by rekless 38 Replies latest jw friends
I remember the announcement too. I knew at the time that it was a coverup operation since the brothers 'in the know' were not turning in theirs. In fact I was 'advised' to take mine off my bookshelf at home and put them in boxes so that brothers who came over to the house would not see them and be 'stumbled'. WTF??
Crazy...
Jean
Ok
I want a time line.
I left in 85. So the recall must have happened after that because I don't recall any announcement.
When was it that the firstmajor apostates started coming out and making known their views of old light/new light? 1985 The Orwellian World of Jehovah's Witnesses by Botting & Botting 1989 How to rescue your loved one from the Watchtower by David Reed. I'm off to do a bit of research
There have been a lot of books published since 1990 But authors were busy exposing the WTS (in book form) from as early as 1983. The WTS mo has always been to hide the evidence. It would seem perfectly realistic to think that the recall had at leaset something to do with making sure the books were not available for apostates and especially for the R&F to do more digging in the WTS history.
What does Blondie remember, that it did not happen in her congregation or this area. Occasionally people are asked to bring in older publications to set up the libraries of new congregations but that was it; and I saw them in the libraries after that, it wasn't a ruse. (Do you get the idea that I help set up KH libraries?) The congregation I last attended had publications back to the days of Russell. My family goes back to the 1920's and all have publications back to that time and earlier, never turning them in. I was once told that the book The Way to Paradise, was also on the burning list and lo and behold I found it in libraries of older JWs and older congregations.
I won't say it hasn't happened in other areas, but somehow the JWs in this area didn't interpret it that way or disregarded it.
Blondie
I remember that. I remember my mom keeping her books because she might "need" them. We did, however, pack up a bag full of old "placement" books and take those to the bookroom. Also, I vaguely remember helping my dad pack up some old books from the lit counter and remove them from inventory. We didn't have too many though. Our congregation always had high literature placements. Mostly what I remember is books that couldn't be ordered because they had been "discontinued."
I think I still have quite a few of the old books, (pre-1980) in my own WT library, packed away.
There was a famous photograph.
It had Lenin and Stalin in it. Equal partners in the glorious revolution that overthrew the Czar and established
a "worker's paradise" in Russia. The beginning of a brave new world.
Later, Lenin fell out of favor as he saw what Stalin was up to. Lenin died.
The photograph....what of the photograph?
It changed!
Subsequent printings proved beyond a shadow of a doubt (photographic doubt) that there was no Lenin at all. It was, you see, only STALIN who was the valiant hero of the revolution.
Seeing is believing.
Communists became dedicated to preserving the history of their wonderful progress by eliminating people and documents which got in the way of the.............myth........of history.
History, you see, is what the party wished for it to be. What history "really" was---became irrelevent.
Honest men who had been fooled spoke out.
They told the truth about what evils were being perpetrated in the name of socialist doctrine. These men and women were labeled ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!
These apostates to truth were ostracized, shunned, arrested and shipped off to gulags, labor camps and vanished into a vacuum of silence.
Once in a great while somebody like Alexander Solzhenitsyn exposed the lies, the sham, the destructive iron grip of the administration to public view. A book would be written such as THE GULAG ARCHEPELAGO that detailed the crimes against humanity committed by the communist part elite in the name of "social justice".
The book would be decried, of course. But, damage control ensued.
Decay ate away at the lying, conniving malefactors who pretended to represent truth and justice in Soviet Socialist Russia.
And one day...............
quite unexpectedly.................
the Evil Empire fell with a resounding thud and it was no more.
It all started with trying to cover up the lies by eliminating books and photographs and by twisting what had really happened.
The fate of the Watchtower Bible and Tract society mirrors this exactly, in my view.
Terry
I have an older book "The Russians" which was written by a former US diplomat to the former USSR. (I think Frederick Smith). He is writing about general life for rank and file Russian citizens.
One really unbelievable story was about a newspaper article which had to be changed after the political commisar got a look at it. So, they REPRINT that whole days newspaper with the changes made. In the new newspaper it tells citizens to bring back the original to the newspaper office so that they could be destroyed - and he says that he knew many people who actually did it! The previous post made me remember this story.
Also, while at the so-called elders school, the story was told about a brother at an earlier school who actually got a demon, went crazy, and committed suicide. What caused it was getting into the Bethel library and reading old publications! Soo - they kept them around for historical reasons, but put them into a locked room and only the writing or research people could look at them after that...how much of this to believe, I cannot say. However, the point was not to look at anything older than about 1950 (this was in 1970).
I remember this too and for the same reason. I seem to think it was more in the late '80s as mentioned, but it may have been said at different times at different KHs.
I left "the truth" in 1981 so it was before that.There might have been several announcements over the years with the same thought.
There were two different occasions where the WTS requested unused publication to be returned to the congregation.
The first had to do with helping congregations build libraries. The Second had to do with redistributing overstocked items, whether those items were "older publications" or those that the congregation as a whole (i.e., behind the literature counter or in the publishers' homes) just had an overabundance of. If there were overstocked items (and there were plenty!) the congregation was to inform the WTS and local CO and afterward a decision would be made whether it was better to send the literature back to the WTS for distribution, or give it to a more local congregation that needed the items, or just keep it locally until a time when someone needed (wanted!) it.
Our congregation ended up with hundreds (maybe thousands!) of Love Forever books, Greatest Teacher books, and lots more only for the WTS to tell us to just leave it in storage at the local kingdom hall. It's still there, collecting dust. I believe this second request occurred in the late 80s or early 90s. I probably have a letter on this somewhere. If I find one I'll post the pertinent section.
Marvin Shilmer
My memory is a little foggy on this, but didn't they request that the yellow "Lamp" books (Your Word is a Lamp To My Foot) be destroyed shortly after they were replaced by the, "Organization" book (Organization For Kingdom Preaching and Disciple Making) in the early 70's?
