Kingdom News #37 update and future propaganda

by truthseeker 24 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  truthseeker

  This morning, the elder taking the field service group said that ALL placements of KN37 had to be COUNTED, with the campaign ending on November 12.

  Placements after the campaign could be made, but not counted.

  The service was all hype.

  Now, let's imagine that all 6,500,000 witnesses placed 50 tracts. How many would they place altogether?

  6,500,000 * 50 = 325,000,000.

  Expect in a future Watchtower, either when the 2005/2006 service year report comes out on Feb 1, 2007 or during the Memorial, it will be announced that the plague of locusts (JW's) gave a triumphant response to false religion by the placement of 325,000,000 tracts during a worldwide campaign.

  This propaganda will reinforce in the minds of believers that this is truly a global work.

  Yet, dubs are not supposed to say hardly anything when they give out these tracts. I've heard "we're doing a public service" and "we're doing a world-wide voluntary work".

  The tract distribution work LACKS SUBSTANCE. Perhaps they feel the message itself is substance, but it reminds me of the Israelites who marched around Jericho seven times blowing their horns. They didn't do the dirty work of fighting as Jehovah gave the inhabitants into their hands.

  Perhaps the WT is taking a Jericho attitude - let the dubs "march around the Earth" with their tract and people will sit up and take notice.

  How does this benefit the dub? In his mind, he is doing Jehovah's will, taking careful note of how many tracts he places. The emphasis is thus on numerical values rather than level of interest perceived in the work.

  The more he places, the less he cares initially about the response he gets. In his mind, it doesn't matter if the householder is not at home. The tract is left under the door. Yet, in regular magazine work, you would hardly ever see WT and Awake! mages pushed through the door or left under the mat. Dub fails to notice this oddity.

  Dubs are even told to be quick about their special campaign acitivity, thus they have no time to really evaluate their effectiveness of the campaign.

  It seems that Kingdom News #37 is nothing more than a showy attempt at generating high publisher figures, by having the campaign spread over two months, with the foresight and planning to use propaganda in future issues of the Watchtower.
• 

  Scully

  Just my lil ol' opinion here, based on previous experience:

  Tract campaigns were designed, not necessarily for reaching as many householders as possible, but definitely for stirring up a fever pitch in the enthusiasm of JWs at a time when Armageddon™ was believed to be swiftly approaching (this was in the early 70s, when I was a kid and being dragged along in tract placing campaigns).

  I don't know of a single person who was introduced to The Truth™ by way of the tract campaign. In retrospect, it looks more like a desperate attempt to create the illusion that JWs are doing more and more, as a way to extrapolate from the statistics and claim that The End Is Near™ because Jehovah Has Speeded Up The Work™. Take away the campaign and you have the same old doldrums that have been plaguing the WTS's statistics for the last 10 years or more.
• 

  truthseeker

  Hi Scully, thanks for input.

  This elder said that many inactive ones had been reactivated by the tract, some were even sharing in distributing it.

  It may be less a wakeup call for the world and more a wakeup call for the sleepy dubs.
• 

  truthseeker

  Our book stuy overseer even said last weekend, "Brothers and sisters, this could be the last campaign we'll ever have."

  It's funny, but once you know how cult mind control works, you start watching for all the signs. :)
• 

  blondie

  I have reading in some older publications recently. Remember that worldwide there were barely 10,000 WT members? Yet, how did they manage to distribute millions of tracts? Simple, through the newspapers distribution service. They paid the newspaper companies to distribute the tracts.

  But notice how they leave that "detail" out of their history.

  *** jv chap. 14 p. 189 "They Are No Part of the World" ***

  To that end, late in December 1917 and early in 1918, they distributed 10,000,000 copies of the issue of TheBibleStudentsMonthly that featured the subject "The Fall of Babylon," which was a hard-hitting exposé of Christendom.

  ***

  jvchap.21p.348HowIsItAllFinanced?***

  Scores of tracts of varying sizes were published during the years that followed. The vast majority of these (literally hundreds of millions of copies) were distributed without charge. The number of tracts and other publications given out kept growing. In 1915 alone, the report showed that 50,000,000 copies of tracts in some 30 languages were supplied for worldwide distribution without charge.

  Blondie
• 

  Jeffro

  There's been a lot of hype surrounding this latest 'Kingdom News #37' thing, and it got me thinking of the last Kingdom News distribution back in 2000 ("The New Millenium - What Does the Future Hold for You?")

  So I looked it up on the trusty Watchtower Library CD that I don't have, and had a chuckle at the first sentence:

  At midnight on December 31, 1999, the 20th century ended.

  No. No, it didn't. Morons. But then there was a footnote that says:

  We refer here to popular Western views regarding the new millennium. Technically, the new millennium starts on January 1, 2001.

  There's no "technically" about it. There is a right answer, and then there is what they wrote. But there's no point letting facts get in the way of a good fear-mongering campaign. And all those zeros on the calendar did look oh so menacing!

  Plus, saying the millenium ended at the end of 1999 bolsters proof in the year 0, which is crucial for proving that Jerusalem fell in 606BCE. (Sorry, I accidently turned on the old light.)

  Unfortunately there weren't any scary numbers on the calendar for this Kingdom News distribution, so they had to revert back to the boring old "End of False Religion" drivel.
• 

  blondie

  What about this previous campaign?

  *** w96 3/1 p. 29 A Successful Campaign With Kingdom News ***

  In Zambia a circuit overseer has trained his three-year-old daughter, Deborah, to offer literature from house to house. During the campaign with KingdomNews No. 34, Deborah placed more than 45 copies of the tract. Her mother started Bible studies with some who had accepted the KingdomNews from Deborah.
• 

  BlackPearl

  What the..??? 325,000,000 tracts and 6.5 billion people on the planet??? Is that really considered a "world wide" work? I'd say it's about a 1/2% to 1%, part world work.
• 

  compound complex

  Dear Proclaimers of the Real Good News,

  It would be very helpful to read the chapter "The Greatness of the Good News" in Ray Franz's IN SEARCH OF CHRISTIAN FREEDOM. I refer to two points on pages 529 and 530: 1) "Factually, Jehovah's Witnesses today are contacting at best about ONE-HALF of earth's population to any extent worthy of mention...what is said at the doors is short, usually quite routine and almost always centers around the offer of certain literature. The great majority of people have only a vague idea as to what the organization teaches, what its message is about." 2) The preaching work in Upper Volta requires Bible translations in more than one language, Witnesses sometimes using two or three Bibles while in service. Those Bibles are printed by publishers of OTHER religious affiliations, yet the Society is reluctant to acknowledge that. It's those Bibles that are the true source of the Good News.

  With the WTBTS it's all illusion, grandstanding, and hyperbole. A case in point is the padding of statistics: when it suits the Society's purpose (as in a letter of protest to some government) they will refer to XX million JWs and "associates" [Memorial attendees] to impressively bolster the number of supposedly like-minded true worshipers who are 'shocked at such outrageous treatment of innocent citizens.' As if they were all consulted for their unified input.

  Yours truly,

  CoCo
• 

  Zico

  At the book study on Thursday, my father, the conductor, asked people how they were doing with this tract. Not one of them had placed there whole 50. Some pioneers have placed 200+, but that won't make up for the publishers who've placed hardly any.
  
  I also ran into the SO in town on Friday, and I asked him how much terriroty they'd covered, and he admitted 'less than half' I pointed out to him that since they were only 100 publishers in our Congregation, and about 30,000 in our territory, we couldn't possibly have reached them all. He said 'Well, we've still got one weekend left, we've got to keep trying.' I'm not sure how he expected to do over half the territory in one weekend, when they'd not managed to do that in 3 weeks, and 5 days, not to mention the fact that it's impossible to give all those people tracts.
  
  It won't even reach 3,250,000 people.