And yet, after the demise of the Swami, the enthusiasm for Vedanta gradually waned in the West till Vivekananda, who was in his lifetime a household name in America, was forgotten as the world drifted rapidly into rampant material culture leading to two cataclysmic World Wars in the 20th century. Even in Vivekananda's second visit to America in 1899, his earlier infatuation with American culture was dispelled as he saw through the vanity of it all and the rule of the 'Almighty dollar' which he called 'dollar imperialism'. To his great abhorrence, he saw through the pretensions of Western democracy and the sheer brutality of the 'capital', the fraud and force and competition prevailing in society that stifled the least vestige of humanity and transformed the field of divine play of gods and goddesses into a forest of human brutes where man preyed upon brother man for gain, plunging civilisation into despair.
With prophetic fore-vision Vivekananda in 1899 warned Europe of the impending wars that would grind her civilisation to dust within the next 50 years if she did not shift her stand from the material to the spiritual. Europe, he said, had to be deluged in a spiritual tidal-wave if she were to escape the impending political cataclysms. Vivekananda envisioned Europe as 'a vast military camp...sitting on the edge of a volcano, any moment to erupt'. How prophetic were his words! Between 1899, the year of the prophecy and the 50 year time limit set by him, that is 1949, two World Wars indeed ground Europe to dust.
Vivekananda even foresaw the advent of communism in Russia and China when he prophesied that the next sociopolitical upheaval would occur in Russia or China or both which would usher in the Shudra Yuga (the Age of the Proletariat). He further prophesied the exact year of India's political independence from the British when in 1897 he exhorted the Indians to forget the worship of all gods and goddesses for the next 50 years save the moving mass of humanity in India which was the image of the Virat (the Great God). He urged the people of India to hold on to the twin national ideals of service and renunciation and to activate those ideals to regenerate India.
India did keep her 'tryst with destiny' in 1947 as Vivekananda had prophesied. Likewise, Russia became the first Socialist State of the world in October 1917 followed by China in 1949. World War I was fought between 1914 and 1918 and World War II between 1939 and 1945. Even the Chinese aggression of 1962 was fulfilled as Vivekananda had prophesied when he had forewarned that soon after India's independence she might lose her freedom to China. India did lose a vast landmass in Arunachal Pradesh to China in the 1962 Indo-China War.
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