"The whole of Asia is in the throes of rebirth. At last we may see these three—the yellow race, the Indian race, and the Arab-Persian Mohammedan race. And all that is making for the Armageddon."
A writer in the May, 1913, issue of the London Nineteenth Century and After, reviewing the situation at the close of the Balkan War, said:
"A new spirit is abroad in the East. It arose on the shores of the Pacific when Japan proved that the great powers of Europe are not invulnerable. North and south and west it has spread, rousing China out of centuries of slumber, stirring India into ominous questioning, reviving memories of past glory in Persia, breeding discontent in Egypt, and luring Turkey onto the rocks."
With all the nations stirred up by the spirit agencies of the god of this world, the prophet next saw the armies of earth gathering to the last great battle. The prophecy continues:
"And he gathered them together into a place called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon." Rev. 16:16.
Armageddon means the hill, or mount, of Megiddo, which overlooks the plain of Esdraelon, the historic battle ground of northern Palestine. Carmack says of it:
"Megiddo was the military key of Syria; it commanded at once the highway northward to Phœnicia and Cœle-Syria and the road across Galilee to Damascus and the valley of the Euphrates. It was moreover the chief town in a district of great fertility, the contested possession of many races. The vale of Kishon and the region of Megiddo were inevitable battle fields. Through all history they retained that qualification; there many of the great contests of southwestern Asia have been decided. In the history of Israel it was the scene of frequent battles. From such association the district achieved a dark nobility; it was regarded as a pre-destined place of blood and strife; the poet of the Apocalypse has clothed it with awe as the ground of the final conflict between the powers of light and darkness."—"Pre-Biblical Syria and Palestine," p. 82.
Thus Armageddon, as the "military key of Syria," marks Palestine and the Near East as the great international storm center in the final conflict.