Foreshadowing/Real Life

Foreshadowing in Real Life is often just very good guessing... but sometimes somebody is smart enough to see what's coming. Examples include:

• Josef Stalin said in 1931 "We are 50-100 years behind the advanced world powers. We must cover this gap in ten years, or else they will crush us" . They made it. Barely.
• When the passage denouncing slavery was removed from the Declaration of Independence, John Adams said that it must be kept in, because if they didn't resolve the slavery issue there would be "trouble a hundred years hence." He was only fifteen years off.
  • Which is actually why the line had to be changed in 1776: Reality Is Unrealistic, and the writers feared that viewers would think they were being Anvilicious.
• Ferdinand Foch, French general in World War I said after the Treaty of Versailles (1919): "This is not a peace. It is an armistice for 20 years." And twenty years later...
  • It was not exactly an unpopular train of thought at the time, however. Many people voiced their opinions that the Treaty did too little, and political cartoons got in on the debate. One particularly black example had two dejected German soldiers trudging home on their horses, one saying "Vell, I guess war didn't pay." The other responds "Yes. Not this time."
• Chamillionaire's song "The Evening News" contained the lyrics "The White House is gonna stay white, even though we know that Obama's black." The album came out in September 2007.
• Otto von Bismarck is credited for having predicted: The next great European conflict will be started by "some damned foolish thing in the Balkans". And of course, in 1914...
  • He also said that Germany will collapse twenty years after his death. He died in 1898.
    • He was right From a Certain Point of View.
• Comics National Comics #18 was telling a story about a Nazi attack at Pearl Harbor. One month before it happened.
  • Just to be pedantic, but the Nazis didn't attack Pearl Harbor. Is it really foreshadowing if it didn't happen?
    • Forget it, he's rolling.
  • As part of a U.S. Navy war game in February 1932, Admiral Yarnell attacked Pearl Harbor with carrier-launched airplanes, coming from the northwest. A cloud bank that's almost constant over the Koolau Range hid them from sight of the base until the last minute. It was Sunday morning ... the 7th. They achieved complete surprise — but the Navy refused to pay attention and review its strategies. Not quite ten years later, the Japanese attack also came out of the Koolau cloud bank. Some writers suggest this wasn't so much foreshadowing as the Japanese admiralty saying, "This is a great plan. Let's do ours just like this!"
• Sports example: In Super Bowl XXV in January 1991, the Buffalo Bills, trailing 20-19 late in the game, had driven to the New York Giants' 30-yard line to set up what would be a game-winning field goal by Scott Norwood. As he prepared to kick, ABC ran a graphic stating that Norwood was pretty much at the outer limits of his kicking range, and later added that he had never kicked well on a grass field. Sure enough, he missed.
• Once upon a time, there was a man named W.T. Stead. In the late 1800s, Stead penned two stories - the first one about a mail boat that collided with another boat, resulting in massive loss of life due to a lack of lifeboats. The second one was called From the Old World To The New, and dealt with a White Star Liner named the Majestic that was called unsinkable, sunk by an iceberg. He published this story in 1892. He died on April 15, 1912, at the age of 62, when the HMS Titanic sank.
• Martin Luther King, Jr. "We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land! So I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!" That speech was given on April 3. King was assassinated the next day.
• A few days before he was assassinated, Abraham Lincoln actually had a nightmare where he was awakened by muffled crying coming from downstairs in the White House, in which he then found out that the crying was actually coming from the mourners at his own funeral held in the White House's East Room.
• Osama Bin Laden once said in an interview, "If I am to die, I would like to be killed by the bullet." On May 1, 2011, SEAL Team Six had no problem in granting that request.
• The Titanic had so many foreshadowings, it is hard to tell how many of them were true or myth.
  • On the day the ship set out, a wave detached a ship that missed crashing into the Titanic by inches. The name of the ship? The SS New York.

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