What is this reference to Malawi??? That's really OLD news, isn't it?? Or has Malawi started persecuting the Jehovah's Witnesses AGAIN???
From "Crisis of Conscience", 1985 printing, Chapter 6, "Double Standards", [excerpts from...] pages 112 - 115...
[page 112, 1st paragraph...]
"...Beginning in 1964, Jehovah's Witnesses in Malawi began to experience persecution and violence on a scale rarely equalled in modern times. Successive waves of vicious countrywide attacks...swept over them in 1964, 1967, 1972 and again in 1975. In the first attack, 1,081 Malawian families saw their little homes burned or ...demolished, 588 fields of crops destroyed. In the 1967 attacks Witnesses reported the rapings of more than one thousand of their women... In each wave of violence, beatings, torture and even murder went virtually unchecked by the authorities and reached such intensity that thousands of families fled their homes and fields to neighboring countries..."
[same page, 2nd paragraph...]
"What was the issue around which this recurrent storm of violence revolved? It was the refusal of the Witnesses to purchase a party card of the ruling political party. Malawi is a one-party state... Jehovah's Witnesses who inquired were informed by the Society's Branch Office that to buy such a party card would be a violation of their Christian neutrality, a compromise, hence, unfaithfulness to God. The Branch position was upheld by the world headquarters organization and presented in detail in the Watchtower Society's publications..."
[page 113, 1st paragraph...]
"There is, however, a serious question in my mind about the position taken by the Branch Office and supported by the central headquarters in Brooklyn. ... In 1975 I was assigned to write material on the latest campaign...being carried on against the Malawian Witnesses. In explaining why Jehovah's Witnesses viewed the purchase of the party card so seriously, I presented information that had been published earlier, tracing a parallel between their stand and that of [early] Christians...who refused to put a pinch of incense on an altar as a sacrifice to the "genius" of the Roman emperor. At the time of doing so, I felt a sense of uncertainty - was the parallel completely true? ...Was purchasing a party card just as clearly an act of worship?..."
[page 114, 1st & 2nd paragraphs...]
"...the word "political" as well as "politics" came from the Greek word polis meaning simply a city. ... the Latin term politia means simply "citizenship, government, administration." ...Obviously, all government is political in this fundamental sense of the word. ...To be a citizen of any country is to be a member of such a political state, enjoying the benefits and bearing the responsibilities this membership brings. The extent to which one may submit to the demands of such a political state may vary, but the membership is still a fact. ..."
[page 114, paragraph 4 leading to top of page 115...]
"Which leads to the second reason for my questioning. I can understand why a person could coscientiously desire to be separate from the political strife and fierce competition that generally characterize party politics. The factors that made me think seriously about the situation in Malawi, however, was that it was, and is, a one-party state. ...It thus becomes, in a de facto sense, equivalent to the government itself, the "superior authority". If a person could be a citizen, and hence a member of the national political community, without violating integrity to God, where was the evidence to show that being submissive to the government's insistence ... that everyone purchase a card of the ruling party would constitute such a violation of integrity to God?..."
Whew!!! LONG quote!!! But I felt I needed to pull Ray Franz' reasoning out of those pages...
Anyway, in effect, since there was only ONE party in Malawi, how could buying a "political" card - which COULD be compared to a 'driver's license', in some countries - be a violation of Christian neutrality???
He then goes on to contrast the behavior required of the Malawian Witnesses with that of the Mexican brothers - Witnesses - who were openly allowed - BY THE BRANCH AND BETHEL HEADQUARTERS - to bribe Mexican officials to state that the Mexican brothers HAD ALREADY SERVED THEIR REQUIRED MILITARY TIME IN THE MEXICAN ARMY...
That bit of hypocrisy always gets me...
Anyhooo, I was wondering whether the poor Malawian Witnesses are again being required to make drastic and extreme sacrifices, or whether the Watchtower Society is 'resurrecting' their martyrdom to impress the Rank&File - as they did in the '50's and '60's, hammering we average Witnesses with the "sacrifices of the brothers in the German concentration camps"...
I swear, I felt like I was in WWII until the late 1970's, thanks to the Watchtower boys... They do like to drag up stuff from the past, to beat their current members over the head - er, 'encourage' - them with...
Zid
