Prophecy in Politics

Or, the Wigram Aspect

This short book takes up a vast, complex, and well-worn subject – the future. It revisits a half-dozen familiar and not-so-familiar incidents of prophecy – from the warnings given to Stalin about Operation Barbarossa to those given to Bill Clinton and George W. Bush about ‘terrorism’ – in order to uncover a pattern of complacency and neglect.

A useful guide to thinking about the past and present condition of prophecy.

Few people remember Ralph Wigram. If he is known at all, it is as the Foreign Office official who warned Winston Churchill of the Nazi threat with such persistence, conviction, and hard evidence that Churchill had the wherewithal to make his case to the British people.

Prophets like Wigram are a fixture of a world without certainty. Oracles and fortune-tellers populate our myths and holy texts, and modern life is not short of forecasters, intelligence analysts, and threat-mongers. So how can we, and our leaders, know whose warnings to heed?

Reducing the well-worn subject of predicting the future to its most essential aspects, Weisbrode revisits significant incidents of prophecy, from Stalin’s dismissal of the warnings of German invasion to those given to successive US presidents about the terrorist threat in the years preceding 9/11. This idiosyncratic guide considers the past and present condition of prophecy, uncovering patterns of fear, complacency, and neglect.

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