Posts by em1913

23

Stroup's "The Jehovah's Witnesses."

by em1913 in

a book that doesn't get a lot of talk these days is herbert h. stroup's 1945 study "the jehovah's witnesses.

" which is too bad, because in the field of jw studies it pretty much stands on its own as a serious, scholarly look at the rutherford era of the movement -- one written with no theological or doctrinal axes to grind, but rather with the impartial eye of a professional sociologist.. stroup received no cooperation whatever from brooklyn in writing this book, but he spent a great deal of time among rank-and-file witnesses of the late 1930s and early 1940s, attending their meetings, joining them in field service, and eating at their homes, and what emerges is a picture of an overwhelmingly working-class movement which overlapped in its hopes and ultimate goals the ambitions of other radical social movements of the 1930s.

the witnesses were not marching in labor parades or participating in sit-down strikes or engaging in other forms of street-level radicalism, but stroup finds that, in their individual views on the social and economic structures of the time, they were largely in harmony with those who were, even in spite of their religion's supposed disavowal of politics, and he sees them as much as a political movement in that sense as a religious one.

em1913

Whatever his shortcomings on fine points of Witness history, I think you'll find that his sociological conclusions are quite sound in the context of 1930s left-wing social movements. They certainly jibe with the old-time Witnesses I knew during my own days in the movement, who were very much a two-fisted blue-collar crowd. I lived in Maine, where memories of the sacking of the Kennebunkport hall were still very vivid during my time in the movement, and the working-class alignment of many of these old-timers survived the Knorr-era attempts at eradicating that consciousness. I also find very little polemicism in Stroup when compared to others who wrote about the Witnesses in that era, especially "journalists" like Stanley HIgh and others who wrote about the movement for the popular magazines of the period. If anything I found Stroup a bit on the sympathetic side compared to the general trend of public thinking at the time.

I've read Separate Identity volume 1, by the way, as well as your blog, and found it quite fascinating. Nice job.

85

“Monkey this up”...

by minimus in

jw
friends

that expression is a no-no now.

it is racist and hateful.

some people just need to get the monkey off their backs..

em1913

Non sequitir. Who is this monolithic "left" you're speaking about? There are many lefts, just as there are many rights. There are many people on the left, like me, who believe in class-based social analysis, and reject identity politics as reactionary.

I don't mean this as an attack, and I hope you won't take it as such, but I get the sense that this {{{LEFT}}} you're talking about is some kind of trumped-up (ha ha) boogeyman that has little real substance outside the Fox News/alt-right bubble. It doesn't bear any resemblance to any actual leftists that I know or interact with.

23

Stroup's "The Jehovah's Witnesses."

by em1913 in

a book that doesn't get a lot of talk these days is herbert h. stroup's 1945 study "the jehovah's witnesses.

" which is too bad, because in the field of jw studies it pretty much stands on its own as a serious, scholarly look at the rutherford era of the movement -- one written with no theological or doctrinal axes to grind, but rather with the impartial eye of a professional sociologist.. stroup received no cooperation whatever from brooklyn in writing this book, but he spent a great deal of time among rank-and-file witnesses of the late 1930s and early 1940s, attending their meetings, joining them in field service, and eating at their homes, and what emerges is a picture of an overwhelmingly working-class movement which overlapped in its hopes and ultimate goals the ambitions of other radical social movements of the 1930s.

the witnesses were not marching in labor parades or participating in sit-down strikes or engaging in other forms of street-level radicalism, but stroup finds that, in their individual views on the social and economic structures of the time, they were largely in harmony with those who were, even in spite of their religion's supposed disavowal of politics, and he sees them as much as a political movement in that sense as a religious one.

em1913

A book that doesn't get a lot of talk these days is Herbert H. Stroup's 1945 study "The Jehovah's Witnesses." Which is too bad, because in the field of JW studies it pretty much stands on its own as a serious, scholarly look at the Rutherford era of the movement -- one written with no theological or doctrinal axes to grind, but rather with the impartial eye of a professional sociologist.

Stroup received no cooperation whatever from Brooklyn in writing this book, but he spent a great deal of time among rank-and-file Witnesses of the late 1930s and early 1940s, attending their meetings, joining them in field service, and eating at their homes, and what emerges is a picture of an overwhelmingly working-class movement which overlapped in its hopes and ultimate goals the ambitions of other radical social movements of the 1930s. The Witnesses were not marching in labor parades or participating in sit-down strikes or engaging in other forms of street-level radicalism, but Stroup finds that, in their individual views on the social and economic structures of the time, they were largely in harmony with those who were, even in spite of their religion's supposed disavowal of politics, and he sees them as much as a political movement in that sense as a religious one. There's a reason why reading "Consolation" from the late 1930s often feels like reading a radical political magazine more than any kind of a religious one

This is a perspective few other authors have addressed in their studies of the Witnesses -- especially authors whose purpose in writing is largely polemical rather than sociological. It also helps to put into perspective exactly what happened to the movement during the Knorr era -- it wasn't just a shift in surface style or in teaching methods, it was an overt and very specific political shift, from the radicalism of the Rutherford era to an extremely bourgeois conservatism that went to great lengths to embrace aspects of the socio-politcal system that it claimed to oppose. Reading Stroup's depiction of the pre-1945 movement really draws that fact into sharp focus, and it makes understanding what happened to the Society in later years that much more obvious.

This is a book well worth reading, and I hope that those who haven't will seek it out. It's a fascinating text.

85

“Monkey this up”...

by minimus in

jw
friends

that expression is a no-no now.

it is racist and hateful.

some people just need to get the monkey off their backs..

em1913

Not at all. And other than perhaps the late Elijah Muhammad with his teaching of old Mr. Yakub and his grafted white devils, I don't think anybody teaches "black supremacy." I've been reading your stuff here for years, Minimus, and to be honest you've always struck me as too intelligent a guy for that kind of cheap strawman argument. I hate to see the Trumpies sucking you into the cult of identitarianism. That way lies madness.

85

“Monkey this up”...

by minimus in

jw
friends

that expression is a no-no now.

it is racist and hateful.

some people just need to get the monkey off their backs..

em1913

"Capitalist science" is a thing. If it's good for Exxon, it's good for the planet, and if it isn't good for Exxon, it's obviously MADE UP FAKE NEWS BY COMMIES. There are entire corporate-funded think tanks that do nothing all day long but pump out talking points to "prove" that this is the case.

As far as the claim that "the left teaches that every white person is inherently prejudiced" goes, well, no. What it does teach is that capitalism uses and has always used the doctrine of "white supremacy," either overtly or coded, to keep the working class divided in America. The use of racism is structural, and is not dependent on the beliefs or actions of any particular individual. "Whiteness" in this sense has less to do with skin color than with a figurative carrot of privilege dangled before a certain segment of the working class to ensure that it does not cooperate and find common cause with other segments of that class. "We're like you and you're like us, we're really on the same side against Them, " say the capitalist class to these workers, even as that class continues to exploit them as severely as it exploits the "not white" segments of that class. But the "white workers," like faithful dogs groveling for table scraps from their masters, just wag their tails and bark on cue.

This strategy has been very successful over the past two hundred years, whether pitting white against black or "white" against other ethnic groups -- Jews, Italians, Irish, Chinese, etc. -- who have been put in the position of "not white" by the social structures of a given period. We see it today in the way the immigration issue is presented -- the foreign "others" posing a threat to the way of life represented by Real 100 Percent Americans. That was the basic thesis offered by the KKK in the 1920s, by the Coughlinites, the Liberty Leaguers and the America Firsters in the 1930s and 1940s, the Christian Crusade against Communism (changing the initials doesn't change the pronunciation) and the Birchers in the 1950s and 60s, the Nixon Southern Strategy and the Willis Carto/Liberty Lobby crowd in the 1970s, the Reaganite Neocons in the 1980s, the Buchananites of the 1990s, and so on down to Brother Trump and his friends today. The honking and quacking from the right today is nothing but old wine in new bottles.

Sociology is cool. Read some.

85

“Monkey this up”...

by minimus in

jw
friends

that expression is a no-no now.

it is racist and hateful.

some people just need to get the monkey off their backs..

em1913

I've never heard the phrase in the thread title until now. To think I've lived more than half a century without access to the rich colorful language of whiny old men. Where I come from we say "ball this up." Apologies if any of you old monorchoids find that offensive.

15

Terry's Editorial on the Pledge of Allegiance

by TerryWalstrom in

terry's editorial on the pledge of allegiance_____.

can one child in a thousand actually define the word or give the meaning of "allegiance?

" can you--without stumbling around about it?give me a moment of your time, will you?first, in medieval times, wealthy landowners allowed peasants to cultivate their property as long as these pitiful souls made a pledge of fealty or allegiance to become a soldier for that lord of the manor if he needed to go to war against some imagined enemy.

em1913

There were plenty of neighborhoods in New York in the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s that were strictly defined along ethnic lines -- if you were Irish you knew to stay out of the Italian neighborhoods if you knew what was good for you, if you were Polish you avoided the Hungarians, if you were Jewish you avoided the Irish, and so on and on. You could spin the radio dial in the years before WWII and hear a Tower of Babel's worth of different languages -- Yiddish, German, Polish, Hungarian, Italian, Lithuanian, you name it. And meanwhile "race suicide" crackpots wrote long, hand-wringing articles in the Saturday Evening Post about how all these unassimilable immigrants were going to be the death, oh, the utter DEATH of God's Own Country.

And yet somehow, the world spun on and the children of those immigrants grew up to become splenetic senior citizens -- whose own "whiteness" doesn't extend back more than a century as such things were once understood -- fulminating about what all these new Others will do to God's Own Country. It's an old song, just one with a new arrangement.

54

What JW habits do you still have?

by Exelder in

since leaving the jw's after over 4 decades, i can see exactly what it is and hate everything it stands for.

however, there are still some jw habits and traits that i can't get rid of:.

1. i can't swear in general conversation (i'd have to be really angry).

em1913

I still hang things on the "information board."

15

Terry's Editorial on the Pledge of Allegiance

by TerryWalstrom in

terry's editorial on the pledge of allegiance_____.

can one child in a thousand actually define the word or give the meaning of "allegiance?

" can you--without stumbling around about it?give me a moment of your time, will you?first, in medieval times, wealthy landowners allowed peasants to cultivate their property as long as these pitiful souls made a pledge of fealty or allegiance to become a soldier for that lord of the manor if he needed to go to war against some imagined enemy.

em1913

The pledge issue was one thing the Judge got right. Swearing an oath of allegience under compulsion to the state, or any symbolic representation of the state, is pure, unalloyed Fascism.

17

Did You Ever Think You Would Be A Member On A Site Like This?

by minimus in

jw
friends

when i first started looking at “apostate” sites , i was always watching over my shoulder, hoping no one would catch me viewing “spiritual pornography”.

i found these types of sites mesmerizing but i never thought i’d join one.... look at me now.😈.

em1913

When I left, there were no sites like this, and there was no internet. So there's that. I did, however, used to sneak looks in unauthorized books about the Witnesses at the puiblic library, things like "Visions of Glory," which fueled my curiosity about the actual history of the movement since the "official" accounts in the Yearbook, and that dopey "Divine Purpose" book just didn't cut it for me.

I'd long been out when the Internet came along, but "watchtower" was one of the first things I ever entered into a search engine just out of curiosity to see what would come up. I used to read the old H20 site in the 90s, and I've actually been reading this site on an off-again on-again basis since it began but only recently figured I'd throw in my two cents here and there. I used to really enjoy the serious pieces on WTBTS history such as the stuff Farkel came up with on the Judge, and I really really enjoyed JT's posts on the inside stuff at Bethel. Miss those guys a lot.