Herbert W. Armstrong's 209 False Prophecies

The Most Comprehensive Listing
of Herbert Armstrong's 52 year record of False Prophesies ever made.
Or
Herbert W. Armstrong's Worldwide Church of God: A Non-Prophet Organization

By
"The Watcher"

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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: Herbert W. Armstrong - "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.

Concerning136) 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: On Page 3, 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: Herbert W. Armstrong - "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 - Herbert W. Armstrong - " ... 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!

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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.

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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.

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