Things to Come and the Way to Escape — Hal Lindsey

I'd like at this time to introduce Hal Lindsey. He has written a number of books, the most popular of which is The Late Great Planet Earth. And at this time, worldwide, it has sold more than 15 million copies.

I remember when it first started to sell a lot, the book company that was selling it couldn't handle it. In Christian writing, except for Bibles, they had never had a book sell like this before. They couldn't even produce it, so they had to go to another production line.

He's written, since then, seven or eight books, which have totaled over 20 million altogether. At this time, I'd like to introduce to you a good friend and brother of mine, Hal Lindsey. Well, I'm really glad to have this opportunity to talk with Fireman because, as Mike hinted, we used to have lots of trouble with the fire marshal in a very good-natured way because he was for what we were doing.

But we were always having more young people crammed into this building by the UCLA campus than we could handle. And it was thrilling to see some people that used to come to the old Light and Power House here today.

And so I'm going to give a little commercial here, if you don't mind. Many ask if I speak anywhere in the L .A. area and if I have an itinerary. Well, about the only time I speak in the L .A. area is every Sunday.

I started speaking on the Santa Monica Beach at Lifeguard Station 15. And so if at 10 o 'clock on any Sunday morning you'd like to come down, we'd love to have you. Just bring a towel or something to sit on because we sit right on the sand.

And we've had some exciting times there. We have a very unique kind of place to share the Word of God. And we've got the world's biggest baptistry, the Pacific. And when we baptized 700, we stopped counting them.

So we've had an exceptional blessing of the Lord there. And it's an unusual kind of people who come there. Most of them wouldn't darken the door of a church building. But they're people who really wanted to know the Lord in a personal way.

And they wanted to find out if they could understand the Bible in terms for daily living and how to apply it to today. So that's our emphasis. It's a very casual thing. We've had surfers come off the water, bring their surfboards down, have a beer and so forth while they were listening to what's going on.

We don't care what they do as long as they listen. And so, you know, we'd just love to have any of you come. That's Lifeguard Station 15. It's just north of Chautauqua off the Pacific Coast Highway. So if you're interested, come by and see us.

Three Perils Facing the Modern Generation

You know, we live in an exciting day. And exciting, I guess, is a relative term for how you look at it. Because I think everywhere we turn, the average man on the street realizes that things are happening in our world today that no other generation has ever had to face.

Just the average man on the street that's aware of anything that's being said in the news realizes that there are things going on today that are unique. And everything seems to be accelerating. I mean, you get used to where things are now and it's already past.

Something new is happening. The culture and everything is changing more rapidly than psychologically we can handle it. That's what the book Future Shock by Alvin Toffler emphasized. That there's an accelerating rate of change just in the things that we're familiar with day by day.

And it's leaving people bewildered and wondering what's next. What's going to happen next in this crazy world we live in? But in the midst of all of this, there are experts who are pinpointing some things that are happening in our world that are of great peril, unique to this generation.

I just finished a project that was really exciting to me. And that is Hollywood just made a major motion picture on the late great planet Earth starring Orson Welles. And it's already been released. It's in many parts of the country right now.

And it will soon, well, at the end of February it will be here in Los Angeles. The reason I mention that is because it gave me the opportunity to do something I'd always wanted to do. And that is to interview some of the world's leading experts on what's going on in our world and interview them personally.

We interviewed 35 scientists, military experts, statesmen who have to do with what's happening in foreign policy and so forth from all over the world. And many of these men were Nobel Prize winners. And as we interviewed them, we found that there was a consistency to what each one was saying, even though they came to these conclusions from different disciplines, from different fields of expertise.

And there was one man who particularly stood out, Dr. George Wald of Harvard. He kind of had a way of summarizing what everyone else was saying and put it in a capsule form. Dr. Wald is a Nobel Prize winner and considered one of the world's leading experts on what's happening in our world today.

He said, and I quote, this generation is faced with perils unique, perils that have never been experienced by any other generation before us. And he said that he is one of those scientists who believes that we will not last much beyond the year 2000 as the human race.

He said, unless we're able to cope with three unique perils, which are the runaway nuclear proliferation, secondly, the pollution of the air and water of our planet, and third, the runaway population explosion, unless we can cope with these three perils, which are unique to our times, there's no hope for us.

And he said he didn't believe that we could cope with them, that the chance to really do something about these perils is rapidly passing us by. He said that these perils are all interrelated. In other words, they work on each other.

Each one of these perils could destroy the human race, but when you find that they are interrelated and affecting each one, it's even more perilous. Let me illustrate that. Let's take, for instance, first of all, the population explosion.

Population Growth and the Threat of Famine

Why is this unique? Well, just think with me for a moment. It took from the beginning of man to 1850 to reach the first one billion in population. It took from 1850 to 1930 to reach the second billion.

From 1930 to 1960 to reach the third billion. It only took from 1960 to 1974 to reach the fourth billion, and now we're really generating. We'll hit the fifth billion by about 1981, if we're lucky. But there are experts that do not believe that we will really hit five billion.

The reason is we can't feed the population that we have now. We're up against the limits of our present systems and agricultural production around the world to not only produce the food, but to get the food to the people who are dying of famine by the hundreds of thousands every day.

And so, men like Dr. Paul Ehrlich of Stanford, we interviewed him, who wrote the population bomb. He said that he did not believe that there would be a way to avert a major disaster by the early 1980s.

He said that, he said this along with many other experts in this field, that we've already reached what is being called the age of famines. The greatest famines in history already are raging and have been since 1975.

And as the population continues to explode in the underdeveloped countries, where they can least afford such a thing, that the momentum toward disaster can only accelerate. Now, that's one area that's unique.

No other generation has ever had to face the very real peril that within 30 years from 1974, we will double the population. The doubling time of increase in population has reached such a state that within 30 years from 1974, we'll have doubled what was there.

That is, if we're lucky. Now, there's another great peril that's interrelated with this. And that is the advent of weapons that now can destroy humanity. Many people are skeptical as to whether this could happen or not.

Nuclear Weapons and Global Destruction

Well, you're firefighters, so I'm going to throw some things out that some scientists are really speculating on. That there could be a fire that none of you could even begin to cope with, if we had an all-out nuclear exchange.

Because most military experts believe that in the event of an all-out nuclear exchange, there would be a chain reaction set up between the Appalachian Mountains and the Rocky Mountains, that is, that whole great plain area in the middle of the United States, and that that would become a lake of fire all the way across it, because of the intensity of several nuclear weapons being set off in that one area.

But, Dr. Wald again brought out some facts that were really frightening. He said, as of 1970, and believe me, we're way beyond what we were in 1970, but as of 1970, there were enough nuclear weapons on station, ready for launch, to equal out to 10 tons of TNT for every man, woman, and child on Earth.

That ought to do the job, don't you think? But that was 1970. 10 tons of TNT for every man, woman, and child on Earth. But, today, because of the pressure placed on us by the consistent drive of the Soviet Union to gain overwhelming advantage in the nuclear area, we have had to continue in the arms race, and we're now producing three hydrogen bomb warheads per day.

Can you imagine what that means? And the Soviet Union is doing at least that good. So the destructive power that's now available is unbelievable, because we have the MIRV system added into the nuclear arsenal since 1970.

MIRV meaning many of the singular rocket delivery systems now have multiple warheads, multiple independently targeted warheads. And so, in this field, no other generation has ever had to face the very real peril that within 30 minutes, the East and the West could destroy each other mutually.

And, of course, this would not just apply to the Northern Hemisphere, this would also go to the Southern Hemisphere. There wouldn't be any place really safe left on Earth in the event of an all-out nuclear war.

The question is, with such terrible potential, will there ever be a nuclear war? Well, history shows that there's never been a weapon invented that had great military application and strategic application that wasn't eventually used.

Now, in the event of nuclear weapons, the government hired a blue-ribbon panel of experts, scientists from MIT and Harvard, to study whether there really is a potential all-out nuclear war in the future.

After several years of study, this blue-ribbon panel came back and said that a limited nuclear war appears to be inevitable before 1984, and that an all-out nuclear exchange will occur before 1999. That was their grim report.

A CIA report showed how one peril interrelates with the other. And that was this. They showed that in the underdeveloped countries, where the greatest peril of famine exists, that when massive numbers begin to die off from famine, and we're talking about millions within a short period of time, and this is inevitable as we see the ability to produce food decreasing and the population increasing, that many of these underdeveloped countries, where the greatest impact of famine will hit, now have nuclear weapons with delivery systems.

And as governments are about to be toppled by the pressure of the population rebelling against so many millions dying, for instance, India or China, it's believed that by the experts, that they will make their point known, or even blackmail the countries that have food surpluses to give them food or fire nuclear weapons off, and they believe that they actually will fire nuclear weapons to make their point.

So we see these things are interrelated, and that's what's got the military experts and high government officials so frightened about the future. Now, a third peril is the pollution of the air and water of our planet.

Pollution, Ozone, and Food Production

Never before in any other century, really in any other generation, has there been such a massive increase in industry. And that, of course, has been coupled with a growing expectancy and a growing, in a sense, an attitude of taking for granted by all of us that we need more and more creature comforts in the form of electrical gadgets, in the form of automobiles, transportation items, and so forth.

And we've become so used to it, and I'm certainly as much a part of this as you are, we've become so used to these things that we feel like they're our inalienable right, and once we get used to them, it's hard to ever go backward.

That is, and just say, for the sake of survival, we won't have all of these conveniences, and go back to where we were. That's really impossible. But what it's done is forced a greater and greater increase in industry.

And in turn, industry has polluted the atmosphere of this planet to a degree that's incredible. Such men as Dr. Jacques Cousteau of France, one of the greatest living experts on oceans of all time. He's literally spent thousands of hours over the last 30 years underwater.

He said that with his own eyes, he has seen the Atlantic Ocean dying. And that he believed that unless there's a radical change, that the Atlantic Ocean will become a dead sea in 20 years. Now this has been borne out by statistics.

Since 1970, the annual total tonnage of fish taken from the sea has been steadily declining. So at just the time when we need this kind of food in the greatest way, we're actually getting less food from the sea.

That's one impact of pollution. Another impact is this, and it's becoming a matter of great concern to climatologists. And that is because of the pollution of the upper atmosphere of our planet, there is a radical global weather pattern change taking place.

Now this is something unique that has not happened before. There have been weather pattern changes before, but not of this nature. And the reason is because there's never been this kind of pollution before in the upper atmosphere.

Do you know that all that stands between us and death is a layer of a substance called ozone, that if you bring it to its laboratory natural state, would equal to 3 millimeters. 3 millimeter thick layer of ozone in the upper atmosphere is all that stands between you and I and death, because that ozone layer filters out some destructive rays of the sun.

Without that filtering process, we couldn't exist on the face of the earth. We couldn't live on the surface of the earth. Now that ozone layer is being radically affected by pollution. You know how thick 3 millimeters is?

A little less than an eighth of an inch. And when we tamper with that, we're tampering with something that's vital to the whole ecological chain on the earth. But we are. Now what's been the impact of the radical weather pattern changes around the world?

Well it translates out to super storms, and some places storms that have reached an intensity never before known in recorded history. But the most frightening impact of it is this. Once again it gets at our ability to produce food.

Droughts in places where droughts have not been. Floods in places where floods have not been. All of this is upsetting the agricultural ability around the world to produce food, so that not only are we able to produce less food from the sea than we could in 1970, but far less food agriculturally than we could since 1970.

And this is at a time when that curve of acceleration of population is going almost straight up. The momentum for disaster, Dr. Bolang said, is frightening. Dr. Bolang was the father of the Green Revolution.

You know, many people thought that was going to solve our problems. The Green Revolution is dead, Dr. Bolang said when we interviewed him. The reason is because when the Arabs quadrupled the price of crude oil overnight, it killed the Green Revolution because it depended upon cheap petroleum as its source of success.

The reason is because the fertilizers, the pesticides that are used in connection with this process come from oil. Also, the machinery that had to be run had to be run by gasoline and derivatives from oil.

So once he said, once the Arabs quadrupled the price of oil, they guaranteed the death of millions because of starvation. Now, all of these things are accelerating together, and I'm only touching upon some of the more obvious perils that are unique to this generation.

All of these things are accelerating together, though, and bringing us to a point where sober men of science like Dr. Bolang, Dr. Paul Ehrlich, and many others are saying, we probably will not last beyond the year 2000.

Many, many men said that, military men as well. And this is causing those who have their eyes open to what's happening in our world to say, you know, where do we go from here? What's happening? What's the answer?

The Bible’s Prophetic Pattern

But at just the time this is happening worldwide, it's important to note that there's something even more startling taking place than the things that I'm telling you from the secular world. Because contained in this book, the Bible, there has always been a very precise pattern of events predicted.

And this pattern of events was predicted to come together simultaneously, just shortly before the end of history as we know it and the coming of the Messiah. Now, I first came in contact with this pattern nearly, well, it was 23 years ago, when I was 25 years old.

I was an agnostic. I didn't believe in anything, really. And I was concerned about the situation in the Middle East, and during this time the Suez Crisis broke out in 1956. And I was really concerned about whether we were going to have an all-out nuclear war.

That was the time when much was being said publicly about the hydrogen bomb and so forth. And I was very concerned. It was about that time that I heard that there was a Bible scholar, one who knew the Greek and the Hebrew of the original scriptures and so forth, that he was going to speak at Rice University there in Houston on what the ancient Hebrew prophets said about the Middle East crisis.

Well, I thought, wow, if he could demonstrate they said anything, it would be amazing. So I went out just sort of to hear what he had to say. But after hearing him for two and a half hours, I was so shook up that I spent the rest of the night trying to make a liar out of him.

And I'd taken notes and I was trying to check it out and trying to pull on what he had said. But I'll tell you, by daybreak I was convinced that what he said was true. And I was convinced from then on that this book was unique.

It was not just the good, lucky guesses of a bunch of men, but that this book was a supernatural revelation from God. I was already a believer in Jesus Christ, but I was kind of floundering. I didn't really know what I believed in or whether I believed at all.

But it was that startling bit of information that started me on a path of study, which eventually led me to four years of graduate study and translating the New Testament and a good part of the Old Testament.

But it resulted in this. It resulted in me confirming and searching out more myself this pattern of events that were predicted in the ancient Hebrew Bible. And I can tell you today that as never before in history, that pattern is happening right before our very eyes.

There is no doubt, no question about it. It is happening. And it's for the first time in history that this has taken place. So I want to briefly go over that pattern with you this morning and the implications of it.

And I want you to remember something. That before I even started talking about Bible prophecy, I laid out the considered and sober statements of many, many scientists. It's not the Bible prophets that are saying, you know, the world is coming to an end.

It's the scientists, the statesmen, and the military men who don't know anything about the Bible who are saying it. But at the same time that's going on, what the Bible predicted is happening. And it's all happening before our eyes.

Now that is not a coincidence. And I believe that we should all weigh that very carefully. But what is this predicted pattern of events? Well, the first and the most important part of this pattern has to do with the Jewish people because their whole history has been predicted and broad outlined from their beginning until their ultimate destiny.

Israel’s Destruction, Dispersion, and Restoration

And long ago, starting with Moses, the prophets of Israel predicted that many things would happen to the Jewish people. They predicted that twice in their history their nation would be destroyed, that the people would be scattered and taken from their nation and their land, but that twice they would return.

And graphic details were added to what Moses predicted. Many of the other prophets added details to this. But the incredible thing is that just as these prophets predicted, it happened. The first destruction of the nation was predicted in great detail and even the one that would do it, Babylon, it happened.

Babylon destroyed Israel about 600 B .C. The prophets said they would be held against their will and captivity for 70 years. That's exactly how long they were kept. Even the name of the Persian king, Cyrus, was predicted 200 years before he was born and it was predicted that a man named Cyrus would release them.

He did. So they were destroyed as a nation. They returned as predicted. They flourished again. But the second destruction took place in 70 A .D. And according to the prophets, this would be the greatest peril and the greatest suffering the Jewish people would ever know.

And Jesus himself predicted that it would be the people in his generation that would see the beginning of that great destruction and dispersion through the world. Just as predicted, the Jewish people were destroyed as a nation, scattered throughout the whole world.

And as Moses described it, he said, there you will have no place for the sole of your feet to rest. You will fear day and night. You will have no assurance of life for the dread that you will see with your eyes.

Now that's been the story of the Jews since 70 A .D. Every country, it said, the Lord said, I will scatter you throughout every nation under heaven. That happened. And they have been in peril of life everywhere they've gone.

Persecuted unjustly without even understanding. And yet it was predicted. Why was it predicted this would happen? The prophets said it would be because they would come to a period where they would not believe in their true God.

And that's what happened. God sent the Messiah. They rejected and crucified him. And so we see in history a graphic fulfillment of what God predicted uniquely about these people. But the same prophets that predicted their destruction and dispersion also predicted that they would return in the last days.

That just as history would begin to move toward its climax and the coming of the Messiah, or as we know it, the second coming of Jesus Christ, as the world would lead toward that, that the first sign that would indicate we were in the general time of that event would be that the Jewish people would miraculously return from where they had been scattered and they would reestablish their nation again in their ancient homeland.

Now that happened May the 14th, 1948. And that was the beginning of a countdown, a prophetic countdown. Before that event, nothing was really relevant as far as prophecy is concerned for the last days.

I want to make that very pointed because when you start talking about, you know, a prophetic pattern and that this indicates that we're near the second coming of Christ, the first thing people do is say, well, I heard that before, especially if you're 50 and over.

The reason is because in World War I there were well-meaning students of Bible prophecy who said that that was going to be the end of the world and Christ was coming. There were many more well-meaning students of Bible prophecy in World War II who said the same thing.

And they even had Hitler as the Antichrist, this world dictator that the Bible predicts is to come, and Mussolini the false prophet and so forth. There were all kinds of things that were said and they didn't happen and so this discredited prophecy.

But really it should have just discredited those who jumped the gun and were not careful students of prophecy. But there's something that's unique to now that's never been before because after almost 2 ,000 years of being scattered throughout the whole world, the indestructible Jew is now back in his ancient homeland and that was a miracle.

Jerusalem, Arab Conflict, and Prophetic War

Now that's the first great sign and it's the key to the whole prophetic puzzle. Everything else has begun to fall together like a great jigsaw puzzle and all falls together and fits just right at the same time.

According to the prophets, the nation of Israel once it was reborn in the last days would become a focal point of world trouble and actually it would bring the world to such a state of chaos that the whole world would become involved in a dispute between Israel and the Arabs.

Now that's exactly what has happened since the rebirth of Israel. As a matter of fact in Zechariah chapter 12 verses 2 and 3, this was written 2 ,500 some odd years ago, it said that the last battle of the world would be started over Jerusalem disputing who owns it and that every nation under heaven would have armies in the Middle East because of this and it would bust out in a great war.

Well the conditions for that are there now. Israel is never far from the front page. I hope you realize that. And yet it contains less people than the city of New York and yet it's still a focal point of the world.

Now at the same time all of this would be going on, the prophets said that there would be another important sign and that is that the Israelis would recapture and gain sovereign control over old Jerusalem.

Now in 1967 that occurred and that was the first time after they held on to it, first time in nearly 2 ,600 years that the Jew had sovereign control over old Jerusalem. Even in the days of Jesus Christ they did not have sovereign control over it, the Romans had it.

And that was a very significant part of prophecy as Jesus predicted in Luke chapter 21 verse 22. He said that Jerusalem would be trodden down under the foot of the Gentile until the times of the Gentiles were drawing to a close.

And once the Jew got sovereign control of Jerusalem in 1967, this was a very significant part of this puzzle fitting together. Now at the same time all of this would be going on, the prophets predicted that there would be a confederation of the Arab nations who would have been all disunited before that, but a confederation of the Arab nations with a mutual desire to destroy the state of Israel.

Now this is predicted in passages like Daniel chapter 11 verses 40 through 45, a book written some 600 years before Christ, and it's also predicted in Ezekiel, the prophet Ezekiel chapter 38. And here as these prophets talk about the ancient Arab tribes and how they would in the last days unite together against Israel, they predicted that actually the last war of the world would be triggered by an all-out invasion of the Arabs on Israel at a future point.

Now certainly we see that one of the greatest periods of unrest that we've ever known on this earth has been caused by the conflict between the Arabs and the Jews. Now that's a conflict that goes back 4 ,000 years, so don't think anybody like Kissinger or anybody else is going to solve it today.

It's something mystical. It goes beyond just the normal conflict between two nations or several nations. There's something mystical that dates back to the very times when the forefathers of these races existed.

God predicted they would never get along. Now the problem, however, is this. Just before the last seven years of history, which will end when the second coming of Christ begins, that seven-year period is called the Tribulation in Bible prophecy.

Just before that period would begin, the Bible said that there would be a pseudo-peace established in the Middle East. And I believe what's going on over there now could be the forerunner of that pseudo-peace that's going on because in passages like 1 Thessalonians chapter 5, it says they will be crying peace and safety, and then sudden destruction will come upon them.

The idea is there would be a period of false peace, and the world would be lulled into a confidence that would make it think that God will not intervene. But according to Scripture, there will never be a permanent peace in the Middle East, and therefore in the rest of the world, until the Prince of Peace establishes it when he comes back.

But we do see the conditions that were predicted set up in the Middle East exactly. Now another piece of this prophetic pattern is predicted in a passage like Ezekiel chapters 38 and 39. And once again, that was written about 2650 years ago.

And yet in Ezekiel chapter 38 and 39, he predicted that at the same time that Israel would be reborn as a nation in the last days, the Arabs would be against them, that there would emerge to the uttermost north of Israel an incredible military power that would frighten the whole world.

Now for centuries, there have been both Jew and Christian scholars who have studied Ezekiel 38. And those who have seriously studied it and taken it at face value have come up with something for centuries, and that is an understanding of what nation is being spoken there of being to the uttermost north of Israel.

You take a globe and you go to the extreme or uttermost north of Israel, there's only one nation there, and that's the Soviet Union. And both Jews and Christian scholars have recognized this for at least three centuries that I could trace back.

And Russia is fitting exactly that prediction. Now according to Bible prophecy, at this future point, when there will be an all-out invasion of Israel again by Arab forces, the Russians will take the opportunity to move into the Middle East with an overwhelming mass of troops, and that will be the beginning of the last war of the world.

It almost happened in 1973. If it had been God's timing, it would have happened. But I don't know how many of you realize what really happened in 1973. I found this out by talking to Dr. Eric, or I should say General Eric Sharon of Israel.

He was the hero of the 1973 war. He's the one who, against orders, led an attack of Israeli forces across the Suez Canal and was on his way to Cairo. And it took everything. Moshe Dayan himself had to come over there and stop him because he was going to go right on to Cairo.

He said, to hell with all of you people. When he crossed the Suez Canal, he said that they were going to break him, strip him of his rank, and he shouted back as he was in the lead tank going across, he said, I'll join up as a private then.

And he took off. But as I was talking to Dr. Eric Sharon, an incredible man, he revealed to me that the Russians already had their best marine divisions airborne headed for the Sinai. And that was when Nixon declared a worldwide alert, and that called their bluff.

And they turned them around in midair and sent them back. If those Russian troops got into the Middle East, we'd have had Armageddon right there. But it wasn't God's time. But what this illustrates is that the conditions that were predicted are there.

They're just waiting for the time to be unleashed. Because according to Daniel chapter 11, verses 40 through 45, this great northern power will sweep down with an overwhelming force and just ravage right through like a lightning war, what the Germans call a blitzkrieg.

They will sweep through Israel. They will go down to Egypt, double-cross the Egyptians, and they will take over Egypt, and then they will begin a plan to take over all of the Arab lands and Africa. Now, in the Soviet strategy, it's very clear that's exactly what they want to do.

It's very obvious why they would want to take over the Arab lands, because the Soviet Union, which has never changed its avowed purpose since the takeover in 1917 or around there. I forget the exact date of the Soviet revolution.

But since Lenin and the Soviet Party took over Russia, they have never changed their ultimate goal, which is to take over the world. And they know that the surest and quickest way to take over the world would be to get their hands on the control valves of the Arab oil.

They could bring Western Europe to its knees within two months. And shortly thereafter, they could bring the United States to terms if they can get the Arab oil. So it's clear why they would want to take over that area and why they have many plans of how to do it.

Well, Bible prophecy predicted long ago that's exactly what would happen. And so that's another factor in this scheme. Now, at the same time this would be going on, the prophets predicted there'd be another great power.

The Kings of the East and the Ten-Nation Confederation

And they're called the Kings of the East. In Revelation 16, verse 12, it says that there would be a vast army come in from the east of the Euphrates River. It would be a great oriental army. In a very cryptic description of this army in Revelation chapter 9, it says it would be a 200 million man force.

Now, when this prophecy was made, there weren't 200 million people in the world. And yet God led the prophet John in the book of Revelation to predict it. But now it's not only feasible, but the Red Chinese leaders have boasted they can field exactly that number.

Several times it's been said, and I have it in my files at home from the newspapers, that the Red Chinese leaders themselves boasted they can field an army of 200 million militiamen at any time they need it.

And they use the exact term. I believe that the Red Chinese are the beginning of that great oriental force which will come into the Middle East once war breaks out there. Now, that is something that has never happened before in the world.

I mean, think of an army of 200 million men. And yet, it's easy to see why that would happen. If the Russians make a move to take over the Arab oil, the Red Chinese, who are really at odds with the Soviet Union, would realize that, and they are sworn to prevent any more major takeovers of the Soviet Union.