Meadow36 - "...the Revelation Book started me questioning things ever so slightly. I remember sitting in bookstudy thinking "How the HELL did they come up with THAT?!..."
Despite its "international" focus, the WT is, at its core, an extremely American religion.
As a result, most of Fred Franz's End-Times script was formulated in the 50s and 60s, with a lot of ideas having their origins in mid-20th-Century American right-wing conspiracy theory (there was a lot more cross-pollinization of ideas between apocalyptic millennialist groups back then).
For example, the UN being the wild beast (in Franz's eschatology) was very similar to the fundagelical idea that the Antichrist's One-World government would be formed from the UN. I suppose a lot of conservative Christians found it genuinely plausible; after all, the Right Wing has always been extremely suspicious of socialism, and significant portions of the UN Charter were drafted by Europeans with Soviet connections (remember McCarthy's "godless communism" paranoia?). From there, it wouldn't have been much of a stretch for Franz to conclude that the "King of the North" was the USSR, and by extension, the "King of the South" must be the US and UK. The Soviet regime's crackdown on JWs could have only reinforced that conclusion.
I was kinda surprised when the Rev book was studied one last time back in '06, considering some of the problems the script has nowadays:
- The Soviet Union collapsed over 20 years ago and the role of the King of the North has still not been recast yet.
- Religious freedoms in the West are staunchly protected by international law, rather than repressed, while at the same time, overt religiosity is quietly fading away, rather than being violently crushed.
- The UN Security Council is virtually powerless to enforce any resulution, let along coordinate a global campaign against "Babylon the Great". The "Wild Beast" has become little more than a forum for debate, where any superpower has veto authority.