Well, the big guns are booming in Shanghai, and the Chinese are putting up an unexpected resistance. More power to them. I’d like to see them beat the hell out of Japan. Though, if they do, it’s remotely possible that it might be the beginning of the end of foreign domination in China. Remote, but possible. A victory over Japan would undoubtedly stir the Chinese, and might lead to a far more aggressive assertion of national rights. It seems hardly possible that China could win, lacking a strong central government, proper equipment, etc., and with her vast unwieldy armies controlled by separate — and mercenary — war-lords. But you can’t tell. I hear on good authority that many German soldiers of fortune, from the old Prussian armies, are in the Chinese forces. I note that in Germany, by the way, the citizenship of Hitler has been questioned to the extent of forcing him to withdrew from the presidential race. I hope Von Hindenburg carries the election. During war days I would cheerfully have lighted a torch to burn him at the stake, but now I think he is one of the strongest stabilizing factors in Europe, and that his re-election would be to the advantage of not only Germany, but the entire world. He was doubtless the ablest general of any nationality in the Great War, and now seems to be about the most level-headed statesman on the Continent.

I expect the disarmament conference to come to nothing, and am in favor of that result, if the alternative means shearing more claws from our already depleted national defense. The outlawry of war is proven to have been an empty thought. I believe that the next few generations will see a continual series of wars, and the best thing to do, is to be prepared. America has no friends in Europe, or in Asia, or in the world. It seems to me that conditions are somewhat similar to those which produced the feudal age. The only nations which are likely to survive the dawning Age of Iron, are those which adopt a powerful military form of government. This style of government is not the kind to endure in such an age, because big business has its finger too much in the pie. It seems we must choose between a strong soviet government, and a strong dictatorship on the fascist style. Just as in the feudal days, men chose a strong baron or count to serve, for mutual protection. Personal liberty, it would seem, is to be a thing of the past. Individualistic independence must be sacrificed for national security. We must throw off the idealistic cloaks we have partially donned during the last generation or so, and recognize the naked bestiality of life. There is no question of right or wrong, but simply of necessity and survival. The strong will win, and might will rule, as it always has, and there need be no hypocrisy about it. Right or wrong, for instance, has little to do with the present Japanese-Chinese-Manchurian affair, as I see it. It is necessary to the existence of the Japanese nation that they expand into Manchuria, and eventually into China. It is necessary to the existence of other nations — America, for instance — that they are not allowed to expand. I am in sympathy with China, because the more Japanese forces they shatter, the less Americans will have to face when the eventual war comes. I am all for the building up of the armies and the navy, for the equipment of the forces with the most modern type of arms, and, if it seems necessary, of compulsory military training. The naked facts are — we must grind or be ground.

I am no student of events, but I consider at least these wars inevitable: a Russo-Japanese war; an American-Japanese war; a Russo-American war; a French-Italian war; and possibly a war in which Russia will be pitted against the foremost European powers. The world is a seething volcano.

• Robert E. Howard to H. P. Lovecraft, 2 March 1932, Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard 2.308-309

Robert E. Howard was born in 1906, and so only barely hitting puberty as the Great War ended; he had an avid interest in historical conflicts, but disliked the mechanization and technological advances of modern warfare, and saw the contemporary politics of the interwar period through the lens of various prejudices. He was quite taken - or at least, convinced - of the looming threat of a racial war, which was to some degree shared by H. P. Lovecraft, though they tended to differ on some of the particulars, and the feeling of an imminent threat from Japan (and Mexico) was not uncommon in Howard's native Texas. This particular set of predictions was based on the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in September 1931, and the Conference for the Reduction and Limitation of Armaments which began in 1932 in Geneva, though Howard had been working out some version of possible future world conflicts, often on racial lines, since the 1920s; the work didn't make it into much of his published fiction during Howard's lifetime, though he left several unpublished stories, and left its mark on some of his more popular stories of Conan the Cimmerian, where the setting often include racial conflicts.

I might have gone with one of my favorite quotes to lead this off, apocryphally attributed to everyone from Niels Bohr to Yogi Berra: "Prediction is very difficult, especially when it's about the future."

But in terms of predictions, Islamic eschatology is kind of fun.

There are a few different sources of Islamic eschatology. The ones we can most reliably ascribe to the Prophet Muhammad are those contained within the Quran itself. So for instance there is the story of Dhul Qarnein, the "two-horned one", who confronted "Gog and Magog" who are "spoiling the land" until they are confronted by Dhul Qarnein and contained behind a great iron barrier. This barrier will be brought down by God in the time of judgement and Gog and Magog will be released:

This is a mercy from my Lord; but when the promise of my Lord cometh to pass, He will lay it low, for the promise of my Lord is true. And on that day we shall let some of them surge against others, and the Trumpet will be blown. Then We shall gather them together in one gathering. On that day we shall present hell to the disbelievers, plain to view... Those are they who disbelieve in the revelations of their Lord and in the meeting with Him. Therefor their works are vain, and on the Day of Resurrection We assign no weight to them. That is their reward: hell, because they disbelieved, and made a jest of Our revelations and Our messengers. Lo! those who believe and do good works, theirs are the Gardens of Paradise for welcome,

Now, the problem is that that's rather vague. Who is "The Two Horned One?" Who or what are "Gog and Magog"?

The explication for that, for the most part, comes from Quranic exegesis, the tafsir. The tafsir, unlike the Quran for which we have very early manuscript evidence which leaves us reasonably confident that this was a document produced by the prophet, the tafsir is, to cut a long discussion short, quite often of a spurious origin which often relies on biographical literature about Muhammad which is even more spurious than the already suspect (at least in the western academic tradition) hadith literature.

So from that Tafsir and exegetical tradition we end up with an identification of "The Two Horned One" as Alexander the Great. (And no, it's not even slightly Satanic.)

Now, Gog and Magog are part of an earlier Abrahamic tradition that I'm not really familiar with but they get interpreted in all sorts of ways. So sometimes you end up with them being symbolic monsters and at other times very really peoples, most notably the Turks and later the Mongols, have been interpreted to be Gog and Magog.

So I think one of the things that's interesting about Islamic prophecy is just as with Christian eschatology if you make events vague enough ("The Whore of Babylon") it becomes relatively easy to find parallels for them in your own time.

Which brings me to next point, of when, also like Christian eschatology you end up with events specific to a time and interpreted as apocalyptical as being applicable to later dates.

So, it's not entirely clear the extent to which the early Islamic movement was an apocalyptical movement, but it's entirely plausible that it was so. Apocalypse was in the air, on the Islamic side just as much as the Byzantine and even to an extent the Zoroastrian side. So from a very early period going back to the 7th century in the immediate aftermath of the death of Muhammad you end up with apocalyptic traditions, attributed to Muhammad himself as (usually judged un-sound) hadith in which the battles between Muslims and Christians (or "Rome" as they called the Byzantines) are taken as signs of the apocalypse.

So for instance, when in our own times ISIS calls its magazine "Dabiq" they are referring to a prophecy in which the army of the believers will confront "Rome" on the plains of Dabiq, which is in modern north-western Syria (not far from where the current front lines are of the Turks, which I imagine has quite a lot of ISIS fighters very excited because Turkey is one of the candidates for the interpretative inheritors of "Rome"). But this is in all likelihood a specific reference to fighting that was actually going on there at that time in the 7th century.

Great topic! The arrival of the Spaniards under Cortés in Mexico has led to quite a few later prophecies aiming to "explain" the event. I'll focus on of them by the mestizo scholar Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, taken from his Historia de la nación chichimeca from the early 17th century. In it, the Spaniards are connected to native beliefs in one long narrative arch that I'll try to summarize in three parts:

The prophecy's first part comes quite early in the chronicle, with a white and bearded wise priest named Quetzalcóatl who came to Mesoamerica from the East. After trying and failing to preach his faith (incl. planting a cross) he returned East, but not before announcing his return in a year under the Aztec sing ce ácatl, "when his doctrine would be received and his sons would be lords and posess the earth, and [...] they and their sons would befall many calamities and persecutions." [my translation] All this supposedly happened a few years after Christ's incarnation. Ixtlilxochitl's focus on the priest's Oriental origins has precedents in Aztec narratives. Nonetheless it is quite certain that he was aware of the story of St. Thomas' arrival in the Americas, which indeed through his telling would come to influence later authors.

Second part: We're skipping a few centuries now, arriving in the mid-15th c. with the (Aztec) Acolhua ruler and poet Nezahualcoyotl - an ancestor of Ixtlilxochitl's whose exploits he highlights. This is also evident in Nezahualcoyotl's strong forecasting abilities: Starting with his birth taking place at the time of the good omen of sunrise (connecting him to the Aztec solar deity Huitzilopochtli). One of his later prophecies comes from the Xompancuícatl or spring songs:

When you have gone from this life to the next life [...] a time will come when your vasalls will be destroyed and ruined, leaving all your things in the mists of oblivion; and then in truth, the rule and sovereignty won't be in your hand but in God's hand. [...] [I]n this time the rules, realms and reings will stop, those that last only a short time and are not stable. The things of this life are only borrowed, and in an instant we have to leave them like others have left them.

Narrartive elements, and especially the beautiful last sentence highlighting that rulers only "borrow" their rule from deities are characteristic of Aztec poetry. At a later point, the ruler Nezahualcoyotl adds a more negative judgement, whereby at that prophesied time the earth would be less fertile, and sins and crimes would increase. Once more the date ce ácatl connects this telling back to Quetzalcoatl and forward to the prophecies' third part, the coming of the Spaniards.

Before that we have again a few omens announcing the Aztec realms' destruction, including a huge glow of fire from the East. Cortés' arrival in 1519 is then clearly connected to ce ácatl, and other parallels to Quetzalcoatl include that (of course) both are white and bearded, and both directly start preaching with a cross.

Moving back from the prophecy a bit, I'd first like to highlight that Ixtlilxochitl (like other colonial chroniclers) does not describe the Spaniards as deities, nor is the priest Quetzalcoatl identified with the deity of the same name. What is more, the whole story intentifying Cortés as a native deity has been traced to colonial writings, esp. Sahagún's Historia general; the narrative of the native ruler's return is already mentioned by Cortés himself.

Thus we can see Spanish influences at work in Ixtlilxochitl's portrayal, for which Camilla Townsend gives one interesting explanation: "It was their own class [of native scholars], even their own family members, who might have been thought to be at fault if it were true that they had no idea that the Spaniards existed prior to their arrival". Then again, the native scholar Ixtlilxochitl also manages to incorporate the "unexplainable" events of the Spanish arrival & colonisation into a native worldview: Cortés is connected to the (albeit modified) early native ruler Quetzalcoatl, and so are the Spaniards forecast by the author's ancestor Nezahualcoyotl, as are some of the desastrous consequences of colonial contact.