Michel de Nostredame

Source: César de Nostredame

With the recent 80th-anniversary celebrations of D-Day, it seems an appropriate time for us all to ask ourselves, when will World War III begin? As soon as 18 June, apparently. So says Kushal Kumar, an Indian Vedic astrologer who went viral late last month after warning that, according to his own complex calculations, “Tuesday, June 18, 2024, has the strongest planetary stimulus to trigger WW3, although June 10 and 29 may
have a say as well.”

Kumar should apply for a new job at the Kremlin. As Russian President Vladimir Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine did not quite go as well as his own military astrologers had predicted, an immense amount of propaganda has had to be deployed to keep Putin’s own population on-side with his so-called “special military operation”—propaganda produced not simply by the usual ranks of public-relations experts, but also by self-styled psychics, soothsayers, and religious mystics.

Calculated Lies
Not all Putin’s oracles claim paranormal powers—some simply use complex math to infallibly predict the future, like TV weather forecasters do. And TV weather forecasts are never wrong, are they?

Putin’s current chief numerical wizard is Mohammad Sediq Afghan, a mathematician from (yes) Afghanistan, who calls himself “the Nostradamus of the 21st century,” and whose own prediction of when WWIII will break out is reassuringly distant: According to his sophisticated algorithms, the conflict will not begin until 2055, when Putin will hopefully be long dead, as may the 60-year-old Afghan himself.

Afghan’s other key military calculations are spread via Russian social media as Kremlin-orchestrated disinformation. One such algorithmic forecast is that “Putin should in no case step back from the ‘special operation’ [in Ukraine]. Because otherwise, trouble awaits Russia.” Which, quite handily, is precisely what Vladimir Putin wants his domestic audience to think, too.

Often, Afghan’s predictions serve to distract citizens from periods when the war is not going well. One 2022 Russian blog from a “Mr. Z” bemoans how terribly the war in Ukraine was then going…before telling readers to cheer up, as the prognostications of Afghan foresaw how it would all turn out okay in the end. Due to his immense reliability, it now turned out the prophet was “officially under the protection of the UN and UNESCO, since his intellect has been recognized as the property of all mankind”; as he once won “a brand new Ford Mustang as a prize for defeating a supercomputer” in a battle of numerical wits, Afghan could never possibly be wrong.

In Mr. Z’s account, Afghan calls Putin “a genius and a messiah,” who correctly discerned there were 24 separate regions in Ukraine, a number of supposedly awesome mystical significance. In the equally numerologically blessed year of 2024, Afghan reported to Mr. Z that Donald Trump will win the U.S. election but be cheated out of it by Joe Biden, leading to full-blown American civil war in 2025, leaving Putin free to conquer Ukraine without full NATO opposition. Subsequently, the E.U. will likewise fold, leaving Russia free to rule the world unchallenged.

In online videos aimed at English-speakers, Afghan’s ideas are expanded further, “proving” that, in 2025, beginning in Ukraine, the USSR will be reborn anew under a new name, to such an extent that even Germany will “voluntarily” join up to it, as “soon every citizen of Planet Earth will dream of having Russian citizenship.” Before long, Afghan’s special number tables establish, “the word ‘border’ will cease to exist” for many people across the world—because Putin’s tanks will forcibly erase them to their own immense benefit in a universal “impetus of convergence.”

Paper Prophets
Inconveniently, some of Afghan’s past predictions have fallen flat. Following the initial failure of Russia’s attempts to seize Kiev in 2022, Afghan diagnosed doom for the following year instead, in the shape of a new global pandemic “cooler than the coronavirus,” which would distract the West so much it would forget all about the petty little sideshow in Ukraine. That 2023 came and went without this “cool” new pandemic appearing doesn’t say very much for the accuracy of Afghan’s algorithms.

Perhaps this is no wonder. Whilst he runs his own special institution, the World Philosophical Mathematical Research Center, it has been alleged Afghan’s claims to have achieved a doctorate in the old USSR before being expelled from the nation for correctly predicting its imminent geopolitical collapse in the early 1990s are unconfirmed by any actual documentary proof.

Nonetheless, this “world genius” (as his Facebook page modestly describes him) does have at least one notable certificate: his official “MAN OF THE YEAR 2012” award, a small printed piece of paper handed out to “The World Philosopher, Mohammad Sediq Afghan” by the now-defunct International Biographical Center of Cambridgeshire, England.

Sadly, this institution had nothing whatsoever to do with the actual world-famous University of Cambridge, but was instead an infamous diploma mill from which you could buy your own fictional “academic” certificates for about $400.

Back to the Future
If Afghan is indeed “the Nostradamus of the 21st century,” then Putin’s propaganda machine has not been averse to utilizing the equally dubious prophecies of the original Nostradamus of the 16th century, Michel de Nostredame (1503–66). Many modern-day biographies of the famous French seer are today being actively promoted with the explicit selling point that he successfully predicted World War III beginning in Ukraine.

Actually, Nostradamus did not predict anything explicitly at all. He penned his forecasts as “quatrains”: four-line verses of poetry, written in symbolic language that can be interpreted however you like. For instance, when he wrote about how “When the letters and weapons are enclosed in the fish/Out comes a man who makes war,” this was supposedly a prediction of WWIII being triggered by a future nuclear submarine attack on the U.S. coastline—something Putin has recently threatened with his reputed new Poseidon nuclear torpedo devices.

Nostradamus is big in the Russian-speaking world too, thanks to verses like the following:

Through the three brothers, the world will get into trouble.
The enemies will take a marine city.
Hunger, fire, blood, plague,
And a double dose of all disasters.

The “three brothers” are supposedly Putin, the NATO Secretary-General, and President Biden, whilst the “maritime city” is Odessa: If that major port city really was taken by Moscow, there would indeed be “a double dose of all disasters” for Kiev. Spreading such allegedly “infallible” predictions serves the double purpose of boosting Russian morale and depressing Ukrainian morale alike.

Blind Woman’s Bluff
Even more trusted in the Russky mir (Russian World) is Baba Vanga (1911–96), a blind Bulgarian prophetess who sourced her own predictions direct from holy visions of St. George that began after she was struck by lightning. Being illiterate, Vanga never wrote any such forecasts down—handily enabling Putin’s propagandists to kindly write some new ones down for her, 25 years after her death.

Vanga’s newly uncovered estimates that Putin will become “Lord of the World,” whilst Europe will become a “wasteland” in a forthcoming WWIII beginning in Ukraine, have been widely disseminated online and on Russian State TV. In old-time Communist Bulgaria, Vanga was cannily co-opted by a special Institute of Suggestology and given a salary, driver, house, and secretary to exploit her “powers” for the Politburo’s own ends: Today, it would seem that Putin is basically copying the Cold War-era Bulgarians.

What Putin perhaps did not predict, however, is that his own tactics could easily be used against him. One of Baba Vanga’s most popular prophecies for 2024 is that Putin will be ungratefully assassinated by one of his own countrymen. That particular piece of fake “Suggestology,” I think, may just have been written in Kiev, not Moscow…

My own personal prediction for WWIII, by the way? That, if and when it finally does break out, the West will probably lose it.