Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2017 July 3

= July 3 =

What are some of the most prescient predictions of WW2, Naziism, Pearl Harbor, the Great Depression or the Holocaust?
Any kind of prediction: Fiction (i.e. a 1919 film), persuasion (i.e. a politician's quote), speculation etc. Doesn't have to include more than one (i.e. a novel with a great depression but no world war(s), or Germans invade Europe but Japan's against them like WW1 or unimportant like pre ~1900). Napoleon predicted China two centuries in advance after all so it can be done. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 21:42, 3 July 2017 (UTC)


 * Hmmm... just searching, I find those who give great credit to Winston Churchill - . There are others who make much of the Three Secrets of Fatima, though I have to say so far what I've seen about it seems unimpressive at first glance.  Then there are other things like this that seem like pure chaff.  H.G. Wells gets some credit here.  Presumably there are more impressive predictions by less known people that do not come up as quickly in a search... and I have scarcely looked. Wnt (talk) 23:47, 3 July 2017 (UTC)


 * The Great Dictator was made in 1940, so perhaps more of a condemnation of the (then) current events than a prediction of future events. Still, well worth watching. StuRat (talk) 00:10, 4 July 2017 (UTC)


 * Hear hear. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 06:39, 4 July 2017 (UTC)


 * The best known for non-fiction is probably John Maynard Keynes Seraphim System ( talk ) 00:22, 4 July 2017 (UTC)


 * Read about Billy Mitchell. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 01:36, 4 July 2017 (UTC)


 * Ferdinand Foch on the Treaty of Versailles: "This is not a peace. It is an armistice for twenty years".-- Jayron 32 01:57, 4 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Jacques Bainville on the same; "Versailles Treaty was too harsh in its mild features, too mild in its harsh aspects": provoking Germany to seek vengeance without restraining it from doing so. Gem fr (talk) 15:47, 4 July 2017 (UTC)
 * As already mentioned, H G Wells, notably Things to Come. See also:
 * — 2606:A000:4C0C:E200:A975:997:5261:F444 (talk) 03:01, 4 July 2017 (UTC)


 * The attack on Pearl Harbor was anticipated with great prescience in 1932 by Admiral Yarnell as part of a US Navy war-game exercise. --76.71.5.114 (talk) 09:04, 4 July 2017 (UTC)
 * LOL, read to the end -- that was not a prediction at all! The Japanese actually copied that attack plan, having been free to observe it!  Moral of that story is, don't look for vulnerabilities if you don't plan to pay as much attention to them as the enemy does, I guess.  This also pretty much rules out looking for any post-1932 Pearl Harbor prediction since it could be based on the same source. Wnt (talk) 13:06, 4 July 2017 (UTC)

Nostradamus predicted Adolf Hitler, although he gave the name as Hisler. 79.73.134.123 (talk) 09:16, 4 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Uhm, no, he didn't. Fut.Perf. ☼ 11:03, 4 July 2017 (UTC)
 * I was misled by this: Reference desk/Archives/Language/2016 November 23. 79.73.134.123 (talk) 13:50, 4 July 2017 (UTC)

Per the article The Shape of Things to Come (1933), H. G. Wells correctly predicted that there will be a World War II, but was wrong on how the War would work out:
 * "Wells predicted a Second World War breaking out with a European conflagration from the flashpoint of a violent clash between Germans and Poles at Danzig. Wells set the date for this as January 1940 – quite close to the actual date of September 1939. But where Wells' imagined war sharply diverges from the actual WWII is in Poland proving a military match for Nazi Germany – and they engage in an inconclusive war lasting ten years. More countries are eventually dragged into the fighting, but France and the Soviet Union are only marginally involved, the United Kingdom remains neutral, and the United States fights inconclusively with Japan. The Austrian Anschluss happens during, rather than before, the war. Czechoslovakia avoids German occupation and its president, Edvard Beneš, survives to initiate the final "Suspension of Hostilities" in 1950."
 * "Wells correctly predicted that the coming war would involve both sides launching heavy bombings of each other's main cities, but was wrong in assuming that land fighting would quickly bog down as in WWI, and that the idea of using tanks to develop a war of movement would come to naught. Wells predicted that submarines would become the launching pads for "air torpedos" (i.e. missiles) carrying weapons of mass destruction, enabling a country to threaten the destruction of places halfway around the world – which actually happened, though not in WWII but decades later."
 * "Wells' predicted war ends with no victor but total exhaustion, collapse and disintegration of all the fighting states and of the neutral countries, equally affected by the deepening economic crisis. The whole world descends into chaos: nearly all governments break down, and a devastating plague in 1956 and 1957 kills a large part of humanity and almost destroys civilisation." Dimadick (talk) 11:08, 4 July 2017 (UTC)


 * As for the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and ensuing Great Depression, Ludwig von Mises had warned about the collapse, and even "stubbornly turned down a lucrative job offer from the Viennese bank Kreditanstalt, much to the annoyance of his fiancée, proclaiming 'A great crash is coming, and I don't want my name in any way connected with it'". (See for example Mark Spitznagel's WSJ article on "The Man Who Predicted the Depression"). ---Sluzzelin talk  13:31, 4 July 2017 (UTC)


 * This well known newspaper cartoon shows a little boy, labelled as "1940 Class", crying over the Treaty of Versailles as the principal "instigators" of the treaty leave the venue. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 13:38, 4 July 2017 (UTC)

I bet Heinrich Heine, writing in 1823, would have been surprised at the fact that his prophecy applied to his own compatriots: "Dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen. Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings." Sadly. --Dweller (talk) Become old fashioned! 13:46, 4 July 2017 (UTC)


 * In his novel 1984 (written in 1948) George Orwell predicted endless war.  In the fifteenth century Leonardo da Vinci provided the theory for constructing a number of devices, which were built when technology became sufficiently advanced to do it.   Modern electronic computers use the nineteenth century theory of Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace.   In this book  published in 1968 John Brunner describes the world of 2010 in which


 * the United States is troubled by school shootings
 * President Obomi is leader
 * world population tops eight thousand million
 * young people prefer casual relationships
 * cars are all electric (Volvo has provided a date of next year for this)

among other things. 92.19.185.111 (talk) 13:16, 8 July 2017 (UTC)