The Beginning Of Birth Pains

The beginning of birth pains

TBW

Was there ever a moment in the history of mankind when something so esoteric, so volatile, ambivalent, dark and mysterious occurred as in the summer of 1914? The simple answer is no! Sure we had wars, death, cruelty, poverty and disease long before but... what happened in the summer of 1914 elevated all of the above onto a new unprecedented scale, wars, death, cruelty, poverty and disease were no longer to be considered a country wide problem, or even a continental problem, oh no, overnight it became global!  

A “paradigm shift” in sociology and human behaviour, a time of unparalleled hatred a time when darkness mysteriously took over the world. A seismic shift stole from the people their up-to-then sedentary pace of an old nineteenth century lifestyle. An old world of rigid tradition was suddenly swept away, gone and replaced by a rapidly evolving twentieth century, the old ways, changed forever and replaced by a new and appalling one, driven by machines and a totalitarian ideology which, not only became unmistakably entwined with the prophecies of Jesus Christ, who had specifically warned us of this terrible change 2,000 years earlier, but also the sudden degrading way we treated our fellow human beings. It was as if, the devil himself had arrived and of course, he had. 

One insane moment caused an unprecedented global implosion which set off a chain of events that had never occurred in the history of mankind before or since and is still reverberating around the world today. An escalation that our world has never fully recovered from and which set the trend of hopelessness in which we find ourselves today, where nearly 8 billion people living on a dying planet don't have enough food to feed everyone, with a society hellbent and on the verge of destroying itself.  The trigger which released this chain of events and led us to our "brave new world," was but a brief moment in time, on a sunny afternoon in Eastern Europe but which is now embroiled deep in conspiracy, just as Pearl Harbour, the assassination of JFK, 9/11 and Covid-19.

Mat 24: 6-8 

6 You will hear of wars and rumours of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. These things must happen, but the end is still to come.7Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. 8 All these are the beginning of birth pains. 

In Luke 21:1, we are also warned of pestilences and great signs and fearful sights from heaven, something I will be covering later on in this book. But the question is, how does 1914 link up to Jesus’s specific warning in Matthew 24, Luke 21 and Mark 13? Let’s break it down.

Wars

Wars have always happened since the beginning of time, great wars, all history is built on the back of wars from the beginning of time. Great empires have ruled vast areas of the world with an iron fist throughout ancient history and beyond. Pestilence is no stranger either. The Bubonic Plague killed more than 100 million Europeans in the 1300s just years after a great famine wiped out almost 60% of the European population. However, what began on July 28, 1914, and ended on the 11th November 1918 had never before happened on such a scale, no, not even close. For the first time in the history of mankind, a war so great had to be deemed a “World War, or the Great War.” For the first time in history, a “global war” erupted on the scale of what had never before occurred in human history. A war which saw millions of young men cut down by man-made industrial killing machines, chemicals in the form of mustard gas and mega-size (unlimited) bombs. WWI butchered around 40 million people in just 4 years. History had changed forever, the direction of the world’s future had been altered. Man could now kill his fellow man on a production lined industrial scale.

More wars and food shortages

While the world was still at war, one of the bloodiest of all revolts exploded, a war within a war you could say. In 1917 the Russian Revolution began, culminating in 1923. It is thought approximately 12 million people died during the Russian revolution, mostly poor people. Many died from famine. (For nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom and there will be food shortages and earthquakes in one place and another.)

Pestilence became global.

As the end of WWI approached, the whole world began to look forward to better times, but, something similar to what our world is now facing descended on an unsuspecting public who were on the verge of celebrating the end of a devastating war. A new global pandemic systematically caught the world unaware. The Spanish flu, which started in the US killed tens of millions of people. It is thought as many as 500 million people were infected, one-third of the entire world population and it is estimated more than 100 million died, more than double the number of people who died in WWI.

Food shortages became global.

As the world slowly recovered from the unprecedented deaths of millions from wars, famine and pestilence the world took yet another hit, just ten years after WWI ended and seven years after the Spanish flu died-off, the world was once again caught unaware. This time it was ‘The Great Depression.’ The Great Depression started in 1929 in the US but soon reverberated around the world, lasting until the late 1930s. Poverty and famine crippled much of the world's population. Millions of jobs around the world were lost, hunger and starvation were the new killer, it is estimated The Great Depression killed around 120 million people.

Food rationing was so severe during the two World Wars that millions of people died from starvation. During the first World War, the German people were put on severe food rationing. After the First World War the German economy imploded, a wheelbarrow full of money was needed just to buy a loaf of bread. According to " The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror Famine," around 14.5 million people died of starvation in the Great Famine of 1932-33, also known as Holodomor. During the Second World War the Dutch people were so hungry they resorted to eating tulips. More than 30 million, 10 million of them kids died like savages along the Eastern Front due to incredible cold no human should have to endure never mind fight for their lives but it was the inevitable starvation which claimed both German and Russian soldiers in the end. The German Russian struggle reached a new climax for human savagery and depravation. The British people suffered food rationing well into the 1950s as a result of WWII and lost their treasured empire. The Great Chinese Famine is widely regarded as the deadliest famine of all and one of the greatest man-made disasters in human history, with an estimated death toll due to starvation that ranges in the tens of millions (15 to 55 million). Since 1914, it is thought more than 100 million people have died due to famines during the 20th and 21st centuries.

In 1936 the Spanish Civil War began, although half a million people died it was just a sideshow to what was coming. By September 1, 1939, the world was at war again. The Second World War was even more destructive than the first. More sophisticated machines had been developed and on a mighty industrial scale, airplanes provided a new horror, aerial bombardments which could destroy whole areas of cities and kill its innocent occupants, which became morally acceptable. After 6 years of bloody warfare and millions of deaths, a new weapon was introduced, supposedly to bring the war to an early end. It was the next paradigm shift. The US brought an already demoralised and humiliated Japan to its knees with, not one but two “thermal nuclear bombs” which destroyed two major Japanese cities and killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people in just minutes. As he witnessed the first detonation of his invention, the nuclear weapon on July 16, 1945, a piece of ancient Hindu scripture ran through the mind of Robert Oppenheimer: “Now I have become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” quoting an ancient text from the Bhagavad-Gita. It was surely a massive understatement from Oppenheimer, what he didn't realise at the time in just a few years there would be enough nuclear weapons to destroy our world many times over! Our wonderful world was slipping ever deeper into a darkness unimaginable just thirty years earlier.

Some estimates place the total number of deaths, due to wars and armed conflicts since 1914, at nearly 300 million! Others would say 500 million.

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