Put yourself in Russell's shoes. You are studying the Bible with Organized Religion. You start reading the Bible on your own and looking things up in a giant concordance, comparing what these religions are teaching with what scriptural comparisons seem to be revealing. You begin to question and challenge what these religions are preaching and teaching.
In short, Russell was guilty of Independent Thought.
Russell breaks away from Organized Religion and sets up his own movement, and then pronounces God's blessings and guidance on himself and his little group of International Bible Students with their little independent chapters.
In that context, and in that environment at that time, Russell the maverick had to think things on his own. There would have been nothing more important and precious to him that to have that freedom of thought and religion that the founding fathers of the United States of America enshrined in their Constitution.
Now fast forward to World War !, and to the time when Russell dies. Rutherford takes over the empire, and he does this by vote of the shareholders. He got them to side with him, so as to ensure his successorship to Russell. However, there were quite a few who did not like the way Rutherford did business. Rutherford had these Russelite Loyalists expunged from the Organization, and branded them as the "Wicked and Evil Slave Class". (They continue on to this day as a separate group, and, in fact, have available online all of the books and publications of Charles Taze Russell.)
Now it was Rutherford who created an Organization of "Group Think", and being organization-minded. He even had a spy system where he would have one brother watching the behavior of another brother, recorded all this in a file dossier, so that he could keep tabs on everyone, and control and weed out the independent types. William Schnell, who spent many years with the JW's wrote a book "Thirty Years a Watchtower Slave", in which he told at great length how this system worked, and how it was used on him and others. Schnell started out in Germany in the Second World War. The German people were great at Organization, and could be easily controlled. So much of what Rutherford instituted was first tried out and experimented with in Germany, and when a good model was established, he put things in place Organization wide. Schnell immigrated to the USA and discovered many of the things that were established in Germany were now being set up in the USA. That's how he discovered how Rutherford really worked.
Nathan H. Knorr excelled as a good Administrator, a good Organization Man. This served him well over the years, but it also perpetuated and etched in stone the policies and teachings that were imposed on the R & F JW's.
This all became part and parcel of the kind of behavioral programming and blind, unquestioning loyalty of the JW followers. And that's the way this Cultic Organization operates to this very day. Except now it has become much worse, because the GB at the top is under such attack and vulnerability that it reminds me of Hitler and his coherts in the final days of the War when they hid in this bunker until the bitter end, in a kind of seige mentality. And in the middle of the battle that is all around them, they are calling upon all of the remaining JW's to get out there and fight the good fight for Jehovah and their eternal life. Yours is not to question why; yours is but to do or die! Be a good soldier. And you all better walk in single step, and don't get out of line, or else!
Yes, Russell would turn over in his grave if he saw what he started has now become.
Whatever happened to "Jesus Christ is the same today, yesterday and forever"?
Rod P.
