Herbert Armstrong's
209 False Prophecies

by

"The Watcher"

and contributions at the Painful Truth

~ Add your story Here ~

 

1) Plain Truth Dec 1940: Britain will be conquered by Nazis

2) same: Turkey will turn traitor to Britain; it stayed neutral

3) 1944 PT: "we have made but the slightest dent in Jap defenses in the Pacific & at the present rate, it will take us about 20 years" to defeat them

4) 1964 Coworkers letter: "only 7 years before H-bomb warfare breaks out"

5) May 1965 PT: "Hitler will be falsely resurrected by the Pope"

6) Feb 1965: by Meredith: "documented proof Hitler did not die in his bunker"

7) Nov 30, 1963, coworkers letter: "we have only eight years to finish the Work"; Nov 22, 1963, coworkers letter: "in eight years all of our ministers will be silenced" - religious persecution on WWCG

8) 13 Dec 1965, HWA in co-workers letter: "We are in the grand smash climax - only 6 years left."

9) July 5, 1967, coworkers letter by HWA: "the Jews will demolish the Dome on the Rock"

9) 1953 PT by Hoeh: "Kremlin plans for 20 year in Korea" - Eisenhower settled war within one month

10) June 27, 1964, Hoeh: "Christ's apostles failed in not starting school like AC"

11) 1955 PT by Hoeh: "within 20 years this nation will be toppled by worst drought in its history" - note: 1975 US had one of greatest grain surpluses and sold it to Soviets

12) 1939 PT: "Hitler will give his power to Mussolini"

13) 1939 PT: "Franco will give his power to Mussolini" - note: stayed in power for 30 years after Mussolini died

14) 1939 PT: "Ethiopia & Libya will join USSR in WW2" - note: they were conquered from Italy by Britain within 2 years

15) 1939-40 PT: "Mussolini will conquer Egypt & Palestine" - note: Dec 1940 30K British troops capture 250K Italian troops

16) April/May 1940 PT: "Today England is a dictatorship as absolutely as that of Hitler or Mussolini"

17) April 1956 PT by Hoeh: "Disease epidemics threaten US in 2 years"

18) 1959 PT: "Doom for US within 10-15 years"

19) 1965 PT by Meredith: "trade embargo by European Common Market will ruin Britain and US"

20) 1962 PT by HWA: "There is no boom in sight" - note: US was at beginning of biggest boom in history of the world

21) 1959 PT by Hoeh: "Red China plans spring invasion of India"

22) 1934 PT: "Christ will return in 1936"

23) 1940 PT: "Christ will come after 3.5 years of tribulation in October 43"

24) 1982 Coworkers letter: (for those who claim he mellowed with the years) "I hope to arrange for the use of Petra as a possible refuge or place of safety during the Great Tribulation when I see King Hussein. Pray for this please."

25) 1960's PT repeatedly claimed 1972 would be the year of Christ's coming

26) after 1969: HWA claimed it would be 1975

27) first half of 1950's PT: Christ would return in 1957

28) 1965 PT: east Jerusalem would remain in Gentile hands until Christ's coming; note: less than 2 years later Israelis conquered it

29) 1967 Passover speaking at Bricket Wood, England: within the year Jordan would conquer west Jerusalem from Israel; note: within six weeks Israel conquered West Jerusalem from Jordan

30) 1927-47: 27 major false documented prophecies already proven wrong. Explains why he had to flee Oregon for California

31) 1960's through early 1970's coworkers letters: Prince Charles will become king of England & become the wicked prince prophesied in book of Isaiah

32) 1946/47: there will be no Jewish state in Palestine; reasoning: since Britain & America are really Israel Palestine must be kept for them in the Millennium

33) 1942 PT: Rommel will conquer Jerusalem & Egypt with help of German army coming through Caucasus and southern Russia; note - more than 1 million German/axis troops destroyed in Stalingrad, August 1942 - Feb 1943; British eighth army destroys Rommel's army at Alamein Nov 1942 & then advances 1000 miles across Africa

34) 1957 PT: predicts the Treaty of Rome creating European Common Market will lead to Catholic/Nazi dictatorship by 1962

35) 1956-1980 PT: Franz Josef Strauss will be the beast and the man of strife in the book of Hosea; note - Strauss never became leader of Germany, defeated by Helmut Schmidt in 1982, died 1988, great ally of US & Israel all his life

36) Gerald Waterhouse continually: if HWA died, God would destroy the world

37) 1965 PT: by 1969 Britain will be helpless & impoverished seeking help from Germany

38) early 1960's PT: man will never walk on the moon

39) 1950's/60's/70's PT: US will never win another war; note - 1982 Grenada; 1989 Panama; 1991 Iraq, then rated 4th largest army in the world, destroyed in 40 days

40) 1982 coworkers letter: expect Argentina to sink Britain's royal navy in Falkland war; note - total victory for Britain in less than 2 months, Argentine airforce destroyed, Argentine dictator falls

41) 1956 onward after Suez: Britain will never win another war

42) 1956 onward after Suez: Britain will never regain seagates she lost; note - 1982 Falkland Islands commanding South Atlantic regained

43) late 1960's: by mid 1970's Britain will have lost all seagates; note - by 1992 Britain still holds Gibraltar, bases on Cyprus, Hong Kong, Ascension, Mauritius, and other places

44) ?: before June 1944 HWA appears to have predicted on radio the D-Day landings would fail

45) July 1945: although Germany is destroyed Japan will develop atomic bomb to destroy America; note - US atomic bomb already tested in Los Alamos, key components manufactured in Washington state north of HWA in Oregon; August 1945 2 US a-bombs dropped on Japan to end war

46) 1956 PT: Britain will collapse into famine & anarchy within 3-5 years

47) through 1960's/70's until 1978 in coworkers letters: he & GTA will be two witnesses Zerubbabel and Joshua

48) April/May 1978 Worldwide News: HWA teaches you can only come to Christ through him through government structure: cut yourself off from Christ if you disobey HWA

49) repeatedly taught in books/articles: there is no intelligent life in space apart from angels: let's see who contacts us

50) 1957-72: Britain will never join European Common Market; note - 1973 Britain joined European Common Market

51) 1973 onwards: Britain will leave European Community; note - after 21 years Britain is still in community

52) 1950's-80's: European Community would become German dominated tyranny; note - 1992, after 35 years EC remains most democratic group in European history & dominated by France

53) 1974 PT: US will prove unwilling & unable to go to war to protect world oil supplies from Persian Gulf; note 1991 Gulf War proved them wrong

54) 1934/35 PT: Mussolini will be world dictator

55) 1948/49 PT: Germany will become nuclear superpower within five years; note - instead Soviet Union does in 1949 A-Bomb, 1953 H-Bomb

56) through 1950's: man would never get into space; note - April 1961 Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin

57) Plain Truths and radio broadcasts: 1947-57: Germany will develop super-V2 rockets to destroy America's cities.

Instead, when the long-feared intercontinental ballistic missile was finally developed in 1957, the first nation to do so was - of course - not Germany at all, nor even the United States, for that matter, but the Soviet Union. Herbert, as throughout his long, shameless and ludicrous career, was even blinder towards Russia than all the other things he missed. Remember that the stupid old fool confidently predicted throughout World War II that the Nazis would force the Russians to their knees. As the Russians were "mere" Slavs and not either the Anglo-American chosen race nor Hogberg's German Aryan supermen, neither Herbert nor his fellow whores ever took them seriously.

58) 1970's: Germany will make a deal with the Soviets to take over Eastern Europe; note - 1989-91 US negotiates Soviet withdrawal from EE

59) 1960's-80's: German unification will be immediately followed by Germany becoming fierce anti-American nuclear power; note - 1990 united Germany leaves Warsaw Pact and stays in NATO, US more popular than ever for support of unification

60) 1979 PT by Hogberg: Panama Canal Treaty means US has forever lost control of canal; note - 1989 US invades Panama, kicks out anti-American dictator Noriega

61) 1966 PT by Dale Schurter: prepare for famine in US within 3-5 years; note - hundreds of WWCG farmer members bankrupted following his teaching that fertilizer was sinful

62) 1966 sermon by Meredith: within three years by 1969 society will have collapses in America; millions will flee into cities

63) March 1963 by Hogberg in first article in PT: worst weather in a decade means start of famine cycle

64) 1974 PT HWA: After Nixon's resignation, the United States will never again lead the world or be effective in war.

65) 1960s-70s PTs: The United States will never be able to reverse the tide of communism in the world.

66) 1960s -194-75 PTs: HWA and GTA - Radical Arab threat to the oil fields will lead Germany and Japan to rearm because America could not protect them. In the 1991 Gulf War, the opposite happened.

67) HWA throughout the 1950s and 1960s: When Germany becomes united, it will immediately turn on America, arm to the teeth with nuclear weapons, and make the whole world tremble. Instead, German unification was followed by Germany remaining an ally of America in the NATO alliance and Germany remained democratic and became less bold on the world stage, not more.

68) HWA, GTA, Hogberg etc. al through the 1970s: Defeat for America in Vietnam will be followed by more Vietnams in Central America. It wasn't.

69) HWA in mid-1970s newsletter: "Ministers who rebel against me and leave this organization are reduced to working with their hands" - an interesting comment on how he saw "the dignity of labor" - Instead, two of them, Art Makarow and Robert Kuhn, became millionaires. Another, Ernest Martin, became prosperous, successful and respected in the Biblical academic community.

70) Repeated 1950s and 60s HWA theme: Whenever Britain loses a 'sea-gate' it never gets it back. 1982 Falklands War, Britain regains the Falklands 'sea-gate' from Argentina.

71) Turkey will prevent the United States Sixth Fleet from fleeing from Nazi European air attacks and will stab America and Britain in the back. It will later be destroyed for this treachery. - Plain Truth articles by Hoeh, Herbert and Meredith in the 1960s.

It never happened, of course. Just as Turkey never joined Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in World War II, despite all of Herbert's confident and supposedly "knowledgeable" predictions than it would.

This particular bizarre claim, repeated in one form or another by Herbert for more than 40 years, was based on Herbert and Hoeh's "scholarly" conclusion that Turkey was Edom of the Bible.

As usual, there is absolutely no real evidence at all to support this bizarre conclusion. But what else would you expect from Hoeh? This is the man who seriously claimed that Job in the Bible built the Great Pyramid of Giza although his only argument in favor of it was that the King James translation of the Bible referred to a "cornerstone" which "must" have been the capstone of the Great Pyramid.

Hoeh would explain away all those references to the Chrysler Building being built only 70 years ago come from deceived historians of "The World" who were part of a conspiracy to prove his two-volume Compendium wrong.

72) HWA - 1953 "Middle East in Prophecy" article predicts Russia and China will never split but will remain united until Christ's coming. They split in 1958 and remained bitter enemies for more than 30 years. China never again fell under Moscow's leadership.

73) 1960s - Predicted Russia and China would mend their split. They never did.

74) 1960s and 70s: The fall of Vietnam to communism will be followed by the fall of the rest of Asia. It wasn't.

75) Communism in Russia will last in Russia until Christ comes back - Repeatedly written and preached by HWA through 1950s, 60s, 70s and early 80s. Instead, Communism collapsed in Russia in 1991.

76) HWA, 1956 PT: "Who will bury who?" Predicts that communism in Russia will outlive the United States. It didn't. It collapsed in 1991.

77) Another repeated HWA prophecy from 1940s through into the 80s: German unification will lead to European political unity. The opposite happened. German unification in 1990 led to the collapse of the European monetary system 2 years later because Germany put funding reunification first above funding a European currency.

78) Another repeated prophecy: creation of a single integrated market in the European Community will immediately lead to immense wealth there and America collapsing into poverty. Instead, creation of the integrated market at the start of 1993 led to European unemployment levels running at twice America's. While the U.S. economy recovered, Europe's slumped into depression.

79) 1960s PTs: All the soil of the U.S. Midwestern "Breadbasket" states will erode by 1972, leading to famine. Instead, Midwest soil erosion was largely reversed in the 1980s by an excellent Reagan administration Department of Agriculture program to plant trees and take other anti-erosion measures in the region.

80) 1960s PTs: The new wheat and plant strains of the high-yield "Green revolution" will cause more famine, not less. The opposite happened. Food yields in Asia, Africa and Latin America soared over the next 20 years and outstripped population growth.

81) HWA and Hoeh in 1956 PTs: Predicted Otto Von Habsburg would take over Hungary after the 1956 Hungarian revolution. The revolution was crushed. 38 years later, Otto is still waiting.

82) Also repeatedly predicted Otto would return as emperor of Austria. Again, it never happened.

83) 1953 PT: HWA predicted that the anti-Communist rising in East Berlin would lead directly to a restored Nazi Germany. The rising was crushed. 40 years later, no Nazis have ever taken power in Germany.

84) Early 1950s, HWA predicted in the PT that a native Egyptian would never rule Egypt. In 1954, Gamal Abdel Nasser took power. Herbert responded by claiming that Nasser was a light-skinned Arab and not a real Egyptian. In 1970, Nasser died and was replaced by Anwar Sadat, a black native Egyptian from southern Egypt.

85) Another repeated HWA prophecy: The European Community's currency would become the "Mark of the Beast" - the most powerful currency in the world. In September 1992, that currency collapsed.

86) Throughout the 1950s and 60s, HWA repeatedly prophesied that "within 3 to 5 years" the bumper grain crops of the U.S. Midwest would "certainly" vanish. The "certain" date this would happen by was 1972. Instead, 1972 saw record surpluses which were sold to Russia to avert famine there.

87) 1961 PT: HWA prophesied that the Berlin crisis would lead to the collapse of America and the rise of a united Nazi Germany. Instead, the strong U.S. response to the Berlin crisis confirmed U.S. leadership in Europe for more than 30 years, Germany remained divided for almost 30 years, and when it united, it did so as a democratic, American ally.

88) Warned in 1960 that if John F Kennedy was elected president, the Pope would have a crucial foothold to seize power in America. Again, empty fantasy.

89) He and Dale Schurter warned farmers against using nitrate fertilizers claiming it would ruin their lands and would cause famines around the world. Instead, nitrate fertilizers, developed after the turn of the century, have fed billions of people. It was farmers who followed HWA who were ruined when they suddenly abandoned all fertilizers on his urging and went immediately to compost heaps without easing their land off it. Hundreds or thousands of families were ruined.

90) 1978 co-worker letter. HWA predicted that the next pope (who turned out to be John Paul II) would very rapidly united Europe. He didn't.

91) HWA 1950s article, often reprinted called: "World War III: There is a way of escape" There may be. But not through following him.

92) From 1950s onward, HWA and Hoeh: King Hussein of Jordan will grant the WWCG a tribulation-time "place of safety" at Petra. 1994, King Hussein is dying of colon cancer. Extreme Islamic fundamentalists are threatening to topple his dynasty and seize Jordan.

93) Repeatedly predicted through the 1940s through 1960s that control of Jerusalem would be a "stumbling block" to the state of Israel and the Jewish people. Not so. It proved one of the most powerful forces keeping them united.

94) Repeatedly predicted from the 1950s on that "within 3 to 5 years" Jerusalem would become an internationalized city. 1994, Israel remains in full control.

95) Claimed in 1950s and 1960s that Britain would plead with Franz Josef Strauss and Germany to "rescue" it from ruin. Strauss died in 1988. Britain was riding higher under Margaret Thatcher than it had for 40 years.

96) In 1947-48, predicted that the violence in Palestine would result in Jerusalem becoming an international city run by the Pope. It didn't. Jordan controlled East Jerusalem for 19 years, the state of Israel for the quarter of a century since.

97) Repeatedly predicted through the 1960s that the Germany army would "rescue" the state of Israel from destruction. Again, it never happened. U.S. military aid saved Israel in 1973 war and helped defend it in the 1991 Gulf war.

98) 1967 PT: The Israelis will make a deal with the Vatican to build a Third Temple by 1972. Again, it never happened.

99) 1984: On his last visit to Jerusalem, HWA, realizing that Israeli leaders don't take him seriously, rants and raves on his last visit there before an audience of diplomats "prophesying" ruin and destruction will come after him. He dies in January 1986. The decade which follows sees unprecedented prosperity and general peace for Israel and Jerusalem. Even the 1987 Palestinian uprising doesn't dent Israeli control. Israel gets its inflation under control for the first time in 20 years and ends a painful 2-year war in Lebanon successfully immediately after Herbert's curse.

100) After Vietnam, Britain and America will forever lose the pride in their power. Instead, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher restored it. However briefly, that proved this "bold prophecy" false.

101) France, from 1950s, will never again play a major or heroic role in the world. Instead, the Fifth Republic from 1959 restored French political power.

102) Germany, in prophecies from the 1950s on, will become the dominant military power and the one major nuclear power of Western Europe. Instead, from the late 1950s, France fulfilled both those roles, and still holds them 35 years later.

103) From 1950s onwards, predicted that France would never win another war. Instead, French paratroops smashed the Libyan army in Chad in 1986-87.

104) Predicted that Germany would dominate the European Community from the 1958 founding of the Common Market. Instead, France dominated all the main institutions of the Community and retains this control 36 years later.

105) Predicted France would follow Germany's lead and be part of the European power that would destroy Britain and America. Instead, in the mid-1980s, France rejoined American-led NATO alliance.

106) Predicted Germany would seize the oil of Saudi Arabia. It never happened.

107) March 1950 PT: On the United Europe: "Definitely Britain will not be in it." 1973-Britain joins the European Community; 1991-EC becomes the European Union following Treaty of Maastricht. Britain remains a member to this day.

108) March 1950 PT: "One third of our people will die from starvation ... - and in the next FEW YEARS!" Is 48 years just "a FEW YEARS!"?

109) March 1950 PT: "Most certainly it is easily possible the thing (United Europe) will be fully developed and ready to strike in seven years! Yes, time is running out on us." 1957 -Six nation European Economic Community is in fact founded by the Treaty of Rome (and how Herbert loved that). Only one problem: it remains after 41 years entirely democratic and pro-American, and far from bankrupting the United States, has regularly imported more from us by far than it sells to us.

110) August 1950 PT: Article entitled "Hitler Did Not Die" - "Thus it has been proved conclusively and beyond doubt that Hitler did not die - his body was not there - HE HAD ESCAPED." 1947 - British Prof. Hugh Trevor-Roper, a British army intelligence officer in Berlin in 1945, publishes "The Death of Hitler." It is an international bestseller documenting the evidence Hitler died in the bunker. But Herbert, who had never visited Berlin when he wrote this, had no doubt he knew better than the future Regius Professor of History at England's Oxford University. 1996-97-Opened former Soviet secret archives reveal that Stalin had the burnt remains of Hitler's body transported to Moscow. Soviet forensic checks confirmed they were Hitler's remains. Dental records among others were perfect fit. Russian historians now believe Stalin deliberately wanted to sow confusion and fear with the possibility that Hitler was still alive, but only herbert and his merry men fell for it. They kept falling for it through the 1960s too.

111) August 1950 PT - "The next Pope will be a miracle worker, a supposed proof that God is using him to order and pacify the world!" 1958-62 - The next pope was Pope John XXIII. He never claimed to be a miracle worker and never tried to organize or pacify the world.

112) May 1954 PT: One of Herbert's writers , surname Kenneth Hermann writes with HWA's hands-on approval: "The idea of men climbing around on the outside of their space suits clad in pressurized suits is fantastic in the light of these facts." 1961-Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin becomes first man in space. 1965- Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov becomes first human being to walk in space. Hermann sure was no rocket scientist.

113) April 1956 PT: Herman Hoeh: "PLAGUES coming - and, according to this prophetic warning, in about two years from now." This from the man who recently said, "If you believe everything we say, you're not thinking." How true.

114) Same issue, same "scholar.": "We have about reached our population peak, despite the guesses of our political and industrial planners." As usual, their guesses were a lot better than his. U.S. population in 1956, 180 million. U.S. population in 1998, 270 million, an increase of 90 million, or 50 percent.

115) Same issue, same "scholar" - "Many of you will remember that over three years ago we told you of the strong indication that the last half of this - God's - Work of spreading the Gospel of the Kingdom of God to all the world would probably end in 1972." They couldn't even get their own activities straight. In fact, after the fiasco of the end that didn't come in 1972, herbert revised his definition of what spreading the gospel meant to buy his way into brief meetings with leaders around the world. Curiously, many of them got toppled from office or even murdered (like President Allende of Chile) within a month of meeting him. The accepted worldwide line on that: "Satan is removing these men before they can act on God's message." No one remarked that this interpretation made Satan out to be more powerful than God. The common sense "religious" interpretation, these people came under a curse for meeting herbert or listening to him in the first place.

116) Same issue, still Hoeh: "This SEVEN YEARS of national trouble take us - if the dates which appear so definitely indicated by these prophecies are correct - from 1965 to 1972!" Wrong again. There a re a lot of Americans who regarded LBJ and Nixon as "national trouble" enough, not to mention Vietnam and race riots. But during those years: no plague, no nuclear attacks, no military invasion of the United States and no famine.

117) Same issue, same author: "The sword of Communism and of the revived fascism in Central and Southern Europe will begin (by 1965) to bring us to our knees." No revived fascism in south or central Europe in 1965, nor over the next 30 years. As for communism, after Leonid Brezhnev became Soviet leader in 1964, nuclear tensions with the West dramatically eased. By 1972, Brezhnev, with Nixon, had inaugurated the era of superpower d,tente, at the very time herbie and herman had for so long claimed America would be destroyed.

118) Same issue, still hoeh (If you wonder if he ever shut up, the answer is 'No'): "In another 10 years for fear of Communist terrorism it won't be safe to live in Asia or Africa." 1975-U.S. forces were finally driven out of Vietnam and Indochina, but U.S. military bases remained secure everywhere else in Asia. The only part of the world in those years where American civilians faced a real threat of personal terrorism was the Arab Middle East; Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia were fine.

119) Same issue, same hoeh, still in 1956: Refers to "the coming Fascist-religious revival of Europe that will conquer us within a prophetically indicated 17 years." 1973 - President Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger proclaim "Year of Europe". European Community expands to include Britain and Ireland among others. Needless to say, no fascism, no conquest. The challenge to the United States comes from the Arab and other oil producing nations who quadruple the price of oil, crippling European economic growth"

120) August 1957 PT: Another old favorite still with us today. Roderick Meredith: "at the conclusion of the drought and floods we are now just beginning to suffer this nation is going to be punished by horrifying DISEASE EPIDEMICS - plagues." When? He approvingly cites a 1956 Plain Truth title: 'Disease Epidemics Threaten USA in Two Years!" Clearly, 1958 was meant. Meredith continued, "In addition to those warnings ...we will soon find that hoof-and-mouth disease will spread COMPLETELY OUT OF CONTROL!" The only thing that spread out of control, then and the next 40 years, was the disease of his own big mouth.

121) Same article, same Meredith: "After 1965 we are destined to run into increased trouble with the Gentile nation. America and Britain will begin to suffer from trade embargoes imposed by the Brown and Oriental races and by the coming German-dominated 'United States of Europe.' ...We will begin to experience the pangs of starvation and of scarcity of goods." The close student of herbert-ology should note here the extreme PRECISION with which NOT ONLY herbert BUT ALSO his disciples got even the smallest and most unlikely points WRONG!!! 1965-73 - Not only no trade embargoes or shortages of goods in America and Britain, but the greatest material prosperity in history for both countries. Far from imposing any trade embargo on dealing with the United States, East Asia began its modern industrial "miracle" with booming exports to America precisely during those years. Even when an economic embargo DID rock Britain and America eventually, it took herbert and his disciples completely by surprise. It came from the Arab oil producers and Iran in 1973-74. The "Brown" and "Oriental" "Races", to use Meredith's condescending terms, had nothing to do with them at all.

122) January 1955 PT: hoeh: "We face a national catastrophe by 1975.. . we will be totally consumed and carried away captive to other nations as slaves within twenty years." No.

123) October 1958 PT: hoeh, whose imagination could always be relied upon to be particularly fevered behind his "scholarly" act, writes article entitled "U.S. and Britain and Nazi UNDERGROUND Behind Arab Crisis." In fact, it was Arabs who were behind "the Arab crisis." In the 40 years since then, Nazism has never been a significant ideology in the Arab world. Instead, the crises in Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq in 1958 were fueled by a wave of Arab socialism, still reflected 40 years later in the Ba'athist Arab Socialist ideologies of Syria and Iraq. And they were backed by the Soviet Union. 40 years on, Russia remains a significant ally to those nations. Herbie and Hermann's fevered predictions that Israel and other countries would eventually be "overthrown" by German or Catholic European invasion have never happened or come close to looking as if they would ever happen.

124) PT: January 1967: Hogberg - "There WILL be an end to strife and struggle among men and nations. And in less than 10 years!" Did strife and struggle among men and nations end by 1977? Wrong as usual.

125) PT: May/June 1941: HWA - "Hitler now emerges as the "BEAST" of Revelation!" Hitler certainly was a beast, but not THAT one and Herbert was sure no Elijah."

126), 127), 128) and 129) PT: Same issue, same self-styled "prophet" - "Bible prophecy ... shows the Roman Axis forces will take Egypt, Suez, Palestine - even Gibraltar."

This sentence deserves to be recorded and treasured. Even for herbert, it sets a record for outrageousness and sheer, monumental incompetence and stupidity. Four (Count 'em, FOUR) false prophecies in one sentence.

The Nazi-Italian army of Gen. Erwin Rommel in North Africa never took Egypt, Suez or Palestine. It was virtually annihilated by the British Eighth Army under Gen. Bernard Montgomery at the battle of Alamein in November 1942. The British rock fortress of Gibraltar was never even threatened by the Italians or the Germans.

Herbert's prophecies looked most likely to happen in the summer of 1942 when Rommel's Afrika Korps, having advanced nearly 1,000 miles, was only around 100 miles from Alexandria. Then Montgomery smashed them.

This raises the interesting possibility: Does the Western World owe its deliverance in World War II to the fact that herbert was a false prophet as God always seemed to go out of His way to prove herbert ridiculous and wrong? If herbert had prophesied an Allied victory, would Hitler have won? Therefore was herbert the false prophet Churchill's most secret and powerful (not to mention loathsome) weapon?

130) Same PT issue, same herbert: "Britain will go down."

Amazingly, as soon as he had printed these words, Britain started to go UP. The German battleship Bismarck was sunk in May 1941 ending the most serious threat to Britain's Atlantic convoy lifeline. On June 22, 1941, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union and the year-long blitz on Britain's cities ended as the Luftwaffe was switched to the new Eastern Front.

131) PT Sept/October 1941: "Plain Truth readers know world events before they occur."
The only world events millions of Plain Truth readers knew before they took place were the ones that never happened.

132) Same issue, same article: "Hitler MUST BE THE VICTOR in his present Russian invasion!"
Don't you just love the old fool's capital letters and exclamation marks? The bigger the lie, the more hysterical he was in hammering it home. And he got away with this for 50 years. Indeed, practice makes perfect, the longer he did it, the more he deceived. But he could never stop screwing up on everything he opened his big mouth on. Two months after that was written, on Dec. 6, 1941, the first great Red Army counter-attack rolls Hitler's Wehrmacht back from the suburbs of Moscow. Advance Panzer officers could even see the Kremlin in the viewfinders of their tanks. If Herbert had not prophesied their victory, they might even have occupied it.

133) Same issue, same article, same "prophet": "A settlement will be reached, giving Hitler the supplies and resources he must have and undoubtedly part of Western Siberia."
No settlement between Hitler and Stalin was ever reached, in large part to the flood of American supplies to Russia under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Lend-Lease program, which Herbert then and later endlessly sneered at and belittled.

134) Same sentence. Once again we see the strange, unerring accuracy with which herbert was unerringly wrong about even the finest and most obscure details. Hitler never got the oil and mineral wealth of the Soviet Union. His main effort to do so was never directed at Siberia anyway but at the far richer and more accessible oil territories of the Caspian Basin, but he diverted his drive there to subdue Soviet resistance at Stalingrad and suffered catastrophic defeat. Far from Hitler winning the resources of Siberia by his drive on Russia, it was the 50 tough Siberian divisions of the Soviet army which were transported 3,000 miles who threw his Army Group Center back from the gates of Moscow in December 1941.

135), 136) and 137) Same article, same same herbert: "The Red Army is unable to attack him as Hitler turns his wrecking machine to the British Isles, the United States and Palestine (Herbert)."

Concerning 135) Apart from a bombardment by V1 flying bombs in the second half of 1944, Hitler never again had the chance to turn his wrecking machine on Britain.

Concerning  136) The United States never suffered a single fatal casualty on its land territory through the whole of World War II from German Nazi actions, while an estimate 80 million people died as a result of the war worldwide.

Concerning 137) There was very little air attack on Palestine, then a British-ruled territory and not a single death from land attack during World War II.

138) Herbert's repeated predictions that Hitler and Mussolini would also conquer Syria, Jordan and the rest of the Middle East during World War II.

Far from being attacked, Palestine was the base from which the British reconquered Syria and Iraq with minimum casualties.

139) Same article, same writer: "Hitler will emerge from this Russian campaign stronger than ever."
Hitler emerged from his Russian campaign dead, with his bodies burned to cinders after being doused in gasoline as the victorious Red Army sacked his capital city Berlin. The invasion of Russia was Hitler's biggest mistake. Maybe he did it because he'd been reading the Plain Truth too.

140) Repeated Plain Truths throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Former German Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss will unite Germany and make it the leader of the European Union.

Strauss died in 1988, two and a half years after herbert. It seemed that German unification could not take place until both of them were dead and and happily out of the way. The collapse of communism in East Germany began in August 1989, less than a year after Strauss's death. Neither he, nor Otto von Hapsburg, nor -for that matter- the pope - had anything to do with it... (Which leads to the thought, did Franz Josef Strauss die crying out "Armstrong, you old fool! You lied to me! I NEVER became chancellor of Germany."?)

141) PT, March 1966: Charles Dorothy: "Hitler escaped, probably to Argentina."

142) PT, "The Day of the Eternal ... is going to strike between 5 to 10 years from now!"
Well, we did get a believing Southern Christian in the White House in Jimmy Carter. But otherwise, as usual, God somehow refused to arrange His timetable according to herbert's predictions.

143) "The United States and the British Commonwealth in Prophecy," 1967 edition.

"The events prophesied to strike the British and American peoples in the next four to seven years are SURE! ... These colossal world events, shrinking the first two world wars into insignificance, WILL COME, on schedule."

Total U.S. dead in Vietnam War, 55,000. U.S. combat dead in World War II, over half a million. Soviet dead in World War II, 27 million. Apart from Vietnam, during the years herbert prophesied of catastrophe: The longest domestic economic boom in U.S. history continued and was followed by a serious recession, but nothing remotely comparable to any of the Boom-or-Bust cycles before the Great Depression. The United States lands human beings on the Moon.

Britain joins the European Community, but retains both her prosperity and her freedom.
Israel is taken by surprise in Arab attacks in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, but wins the war after throwing back Egypt and Syria. Total Israeli dead, 3,000, out of 3 million: heavy, but much less than the 10,000 out of 500,000 in its 1948 War of Independence.
Even when "colossal world events" did happen, herbert failed to predict them:

The Jets won the Super Bowl. The Mets won the World Series.

144) PT June 1934: herbert drew a chronological chart of End-Time events. He labeled the year 1936 as the end of the time of tribulation and "the End of the Age."v The Book of Herbert: "In the beginning, was the lie."

145) PT July 1962: 28 years on from the last example and neither the pitch nor its falsehood has changed one inch.
"Do these heads of state know that a whole third of the Bible is prophecy -m and that about 90 percent of that lays bear in advance world events that will occur within the next ten to fifteen years from now?"
Now, here is a challenge to put a little zest into that stale Bible study of yours, dear reader. Since, of course, herbert MUST BE RIGHT!!! -Go and find the fall of Richard Nixon, Watergate, the Viking probe landing on Mars, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, the Pittsburgh Steelers and the first Star Wars movie in the books of Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Zechariah! With herbert's example in creative Bible-interpretation before you, it should be easy.

146) Also July 1962 PT: Herman Hoeh (NOTE: Why ever bother calling him "doctor" since it was an "Ambassador College" "degree" and for that ridiculous "Compendium" at that which even he has spent the past 25 years trying to bury?) "Russia and China Will Not Split!" .... "So Russia and China are to remain allies!"
It is impossible to out-herbert herbert in ridiculousness, but for more than 45 years, hoeh has shown repeatedly why he deserves the silver medal as runner-up. Any disciple of herbert WILL get the future wrong, but it takes even among them a special genius to screw up the PAST too. The Sino-Soviet split between the Soviet Union and China happened publicly in front of the whole world in 1958. Four years later, hoeh had still missed it.

147) PT, January 1963: HWA - "Possibly not more than seven years from now - America suddenly will wake up to the gigantic THREAT that shall be rising, or even then have arisen, in Europe. ...."

The 1970s proved to be one of the most peaceful, stable decades in 20th century European history. There was economic recession and belt-tightening from rising Arab oil prices, but no major political dislocations in either east or west. Pro-American sentiments recovered after a surge of popular hostility over Vietnam in the 1960s.

148) PT, March 1963 - HWA - " ... the present movement of events, together with the prophecies, strongly indicate that the BIG CRISIS - the threatened invasion - will not come about until 1972 (I said about). De Gaulle will be too old by that time. THAT IS ONE REASON HE IS HURRYING" to unite Europe and keep Britain out.

In fact, De Gaulle, the greatest French leader in peacetime in nearly 400 years since King Henry IV, resigned from office after losing a plebiscite vote in 1969 and died peacefully a year later. He never wavered from democratic values and freedoms.
"herbert rather endearingly clung to his conviction that Hitler was alive and well and living in Antarctica (while worldwide "moderates" or "realists" wrote only that Adolf might be in Argentina). And, similarly here, he appears to have had a brief but blinding "revelation" that President Charles De Gaulle was "the BEAST." (Refer to William Dankenbring's current Triumph ministry for his argument that King Juan Carlos of Spain is a candidate for that post).

149) PT, June 1963 - Roderick Meredith gets his knickers in a twist claiming that a "Protestant leader credited the Roman priests of Europe as being 'the minds behind the (European Common) Market', the real planners of this coming Holy Roman Empire which is prophesied to arise in Europe and CONQUER America and Britain within the next 10 to 12 years ... It is later than you think."
34 years on from that remark, meredith continues to sound off on such subjects, still without humility, without shame. In fact, the true "Minds behind" the European Community after World War II were Robert Schumann, Jean Monnet and - most of all - Winston Churchill, whom herbert had already predicted years before would be conquered by Hitler.

150) PT August 1963 Ron Kelly, "The prophet Jeremiah looked down into our time today - at what will take place in America and Britain within the next 10 to 15 years."

Take all the time you want in the book of Jeremiah looking for references to Britain and America in the years 1973 to 1978 (Mary Tyler Moore, All in the Family, the last time the Yankees won back to back World Series, Earl Weaver's Orioles, Terry Bradshaw quarterbacking the Steelers). But you'll have as much chance of finding anything to confirm this or the similar claims as you will finding any reference to Jeremiah tearing off to Ireland and calling himself "Ollam Fodha" with a princess called "Tea-Tephi."

151) PT August 1963. Meredith proclaims Jerusalem will remain a divided city between Israeli and Arab states until it is taken into captivity.

"HALF the city is taken into captivity - yet the other half is not killed or taken away! So Jerusalem is now READY for his prophecy to be fulfilled. It is already a divided city. The stage is set!"
Less than four years later, far from losing Jerusalem, Israel conquered the other half of it and still retains control at this moment of writing 31 years later. Not only were the Israelis not taken into captivity or driven out, they didn't do that to the Arabs either. The Palestinian Arab population of Jerusalem is at the time of writing more than double what it was at the time of the Israeli conquest.

152) PT, October 1963: "ALL HUMAN LIFE will be blasted out of existence by nuclear warfare and other means of mass destruction - perhaps not more than twelve or fifteen years from now!"
Once again, we see herbert's unerring ability not just to be broadly, grossly wrong, but to be even wrong in the fine print details. The years 1975-78, which he so specifically singled out here, were the high-water mark of U.S. Soviet d,tente. They saw the negotiating of the two SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation) treaties and ratification of SALT I and the signing of the 1975 Helsinki Accords, which greatly eased East-West tensions in Europe and encouraged the emergence of human rights movement sin the Soviet bloc.

153) PT, January 1964: herbert prophesied very explicitly that the coming year "shall increase drought and upheavals in the WEATHER pattern...the trend in general will continue until - probably by 1971 or 1972 - it will become an acute disaster, especially to the United States, Canada, Britain and Australia."
In fact for each of those countries, 1964 was one of the most economically prosperous in their entire histories till then. Still, doesn't it make you wonder what herbert would have done with global warming and el nino. He'd have loved them.

154) PT, March 1964: hoeh, "We face a national catastrophe before 1975! ...(God) will let our own lusts cause such drought, floods, pestilences and famines that we will be totally consumed and carried away captive to other nations as slaves within probably eight or ten years."

A pause, dear reader, to wonder, does God exist and does any of this matter to Him? Herbert in his time, and today Hoeh, Dankenbring, Meredith, McNair and the rest of them, if they had any sense, really ought to pray that God either doesn't exist, or is NOT as the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, portrays Him. Because if those books are accurate, those men face fates far worse than ordinary death when they are judged for their unrepentant lifetimes of claiming to speak in God's name when He made it repeatedly clear by the outcome of events that He never sanctioned or "called" ANY of them.

155) PT, July 1964: herman hoeh sets another date:

"Universal Prosperity in Fifteen Years!" ... "In less than fifteen years all nations are going to live in a Utopia! They will be forced to learn the ways of peace and prosperity!"

In 1980 admittedly the United States did elect Republican President Ronald Reagan who, along with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher forced the principles of sound currency and free markets with minimum government investment on the industrialized world. But strangely enough this wasn't what hoeh had in mind.

156) PT, February 1965: Roderick Meredith - "Dozens of prophesied events indicate that this final revival of the Roman Empire in Europe -and its bestial persecution of multitudes of Bible-believing Christians - will take place within the next seven to ten years of YOUR LIFE!"

Yet another false prophecy, another foul lie. In fact, the years 1967-70 saw the Catholic Church charity organization Caritas make far greater and more successful relief efforts to save hundreds of thousands of starving children (hundreds of thousands died anyway) in the Nigerian Civil War than all other groups combined. The 1966 Medellin accords opened a new era of respect and support for human rights in the Catholic Church throughout Latin America.

157) Herbert: "Babylon will never be rebuilt"

A centerpiece claim from his "Proof of the Bible" booklet. In fact, the Iraqi government started to rebuild the ruins of ancient Babylon in 1978. In 1982, during the Iran-Iraq war, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, who came to power in 1979, massively expanded that project. It has since become one of the biggest, most ambitious archaeological reconstruction projects in history.

158) "Babylon" in both Old and New Testament prophecy always means Rome.

This is -arguably - the case in the Book of Revelation. But even there, the "Rome" in question would not be the Catholic Christian Church. That identification would have been meaningless to any of the readers of the book of Revelation for 200 years after it was written. Rather, the term would have referred to the pagan Roman Empire of the time which had fitfully slaughtered Christians under such emperors as Nero and Domitian.

But even then, IF the book of Revelation is in fact intended as a prophetic vision of the far future, there is no reason why the site of ancient Babylon itself was meant.

And if the book of Revelation's symbols are meant to be compatible with those of the Old Testament (Remember Herbert's repeated "teaching" - "The Bible interprets the Bible"), then "Babylon" in Revelation MUST mean the ancient city in Iraq.

And even Herbert - old "Dr. Confusion" himself - accepted that the "Babylon" of the prophets really WAS Babylon. He took its destruction in "The Proof of the Bible" AS a 'proof' of the Bible. But if Babylon WAS 'Babylon' then it could NOT be ROME as well. "Get it??" - as that repulsively stupid old loon Gerald Waterhouse would, as ever, have charmingly said.

159) Herbert - The once great city of Sidon in southern Lebanon will remain a miserable little village, again in "The Proof of the Bible."

In fact, while not a major metropolis, it is an extremely large town and regional center which has quadrupled in size since Herbert made his claim.

160) Herbert - When Europe finally unites, it will either be fascist, or become so virtually instantaneously. - Repeatedly claimed over decades.

Whether one dates from the 1957 Treaty of Rome, which founded the European Economic Community, then of six nations, or the 1991 Treaty of Maastricht which created the current European Union, the EU has been the largest, longest lasting, most popular and most stable DEMOCRATIC political system in European history.

By contrast, let us note that Herbert's guiding model for "government" within the Worldwide Church of God was fascist and totalitarian to the day he died.

161) Herbert's repeated claims from the 1940s till the day he died. - The united Europe will be an economic powerhouse that will outstrip and impoverish Britain and America.

Herbert behind his bluster showed the same ignorant incompetence about macroeconomics as he had in his crackpot little private business. adventures in Chicago and Oregon. EEC growth rates were spectacular from 1957 to 1973 in the six nation Common Market. But after that date, the more the Europe Community expanded in size, the slower its growth rates became, the more it lagged behind the United States and East Asia, and the higher its unemployment rates grew.

For virtually all of the past decade, EU growth rates have been running far behind America's, EU unemployment rates are double those of the United States, and per capita wealth is also far less and ever falling further behind. Also, while the United States continues to run enormous annual trade deficits with Japan and the East Asian nations, it prospers from a favorable balance of trade with the European Union.

162) Another repeatedly expressed Herbert favorite - Catholic, "non-Israelite" European nations led by Germany would impoverish the United States and be able to buy economic control of the American economy.

In fact, the two nations by the 1980s which controlled more of the American economy than any other were Britain and the Netherlands, both Protestant European nations which in Herbert's interpretation - virtually totally stolen from Joseph Allen without any acknowledgement - are "Israelite." The third largest overseas investor in the U.S. domestic economy is Japan.

We should add here that, in the investment and wealth they bring into the country and the more prosperity they generate. Japanese car companies have revived Britain's auto-making industry from total collapse in the 1970s to make it the second largest and the fastest growing in Europe.

Herbert never expected that. His economic "expertise" was limited to impoverishing 100,000 families by terrorizing and brainwashing them into signing over their money to him so that he could buy Faberge eggs and other trinkets in Harrods of London.

(Clearly, no mere "American" department store was good enough for Herbert, and he had to do HIS part to impoverish America by exporting millions of dollars to buy worthless imports. But, no doubt, he could have justified his actions by arguing that he was doing his bit to fulfill prophecy by doing all he personally could to destroy the American economy.)

163) Herbert - again in repeated Plain Truth and radio ravings in the 1950s and 1960s - The European Commission in Brussels, Belgium which runs the united Europe will become a super-efficient , computerized tyranny that will keep track of every individual by a number, the "Mark of the Beast", which will be stamped on every individual.

Colorful and lurid stuff. Instead, the European Commission in Brussels has become a symbol of bureaucratic incompetence and selfish pork-barrel politics, which makes our own underrated Congress look like a paragon of super efficiency and virtue.

(Of course, if you believe William Dankenbring and "The X-Files", the U.S. government is more evil than Hitler. But even Chris Carter, who writes the wonderful stories of "The X-Files doesn't believe them, and "The X-Files" are more believable than Dankenbring's neo-Herbertian prophetic ravings ANY day.)

164) Herbert - Plain Truths of the 1940s and 1950s - The Pope who would follow Pope Pius XII, who died in 1958, would mercilessly crush all dissent and slaughter millions of Protestants in a new Holocaust which would dwarf the Nazi crimes of World War II.

Once again, we must pause to appreciate Herbert's unerring ability not just to be ludicrously wrong, but to be wrong in every minor yet unerring detail. If God is Truth and Satan is the Father of Lies, which one of them can possibly have been inspiring him, especially as to the day he died he repeatedly insisted that God Himself had often been a liar by deliberately deceiving HIM?

The pope who succeeded Pius XII as head of the Roman Catholic Church was John XXIII, who - far from slaughtering Protestants or stirring up hatred against them - summoned the Vatican Two Council and inaugurated a new, unparalleled era of dialogue, tolerance and mutual cooperation between the Catholic and Protestant churches.

Far from wanting to unleash a new Holocaust on the world, as Herbert repeatedly insisted he would, John XXIII, as the papal ambassador to Romania during World War II, was directly responsible for saving hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives from Nazi extermination. He brought courageous and fearlessly outspoken pressures on the Romanian government, which was allied to Hitler, threatening divine judgment on anyone from the king down who cooperated with the murderers.

Since all of you, dear readers, like The Watcher who authors this report, were subjected for decades to Herbert and Company's endlessly brainwashing about the supposed diabolical evil of the Catholic Church, ask yourselves the following questions:

A) How many Jewish lives from the Holocaust did Herbert, that great self-proclaimed "friend" of the Jewish people save?

B) Did Herbert ever go out of his way, much less risk his life, to save a single innocent from danger in all his far-too-many 94 years on this earth?

C) How courageous and outspoken was Herbert on the great moral American social issue of HIS day, the struggle for Civil Rights in the 1950s and 1960s? In fact, he and "Doctor" Herman Hoeh repeatedly taught through the 1950s that Dr. (a real PhD, unlike Hoeh's) Martin Luther King was just a communist dupe whose movement would destroy the United States from within and prepare the way for the final Nazi-Catholic European conquest. Wrong again.

D) If you regard yourself as a Christian, ask yourself, who is inspired by real Christianity and who by Satan? Those who, regardless of the details of their creed , believe the teachings of the new testament, try to do good in the world, work to protect and rescue the sick, the innocent and the threatened, and who try to build bridges of love and understanding to those who believe differently from themselves?

Or, those who believe that 99.999 percent of all the Christians alive today are helpless puppets of Satan and one should avoid all dealings and cooperation with them as much as possible?

165) Not deterred by making such a fool of himself in his predictions about John XXIII, Herbert applied his prophetic powers with equal confidence to the next pope, Paul VI. In numerous Plain Truth editorials and other articles through the late 1960s, he repeatedly predicted that Paul would raise the Catholic Church to a level of world power and confidence that it had never experienced in history.

Had Pope Paul really wanted to achieve that goal, his best course of action would have been to persuade Herbert to prophecy the ruin of the Catholic Church because, of course, precisely the opposite would have happened. As it was, Paul's pontificate was the most troubled for the Catholic Church in a century as it was rocked by dissidents from left and right simultaneously and lost hundreds of thousands of priests worldwide in defections over birth control and celibacy policies and liberation theology.

166) Plain Truth articles by Herbert, Raymond "Einstein" McNair and others in the 1960s: The German army will be called in to SAVE the state of Israel from the grievous wounds inflicted on it, presumably in defeat by the Arab armies.

It is easy to successfully predict the obvious, for example, in 1974, that the Pittsburgh Steelers would go on to win more Super Bowls. A true prophet, of course, would predict something that would appear inconceivable, for example, saying in the late 1970s that George Steinbrenner would bungle his ownership of the New York Yankees so much that it would take then 20 years to win another World Series.

But Herbert and his brain addled heirs were FAR MORE inventive. They repeatedly came up with wonderfully weird prophecies which even sounded preposterous when they were made, yet were proven wrong in ways that not even sensible people could have imagined at the time.

Sure enough, in the middle and late 1970s, it was the ISRAELI army that SAVED Germany! German democracy was being threatened, not by neo-Nazis, as Herbert had for so long predicted, but by the ruthless, highly competent extreme-communist terrorists of the Baader-Meinhof Gang and the Red Army Faction.

Top commando and counter-intelligence experts from the Israeli army and secret service helped the democratic German government of Chancellor Helmut Schmidt set up GSG-9, an elite commando and counter-terrorist unit, which smashed the terror groups. In the decades since then, intelligence and security cooperation between Israel and Germany has remained close and mutually beneficial.

167) The European Beast power will rise by 1982 at the very latest since that comprises the ending of the 2,520 year "Time of the Gentiles" referred to in Luke 21:24, which began with the fall of Babylon.

Here, Herbert crammed together even more stolen ideas, false assumptions, incompetent fake scholarship and mutually conflicting ideas than usual, which is really saying something.

First, the crucial prophecy attributed to Jesus in Luke 21 nowhere refers to the fall of Babylon, it discusses the period of time Jerusalem, not Babylon, would be trodden under by the nations.

Second, there is no reference anywhere in this passage - or anywhere else in the Bible - to ANY 2,520 year period.

Third, the whole idea of 2,520 time periods comes from INTERPRETING the "seven times" repeated in the Leviticus 26 prophecy as seven "prophetic years" of 360 days each, as this as the length of a year in the Five Books of Moses.

(This suggests either that God couldn't count how long an earthly year was; or that He didn't inspire every word the Bible authors wrote after all; or that God DID inspire this, and got it right, but that the earth had a radically different orbit around the Sun in those days. Take your pick, readers).

Fourth, there isn't a single reference to Babylon - or Jerusalem for that matter - in the Leviticus 26 prophecy.

Fifth, the whole idea that the "seven times" in Leviticus 26 can be interpreted this way at all was only cooked up by American fundamentalists during the Second Awakening movement in the 1820s and 1830s. That was a time when even more half-baked, home spun crackpot religious, health and other theories were spun than in the 1960s or our own days. Obviously, it was a time when Herbert would have felt right at home.

Sixth, if the Luke prophecy is a real one, and if it does refer to the Jewish people as it appears to, then the obvious dates it would apply to would be:

Either the establishment of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948, or the Israeli capture of the Old City of Jerusalem in June 1967, returning it do Jewish rule for the first time since the Roman conquest by General Pompey in 63 BC.

Seventh, BOTH these dates of intensely dramatic world events occurred during the height of Herbert's "ministry" but the pompous, corrupt , arrogantly ignorant old fart couldn't even see what was in front of his eyes. As documented above, he had repeatedly prophesied that BOTH the establishment of an independent Jewish state in 1948 AND the Israeli liberation of the ancient Jewish capital in 1967 would NEVER happen.

Instead, speaking at the Ambassador College Bricket Wood campus in Hertfordshire, England at Passover, 1967 - less than six weeks before the Israeli conquest of East Jerusalem - Herbert prophesied that BEFORE THE YEAR WAS OUT, the army of King Hussein of JORDAN, would capture WEST Jerusalem from Israel! Ooops. But Herbert was undeterred. His lifelong admiring study of Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' is a repeatedly documented fact. But it seems like he'd studied George Orwell's too.

In the decade that followed, the false Passover prophecy of Bricket Wood in 1967 was repeatedly and admiringly referred to by Worldwide ministers and their dupes as a "true" prophecy.

They said - correctly - that Herbert had predicted that Jerusalem would be reunified in war by the end of the year. They only left out that he had ALSO predicted that the city would be captured BY the very nation that in fact lost it, and that it would be captured by the very nation that in fact won it!

168) "NO American astronaut will return from the Moon ALIVE!"- Herbert in repeated 1960s Plain Truths and radio broadcasts.

In fact, of course, NO American astronaut returned from the Moon DEAD! Nine American Apollo missions carrying 27 astronauts orbited the Moon between December 1968 and December 1972 and 12 of them actually walked on the surface of the Moon. EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THOSE 27 Americans returned to Earth without even a scratch, including the three who survived the explosion that wrecked the Apollo 13 spacecraft before it even reached the Moon!

A number of points, easily overlooked, but of great significance, need to be made here.

A) The leaders of NASA and the surviving astronauts including Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and - most of all - Jim Lowell and his crewmates on Apollo 13, owe Herbert an enormous debt. They probably lived BECAUSE he prophesied their DEATHS! Had Herbert prophesied American success, the Russians would probably have beaten us to the Moon. So NASA, like the Allies of World War II, owe Herbert a great debt for prophesying their failure. It was then a certainty that God would guarantee their success to proclaim his rejection of Herbert yet again.

B) British Prime Minister Harold Wilson once said, "A week is a long time in politics." For all Herbert's addiction to 2,520 years time cycles, a week seems to be an even longer time in prophecy. You can get away with whatever you want because the poor boobs will just forget you ever said it in the first place. None of Herbert's repeated arrogant stupidities on this issue seemed to dent his following or income in the slightest. William Dankenbring, currently dropping heavy and far from subtle hints that he is Elijah, has adopted that principle eagerly. Four and five years ago he was confidently claiming that the 1993 Oslo accord between Israel and the Palestinians contained a secret agreement in which the Palestinians agreed to let Israel build a Third Temple on the holy mount in Jerusalem beside the Muslim mosques there. Needless to say, no such agreement was ever reached.

C) Herbert was NEVER an American PATRIOT! He HATED and DESPISED democracy and spent a quarter of a century screaming abuse at three of the greatest presidents in our history, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower. He repeatedly prophesied FALSE doom and destruction on the Home Front in World War II. In Britain during that war, he would certainly have been jailed. Had his broadcast have been carried by Nazi Germany, he would certainly have been (deservedly) hanged as a traitor. Now, in the 1960s, during the height of the historic confrontation between capitalist democracy and communist tyranny to determine the future of the world, we find him again FALSELY prophesying the failure, humiliation and defeat of his own country. What a repulsive little SLUG he truly was!

What the hell did HERBERT know about the U.S. space program? Absolutely nothing that he didn't copy from "Reader's Digest" of course. Or, about as much as Dankenbring seems to have known about the Oslo peace accord. The trick for these people is to SOUND as if they know what they're talking about. Remember, Herbert was a man whose great "scholar" was brain-scrambled Herman Hoeh and whose great "scientist" for decades at Ambassador College was Hegvold, who claimed to have worked for NASA, but who sure was no rocket scientist. He couldn't even complete a single, coherent spoken sentence.

169) NO life will be discovered on Mars. In 1997, the National Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA) announced that a meteorite identified as being from Mars that was found in Antarctica contains unmistakable indications of organic life.

170) Assyria is modern day Germany. - Found in "The United States and British Commonwealth in Prophecy."
This assertion, repeated ad nauseum for the 40 years up to Herbert's death, is still, of course, fervently believed by the poor deluded fools who still follow Gerald Flurry, old "Rod of Iron" (and rusting) Meredith, and Dankenbring. But it is a classic example of the great neurologist Pavlov's condition, and of Josef Goebbels principles of lies and propaganda. The bigger the lie, the longer and louder you shout it, then the MORE it will be BELIEVED!!!! GET IT!!!!

In fact, THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO, REPEAT NO EVIDENCE AT ALL to link Germany with Assyria in ANY WAY WHATSOEVER! The only thing in the way of historical "evidence" that Herbert could even get his endlessly inventive and imaginative chief ideologist Herman "German" Hoeh to come up with was the typically Hoeh argument that the Hessians of Germany who sent mercenary soldiers to fight with Britain to crush American Independence in 1776 were descended from the Hittites, who were the neighbors of the Assyrians because Hess sounded a lot like Hitt-ite.(GET IT???????).

Now, there is absolutely NO historical, archaeological or mythical evidence, EVER, ANYWHERE, that the Germans were descended from the Assyrians. Nor is there ANY evidence that the ancestors of the Germans EVER lived ANYWHERE in the Middle East. There is NO linguistic connection between them either. Nor did ANY Germans EVER claim such descent, unless you include Herbert's German-American buffoons Hoeh and Gene "Never Saw a Nazi I didn't Love" Hogberg (Name literally means "Pig Mountain" or "Huge Ritually Unclean Lump of Pork" and God CALLS people WHAT THEY ARE!!!!!! As Gerald "House of Piss" Waterhouse incontestably observed.)

In fact, the ONLY part of "US and BC in Prophecy" that is NOT LITERALLY STOLEN - paragraph by paragraph and sentence by sentence - from Joseph H. Allen's "Joseph's Birthright and Judah's Scepter" is the bit Herbert stuck on to the end of it claiming that Germany was prophetically certain to destroy Britain and America BECAUSE they were the descendents OF the Assyrians.

Now, at this point, it is inevitable that some smart-ass Armstrong-ian "intellectual" will ask with a self-satisfied smirk" "Well, if the Germans weren't the Assyrians, then who ARE the Assyrians??" ANSWER: "The Assyrians are the Assyrians, bird-brains. They exist. They still live in the north of Iraq where Assyria was located. " There are only a few hundred thousand of them and Saddam Hussein has whipped them particularly savagely. But they are there. They claim the descent. Historical records support their claim. And so does the genetic and genealogical evidence.

The second question that the Herbert-ian true believer always tried to trump skeptics with is: "If Assyria wasn't Germany, then who else looks like fulfilling Bible prophecy?

The answer to this is simple, these particular prophecies have ALREADY BEEN FULFILLED way back in 720-700 BC when the 10 northern tribes of Israel were conquered and deported by the Assyrians. That of course, is for believers who believe the recorded prophecies were in fact made BEFORE those events, and not for skeptics who believe they were written and retroactively made to fit after the event in order to explain it.

171) "Germany will arm to the teeth and terrorize the world as soon as it reunites" - Herbert and co repeatedly in the Plain Truth and on his radio broadcasts throughout his "High Summer of Lies" from 1947 to 1972.
Wrong again. Germany reunited in 1990, joined the U.S.-led North Atlantic Alliance (NATO) and promptly began to SLASH its military expenditures, which had never been high in the first place. NOT A SINGLE SENIOR OFFICER in the old communist, anti-Western East German People's Army was allowed to serve in the new united German Bundeswehr, or Federal German Army.

172) "A KEY to understanding END-TIME prophecy is the fact that God arranged Biblical events as a TYPE for this END TIME" - Principle screamed out by Herbert ad nauseum for nearly 40 years until 1972 until he superficially wanted to at least appear respectable.

Again, as with the "Assyria is Germany" scam, THERE IS NOT A WORD OF TRUTH to this claim, which is endlessly repeated by Flurry, Dankenbring and many other "sons of Herbert" to this day. The Orthodox Jewish commentators and rabbis never taught or believed it. They maintained that many Biblical prophecies were fulfilled in ancient times while many others are yet to be fulfilled before and when the Messiah finally comes. This has also been the mainstream position of major Christian churches across the centuries and millenia.

Herbert DID NOT SPEAK A WORD OF HEBREW, ARAMAIC OR GREEK in his life. His chief "scholar" was just as laughably ignorant and inept. The two of them were even forced to admit in 1972 that they had mistranslated an extremely common little Hebrew preposition for decades so that - apart from all their other false reasoning - they had put their observance of Pentecost on Monday rather than Sunday JUST BECAUSE THEY WERE STUPID!!! Their defense of course, was that it was ALL GOD'S FAULT!

173) Herbert - "It has never been our intention to SET DATES!" (capital letters and exclamation mark in the original) - Written in "Tomorrow's World" magazine in February 1972.

The New Testament repeatedly teaches us that GOD is the father of TRUTH and SATAN is the father of LIES. In that case, which of the two of them was Herbert's spiritual father?? This lie is SO outrageous and SO blatant that even Hitler, Goebbels and Josef Stalin would have been impressed. Pick up your copy at once, dear reader, of "1984" by George Orwell (and if you don't have a copy, buy one in paperback immediately, as a "recovering herbert-aholic THAT book, along with "The True Believer" is essential for your multi-step recovery program). In the middle of a rally, Eurasia stops being the hated enemy and becomes the valued ally, while Eastasia, which had been the hated and feared racial threat, immediately becomes the gallant ally instead, AND NO ONE REMEMBERS THAT ONLY A MINUTE BEFORE IT WAS THE OTHER WAY ROUND!

For 38 years, (Interestingly, that figure is two 19 year time cycles. But 19 is one year less than 20, the number of God-approved patience according to traditional Biblical numerical symbolism - See "Numbers in Scripture" by E. W. Bullinger. The implication therefore is that Herbert's 38 year period of prophesying from 1934 to 1972 was NOT a GOD-APPROVED time period and was just a trying WASTE OF TIME!!!!. You see? The Watcher can play these mind-numbing mind games to stupefy his readers just as well as any of Herbert's crazed dupes), from 1934 to 1972, Herbert had deceived and ruined hundreds of thousands of people by terrifying them into following him in order to escape destruction and torture at the hands of the Nazis and their supposed successors, and his entire "ministry" FROM THE FRONT PAGE OF THE VERY FIRST ISSUE OF THE PLAIN TRUTH" "had been based on repeated patterns of false prophecy TO WHICH EXACT DATES HAD ALWAYS BEEN SET - within, at the very broadest margin "three to five years from the present."

And yet here he is, sweet as pie, bare-facedly claiming that all those 38 years of rantings "NEVER HAPPENED!!!!" Not only did the fraudulent old fart spend a lifetime falsifying the FUTURE, he even ended up FALSIFYING THE PAST.

We should also note here that Herbert's ENTIRE ministry lasted 52 years EXACTLY from Jan. 7 (Christmas Day according to Orthodox Christian reckoning ) 1934 to Jan. 7, 1986 when he formally handed over the reins - or so we were told - to Joe Tkach, Snr. Promptly going on to die 9 days later. Now, 52 is four 13 year cycles and 13 is the Biblical number for REBELLION AGAINST God's government. Wasn't Herbert's infamous 52-year career as a self-appointed prophet and apostle one long sick joke against ANY kind of traditional Christian faith. He never accepted a SINGLE authority over himself in his fat, fart-filled odious and all-too-long life, filled as it was with needless luxuries and bizarre perversions.

Let us also note that in Aztec Mexico, the 52 year cycle was the framework for the most long lasting and bizarre cult of human sacrifice in modern human history. Thousands of victims were seized to be slaughtered every year. Herbert was not that blatant. But add the thousands of children who needlessly died because their deluded parents refused to give them medicines or bring them to doctors to the thousands of happy marriages needlessly destroyed. Then add the overall toll of hundreds of thousands of lives ruined and blighted FOR ABSOLUTELY NO SANE OR WORTHWHILE REASON. Then you realize that it is fitting to put Herbert in such company. He was never satisfied unless hundreds of thousands of human hearts were offered up yearly to be destroyed on his personal altar.

174) And in the very same "Tomorrow's World" editorial of February 1972, the Western Christian world's most prolific false prophet makes ANOTHER devastating admission. "In our zeal (to terrorize and dupe the people he always referred to as "drones"), we used "possibles" and "probably's" and even appeared to set dates WE REALLY DIDN'T INTEND TO SET." (This time, The Watcher added the capital letters for emphasis).

Is this, then, an admission, that the old fraud KNEW ALL ALONG that Jesus wasn't coming back in 1936, as he had claimed in 1934, or in 1943, or in 1975, or in any of the other dates in between we have documented earlier in this list? Consider, dear reader, that even when Herbert was still filling his "drones" (his own description of the poor boobs who ruined themselves to give him the money he squeezed out of them) with terror that World War III and the total destruction of America was coming in 1972, he was AT THE SAME TIME, squeezing his dupes EVEN DRYER to grab their money for the building fund to build "Ambassador Auditorium," which, he claimed, was the one and only "true temple of God on earth".

Clearly, the old fart KNEW what he was doing when he made those endless claims of dates from 1934 onwards. He literally set the dates all right. But is he here letting slip that he himself NEVER REALLY BELIEVED HIS OWN CLAIMS IN THE FIRST PLACE?

One thing is clear, as we've noted above. If the Christian or Jewish faiths have any validity at all, or if there is any validity to either the Old Testament or the New one, then Herbert Armstrong stands condemned out of his own mouth to be exterminated or tortured forever in hell-fire as one of the most shameless, prolific and lying false prophets in recorded history.

175) Same "Tomorrow's World" article. Yet another extraordinarily shameless lie. Herbert claims that, in the previous 48 years of his ministry, the subject of prophecy, of the coming hideous dooms on Britain and America, of the supposed evils of the Catholic Church, and the dates he set for the coming of Jesus were all matters "of MOST MINOR consequence." And this time, the capital letters were put there by the old liar himself.

Well, dear reader? WHY did YOU join the Worldwide Church of God? And WHY did YOU stay there during the years your family ties were being ripped apart and those $65,000 a year pastors were abusing YOU? Were Herbert's prophetic claims ONLY "of MOST MINOR consequence" to You and those you knew? But then, given what we know now through his own admissions in front of numerous witnesses about his decade of rape and incest perpetrated on his own daughter and the weird diary he still kept in his 60s and 70s about his own masturbation activities, all the time inflicting enormous burdens of sexual frustration and guilt upon those dumb enough to believe his "Missing Dimension in Sex" (The "missing dimension," it turned out, was entirely Satan's), he wouldn't have batted an eyelid at announcing such a shameless lie to his millions of readers and 100,000 hard-core dupes, would he?

176) Another KEY to understanding Biblical prophecy is that there are huge TIME GAPS, often thousands of years long, in the middle of Biblical verses between one event and the next.

This is an enormous topic on which, for once, we will exercise some restraint and spare you the details, dear reader. But consider this. There is, again, not the slightest hint of evidence for such a crackpot claim ANYWHERE in the Bible itself. The verse of Isaiah always cited about "here a little, there a little" is very clearly NOT in the context of interpreting the Bible, but it is, instead, describing the child-like language Isaiah is being told to use to the people of his time. The Jewish commentators, who, unlike Herbert, really could read the Bible in its original languages, NEVER made ANY such claim about interpreting it.

As usual, Herbert wasn't even original in his own lies. This "gap" theory was developed during the Second Awakening period in the 1820s and 1830s by self-taught American Protestant fundamentalists to try and make sense of hard (to them) Biblical passages. Herbert was particularly fond of applying this passage to the prophecies of Daniel, especially chapter 11. (In 1990s America, Chapter 11 is a key stage of admitting bankruptcy and Herbert was spiritually bankrupt. Those of us raised in the Gerald Waterhouse school of far-from-logical thinking "know" that that is all the "proof" we need to make that "point.") Now, no one has ever come up with a convincing, coherent interpretation of all of Daniel 11 that successfully served as a map to predict future events. Herbert, of course, rushed in like the blasphemous fool he was where any angels would have feared to tread, and it was his interpretations of the kings of the North and South pushing at each other which "inspired" his ludicrous false prophecies about the course of World War II. When German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel failed to conquer Jerusalem for Hitler and Mussolini as Herbert had claimed he would, Herbert just transferred his label of "King of the North" to his imagined "Nazi-Catholic" Europe instead. And his crazed dupes like Dankenbring and Flurry continue to swallow and vomit out the same nonsense to their own "drones" and dupes to this day.

177) Herbert repeatedly predicted that Iraq would be a weak, unimportant nation at the "End Time" and that it would be conquered by Germany and Europe. As usual, you've got to stand in awe at the extraordinary, unerring precision of how Herbert ALWAYS got it 100 per cent, unerringly wrong, even to the finest details.

First, Iraq under Saddam Hussein built up the fourth largest army on earth and seized fabulously oil-rich Kuwait, giving it a stranglehold on world energy resources. It took a 700,000-man army led by the main superpower on earth to drive it out and even then Saddam's regime survived.

Second, far from Germany and Europe swallowing Iraq, the nations of the Western European Union, led by Germany and - especially - France, have bent over backwards to get Saddam sweet in order to ensure smooth running oil supplies and get expensive industrial contracts from him. The French even built Saddam a nuclear reactor - the Osirak complex - until the Israeli Air Force knocked it out.

Third, Iraq through the 1990s has developed its own nuclear weapons program and has acquired the largest biological weapons reserves on earth. In striking contrast, NO Western European nation INCLUDING GERMANY has either nuclear or biological weapons. All these developments are the EXACT OPPPSITE of Herbert's predictions over a 52-year period.

Fourth, Iraq never turned to Germany or the Nazis for support. Saddam was built up by the Soviet Union and has been a lifelong friend of Russian Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov.

Fifth, far from befriending the Catholic Church, some Vatican experts on the Middle East privately believe that if Saddam ever got the chance to cut loose, he would probably slaughter Catholic Christians as well as other denominations.

Sixth, far from being conquered by Europe, by the spring of 1998 when this is being written, Saddam's power had recovered sufficiently that his oil rich neighbors such as Iran, Saudi Arabia and the gulf states, not to mention Jordan and Egypt, were afraid of HIM.

Again, please note, dear reader, that NONE of these events were EVER predicted by Herbert or his equally repulsive, false prophesying "sons".

178) Iran was also predicted by Herbert to be weak and unimportant. He claimed it was doomed to be swallowed by Germany and Europe too. Since the 1978-79 Islamic Revolution, many of Herbert's "sons" have retroactively tried to jump on the new significance of Iran, even claiming it will be their fabled "King of the South."

Well, in the book of Daniel, the "King of the South" clearly is applied to Egypt and only Egypt. Egypt is SOUTH and slightly west of Jerusalem and the land of Israel. Iran is DUE EAST of them! So, for that matter, is Iraq. So even if either, or both, of those nations becomes a mighty, anti-Western power in the years to come, those obsessively studied verses of Daniel 11 COULD NOT apply to them.

In fact, following the genuinely infallible principle that: HERBERT WAS DAMNED OF GOD AND DOOMED TO GET WRONG EVERY PROPHECY HE EVER MADE, we can clearly deduce that Iraq and Iran WILL be MAJOR WORLD POWERS because Herbert was convinced they would NOT be.

And, as is the case with Iraq, far from conquering Iran, France and Germany - especially France - are going out of the way to grovel and win its favor. Meanwhile Iran, far from looking to Germany, is building a strong alliance with Russia, something else Herbert failed to predict.

179) China will NOT be a major independent world power, but will always follow Russia's lead - Herbert in "Middle East in Prophecy" 1950s article and reprint.

The 1958 Sino-Soviet split between the Soviet Union and China invalidated this wildly wrong and sweeping assumption. Warm relations were not restored for more than 30 years until after Boris Yeltsin became president of Russia. Today, the two powers are strong allies again, but their roles have been reversed, something Herbert and his heirs never dreamed of. China is by far the dominant and growing partner while Russia's future grip on Siberia and northeast Asia looks increasingly shaky.

Interestingly, Herbert's heirs have never woken up to this momentous and obvious shift in world power, even though all they would have to do is throw down a couple of bucks and pick any issue of Time or Newsweek magazine to "watch world news" and learn about it.

But given the repulsive and hardly-hidden racism of Gene "Pig Mountain" Hogberg and his daredevil band of magazine clippers at the "Plain Truth" news bureau, this shouldn't be surprising. Hogberg NEVER, to the best of my knowledge, EVER allowed a single African-American, Hispanic or Jew to work there Given any choice, his "experts" were blond haired and blue-eyed. On the few times the creepy, bullet-headed little fart ever raised his head above the parapet to speak in public, he approvingly quoted Friedrich Nietzsche, the ferociously anti-Christian prophet of Nazi racialism and paganism, far more often than he ever quoted Jesus Christ. Well, Jesus was a Jew boy who looked like an Arab so you can't be surprised Hogberg wanted to keep him at arm's length.

Given that never formally expressed, but overwhelming mindset in the "news bureau" it shouldn't be surprising to see that Hogberg's own heir and spiritual soul mate Keith Stump (gotta love the aptness of these names. Old Gerald Water-Closet got THAT right) was predicting as late as the mid-1980s that China would come back under Russia's leadership to be part of the Asian Hoards that would eventually attack Big, Bad Europe.

Since you have read this far, dear reader, we can safely assume that unlike Herbert, Hoeh, Hogberg and Stump (sounds like a firm of gravediggers from the Beverly Hillbillies, doesn't it?), you are actually interested in REAL FACTS! Well, here are a few:

Russia's population in 1998 - 148 million and falling; China's population - 1,300 million and rising - fast.

China has averaged 7 and 8 percent growth rates in gross domestic product over a 20-year period. Since the collapse of communism at the end of 1991, Russia's economy has imploded and production has fallen by 40 percent, and it wasn't much to begin with. That is virtually TWICE the shrinkage in GDP that the United States experienced in the Great Depression. And unlike 1930s America, Russia has no significant recovery in sight. Finally, since 1991, six million Chinese have settled in Russian Siberia. The whole of Siberia AND all of Russia east of the Urals Mountains only has a COMBINED Russian population of 33 million.

So, NO WAY is China going to meekly submit to Russia's leadership just because Herbert, Hogberg, Hoeh and Stump MIS-read Ezekiel 38-39 and the Book of Revelation, just like they garbled and bungled everything else.

Think about it

180) From 1947 to 1972 - repeatedly - The brilliant German scientists who built the V2 for Hitler will press ahead and build bigger super-missiles and nuclear warheads on them to destroy the United States.

Herbert must for once have felt on safe ground with this one. After all, Nazis would never change their spots, would they?

In fact, it was Herbert and his foul ministers who proved incapable of changing THEIR ways, and therefore could not believe anyone else could. In fact, the historical record clearly shows that it was often easier for Nazi dupes to repent sincerely of what they did than for senior ministers of the Worldwide Church of God to ever abandon their money-grubbing, fear-spreading, screaming and lying ways. Certainly, Garner Ted Armstrong became a master of the fake, tear-stained repentance fluent enough to teach Jimmy Swaggart or Jim Bakker a lesson or two, and his foul old man of course would never have been able to bring himself to even fake it.

But - far from the German rocket scientists of World War II building missile systems to destroy America, they built the missile systems to DEFEND her. Within a year of the first successful launch of an ICBM by the Soviet Union in 1957, the United States had successfully tested one two, and the German rocket scientists led by Werner Von Braun who had come to this country in 1945, played the crucial role in their development. Then they went on to build the great Saturn V booster that put American astronauts first on the Moon. There is no hint that Von Braun or any of his top scientists ever expressed the slightest regret or nostalgia for the Nazi past they had abandoned. In the words of the great Glenn Frey song, even they found it "Better in the USA." In this, of course, they were strikingly different from Herbert, who to the end of his life respected Hitler far more than any American president and whose documented favorite work of political thought to which he repeatedly returned was Hitler's "Mein Kampf."

181) Herbert in his "The Book of Revelation" revealed at last booklet in the 1950s - The First Woe of the Book of Revelation clearly means that Fascist Europe, after it annihilates Britain, America and the other English-speaking white nations, will then fiercely attack the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union and the entire communist system collapsed in 1991 without this ever happening. Germany was untied the year before, in 1990 and, as we have previously noted, promptly became an even more stable, even more pro-American loyal ally within the NATO alliance than it had been before.

If these events had occurred before 1972, the Worldwide Church of God - as it was in those years - might have been rocked by them as, in fact, it was, when the world failed to end when Herbert had told it to. But by 1990, the satanic, child raping little shit had been dead and eaten by worms for more than four years.

Many of you, dear readers, had long since come at least partially to your senses. From The Watcher's personal observations, very few people in Worldwide by 1990 consciously believed the fine details of Herbert's intricate timetables any more, even though everyone still basically swallowed the biggest and broadest lies. These included the beliefs that all other Christian churches were of the Devil, or that Western Europe would become a fascist superpower.

But if you want to know where Herbert got his ludicrous ideas about the course of World War II, it all comes back to this idea. And that is also where that old fool Dankenbring today gets his idea that Vladimir Zhirinovsky is the second woe of the sixth trumpet (There's glory for you!).

Herbert appears to have come to this interpretation in the summer of 1941 right after Hitler attacked the Soviet Union.

In all his life, Herbert never came up with a single sound idea of his own. Other contributors to this site have repeatedly documented how all his Holy Day and "master plan of God" teachings were stolen straight from G.G. Rupert. The entire "United States and British Commonwealth" was a paragraph by paragraph, sentence for sentence, scripture for scripture and word for word shameless rip off of Joseph H. Allen's book

Similarly, once Herbert had a foul, false or just plain crackpot idea in his head, the old goat would never let go of it. Look at his "Hitler alive and well in Antarctica" claims that we've documented, still lovingly referred to throughout the 1960s.

Therefore, just because Herbert's "Fascist Europe versus Communist Soviet Union" prediction failed in 1941 as no reason for him to throw it out. It remained a useful tool in "Doctor Confusion's" medical chest to con hundreds of thousands more out of their wealth and belongings for another four and a half decades. And his "spiritual sons" still sallow and vomit out the same unsubstantiated nonsense to this day.

182) And now let us here a round of applause, please, for that excellent Painful Truth contributor Douglas . Doug becomes the very first - and so far, the only - reader to contribute an additional false prophecy from Herbert and Co to this record.

Doug writes that at the 1964 Feast of Tabernacles in Squaw Valley, David Jon Hill confidently announced that "Brethren, in 10 years, there won't be a single tree left standing in the Pacific North West."

To which, The Watcher will only add, in 1990 it was discovered that there were far more trees standing in the United States than there had been 100 years before. The enlightened preservation policies of three great presidents, the two Roosevelts and Ronald Reagan, was part of the reason. But the achievement was in main part due to modern advanced technology, which had eliminated the demand for wood as a heating fuel and greatly reduced our dependence on it for construction and furniture.

New on 6/20/98

183) India will loyally join with China (and Russia) in their attack on Fascist Europe. - Herbert in his 1950s "Middle East in Prophecy" booklet.

As Herbert himself always liked to say, "Error results from false premises carelessly assumed."

Keith Stump, the leading Plain Truth puppet/whore of his generation, was still pontificating this in the mid-1980s. There can be little if any doubt that scores of thousands, including many who consciously abandoned Herbert years ago, still believe because they swallowed it so eagerly, and have long since forgotten whom they even got it from.

But it is as worthless as every other one of his prophetic proclamations. In May 1998, India exploded five nuclear bombs and the Indian defense minister openly said they were meant as a strategic defense against China.

The Indians have, in fact, been scared stiff of China ever since the Chinese hammered them in the Himalayan frontier war of 1962. So Herbert actually had 24 years to correct this particular screw up but of course he didn't.

His crackpot assumption, as usual, was based on his and ludicrous Herman Hoeh's identification of the nations in Ezekiel 38-39 described in the so-called war of Gog and Magog. They shoehorned in both India and China. Wrong again, ass-holes.

184) India will be decimated by horrific famines killing hundreds of millions of people over the next 10 years. - 1960s "Famine" booklet.

This particular gem again was one of those that must have seemed a safe bet. After all, India WAS threatened by a monster famine in 1966-67 and a couple of intrepid young Plain Truthers from Amb-ASS-a-DORRRRE college were sent out to "research" it. As usual, the parasitical jerks got everything back to front.

They concluded that India was dirt poor, that its population was exploding far faster than any extra land could be brought under cultivation and that, anyway, how could the Indians look after themselves without the British "Israelite" master-race to help them out.

Instead, serious famine was averted by the wise and well-organized actions of the Indian government in 1966-67 and India has never been threatened with serious food shortages since then.

The "Green Revolution" which Herbert, Hoeh and Dale Schurter - a man with a smaller intellect than a dead pea - all sneered at as "scientific," "un-natural" and doomed to failure more than quadrupled rice yields.

Today, India has more than twice the population it did on gaining independence from Britain 50 years ago. Its average life expectancy is more than double what it was when it left the British Empire. And its famine prevention programs are now being eagerly copied throughout the world, especially in sub-Saharan Africa.

For the record, let us also note that the last catastrophic famine to hit India was in 1942 in Bengal and was as a direct result of British imperial incompetence. It killed millions.

185) And now: some light relief.

"Why has God called so many construction workers, plumbers and electricians into HIS Church? It is because we are going to build a city for Him in Petra during the three and a half years the Church is protected from Tribulation." - Carn Catherwood at Feast sites as late as the late 1980s.

Carn Catherwood, The Watcher understands, has always had the deserved reputation of being a sincere, decent and well-meaning man, very rare at his level of seniority in the Worldwide ministry. But this is a clue to his survival there: his rampant STUPIDITY.

In fact, the reason so many Worldwide members have been construction workers or plumbers, "working with their hands" as the Loving Herbert always referred to such jobs in terms of sneering contempt, is that, as sincere dupes -as were we all - they abandoned any efforts at going to college and getting any higher education and settled for what they could get.

One should add here that The Watcher knows of at least one well-paid veteran full-time minister, Paul Suckling in New England, who made damn sure his own son when to Oxford University in England. With YOUR tithe dollars, dear reader. Remember that. Strange, wasn't Amb-ASS-a-DORRRRE College, a finer university than Harvard or Yale, as that lobotomized idiot Raymond McNair liked to proclaim? Guess not.

186) Franz Josef Strauss will build the German Air Force, the Luftwaffe back into the most powerful air force on earth, the terror of the world. - Herbert, Hoeh, Meredith and co. in repeated Plain Truth articles 1956-62 when Strauss was German defense minister.

Again, this must have seemed like a safe bet at the time. Strauss WAS German defense minister. He WAS rebuilding the German armed forces, including the Luftwaffe.

Herbert was consumed with vicious hatred and contempt for the greatest leaders in American history such as Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower, as well as Gen. George Marshall and Secretary of State Dean Acheson for rebuilding Western Europe after World War II. But he always had a soft spot for corruptible crooks who were as incompetent as he was.

In fact, Strauss killed almost as many German pilots as britain's Royal Air Force did during the 1940 Battle of Britain (which, you will recall, Herbert prophesied Britain would lose.

Strauss bought hundreds of Lockheed F-104 Starfighters for his revived Luftwaffe. But the design was so over-ambitious for its time, and overburdened by the fussy, ambitious Strauss with so many additional systems its airframe could not cope with, that the plane became a deadly killer. Hundreds crashed, killing hundreds of Luftwaffe pilots who labelled it "the Flying Coffin" or "The Widow Maker."

As a result, during the very years Herbert, Meredith, Dankenbring, Hoeh, McNair, and Hogberg - all those braying asses still unfortunately with us today - were confidently predicting that Strauss would rise to become the charismatic Fuhrer of the Fourth Reich, the German people, for whom one Nazi Fuhrer had already been more than enough, were concluding that he was, in fact, an incompetant, bungling fool. He was kicked out of office in 1962, served another term as a tamed finance minister, and had to spend 20 years outliving the curses of the parents and widows of those F-104 pilots before he got a crack at the chancellorship in 1982, and lost then anyway.

New on 6/22/98

187) If Herbert Armstrong dies before the Coming of Christ, he will sleep until the Coming and then be the top ruler of the world under only Christ himself.

This truly blasphemous teaching was even hammered home to Worldwide members in a chart in the Worldwide News during the late 1978-early-1979 period when Herbert was "cleaning up the church" from whatever reality and sanity had seeped in during his son Garner Ted's booze, broads and gambling regime. Like father, like son. Though in this case we should add, father liked daughter - enough to repeatedly rape her for 10 years.

Well, as we have already noted, Herbert did indeed die in January 1986, and he hasn't been raised up yet, despite all the fervent hopes and prayers of Gerald Flurry's fools. Keep praying guys. But is Herbert peacefully sleeping and will he still rule beside Christ?

Bruce Renehan, in Chapter 16 of his superb book, "Daughter of Babylon" included in full here on Ed's Painful Truth site, tells the following, well documented and true story.

Right after Herbert died in Pasadena, on Jan. 16, 1986, a psychotic lunatic held under constraints in a bed in the Augusta Hawkins Psychiatric Hospital in Los Angeles, began to scream non-stop in terror and torment, "I'm going to go down under! I am Herbert W. Armstrong and I am going to go to hell."

The lunatic had never mentioned Herbert's name before. He had never had any known connection to Herbert or to the Worldwide Church of God. But his attending nurse, who witnessed and recorded the terrifying outbursts, was herself an ex-Worldwide member. She did not know until days later that Herbert had just died before the outbursts began.

Mr. Renehan is understandably intrigued by the story. He calls it "strange" and leaves it at that.

But what he does not know is that the phenomenon of transmigration of human consciousness out of the body and even into those of animals or of other, usual mentally disturbed, human beings, has been repeatedly documented.

The great American-Indian scholar Vine Deloria, Jr. discussed the phenomenon in several of his articles, some of which are available on the Internet. He argues that a scientific basis for the phenomenon exists in the fact that human memory is an organized bundle of electromagnetic energy and that any such energy by its very nature is capable of being transmitted and received.

Just think here, dear reader, of the truly divine appropriateness of such a punishment.

Here is Herbert, who for 52 unrepentant years denied the very possibility that any human being could have a soul or experience life after death, unless he turned over all his blood and sweat earned wealth to Herbert himself. Herbert also denied the very possibility of any "Hell" after death, except for all of humanity who would continue to deny to worship him as Christ's eventual Senior Human God Number One.

And now we find that Herbert may very well indeed have left a Last Message for All His Followers; a very last message as to what he finally found in the afterlife. He finally gave his One True Witness at the very end after all. For once in his life, he finally told the truth, though it was after his own conventional mortal death. He finally had one true revelation from God after all. And what was it?

"I'm Herbert Armstrong and I am going to go to hell."

The Watcher is convinced that really happened and that it really was Herbert, strapped down in that lunatic's body, screaming in terror. For everyone who suffered torment at his hands, there is Healing in this Truth.

Spread the Good News. Preach the Gospel.

Tell your friends.

188) And now, another round of applause for our splendid colleague Douglas , whose insight into Herbert's insane mental condition on this site has broken so much new ground. Doug sends us a couple more splendid examples. Here's the first one:

Addressing festival sites around the United States and in other countries by telecommunications link on the Last Great Day (his version of the Jewish Shemini Atzeret festival) in 1978, Herbert repeated his claim to be the only 20th century apostle. He then added that, if he were not the apostle, he "wouldn't give a plugged nickel for the chances of his salvation."

Douglas comments on this that at the time he was puzzled by what Herbert as referring to. The Watcher himself recalls that remark and at the time, being a complete dupe - as all of us were at one time or another - wrote it down to Herbert's admirable humility. I assumed he was referring to perhaps a quick temper, rather than, as we now know, repeated rape and incest, multiple sexual deviation, fornication, verbal sexual abuse of teenage girls and many other activities. Oh well, live and learn.

But compare this most revealing Herbert statement with the Lunatic's Witness listed above in No. 187 and all becomes clear.

However hard Herbert worked to convince himself he was "the end time apostle" and however successful he may have been in convincing deranged idiots like Gerald Flurry and company to this day, he wasn't, was he? So he had no "David Defense" after all, did he? So, by his own definition, he DIDN'T have a plugged nickel's chance of salvation after all, did he, despite - indeed, BECAUSE OF - that lifetime of toil stealing the heretical and crackpot ideas of dead men and presenting them as his own.

Burn, Herbie, burn, baby.

189) And now, Doug's second example of Herbert's wisdom and compassion, again, from his 1978 Last Great Day presentation.

"Every man who contracts AIDS will die of it."

As Doug correctly notes, in fact, AIDS, while still not literally curable, is now extremely treatable and people who would have died in horrifying circumstances 20 years ago, now - with the appropriate treatment of medication "cocktails" have held off critical deterioration for often more than a decade at a time.

Further, we should note there are two very good "prophetic" reasons to expect that a full cure will indeed be found.

First, Herbert prophesied confidently that it would never happen.

All of you who have persevered with this record so far, dear readers, know that EVERY TIME Herbert confidently prophesied that something would NEVER happen - whether it was Allied victory in World War II, men walking in space, or America beating Russia to the Moon - THAT IS PRECISELY WHAT CAME TO PASS.

The fat, foul, little old pervert was such a twisted Son of Satan Himself he was CONGENITALLY INCAPABLE of either telling the truth OR predicting it.

Indeed, wouldn't a truly accurate name title for his magazine have been,"The Plain Truth" but "Confused and Crackpot Lies"?

Also, Herbert's prophecies were always inspired to produce terror and despair, never hope, among his listeners. His AIDS claim fits securely into that category.

Second, another historic prophet with a considerably more impressive success record than Herbert appears to have predicted that AIDS would eventually be cured. If correctly understood, he even specified that the cure would be found by Russian cosmonauts who were conducting scientific experts on long orbital space flights, possibly from work that has already been done on the Mir space station.

The skeptical, credulous and curious alike should refer to the discussion of Nostrodamus's quatrain No 5, Century 6 in "Nostrodamus and the Millennium" by John Hogue, Page 155-156, published 1987, the year after Herbert's half century of false prophecies finally ended.

190) We should also note here the claim made by Michael Snyder writing in an early 1980s Plain Truth that the 16th century French seer Michel de Nostrodamus was a false prophet who should be ignored and that, even if he got he a few things right, he was obviously inspired by demons and paganism anyway.

To which we will merely note:

Look who was talking! What gave Snyder the right to pass judgment on anyone, let alone to accuse others of being inspired by demons?

Snyder himself was the well-paid, loyal yes-man and mouthpiece for a man who taught for half a century that: Every form of historic Christianity was a Satanic deception; Every Christian who had ever lived was doomed to be burned to eternal death unless he unconditionally obeyed Herbert Armstrong; Whose every prophecy was proven ludicrous and wrong.

Nostrodamus by contrast has had an impressive track record that has impressed or puzzled skeptics for 450 years, whereas Herbert dwindled to being a derided has-been to within a decade of his own death. And Nostrodamus all his life was a sincere and devout Catholic Christian. He never preached any heresy. He never tried to raise a personal following. He never threatened anyone with damnation if they did not believe him or follow him. He never tried to prevent anyone taking medical treatment himself. Indeed, he was a brilliantly successful practicing physician himself. And he never tried to make a single penny from his published prophecies.

Nostrodamus's life record is a striking contrast to that of Snyder's lord and master. Herbert, at his height in the 1970s and 80s, was bringing in $200 million a year and his palatial Ambassador "campus" was at the time valued at $300 million - all of it wealth screwed out of widows, suffering families and the impoverished poor. Let him who is without sin cast the first stone. Snyder thought nothing of falsely condemning Nostrodamus the damned dupe of demons. What does that make him?

191) This example recorded by Bruce Renehan in his book "Daughter of Babylon." In the late 1980s, even after Herbert had died, "Doctor" Herman Hoeh pontificated as usual at an Annual Ministerial Conference at Pasadena. He ordered the ministers to instruct farmers who were members of the Worldwide Church of God to leave their fields fallow in the 7th year and that then they would be "blessed" it.

But it seems that even the Worldwide ministry had finally had enough of the hypocritical, sanctimonious and plain, f__king stupid "gems" of Herman Hoeh, tearing around Pasadena in his 1957 Chrysler "Bat-mobile." THERE'S righteousness for you!

A young Worldwide minister present actually asked the phony old fart to his face, "Can you guarantee our church farmers will be blessed if they do refuse to plant crops every seven years?"

Hoeh, after a lifetime of sycophantic responses, wasn't used to having to answer a single, simple question. All the great scholar and intellectual could come up with in reply was, "No, I can't."

But did that teach him any real humility as opposed to all the fake varieties he'd specialized in all his life? No. Of course not. Acting the martyred saint, the wealthy old parasite who had poisoned so many thousands of lives with his crackpot teachings and shameless fawning to Herbert's every whim wept his usual crocodile tears.

"This is not the same young man that I knew in Ambassador College years ago," he sadly remarked to his accompanying ass-lickers.

To which The Watcher will respond, for the record: Correct. Unlike you, he had been forced to face the real world, you hypocritical, stupid, judgmental old fart.

192) And while we are on the subject of the "scholarly" and "intellectual" author of the two volume "Compendium of World History", which was the basis for his spurious Ambassador College "doctorate":

It was Hoeh's 1950s "calculations in that ludicrous "Compendium" which convinced him, and, for at least 15 years, Herbert, that Christ would return in 1975 and that the three and a half years of Tribulation would therefore start at Passover 1972.

Well, what can we say, except, Wrong Again. But did the old fraud learn from such a ludicrous screw up. He never learned anything legitimate in his entire fraudulent life.

Because:

193) Over the past 12 years or more, Hoeh has been solemnly assuring the Joe Tkach era leadership of Worldwide to as well as whatever new fawning, young fools he could con about his "scholarship" and "saintliness" that he has "REVISED HIS CALCULATIONS."

Does that mean he now realizes that two and two adds up to four. No. Something that difficult still remains far beyond him. But he HAS "proved" that Adam was born, not 25 years EARLIER than old English Archbishop Ussher claimed in the 17th century but 30 years LATER. That means that Jesus will NOW not return until around the year 2030, when Hoeh himself, no doubt, will be safely dead and no longer around to be blamed or ridiculed for yet another ludicrous and fraudulent foul-up.

In fact, of course, the new date he has "privately" set is without any doubt whatsoever as fraudulent and false as all his previous ones were.

194) The above calculation leads us, of course, to another core assumption Herman inherited from Herbert, and which Flurry, Dankenbring, Meredith and company continue to slavishly swallow to this day: that human history is limited by Biblical Chronology to 6,000 years before Jesus comes back.

Well, sorry to be awkward, but be a little bit more careful about which version of the Bible that you read, because opinions differ.

Orthodox Jews somehow come up with a count from Adam of 5758 years and the Apostle Paul did say in Romans 2 that setting of calendars, dates and the like was to be left even by Christian believers to the Jewish authorities.

But even within Christianity, opinions widely vary. Orthodox Christians have ALWAYS counted Bible history according to the dates in the Septuagint, the translation of the Old Testament from the Hebrew and the Aramaic made into Greek in Alexandria, Egypt around 270 BC under the rule of the Ptolemies.

As usual, those 300 million Orthodox Christians about whose existence Herbert and Herman were so ludicrously ignorant weren't so dumb. They point out that whenever Jesus quotes from the Old Testament in the Gospels, he reported as having done so from the Septuagint translation.

One hundred years after the Septuagint translation was made, virtually all the copies of the Five Books of Moses held by the Jewish community in the land of Israel itself were deliberately destroyed during the religious persecutions of the Syrian tyrant King Antiochus IV whose defeat inspired the Jewish winter festival of Chanukah, observed by Jesus in John, chapter 10.

Now, if the Septuagint translation is correct, the world celebrated 7,000 years from Adam (assuming Adam lived exactly when and how the Book of Genesis describes it, of course) in 1492. Instead of the Old World ending, that was the year Columbus discovered the new one.

Now, you COULD, of course, conclude from all this that while the Jews and the Orthodox Christians got it wrong, old Archbishop Ussher and Herbert got it broadly right, whatever mess old Herman Hoeh went on to make of their theories.

But The Watcher prefers to conclude instead simply that you can prove anything you want with numbers.

195) And lest we forget...

Garner Ted Armstrong repeatedly in 1976 and 1977 sermons to assembled Church congregations: "Jimmy Carter as a jealous and deceived Protestant fundamentalist is going to unleash a murderous persecution upon the Worldwide Church of God."

Old GTA claimed to have been seriously considered by at least one of the big three American television networks to become one of their pundits back in his late 1960s and early 70s glory days. Gems like this explain why he never got the job. This mark you, from the same "Joshua" who shamelessly courted the favor of Franz Josef Strauss when he was convinced that Strauss was going to slaughter hundreds of millions of Americans in a nuclear attack. GTA even in his heyday really could "discern the spirits," huh?

196) Another GTA special, the masturbating on video king is still found of pushing even now: "Japan will destroy Australia and the west Coast of the United States.

It's easy to see what inspired this "insight". GTA was chafing under Herbert's bit while wanting to play the same game. Being as unoriginal and talentless a phony as his old man, he couldn't come up with any genuinely new ideas of his own, so he fell back on a variation of the old scam. Except, where Herbert had warned about how a nuclear Germany would stab it American benefactor in the back, GTA had a nuclear Japan doing the same thing. Both of them stupidly and falsely blindly assumed that World War III would have to be a rerun of World War II, except this time with the bad guys winning.

Well, wrong again. In East Asia, it is a deputy foreign minister of CHINA, NOT Japan, who two years ago threatening to incinerate Los Angeles with a nuclear missile if the Untied States defended the island of Taiwan against any invasion by mainland China.

Japan remains a loyal and reliable ally of the Untied States, as it has been since the stewardship of Gen. Douglas MacArthur half a century ago.

Far from impoverishing the United States, the strength of our stock market, our dollar and our entire economy has for the past two decades primarily rested on the continued willingness of the main Japanese banks to continue to invest in short term United States Treasury Bonds.

By contrast, within the past two years, top Chinese military planning studies acquired by U.S. intelligence have designated the United States as Strategic Enemy Number One. Chinese leaders visiting Moscow last year openly boasted of their strategic cooperation around the world against the United States, and the CIA has concluded that the bulk of China's Intercontinental Ballistic Missile nuclear force is targeted against mainland American cities.

Any of you who are familiar with old William Dankenbring's site might want to inform that particular old fraud of some of these facts as he continues to entertain whatever few dupes he still retains with Garner Ted's same old "Japan will bring Tribulation" shtick.

New on 7/5/98

197) The three and a half year ministry of Jesus began in 27 AD, which was 1,900 years, or 100 time cycles of 19 years each, before Herbert W Armstrong was baptized in 1927.

Herbert learned his "big lie" technique from Adolf Hitler himself. We know this from the report of David Robinson in his book "Herbert Armstrong's Tangled Web" - based on the comments to him by Herbert's family members. Mr. Robinson wrote that Herbert's favorite "recreational" readings in the 1930s and 40s were from the "rags to riches' autobiography of the individual he wrongly thought was the most powerful man on the planet - Hitler. You didn't read that in the old fraud's "Autobiography".

Now Hitler, in unconscious imitation of the Russian neurologist Ivan Pavlov, taught that to make masses of people swallow a lie, you just had to keep repeating the same old thing with confidence. Then, he said, they would so thoroughly take its truth for granted that they couldn't imagine it was false. And the bigger the lie, Hitler taught in "Mein Kampf", the more likely all those gullible fools would swallow it at a single gulp.

To this day, so-called "scholars' in offshoots of Worldwide take for granted the assumptions that Jesus's ministry started in 27 AD and ended in 31 AD. Entire books, including so-called "improved" Gospel concordances, have been written on this basis. But there is absolutely no truth to any of it.

Herman Hoeh chopped up and twisted the 70 weeks prophecy of Daniel 9 to make it fit the 27 AD date Herbert had already decreed. That will be discussed below as No. 207. If you don't want to take the Watcher's word for it, or are still duped by old German Herman, The Watcher recommends "Chronological Aspects of the Life of Christ" by Harold Hoehner, published by Zondervan, 1981.

Luke 3:1 very clearly states that Jesus began his ministry in the fifteenth year of the rule of Tiberius Caesar. Now, Tiberius succeeded his stepfather Augustus in 14 AD. So his fifteenth year was the year 29 AD.

Sound simple? Not to Herbert, his fake scholar "German" Herman Hoeh and all their benighted disciples and dupes. They have busted their collective asses to try and argue that the 15 years actually starts from a co-regency that Tiberius had with Augustus starting around the year 12 AD.

There's only one trouble with that. There is NO EVIDENCE ANYWHERE that the Romans EVER dated the rule of Tiberius that way. His coins only start right after the death of Augustus and that was when Tiberius started counting his sole rule. Since Tiberius, like Augustus before him, ruled the entire known world with an iron fist in the tradition of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Josef Stalin or, for that matter, Herbert W. Armstrong, none of his subjects as likely to have the slightest doubt about that.

Luke chose that dating system precisely because he WAS a precise fellow and wanted to make the true date of the start of Jesus's ministry clear to everyone. Perhaps he realized that some know-it-all, ignorant little jackass like Herbert would come along some day to confuse everyone about what really was a simple fact. As usual, Herbert was trying to palm off on his dupes a complicated lie as a plain truth.

Why bother, you might rightly ask? Because it fed Herbert's own infantile monster ego, that's why.

As William Meyer, Douglas and other contributors to this Web site have noted, Herbert was a narcissistic egomaniac well beyond the points of blasphemy and clinical insanity. The whole universe, the entirety of creation, had to revolve around him and - eventually - bow down to him, at least in his own crackpot mind.

Therefore, the year of his baptism could be no ordinary year. It had to be the start of the only true Christianity there could ever be or ever have been since the time of Jesus. And since Herbert so clearly had been shaped to be Jesus' pride and joy, the very perfection of the Divine creation among men (!!!!!!), and since Herbert's creepy little mind was convinced that God Almighty was a crazed clockmaker and anally-minded number-picking nerd, just as he was himself, therefore the Call of Herbert must have come in a year of Cosmic Significance.

The Call of Herbert was the most important conversion to "true" Christianity since the call of Jesus himself. That, dear reader, was the way Herbert saw it. To him, that was a perfectly obvious "fact." A truth as plain as his booming, bullying, self-justifying voice.

Therefore, the most important reason Jesus had to have been "called" in the fall of 27 AD rather than the fall of 29 AD was, quite simply, because Herbert himself was "converted" (to what, you might rightly ask) in 1927.

And since that was self-evident - to Herbert, it followed that all the supporting evidence simply had to be "interpreted" out of the obviously false facts that seemed to say something -anything - else.

Which brings us to:-

198) Jesus was crucified at Passover 31 AD.

The same crackpot and blasphemous reasoning that Herbert applied to the start of Jesus's ministry, he also applied to the end of it.

Herbert was appointed a minister, following his own frantic efforts, in the Church of God, Seventh Day, in 1931. Obviously, in his eyes, this was the most important event in Christian history since the start of the Christian Church at the Pentecost of Acts 2, just weeks after Jesus's crucifixion.

Therefore that event too must have been meant just to start a 1,900-year prophetic clock ticking to the start of his own ministry in 1931. Therefore it must have started in 31 AD;. Simple, huh. The only "premise, carelessly assumed" that you have to accept to reach this conclusion is the idea that all of Christian history was designed by the Creator God from the very beginning to revolve around Herbert.

To Herbert himself, nothing could have been more obvious or natural. After all, hadn't God given him his daughter Dorothy to "enjoy" for his own sexual pleasure? That is what he told HER during the 10 years that he repeatedly committed incest upon her, often forcibly.

Well, sorry to pour cold water on yet another of "The Apostle's" wet dreams, but the crucifixion of Jesus and the events of the Pentecost that followed seven weeks later CANNOT have occurred EARLIER than 31 AD, based on the evidence of the Gospels themselves.

The great New Testament scholar and historian Paul Meier points out Pontius Pilate, governor of Judaea got the job because he was a bosom buddy of Sejanus, the Emperor Tiberius's prime minister and chief hatchet man. But Sejanus was arrested and killed on the orders of that same Tiberius in October 31 AD and all his supporters in the Roman senate mercilessly purged and slaughtered. It was the bloodiest event in the Roman capital in the century between the civil wars that saw the rise of Octavian Augustus and the reign of Nero and none of the people who witnessed it ever forgot it.

The impact of the purge on Pilate was profound. He kept both his job and his head, but he had to walk carefully ever after.

When Sejanus was riding high, Pilate ruled the Jews as a bloody tyrant secure in the knowledge that his old pal back in Rome would back him to the hilt against any complaints over his massacres, murders or robberies.

But that's not the picture of Pilate we find in the Gospels, is it? There, we find a fearful, cautious cynic who is scared stiff that the Jewish leaders might make evil report of him back to Rome. In other words, it is a picture of Pilate as he ONLY became AFTER October 31 AD when his friend and protector back in Rome was executed.

Now, if Herbert had really been the "scholar' and "seeker after TRUTH" that he repeatedly assured us he was, THIS truth would have been self evident, as Mr. Jefferson would have put it. But the only "truth" that was self-evident to Herbert was his crazed mania that all of creation and Christianity were expressly designed to bow at his feet while he indulged in repeated acts of incest.

In fact, all the fake and flawed charts of Herman Hoeh to the contrary, the most likely date for the crucifixion of Jesus is Passover 33 AD and this is the figure cautiously endorsed by the Catholic Church. Once again, The Watcher recommends the discussion in "Chronological Aspects of the Life of Christ" by Harold Hoehner.

199) The seven churches of Revelation, chapters 2 and 3 are seven successive eras in the history of the "true" Christian Church.

Herbert and Herman Hoeh were both hot to trot on this one too for many years. All we need to note here is that there is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING in the wording of the Book of Revelation to support this claim either. Every major commentator clearly states that there were seven such churches in the Apostle John's time and that they are listed in the order a mail communications route would have carried the book to them.

But little things like facts never stopped the Prophet of Pasadena, did they?

That, you see, is the "beauty" of symbolic interpretation of the Bible to a con man like Herbert. Anything can mean anything you chose it too. And anyone who doesn't swallow your crazy theories can always be written off as an "unbeliever' who "lacks faith" or - Herbert's preferred approach - condemned as a tool of Satan. Once again, The Watcher replies, look who was talking.

200) The Philadelphia church, which is described as the most perfect and heroic church of the Revelation Seven, of course, had to be Herbert's own, with those despised Laodicaeans being the degenerates who would follow him.

This particular lie remains a fruitful one among Herbert's scores of thousands of remaining dupes to this very day. Meredith, Dankenbring, Flurry and the United crew continue to mutually accuse each other of being Laodicaeans. The whole idea excites the poor dears to react like chimpanzees on amphetamines. Come to think of it, amphetamines would do them less harm, and the comparison is very unfair to the chimps.

In fact, if anyone fits the description of Laodicaea in Revelation 3, it's Herbert himself and the Worldwide Church of God organization he raised up himself.

After all, Herbert was the one who always boasted - flying in the face of every teaching of the Old and New Testament alike - that the proof God approved of him was shown by his wealth. He claimed the proof he was blessed by God was precisely BECAUSE he was "rich and increased in goods." He and his fat cat, $200,000 a year ass-licking executives, believed their own inspiration and knowledge was so great that the whole world was piss ignorant and that they had need of nothing.

Herbert claimed to "see" the future by having the "keys" to "unlock" the mysteries" of prophecy. But he was, in reality, a hell of a lot blinder than any bat you will ever come across, dear reader. But, blind though he was, he certainly never "knew" admitted it, during his entire 52- year career of ludicrously wrong false prophecies that we are documenting here.

And - rest assured - there are plenty more to come.

With a fitting sense of Divine Judgment, for decades before he died, Herbert, like the Laodicaeans, was virtually physically blind too. Herbert was certainly "wretched." His second wife Ramona exposed his sexual perversions and darkest secrets to the world, leaving him well and truly "naked". And as a mad manic-depressive all his life from the very time he descended both into incest and into the conviction that he was "God's Chosen Servant" he certainly had plenty of times when he was "miserable" enough.

He claimed to be "the Amen, the faithful and true witness," and even to be the very "beginning of God's (spiritual) creation" that had been put on hold for 1,900 years from the time of Jesus himself until Herbert could come along and do the job for him. Those were his claims all right, just as they are the boasts of the church of Laodicaea.

But just as the Christ of Revelation vomited those self-satisfied deceivers out of his mouth, we already have had ample cause to note that God has not stinted on the signs that Herbert and his heirs have been puked up and left to rot amid the vomit as well. Refer back to No 187 and its documentation of the Lunatic's Witness that Herbert W. Armstrong was going to go to hell.

201) It is a proof of Herbert's calling that the Work he raised up is united, but the Church of God, Seventh Day that rejected him has splintered into so many warring little obscure sects that no-one can even keep track of them all.

Herbert boastfully made this claim in his Autobiography, first written and serialized in the Plain Truth from around 1958 to 1962 and later reprinted and widely circulated to Worldwide members in two volumes.

Well, who's boasting now? The Watcher as particularly interested to see that this self-evident point is even beginning to penetrate the skulls of Herbert's remaining dupes - or "drones", as he lovingly described his own supporters.

The May 1998 issue of The Journal of the "churches of God" contains a remarkable letter from one Craig White. He had previously caught The Watcher's eye by his zeal for preaching Herbert's Prophetic Gems. Everyone else, even at The Journal, had enough sense to realize that such embarrassments should be swept under the carpet in the fervent hope that no one would ever again bother to look at them. But no one had broken this news to poor Mr. White.

However, even he was moved to plaintively exclaim, 'It's only the false and rejected churches that split and squabble among themselves. Why is this happening to us???' To which The Watcher will gently reply, with the kindness one should show the terminally simple and insane, 'Draw the obvious conclusions, Mr. White.'

202) "The Universe will be found to be perfect but unfinished, like a perfectly designed piece of furniture which hasn't been painted or polished yet." - Repeated teaching of Herbert during his last 14 years.

The Universe is a big place. Indeed, it is a VERY big place. The Hubble Space Telescope found in a series of observations carried out in 1995-96 that the known universe is, indeed, at least FIVE times BIGGER than any previous measurements or observations had indicated. And we had already known it was very bg indeed. Thousands of millions of galaxies, each of them with hundreds of millions of stars, most of which probably have planets like our own orbiting around them upon which organic and even intelligent life may have developed.

But Herbert, who never finished high school and who never went to ANY college, as usual never let his own terminal 19th century hick ignorance hold him back from making even more of a fool of himself than usual. He was prepared to sum up all the galaxies of space in language that, to be sure, Albert Einstein or Isaac Newton would NEVER have used.

Only Herbert could have thought he could describe the nature of infinity in terms of the overstuffed, chintzy kitsch junk he stuck in his living room. Since Herbert believed in "quality" God the Father must create according to the only principles that Herbert himself would have approved of. Therefore the Universe will be found to be "perfect," and made from "quality" products. This language is so vague and inappropriate it ought to be laughable. But when we were "under the influence", we swallowed everything, didn't we?

203) If you tithe 10 percent gross of your salary to Herbert, you will be financially blessed far more than if you had never heard of him.

The ludicrous absurdity of this by now ought to be self-evident to anyone who reads this. But judging by Ed's hate mail, there are still plenty of dupes out there ready to buy a nice bridge in Brooklyn from Herbert, or anyone else.

204) If you STOP tithing 10 percent to Herbert, you will be financially cursed.

The power of superstition and fear again. The old bastard made a great witch doctor, didn't he? And he obviously had far more effective demons at his disposal than any voodoo practitioner in Haiti or West Africa.

But for the record, The Watcher himself will report that in the three months AFTER he gave up tithing to Herbert's successor parasites, his own household income TREBLED and has increased ever since.

205) The Korean war broke the pride of America's power forever, and it was all because we wouldn't let poor General MacArthur win a REAL victory for us by nuking China - Garner Ted Armstrong in his 1968-era article/booklet "To Kill a Nation."

Looking at the 70-something old pervert of Tyler, Texas today, videotaped masturbating in front of a prostitute, its difficult to recall how high he was flying when he was deflowering the virgins of Ambassador College back in the 1960s. And what a dashing, confident figure he cut, flying around the world in his private jet to hobnob with the likes of Franz Josef Strauss or Otto Von Hapsburg. But back then, we really hung on every word he said.

More fool us.

In fact, the Korean War was both a brilliant tactical and strategic victory for the United States. It marked a drastic battlefield victory over China, which stopped its military expansion in its tracks for half a century. U.S. battlefield dead totaled 58,000. But China's battle dead totaled TEN TIMES that.

The U.S. determination to confront and restrain communism was not destroyed by the Korean War, as gabbling Garner Ted claimed. America's pride was not destroyed by the experience of the Korean War. And it wasn't destroyed by the failure to win the Vietnam War either. Garner Ted's wisdom and prophetic insight now look as convincing as his sex appeal. Give the old creep a dirty raincoat and sit him in the back of a pornographic movie.

206) Vietnam will be a loyal ally of China in attacking Fascist Europe before Christ returns.

Blink and you'll miss it. But this is one of the confident, ignorant, predictions shoehorned into Herbert's 1950s article/booklet, "The Middle East in prophecy." Remember, he claimed that Russia would lead all the nations of Asia including China against Europe. The Vietnamese people were supposedly identified - thanks to Herman Hoeh's "scholarship," as one of the subset peoples listed in Ezekiel 38-39 following Gog and Magog

One's eyes understandably glaze over now at such things, but we once hung on every word, didn't we, dear readers. And amazingly enough, there are thousands of hypnotized drones out there who still do. If any of them have read this far, "This is for YOU TOO, folks."

Well, in 1979, the Vietnamese, a tough bunch, as hundreds of thousands of our own Vietnam vets can testify, took on the Chinese in a border war and whipped them easily.

The Watcher was in Vietnam on business a couple of years ago and was struck by the lack of animosity towards Americans. As long as they didn't have to fight us, they actually LIKE us.

The Chinese, however, are another matter. The Vietnamese are scared stiff of them, as well they might be. There may be almost 80 million Vietnamese now with a high birth rate. But there are 1,200 million (that's 1.2 billion) Chinese, bursting at the seams for more space to expand, And they're JUST OVER THE BORDER. If The Watcher were Chinese, he'd be worried too.

Also, the Chinese have been the historic enemy of the Vietnamese for 1,000 years. Well, you can't expect Herbert to have known that just as can't have expected him to know that Hitler was more dangerous than Mussolini, or that the Allies would win World War II, or any other of the hundreds of obvious things he got ludicrously wrong, can you?

Some prophet.

207) And now, as we promised above, back to Herbert's convoluted chronologies.

He and Herman Hoeh claimed that the 70 Weeks prophecy of Daniel 9 was fulfilled in the decree recorded in Ezra 7 that the Israelite people could go back to Jerusalem. There were plenty of Persian kings called Artaxerxes and the one that suited German Herman started to reign in 465 BC. Hoeh pulls a few strings to get his seventh year still going in 457 BC and then counts 69 weeks to come out in 27 AD, a nice, neat 1,900 years EXACTLY before Herbert was baptized (much good it did him).

Now you can see how Hoeh, Herbert's intellectual whore, earned those two or three thousand bucks a year that "unworldly saint" pulled down. But do what Herbert always told you to do, and actually READ YOUR BIBLE!!! Then, you will find, strangely enough, that, as usual, Hoeh was talking through his ass.

If ANY event in that late period of the Jewish return from captivity marks the opening date to count the 70 Weeks prophecy, then it is NOT the decree of Ezra 7 but the Persian king's command of Nehemiah 2.

Unlike Ezra 7, this royal command actually DOES refer specifically to the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem. Indeed, the entire Book of Nehemiah is devoted to that subject, which suggests the Jewish rabbis who decided what books to finally include in what we call the Old testament believed rebuilding those walls was pretty hot stuff.

And if you cut to the Gospels, you see the four writers there make a big deal out of Jesus' birth, with heavenly choirs singing, ecstatic virgins prophesying, UFOs doing cartwheels in the sky, the whole caboodle. By contrast, Jesus seems to have started off his ministry low key with his 40 days fast in the desert. But then, Jesus and the Gospel writers didn't know how important putting them in 27 AD would be to Herbert 1,900 years later, did they?

That event took place 13 years later than Ezra 7 in the reign of the same King Artaxerxes, which would be 445 BC. But many scholars such as the late Martin Anstey note that Artaxerxes was an honorific name attached to all Persian kings and they identify this guy with King Darius I Hystaspes who started ruling in 520 BC. Then HIS 20th year would have been 500 BC. Count 70 weeks from that and you come out in 10 BC for the birth of Jesus.Christ. But plenty of scholars argue that 10 phantom years were inserted in the Roman-Greek counting of their history and that its therefore 490 years and not 500 years from Darius I Hystaspes-Artaxerxes to the birth of Jesus.

Of course, all of the above assumes A) That the prophecy of Daniel makes sense to begin with. B) That it, and other chunks of Daniel like chapter 11, were actually written by him in the 6th century BC, and not 450 years later during the Jewish war against the Syrians. And C) That the Daniel 9 prophecy was written to point to Jesus as the Messiah in the first place.

In fact, believing, sincere Christians of every denomination have always found the "proof" of their faith in their prayers and perceived answers to them, and in the change they believe Christ makes in their lives. They don't feel the need to rely upon, or be obsessed by, the anal obsession with twisting obscure numbers that so engrossed Herbert. Was Christ really in Herbert's life? You might well ask.

As you will have gathered, dear reader, there was a time when The Watcher took such things seriously, rather than making a six-figure dollar salary and getting a decent mortgage. For those of you still determined to waste your time as The Watcher himself once did, he recommends the discussion of Daniel's 70 weeks in - again - "Chronological Aspects of the Life of Christ" by Harold Hoehner and "Daniel's Prophecy of the 70 Weeks" by Alva McClain, both published by Zondervan. Dr. (a REAL PhD, by the way) McClain is especially helpful in unscrambling your brains from the ministrations of "Dr." Hoeh.

2/19/2001

208)

 Here's another one to add to your already huge and growing list. This one was from HWA's robocop Gerald Waterhouse.

In the late 1960s I attended one of Waterhouse's marathon sermons. He could rival Fidel Castro for the length of his harangues. During his "inspired" message he started talking about the riots that had occurred in Detroit, Michigan in July 1967. Then he got into how we were all going to flee the evil US society in and then the US would be destroyed by Germany. One of the reasons why our nation needed to be destroyed was its evil holidays like Christmas. So I was not surprised when he put all this together and dogmatically and vindictively asserted, with all the supreme arrogance and "God will back me up even if I'm wrong" insanity typical of these megalomaniacs, that "Brethren, there will be no Christmas in Detroit in 1972. Detroit will be destroyed by then." For the mouth of the Waterhouse hath spoken it. Bozo Waterhouse uttered these words about three or four years before it was supposed to happen.

Just as we were supposed to be able to go visit the place where ancient Babylon existed and find absolutely nothing there now but wilderness, I guess today we could also go visit the smoking ruins of where Detroit, Michigan used to be located. But we won't be able to get very close because of the intense radiation from the nuclear bombs that destroyed it in early 1972.

Bill Fairchild

  9/16/02

209) In 1972, Herbert Armstrong announced loudly in Penticton, British
Columbia, Canada, imperiously thrusting his forefinger into the air over his
head [it could have been his middle finger--I was a long way back], "Follow
ME! I will lead you into the KINGDOM!".

In fact, Herbert Armstrong died in January, 1986.