Rutherford talk "Face the Facts" 1938 A review in TIME Magazine Sept 19

Lady Lee

You just never know what you will find when you are looking for something else.

A TIME journalist, had the following to say. I had bold some interesting comments

Jehovah's Witnesses, or the International Bible Students Association, is a sect which believes it is helping to establish God's kingdom on earth, distrusts formalized religion (particularly Roman Catholicism), engages in periodic spats with the law because its members like to peddle anticlerical pamphlets, dislike to have their children salute the flag in school. The longtime pontiff of Jehovah's Witnesses is rawboned Judge Joseph Frederick Rutherford. The Judge is the big money-maker for the sect, which claims that 275,000,000 copies of his writings have been circulated in 80 languages.

No paupers, Jehovah's Witnesses could well afford last week to hire wire and wireless telephone facilities from American Telephone & Telegraph Co. for a hook-up between Royal Albert Hall in London and auditoriums in 23 U. S., ten Canadian, ten Australian, four New Zealand cities. In those auditoriums, according to Witnesses' calculations, were gathered 100,000 listeners while, in Albert Hall, Judge Rutherford faced most of England's 5,000 Witnesses and 5,000 outsiders who had come to hear what it was all about.

Judge Rutherford's rambling, worldwide speech was entitled "Face the Facts." Its gist: "A hideous monstrosity is rapidly moving to rule the world by dictators and to regiment the people. God, by His holy prophets, thousands of years ago, as recorded in the Bible, foretold this great menace, its cause, and what will be the result."

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,931748,00.html

moggy lover

Joe "FREDERICK" Rutherford? Would you believe that this is the first time I realized the jerk actually had a second name. Wonder what he called himself in those fleeting moments of sobriety? Joe? Freddy? "Big Cheese"? - Dummy more like it.

Cheers

greendawn

I think the journalist who wrote that article got Rutherford's middle name wrong, it should have been Franklin not Frederick. Perhaps he mixed him up with Frederick Franz. Anyway Rutherford made a total fool of himself and the JWs with a never ending series of prophecies that failed without exception. I wonder why anyone believed in him and his grossly mistaken Biblical interpretations.

VM44

Does anyone have the audio recording of "Face the Facts"?

This talk was recorded and pressed onto records, so it should be available somewhere among other Rutherford recordings.

--VM44

kid-A

"A hideous monstrosity is rapidly moving to rule the world by dictators and to regiment the people."

How ironic that he was describing the future of the WTBS....1938....I wonder how many of his oratory mannerisms were copied from Josef Goebbels, who was also making similar speeches around the same time?

Mary