The Wars of Fatima - Past as Prologue: Israel's exile and resurgence

The Wars of Fatima

The Virgin Mary's famous prophecy in her legendary apparition at Fatima, Portugal, in 1917, holds the secret to understanding the unfolding of history in our end times. Her oracles can only be fully interpreted, however, in light of her role as the Heavenly Queen of Israel - God's chosen race. Only through the millennial history of Israel, in other words, can we place all modern events of eschatological significance - the world wars, cold war, and the clash between Islam and the West - in their proper context, to give us an idea of what we can reasonably expect to transpire next.

Past as Prologue: Israel's exile and resurgence

The two world wars (1914-18, 1939-45) were one giant Apocalyptic upheaval to accomplish a centerpiece of God's plan for salvation: to resurrect the nation of Israel in His promised land.

Exile (70 - 1500 AD)

Israel had been banished nearly two millennia earlier, in the year 70 AD: that year, per the prophecy of its rejected Messiah Jesus Christ about four decades earlier, the holy city of Jerusalem was annihilated in a Roman holocaust. This was God's punishment of the Jews in vengeance for their crucifixion of their own king and savior: He had engineered a brilliant power play, whereby the religious leadership of the Second Temple (435 BC - 70 AD) used Christ's execution to briefly regain partial sovereignty over the Roman occupation, unwittingly setting up their own doom a generation later, when they tried to completely eliminate the Roman presence in the aftermath of the emperor Nero's overthrow (68 AD), but were crushed in a brutal counter-insurrection campaign led by future emperor Titus.

In the inscrutable Divine Wisdom, this meant that the Jewish rejection of their own prophesied Messiah not only sent the Jews themselves into a far more permanent second exile from the holy land of Israel (the first being the 70-year Babylonian exile of 587 BC), but paradoxically became the very means by which the God of Israel was instead adopted by the non-Jewish Gentiles - principally Mediterranean and then later northern and eastern Europeans. Per a prophecy of St. Paul, a Jewish rabbi-turned church missionary, the Gentiles were "grafted in" to Israel, effectively supplanting the Israelites themselves, by accepting Christ as humanity's savior from God - that is, the God of Israel. Thus was Christianity established as a new religion distinct from Judaism.

Consequently, while the Europeans of late Greco-Roman antiquity and the middle ages thoroughly adopted the king of the Jews as their own lord savior, thereby establishing "Christendom", the Jews themselves were scattered throughout the known world, but still primarily in the Mediterranean and Near East. They thus became the people of the Diaspora, a wandering race without a firmly grounded homeland, sealing the pilgrim identity that God had always intended for them as "wandering Arameans" - that is, Syrians, because their forefather Jacob had himself been a runaway there, where he raised his twelve sons who would become the patriarchs of the twelve tribes of Israel.

Over subsequent centuries, the tense but generally tolerable relationship between Jews and Christians matured into the Judeo-Christian foundation of modern European civilization. While Jews had little or no political standing in the surrounding Christian society (based largely on their exclusion from landed nobility), they became an integral part of the socioeconomic fabric of towns and nascent cities, where they tended to concentrate and flourish in commercial activities. Their ever-adapting word-based faith, ultimately founded on the recorded scriptures handed down to them by their illustrious forebears, gave them an especially high degree of literacy and education by pre-modern standards.

Resurgence (1500-1914 AD)

Consequently, as Europe entered the modern epoch around 1500, and especially from the onset of the industrial revolution around 1750, the Jews played an increasingly prominent role, wherever permitted, in the development of ever larger-scale financial and economic institutions and networks. By the 19th century, with the American and French revolutions having drastically infused a progressive new world spirit back into the old world, they were thus uniquely positioned for both intellectual and material leadership and influence in the surging wave of secular modernity.

While Jews had always played a disproportionate, even dominant role in money-changing - hence common surnames such as "Goldman", "Silverman", "Diamond", etc. - the rise of national banking systems in the 19th century catapulted a tiny elite among them to an entirely different level. A single family, the Rothschilds, came to effectively administer the rapidly expanding credit markets of every major European state, primarily Britain (the world's principal commercial empire) and France, but with substantial operations in what would in time coalesce into the unified nations of Germany and Italy, as well. Though the sovereign leaders they advised were all Gentiles, the Rothschilds and their associates relied on a network of heavily Jewish-staffed banks, customs stations, and commercial marketplaces all over Europe to handle the ever-growing demands and complexities of industrializing trading economies.

The Jews didn't exactly invent the modern international financial system, but it's not difficult to see just why they became such big players in its dramatic scaling up across vast distances which became possible with steam and coal power. For one, they had always been prudent with money: being stateless ever since 70 AD, they simply never had the same broader societal support infrastructure enjoyed by their Gentile peers. Secondly, a broad prohibition from land ownership right up to modern times had concentrated them in commercial and administrative professions which required both literacy and quantitative ability. And finally, their identity as pilgrims without a homeland - persistent even after centuries of life within Christendom - made them uniquely suited to international as opposed to merely national activities.

Topping things off was the rapid development of a new continental Western civilization in North America: as the United States grew to rival Britain as an economic superpower in the last decades of the 19th century, Jewish emigrants from central and eastern Europe found a warm welcome and a fresh start in a far freer and more tolerant society than those they had left. As New York arose to become a virtual west-Atlantic subsidiary of London, the Rothschilds dynasty found reliable collaborators on Wall Street who were disproportionately their co-religionists, and who steadily rose in wealth and influence up to the outbreak of the First World War. By the time war came in 1914, few major banking institutions anywhere in the western Christian world - and even to a large extent in the eastern Christian world (i.e. Czarist Russia and its satellites) - were not ultimately part of a single overarching (if relatively loose) financier network with its locus in London, answerable to the Rothschilds.

This hardly meant that Jews were running the show: while overly represented in the global financial system and technically at its very apex, they didn't in any meaningful sense "control" it. Not only were the most powerful institutions on both sides of the Atlantic predominantly led and staffed by Christians, but more to the point, even the Rothschilds of the world were entirely beholden to Gentile interests and dependent on non-Jewish goodwill and favors. In other words, they were still essentially politically disfranchised, even as representative governance continued to uproot hereditary privilege.

However, the First World War was such a cataclysmic rupture, exposing such deep fault lines in the unprecedentedly advanced civilization that European Christendom had built, that the exiled children of Israel within it were thrust onto the world stage as principal agents of change.

The Virgin Mary's apparitions at Fatima in 1917 marked the critical turning point of the war - the dawn of the rise of both international communism and global capitalism. From the get-go, her own race by blood - the Jews of Israel - were at the very center of both.