. There’s a guy who certainly left a mark on history.
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Did Nostradamus envisage a small man with a questionable mustache who tried to take over
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half of the world? Kind of.
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He talked about a “young child” who’d be “born of poor people.”
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Hitler’s parents both came from the peasantry, but they weren’t poor when Adolf was born. The father,
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Alois Hitler, was a middle-level customs official, and he provided a stable life for his wife, Klara,
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and Hitler’s 7 siblings – 4 died very young, 2 were half-siblings.
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So, the Hitlers weren’t exactly scraping by, but they did come from poverty.
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Nostradamus went on, saying this child would one day “seduce a great troop” by his “tongue.”
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Hitler was many things but he was a fantastic orator, and he absolutely seduced a nation of
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men to fight for him. Nostradamus also said this man will be born in Western Europe and quote, “His
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fame will increase towards the realm of the East.” Ask anyone in Russia - or anywhere east of
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Germany - if they’ve heard of Hitler, and the answer is an immediate yes. He was massive in
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the East, infamous rather than famous, but let’s not get hung up on semantics.
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Nostradamus also saw “Beasts ferocious with hunger” that “will cross the rivers.”
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That could be planes, tanks, or even ships. Nostradamus might have envisioned the battle
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on the Eastern Front, because he wrote that, “The greater part of
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the battlefield will be against Hister.” That sounds a lot like Hitler. We can’t
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really fault a visionary for his spelling. Staying with the early 20th century,
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there was another major event that killed off humans. No weapons. No madcap idealists. Nature
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did it all by itself. Nostradamus wrote:
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“After great war, a greater pestilence, No remedy, bodies struck without sign;
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Cities left deserted, Death walking unseen.”
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This might be referring to the Spanish Flu. Maybe 50 to 100 million dead globally. No
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one can be sure of the numbers, but this greater pestilence likely killed
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more people than the 9–11 million soldiers and 6–13 million civilians who died in World War I.
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“No remedy” . “Bodies struck without sign?” Maybe he meant the invisibility of an airborne virus.
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As for “cities left deserted”, Nostradamus hit the nail firmly on the head.
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News reports from the US talked about cities under quarantine where the streets were empty.
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Saskatoon, Canada, was described as a “city of the dead”, a ghost town, as everyone stayed home.
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And the “death walking unseen” could have been referring to people wearing masks or being very
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ill and not yet showing symptoms. Another major event from the early
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20th century is two Japanese cities being annihilated by American bombs.
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Did Nostradamus see nukes in his visions? One of his quatrains does sound a little bit
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like destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It says: “Near the gates and within two cities
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There will be two scourges the like of which was never seen,
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Famine within plague, people put out by steel, Crying to the great immortal God for relief.”
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Two cities scourged. The like of which was never seen. Seems pretty obvious.
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Famine and plague might be the radiation poisoning that the US at first denied existed.
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The steel could be related to the B-29 bombers that dropped the bombs. As for relief, well,
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the people certainly did cry out for it, but their government was slow to help.
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Then we have the day many Americans said their country lost its innocence, when darkness
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descended after a relatively stable 1950s - the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
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Nostradamus wrote: “The ancient task will be completed
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From on high, evil will fall on the great man A dead innocent will be accused of the deed
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The guilty on will remain in the mist.” “Ancient task” – assassinating political
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leaders has been around forever. “From on high” and “evil” – that could
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mean the invisible hands many Americans believe arranged the assassination.
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But the best part of this prediction is the “dead innocent being accused of the deed.”
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For conspiracy theorists, Lee Harvey Oswald, who was murdered after he was arrested, was innocent.
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And if the skeptics are right, the guilty did “remain in the mist” – they
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were never officially charged. Now we come to the modern age,
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and the day two planes flew into the Twin Towers as the world watched in a state of absolute shock.
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Nostradamus might have seen it in the stars when he wrote:
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“The sky will burn at forty-five degrees. Fire approaches the great new city.
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By fire, he will destroy their city, A cold and cruel heart, blood will pour.
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Mercy to none.” Fire in a great new
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city is obvious. Compared to other major global cities, New York is still a baby.
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What’s more, it lies close to the 45th-parallel – about 300 miles (483 km) away,
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but we can forgive Nostradamus for that error. It wasn’t completely destroyed, not even close,
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but Nostradamus was right about the cold and cruel hearts, the blood, and lack of mercy.
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He might also have seen WWIII. One of his quatrains talks about “combat and naval battle”.
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He explained the “Red adversary will become pale with fear. Putting the great Ocean in dread”.
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Red adversary? China? Was the great ocean in dread related to the fight in the South
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China Sea where China has been building bases? He also talks about a “great swarm of bees” in
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the fight, which could be the drones used in WWIII. The next big war will no doubt be a war
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of machines more than humans. But one of his best lines is:
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“Three fires rise from the eastern sides, while the West loses its light in silence.”
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Three fires from the East? Western media these days likes to talk about
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the new “Axis” – China, Russia, and Iran. And for years now, political scientists
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have discussed the new multipolar world where the US is no longer the only great
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superpower - so maybe Nostradamus was right about the West losing its light.
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He seemed to think the world would end, writing in another quatrain that on the
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seventh month of 1999, a “great king of terror” would fall from the sky. Unless
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he meant the rain in the UK, no great terror fell from the sky that year.
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The world didn’t end. But maybe he was right when he said that “Mars would rule” the world,
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meaning constant war. But let’s soften the blow.
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The truth is, Nostradamus’s grim predictions can be read in countless ways. It’s not that
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he perfectly foresaw the future - it’s that human history is so full of war, famine,
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and catastrophe that his prophecies can be made to fit almost anything.
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And even if you do believe him, there’s some good news.
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His 26th quatrains, which might relate to the year 2026, don’t just talk about a swarm of
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bees attacking by night, and the rising of the East as the West loses its light.
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He also says, "Shadows will fall, but the man of light will rise, and the stars will
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guide those who look within." We’ll leave that one up to you.
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Now go check out ‘Events That Will Cause the End of the World’. Or click on this video instead.
