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Abstract: Nostradamus prophecies have been used to explain geopolitical events since the 16th century. Historically, they may have been viewed in a context that is negative in regards to Catholicism. In the modern era, the appearance of Nostradamus prophecies often aligns with Russian influence operations known as "active measures". Historical research may show Russian involvement in the promotion of the prophecies of Nostradamus in the Cold War era to the present day. Google search statistics connect searches for Nostradamus to the events of September 11, 2001 and other destabilizing events in Europe provably related to Russia. It is hypothesized that modern distribution of Nostradamus prophecies may be a form of Russian information warfare which is a digital evolution of "prophecy as propaganda" related to Russian state mythology, such as the concept of "Third Rome".
Keywords: active measures, psychological warfare, September 11 2001, 9/11, Google trends, Third Rome
1. Introduction
Outlier Google statistics regarding "Nostradamus" (Google 2011, Google 2017) are correlated to destabilising events occurring in September 2001 (USA), April 2010 (Poland), March 2014 (Ukraine), and August 2015 (Hungary). It has been argued that these search statistics are the by-product of Russian Active Measures operations (Hotchkiss 2017).
Nostradamus interpreter Erika Cheetham had a leftist-Marxist social network. Orson Welles was blacklisted by the United States for communist party affiliations and had direct connections to Russian intelligence (Hotchkiss 2017). From the mid-1960's, Cheetham produced multiple revisions of her Nostradamus prophecies, including the early 1980's film, "The Man Who Saw Tomorrow", starring Welles (Noble 1998). The best known of Cheetham's prophecies are that Nostradamus predicted the assassination of John F. Kennedy (JFK), superpower nuclear war, the AIDS epidemic, as well as turmoil in the Middle East (Cheetham 1986, Noble 1998).
"Russian active measures" are political warfare strategies which influence world public opinion against Russia's adversaries and create an information environment favourable to Russia (Boghardt 2006). Soviet-era campaigns included attempts to promote beliefs that the CIA was involved in the JFK assassination, AIDS was created by the US Government, anti-nuclear peace movements, and promoting anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism in the Middle East (Boghardt 2006, Boghardt 2009, Pacepa & Rychlak 2013, Pringle 2015).
Nostradamus prophecies have often aligned with proven or suspected Russian active measures operations which is argued here to...