Memory hole, international conspiracy, and the JW international network

by slimboyfat 22 Replies latest social current

• 

  slimboyfat

  Can anyone else who was around 15 to 20 years ago remember an odd story about JW missionaries being stopped at the Swiss/Italian border with American bonds worth billions of dollars in their possession? Because I can find little to no information about it anywhere online, yet at the time I am sure I recall it being reported by different mainstream news sources, including the BBC.

  Why do some news stories seem to disappear from the internet altogether? Dwelling on it overly may be enough to turn you into some kind of a “conspiracy theorist”!

  In terms of American organisations with a worldwide reach, there can be few that have the extent and reach that the Watchtower organisation does. Who else has outposts in Mongolia, St Helena, Greenland, St Kitts, Namibia, you name it? Plus the countries that aren’t named. Say you wanted to piggy back an organisation for information gathering, wouldn’t it be a good choice?

  Watchtower itself has talked about being infiltrated by Russian agents in the Soviet Union and by Stasi in East Germany. It is inconceivable that western countries have done the same? Would Watchtower necessarily know it, and would they publicise it if they found out?

  We know that various western countries use organisations for information gathering such as the Amdocs telecommunications company, and all the others implicated in the Snowdon leaks, to effect. We also know that the US state department takes a close interest in the spread of US religions including JWs under the guise of “freedom of religion” reports.

  What really went on at the Swiss/Italian border and why can’t I find out anything about it? Was it someone impersonating a JW? Or was it someone pretending to be a JW over a longer term? And what were they up to? Was it a one off incident or the tip of an iceberg?
• 

  FFGhost

  How hard did you search?

  Took me about 3 seconds to find this Wikipedia article:

  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiasso_financial_smuggling_case
  

  No hint there of anything JW related.

  Regarding the rest of the post, well, I guess anything is possible. But I would also speculate there would be better / more efficient ways to do “dirty work” than going through all the trouble of training fake JWs.
• 

  slimboyfat

  Yeah, that’s what I mean. It was widely reported at the time that the two Japanese nationals were JW missionaries, but there’s nothing about JWs at all now on the Wikipedia page or the news links.
• 

  slimboyfat

  This was a thread from the time. It says Philippine nationals rather than Japanese?

  https://www.jehovahs-witness.com/topic/244367/on-jw-org-any-update-on-philipine-jehovahs-witnesses-116-billion-counterfeit-bonds

  And my own earlier thread from the time.

  https://www.jehovahs-witness.com/topic/211442/what-would-watchtower-society-do-116-billion
  
  
• 

  hoser

  Sometimes news stories just disappear.

  It’s easy if it’s not on paper.

  The government of Canada department of propaganda CBC removes news stories on a regular basis
• 

  slimboyfat

  Actually I think these may be two separate but similar incidents. Has the first dropped out? Were JWs implicated in both or just one? In any case it’s very difficult to find anything about the JW angle online now, althogh it was a mainstream story at the time. What was going on?
• 

  slimboyfat

  Sometimes news stories just disappear.
  It’s easy if it’s not on paper.

  Indeed hoser, but I don’t think it’s necessarily always entirely random either. 😉 There are powerful interests at stake and perhaps some news stores are inconvenient for various reasons.
• 

  FFGhost

  Occam’s razor time.

  Which seems more likely:

  There Is a vast conspiracy involving billions of dollars and government bonds and fake JWs, and dozens of Fake-JW-trainers training fake JWs across the globe, and teams of data scrubbers who meticulously cleanse all web pages everywhere of any mention of JW involvement in smuggling billion dollar bonds across international borders….

  or…

  Some sloppy reporter got his facts wrong in the initial story, and JWs are so vanishingly insignificant in the grand scheme of things that it’s not even worthwhile to post a correction to those early stories?
• 

  slimboyfat

  Well I’ve had to reevaluate a lot of things that I didn’t consider “likely” over the years. I knew for a long time that local reporting was awful, for example, because it happened too many times that the 16 year old student in the local paper called Kevin who won a poetry competition was actually a 61 year old gran called Kelly who came runner up in a knitting contest, or some equivalent, but equally astonishingly wrong series of “facts”.

  What I didn’t fully appreciate is just how wrong the main news is that we got on the TV and in our newspapers. I naively thought that it was basically right in the essentials, with a detail wrong here or there, and with a predictable and manageable amount of bias thrown in, depending on the outlet. What I didn’t appreciate is that it is often wrong in essentials and in the entirely of its reporting on many subjects.

  It’s been a slow awakening over a long period of time: from the lies that got us into Iraq; the obfuscation about the causes and so-called remedies of the financial crisis in 2008; the initial blanket misinformation about the origins of Covid; who blew up the Nordstream pipeline; and most recently, and most audaciously, the lies about the extent of the depravity going on in Gaza, UK complicity from Cyprus, and what happened in Amsterdam a few weeks ago; not to mention the roots of the conflict in Ukraine, what’s going on in Syria, and on and on. The media lies about everything that’s important and it’s not an accident because the lies fall consistently in line the interests of the most powerful and wealthy, in particular weapons manufacturers.

  What we appear to know about the story about the “JW missionaries” is that they attempted to move billions of dollars worth of bonds but were prevented. Given that local criminals are perfectly capable to inventing conspiracies to rob a local petrol/gas station of a few hundred dollars, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to imagine that more intricate conspiracies surround instances where billions of dollars are apparently in play. I don’t think that the detail of a JW missionary in particular is terribly likely to be invented whole-cloth by a reporter. It seems more likely that the people involved either were JWs or were pretending to be JWs. Whether this happens in other cases and is part of a more widespread phenomenon is more speculative. If it is, then, given its record on other issues, I don’t think we can rely on the media to report or reliably record such events in order for us to detect what the pattern is.
• 

  slimboyfat

  And I simply disagree that JWs are insignificant on a worldwide scale. This is such a commonplace remark on this forum, and among former JWs generally that it has acquired the status of a taken-for-granted truth. It springs from the tendency to minimise the significance of the organisation that many perceive themselves as having “escaped” from. But it’s patently false if you step back and give it any objective consideration at all. Over 20 million people attended the JW memorial last year in over 70,000 Kingdom Halls, and in other venues worldwide in practically every nation, territory, and inhabited island on earth. That’s a significant worldwide phenomenon however you look at it. It’s far more people than consider themselves Jews or Jains, for example, and similar to the number of Sikhs or active Anglicans. What other organisation has more than 70,000 outlets in nearly every nation on earth? (That’s a genuine question, I’d really like to hear examples!) I don’t think there are many: McDonald’s, the Catholic Church, some charities perhaps(?), a few Pentecostal organisations, the Seventh-day Adventists – although in the case of the Seventh-day Adventists, despite a large presence in Africa and South America, they are virtually absent from continental Europe. If you were attempting to base some kind of international network on an existing organisation could you do any better than the JW network of KHs worldwide? The only comparable examples I can come up with are McDonalds, the Catholic Church, maybe Assemblies of God or SDAs, but again some of those are more thinly spread in Europe, and patchy, than the JWs are.