Herbert Armstrong's 209 False Prophecies

by "The Watcher" and contributions at the Painful Truth

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.

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!

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 ha