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Contents
Notanda
Demand a Technocracy Dictatorship
“Thy Word Is Truth”
A Jewish Study of the Two World Wars IS
The Fascist Axis—A New Kind of Adversary 18 . A Global and Total WTar
Democracy's Failure to Gauge Nazi Threat 20
Echota Cotton Mill Management Despises
Presenting “TJiis Gospel of the Kingdom”
Manuscripts and Versions of the Hebrew
Sebring Denies Freedom of Worship
Published every other Wednesday by WATCHTOWER BIBLE AND TRACT SOCIETY, INC, 117 Adams St., Brooklyn 1, N. ¥., U. S. A.
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Judge Voltz Should Be Locked Up ♦ If what the Alexandria, La., Daily Town . Talk, ' surprisingly, says about Judge Gus Voltz, of that city, is correct, then, for the safety of the community, the man should be locked up. After sentencing two of Jehovah’s witnesses to pay fines of $25 or serve thirty days in jail for preaching the gospel from house to house, he is alleged to have made the following untruthful, vicious and anarchistic statements:.
Your organization is wholly Communistic and against everything that is religious and wholesome in this country. You are trying to break down respect for our flag and government. I have been told that you have been spreading propaganda among Negroes that they were descended from the Japanese and are trying to get them to rise up against the white people. There will come a time when your kind will be run out of this country. You should not be sentenced to a jail term but instead you should be manhandled. In time of war we have no place in this country for people of your kind.
It seems sad that a fine city like Alexandria should be reduced to having such a man sitting on the bench. How he could crowd six lies in less space is hard to understand. His rightful place is in Germany, on the bench of the Gestapo.
Just Before Bataan Fell
♦ Just before Bataan fell hospital No, 1 was severely bombed; the Japanese apologized. Four days later the same hospital was bombed again, killing 47 Americans and wounding fifty-three more. So says an American officer in Australia. '
American Indians Increasing
♦ In the year 1939 the number of American Indians increased from 342,497 to 351,378, or about 3 percent. This was the. largest gain of any group in the country.
CONSOLATION
“And in His name shall the nations hope.”—Matthew 12:21, A.R.V.
Volume XXV
Brooklyn, N. Y., Wednesday, December 22, 1943
Number 633
“Whom Can You Trust Now?”
TpORT SMITH, Arkansas, was recently -C in the news. The Supreme Court of the United States had just decided that Fort Smith cannot make ordinances that' will prevent Jehovah’s witnesses from carrying on their good work of enlightening the people regarding the purposes of Jehovah God now and in the near future. Fort Smith authorities attempted to prevent this work from going forward.
While this case was still before the Supreme Court, I. K. Nakdimen, president of the City National Bank of Fort Smith, had the equivalent of a column in the Tribune of his city, under the rather lengthy caption, “The Country Has Never Been in a Condition or in a Position as We Are Now.” But it was not war that Mr. Nakdimen was thinking of, as the following paragraphs from his editorial make clear:
When the newspapers expose men like ' ' Du Ponts, the Public Utilities, Standard Oil Co., the Aluminum corporations, newspapers and others, it is not pleasant to consume the thought that goes through our minds.
Whom can you trust now! On whom can you depend now!
The question we ask ourselves, Is the world coming to an end! Then if it is, wTe can account for it. At the same time none of us wants to feel and imagine that the world is coming to an end. But if it is, there is no one to blame but ourselves. There is no one responsible but ourselves because we know it and we arc silent. We can help and we do not. We are lacking in speaking out our thoughts. We are lacking in expressing our feelings, fearing it may displease some one; it may ruffle some one’s dignity; it may displease some of our friends.
If we are willing to be destroyed, without speaking out and without crying out the cold facts one to another, then what else can we expect ?
The Bank President Is Uneasy
Mr. Nakdimen makes it quite plain that he is uneasy, and it is not the little fellows that he is uneasy about: it is the big ones. He mentions some big companies, and without indicating or implying that all or most of these are in the class he has named, yet it is just as well to know who are the mighty ones in the earth in these days, which the Lord likens to “the days of Noah”.
The twelve concerns in the United States that have assets ranging from about $6,000,000,000 down to $2,000,000,000 are, in the order named, Bell Telephone, Metropolitan Life, Prudential, Chase National Bank, National City Bank, New York Life, Equitable Life, Guaranty Trust Company, Pennsylvania Railroad, Standard Oil of New Jersey, Bank of America, and the United States Steel Corporation, sometimes called the “Steel Trust”. _
In the next class, ranging from about $2,000,000,000 down to $1,000,000,000 are the big Chicago Bank, New York Central, General Motors, Southern Pacific, Mutual Life, First National Bank of Chicago, Northwest Mutual, Consolidated Edison, Santa Fe, Central Hanover Bank, Bankers Trust Company of New York, Baltimore and Ohio, Union Pacific, John Hancock Mutual, Travelers Insur-
ance, Manufacturers’ Trust, Cities Service, and the Du Pont de Nemours Company- . . „ a
Mr. Nakdimen mentions but four concerns, and there are thirty in the above list, but some of the remaining 26 will * receive some attention in this article. * These big fellows do some big things, and relatively good things, but they do other things too that make Mr. Nakdimen and other citizens uneasy.
Before the war, American automobiles were found in every corner of the world. It is not unreasonable to admire the enterprise that made such a thing possible. The automobile workers know about it, and are proud of it, but their spokesmen claim that in a $3,000 automobile the investment of their time in wages brings the workers only $180. They do not think that is a fair division. Do you?
Now the plants that were making automobiles are making bombers. The Ford bomber production plant at Willow Bun is probably the greatest single manufacturing plant ever designed and built with but one objective in view. Every American is interested in that plant. Inevitably so.
Americans are interested in the achievements of all their big producers. They cannot help it. The world steps aside to let any man pass who knows where he is going. It does that for Henry J. Kaiser, the builder of dams, bridges, roads, airports, ships, and now, probably, of cargo airships. Kaiser shuttles back and forth between Oakland, Calif., and Washington, D. C. Said to be soft-spoken and kindly, he travels with two or three engineering aides, works day and night, and spends a quarter of a million dollars a year in long-distance telephone hookups. His new methods of ‘ building ships complete in less than two weeks have eclipsed the world.
Transport and Packing Giants
The mention about building cargo airships is not merely fancy; for the W. J. Dillner Transfer Company of Pittsburgh has already applied to the proper authority in Washington for permission to set up an air hauling service to any point in the United States and Canada. Household goods would be carried uncrated. A Fort Dodge, Iowa, concern has made a similar request.
In wartime, whether their work is well done or poorly done, the big meat packers are a big factor in American life. Last year the sales volume of Swift and Company, $1,409,405,770, was the largest in its history. That is a lot of meat The concern has a capacity of turning out 8,000,000 pounds of canned meat a week.
Dehydration is necessary, on account of the submarines, and has arrived with a vengeance.- Ten pounds of fresh vegetables are dehydrated to one pound; 11 pounds of liquid milk become one pound; three dozen fresh eggs become one pound of egg powder. The two cubic feet of space required for 58 pounds of shell eggs becomes less than half a cubic foot when the same food is shipped as 11 pounds of egg powder. A year or more ago the government was taking the entire output of 87 egg-drying plants, and was paying from 98c to $1.13 a pound for the dehydrated egg powder. A five-ounce package represents a dozen eggs. Dehydrated meat occupies one-half the volume and weighs one-fourth as much as lean meat.
Communications are improved. The biggest giant of all, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (which members of Congress have said is more powerful than the government itself) has just laid a new transcontinental telephone cable from New York to San Francisco. Most of the cable was buried in soil by giant tractor-drawn plow trains which dug the furrow, laid the cable and covered it with earth in a continuous operation.
Lighting achievements are marvelous, but they are but a fraction of what they might be. Half the light bills of the country could be chopped off by installing fluorescent lighting in place of the Mazda lamps which the big Edison and Westinghouse companies, for reasons of revenue only, continue to shove over on the public.
Demand a Technocracy Dictatorship
The Technocracy crowd are so impressed with their achievements (real achievements they are, too) that in page advertisements in some of the great metropolitan newspapers they have demanded the total conscription of all men, women, machines, material and money and that all shall get the same wages. In other words, they have demanded that this country, in its tight for freedom, shall give up every particle of its freedom and become a totalitarian state in the most absolute sense. Then, after the war is over, there could be another great war (maybe) to get rid of the Technocracy crowd that would by that time be squarely on the necks of the common people. That would require another batch of self-chosen saviors, and so on ad infinitum.
Standard Oil was mentioned by name by Mr. Nakdimen; so just a few words on that well-oiled subject. On August 20, 1942, officials of the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey told a Senate committee in Washington that their company for nearly four months after Pearl Harbor paid royalties to Germany on the use in America of an American invention vital to American fighting planes and antiaircraft guns. The next day, Robert M. Hunter, special assistant to the attorney general, and a former Ohio State University professor, said that of six Standard Oil officials five had made deliberate misstatements and there was only one of the lot that he could believe.
Nine days still later one hundred of America’s best picked scholars met at Columbia University, New York city, in their third annual conference on science, philosophy and religion. They confessed that they were confused. They decided that they needed mental assistance in making clear to themselves “the nature of the democratic process and of the ethical, artistic, literary and spiritual values we are defending’’; and so they solemnly decided that next year “the conference should include within its membership a group of men of affairs”.
Ah I That is what mankind needs. Give us more technocracy and Standard Oil men to guide mankind out of the darkness. To be sure, five out of the six will lie so that nothing they may say can be believed; but what can the scholars do without their aid? The scholars go on to say that they “await the creation of a series of fellowships in the fields covered by this conference”. That is where the Standard Oil crowd comes in. They can furnish the mazuma and the scholars will then put it over in A-l shape. Maybe.
28 Pages of Crooks
If the professors that are settling mankind’s problems of science, philosophy and religion run out of technocracy and Standard Oil timber they should at once communicate with Congressman Louis Ludlow, of Indiana. That gentleman supplied Congress with 28 pages, singlespaced, of the names of officials and supervisory employees of defense contractors whose salaries were boosted 30 percent or more after war contracts were awarded. Uncle Sam pays the increase as part of the cost of the work. Increases of salary reached as high as 700 percent. Seventeen officials of one company were raised from $125 to $300 (their original salaries) to a fiat $450 each per month. Six hundred officials of ' one company received increases of more than 80 percent.
Some assistance could also be rendered by the publishers of Labor. In a recent issue that periodical mentioned Harry Brown, a York, Pa., manufacturer, who was given a major’s commission in the army’s services of supply while he was under indictment on charges of defrauding the government of thousands of dollars in income taxes. The gentleman was giv'ep a two years’ suspended sentence, fined $2,000, and ordered to pay back taxes and penalties of $36,000. The same periodical lists Morton Bodfish, $20,000-a-year lobbyist for money lenders, who at one and the same time wrote to his clients declaring that “democracy is mob government” While he is himself holding down a *‘dollar-a-year” job in the office 'of the secretary of the navy.
Labor nearly always has some names that could be added to the list. In another issue it makes mention of the nine firms (three of which were the General Electric, Phelps-Dodge Copper Corporation, and United States Steel Company) that were fined $77,500 on charges of conspiracy to fix prices on navy orders for $50,000,000 worth of cable.
Perhaps this is as good a place as any to mention that one of the standard ways of making a fortune in these days is to rise to the position of executive of some big business organization and then gang up with the other members of the board of directors to see to it that, no matter what happens, the executives shall be paid sky-high remuneration. A favorite cry is that the stockholders of these big companies are widows and orphans. Allowing that to be the case, the executives of many such corporations are engaged in taking from widows and orphans all that can be obtained. A little note in a UP dispatch from Washington makes this all clear. After discussing the operation of the president’s policy for limiting net salaries to the sum of $25,000, it reverted to the big business crowd and then made this reasonable and reasoned statement of what would be the result:
Some officials doubted that many corporations would reduce the compensation of their high-salaried executives, but felt that in most cases corporations would continue to pay the same rate and then tap their general funds for the extra taxes.
Achievements of U. S. Steel
One of the marvels of the world is the production of steel in the United States. This country now produces every month as much steel as Japan can produce in a year; it produces every six days as much as Italy can produce in six months; it produces every day three times as much as Germany and all the countries under her control can produce in the same time. The plate tonnage, now around 1,000,000 tons a month, is twice the tonnage that all the rest of the world can roll. The hopes of an Allied victory in this war rest to a considerable degree upon the men that manage the affairs of’ the United States Steel Company. One of the former presidents of this colossal company was Myron Taylor, President Roosevelt’s personal ambassador to the Vatican.
One of the main component parts of the United States Steel Company is the Carnegie Steel Company, which in the previous world war supplied defective armor plate used on United States navy ships and in guns. Some of the guns blew up and killed 147 sailors and marines. The ships at sea had blowholes in their armor. For these misdeeds the United States government received back $140,000 in cash; not much, to be sure, but enough to show that somebody did wrong in the matter of inspection, and that this particular subject shopld be closely watched. It is therefore of interest to quote what In Fact has to say under the heading “History Repeats”, in its issue of April 5, 1943:
Last week Carnegie-Illinois Steel, branch of the United States Steel Corporation, was found passing off substandard steel to U. S. navy, using fake tests. Almost immediately U. S. Steel began a big advertising campaign, taking page ads in NYC and other papers. Sure enough New York Sun report was not a story of big corporation sabotage of U. S. war effort, but a whitewash which began by quoting Pres. Perry saying it was all regrettable, headed: “Big Steel Regrets Employees Faked Tests for Navy Plates.” Herald Tribune faked the news in an editorial which said: “The revelation before the Truman committee that workers ...” etc. This is falsehood. The crime was not committed by workers but by inspectors who were acting for higher-ups. At any rate the crime was not committed by the workers. The crime was exposed by a supervisor of inspection. World-Telegram said: “Evidence does not implicate the higher-up executives.” New York Times editorially advised readers to believe high officials’ statements. When ex-Ambassador Gerard, U. S. Steel stockholder, telegraphed Truman Senate Committee corporation directorship by J. P. Morgan is to blame, Daily News ran column story, Times buried two paragraphs. U. S. tjteel now joins Anaconda Copper and U. S. Cartridge Co. in sabotaging military supplies for U. S., endangering lives of our troops. Nothing in all the history of labor is as un-American as the actions of these corporations.
The Baltimore Sun seems to have more courage than any of the so-called “news” papers referred to in the foregoing. Their column-long story on March 24, 1943, (the day that the news became public)' was headed, “Admit Steel Tests Faked; Employes of Carnegie-Illinois Deny Any Motive Except Patriotism; Head of U. S. Steel, Parent Concern, Says Those Responsible Will Walk Plank.” Even that was whitewashed. But the next day the paper said editorially:
Letters and oral testimony by company officials were offered as evidence that inspectors in the Irvin plant ordered falsification of test records in order to make imperfect plates appear to meet specifications. Committee members connected another ’Carnegie-Illinois plant with the Kaiser-built tanker Schenectady, which broke up in January while on its trial run. The ship began to break, it was shown, in plates supplied by the Homestead plant of the same corporation, and these plates were described in a report on the collapse by the American Bureau of Shipping as “brittle” and “more like cast iron than steel”.
Any reader of this magazine who thinks that the financial heads of the United States Steel trust will come into court and admit having any responsibility for sending out brittle steel that is about on a par with cast iron should see a good physician immediately. When a thing like this comes to light, the first thing to do is to pick some poor man like the man who wrote the following letter to the Truman Senate Committee:
1 am Robert Kinnard. I started pulling tensile tests for Carnegie-Illinois at the Irvin plant about May, 1942. Air. Connell and Mr. Ireland instructed me to “pull up” tensile tests. “Pull up” means to increase the tensile value above their actual value. They repeated this ever so often. To keep my job I followed instructions. We kept ringers on the lower shelf of the table used when the proper test could not be found. Around August I measured the elongation of a test piece wrong and Tom Reed, a Navy inspector, measured it again and found a different value. As a result, I was taken off tensile testing. About December or January I was put back on tensile testing and then began to pull the tests correctly. After I was put back, nobody approached me directly, but they intimated I should again falsify the values. Mr. Ireland seemed displeased when I failed to “pull up” the values. Air. AlcGarrity approached me and asked me how many more tests were going bad. He seemed very worried. When I went back on the job my rejections were a lot more numerous than before. Mr. Tarella (Michael Tarella, general foreman) approached me and asked me to consider if I would pull the values up not more than 2,000 pounds. I refused.
By now, of course, Kinnard is out, and looking for work, while the men who drove him to make the dishonest tests are being covered from wrath, as far as that is possible in a ease of this kind. That the responsibility for this bad steel reached upward beyond the chief metallurgist of the company is apparent from the following which appeared in the N.ew York Weekly People of April 3:
“In November, 1942,” said the supervisor of inspection for Carnegie-Steel, “I referred this matter [shipment for war purposes of poor steel] to W. F. McGarrity [the chief metallurgist] and was instructed to reject all the bad plates. Two days later John McConnell [sheet mill metallurgist] told me that McGarrity- ‘got his ears beat back’ when he brought the subject up in an operating meeting [of higher executives] and I was instructed to go easy on rejections.”
", Another bad baby was laid on the < Steel Trust’s doorstep by Andrew Jackson Higgins. That gentleman was to have built ships in New Orleans, but, so he says, the big steel companies did not want him to have the necessary steel wherewith to build his plant. Higgins then went on to say that if the government would give him the “Go” signal he could get all the steel he needed, because the same steel mills that would not let him have steel direct had loaded the warehouses to the rafters and when orders were placed with the “bootleggers” at their warehouses, at the higher prices, deliveries were made at once. The president is alleged to have said concerning these Higgins charges that if the big steel men were doing this kind of business (loading up the warehouses so as to get fancy prices, and withholding and delaying shipments of the big lots needed for ship construction) then they ought to go to jail.
Kind reader, do not get all heated up with fear that any of the big men in the Steel Trust are in any danger of jail. They are as safe as that corporation owner, a maker of airplane parts, mentioned by Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau, who hired himself as sales representative at a compensation of $1,656,000 (some salary, that) to cut down his corporation’s income tax.
Uncle Sam Is in Business Too
Uncle Sam is in business himself now, and in a big -way. Private industry in 1939 had a plant investment of $21,500,000,000, but Uncle Sam’s own new industrial plant some time back was almost half that amount. The tw’o kinds of plpnts, government and private, are getting results, too. Production is increasing by leaps and bounds, and a steady stream of airplanes, ships, tanks and ordnance is pouring forth to the many fronts where American boys and their friends are on the firing lines.
The first $77,516,392,000 in war contracts was placed about where one would have expected it to go. Naturally the big industrial states got most of the business. Those getting from around $7,000,000,000 down to about $2,000,000,000 were, in the order named, Michigan, New York, California, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Texas, Washington, Kansas. Those getting from around $2,000,000,000 down to about $1,000,000,000 were, in the order named, Massachusetts, Maryland, Wisconsin, Missouri, Virginia, Alabama. Contracts for more than $100,000,000 went to Louisiana, Tennessee, Minnesota, Florida, Georgia, Oregon, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Maine, Colorado, Rhode Island, Iowa, Nebraska, Utah, Mississippi, West Virginia, Arkansas, Kentucky, South Carolina, Delaware, Arizona. The smallest orders went to the least populous states, grading dowm from New Hampshire to Nevada, New Mexico, the District of Columbia, Vermont, Idaho, South Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming. Last on the list was North Dakota, which was given only $270,000 as against its nearest competitor, Wyoming, with $25,074,000.
The Subsidized Sugar Famine
When it comes to managing a business backwards the politicians are as much worse than the Big Business crowd as they arc better than the religious frauds. The sugar story illustrates this. For not producing sugar the politicians paid the following sums to the parties named: Luce & Company, Puerto Rico, $614,643; Fajardo Growers, Puerto Rico, $528,839; Oahu Sugar Company, Hawaii, $510,062; United States Sugar Corporation, Florida, $470,007 ; Eastern Associates, Puerto Rico, $447,959; Waialua Agriculture Company, Hawaii, $444,225; Ewa Plantation Company, Hawaii, $443,021. This was supposed to produce a sugar famine, but the good Lord planned it otherwise. The politicians said there would be a crop in 1942 of 5,300,000 tons, but the actual crop was 8,500,000 tons; so, despite the above-named and other “not producers”, there was so much sugar that iio body except the politicians knew what to do with it.
At the very time that housewives in the north were begging the politicians for enough sugar to do up their canned fruit for the season the Imperial sugar refinery at Sugar Land, Texas, had so much sugar (20,000,000 pounds) in its warehouse that it had to close down. Two other warehouses at Houston were in the same predicament. The United Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Association claims that in 1942 millions of dollars’ worth of berries and other perishable fruits rotted because of the foolish restrictions imposed, supposedly, because of the sugar famine subsidies that had been levied. While Americans were allowed 5 pounds of sugar to can a bushel of peaches, Canadians were allowed 25 pounds for the same purpose.
The Rubber Muddle
The rubber muddle was another sample of how the politicians can take a problem that is relatively simple and waste a year doing next to nothing. Rubber is made of styrene liquid and butadiene gas. The styrene liquid comes from either coal or petroleum, and there is no problem in producing it by the shipload. The butadiene gas can be obtained either from ordinary 190 proof industrial alcohol in one single step or from petroleum by a complicated process in plants which it takes 18 months to build and get into operation.
Fulton Lewis, Jr., who made a study of this subject for The Progressive, saw synthetic rubber being made in Philadelphia. He met capitalists and engineers ready and anxious to make it on a huge scale, but they were told by Frazier Moffatt, who is at one and the same time a government rubber official and an official of an industrial alcohol corporation, that he would not approve the project of making it. One wonders why. Lewis did a good job. He quotes Senator Guy Gillette, Iowa Democrat, as having said:
It is undisputed in the record that the only known and commercially tested processes for the production of synthetic rubber, developed principally in continental Europe by the Germans, Poles, and Russians, were from alcohol produced from grain and potatoes. There is no explanation by any responsible officials as to why this country, in setting up a program for the production of synthetic rubber, gave consideration only to untried laboratory experiments from petroleum, which will require twice the time and many times the critical material needed to produce the same synthetic rubber from alcohol. The only plausible explanation seems to be that the $l-a-year men in the Chemicals Branch of the War Production Board were fearful that the war might end suddenly, and that there might then be some surplus industrial alcohol that would provide competition for companies with which many of these officials had been associated for a long period of time.
Frazier Moffatt might be able to explain all this, and if he can do so he should; and if he cannot, he should resign.
Why All the Tenderness?
One cannot help but wonder at all the tenderness which the politicians that have public money to spend (in the tens of millions of dollars) show toward concerns that have so frequently been up for action by the Department of Justice or 1 by the court of public opinion. The Aluminum Trust is such a concern, and the new and different newspaper PM broke the news in its issue of March 22, 1943, that Jesse Jones loaned this outfit $68,500,000 without interest, to build a plant in Canada, while construction of new public power projects in the United States was being stopped by War Production Board priority orders.
In an article entitled “The Force
Behind the Nazis”, Francis Aidham, in the Vancouver Daily Province, shows that one of the main backers of Hitler is the great dye industry of Germany, commonly known all over the world by the abbreviation “L G. Farben”. A few paragraphs cite some essential facts:
' ■ They (I. G. Farben) reached out and dominated the whole business world. Their hand was, and continued to be until a few months ago, felt in every branch of industry.
They begged, borrowed and stole patents. They falsified formulas so that when their associates in other lands tried to manufacture according to “know-hows” for which they had paid so much in money and in the curtailment of business honor, processes went wrong and workmen died in the attempt. Tens of thousands of Allied soldiers, it is estimated, died from the effects of phony salvarsan, when nonGermans tried to make it from formulas supplied before the Avar by I. G,
With cool disregard for the law of libel, the authors [of the book Germany’s Master Plan) name firms and individuals in Britain and the United States who were more loyal to I. G. than they were to their own nations, during the last war and at the outset of this war. Agreements provided that the moieties of this world cartel should continue to do this and that until the war was over. Thus Du Pont in America and Mitsui in Japan were, in effect, pledged to work against Britain when this war began.
The authors think that Hitler struck too soon; that the sinister work of I. G. in restricting output in non-Axis countries was incomplete, as witnessed by the swift recovery7 which industry7 in the United Nations has made under the spur of war. They think that Germany’s master plan for world domination through production ran be shattered for ever, provided “Big Business” in the United Nations is not allowed to go back to cartel.
What Is the Answer?
What is the anstverto the question propounded at the opening of this article1! It tvill be remembered that the president of the City National Bank of Fort Smith, Ark., raised the query “Whom can you trust now?” He thought that the shameful record of the Du Ponts, the Public Utilities, the Standard Oil Company and the Aluminum corporations and others made it appear that the world is coming to an end. He had a correct thought. The world, Satan’s world, has legally ended. Mr. Nakdimen does not realize that “the earth abideth for ever” (Ecclesiastes 1:4) and that Satan's world, now7 in its death throes, is to be followed by ‘the new world wttebein dwelleth righteousness'. He should get the book The New World, read it and study it, Bible in hand. When he does so, if his heart is right with God, he will find the full answer to his question. He can trust the One that Jehovah God trusts and whom He has appointed to take full charge of all earth’s affairs, that is, Christ Jesus. There is no other place to look for security, rest, hope and peace, and the promised blessings of everlasting life here on earth under perfect conditions. Armageddon intervenes, it is true, but when it is over and gone the joy of every honest heart will have come.
Victory (?
THE Nazis are so sure (?) of their victory that Norwegian postage stamps now bear the British “V”, which the Nazis cribbed for their own use as soon as those friendly to Britain began using it in countries under Nazi control. Everything goes in wartime; so if the Gormans can make use of a British idea
in Norway
and get away with it, Mars is well satisfied. In some parts of Norway only Quis-lingists are now permitted to have radio sets. That does not look much like confidence in ultimate victory, but more like an act of desperation to prevent the Norwegians from knowing what is going on in the world, and hoping for deliverance.
Europe’s Religious Thugs
IN HITLER'S Europe those who rule the people religiously, and those who rule the people politically, and those who supply the armaments of war, happen to be one united group of men. The religious element gained political ground by promoting the dictators; and through the dictators the armaments kings promoted war; and the German military generals happening to be part and parcel with the industrial magnates, war not only opened up their munitions markets and put their armies into action, but swept all together, the military, industrial and religio-political elements, into tremendous power behind the backs of their stooges the dictators.
Mussolini and Hitler each organized gangs of fancy-shirted toughs and started the same brand of thuggery in Italy and Germany that was initiated in America when two Chicago newspapers hired gub-slinging killers to fight circulation wars for them. As Big Business leaders in America hire gangsters to leadrpoison labor unions, for the same reason Big Business in Europe hired the services of Mussolini and Hitler. But AI Capone wound up differently in America from the way Mussolini and Hitler wound up in Europe, Why? Principally because Big Religion in Europe came to the side of Big Business and adopted these plug-ugly mur- -derers for her own children and made full-fledged 'dictators out of them, to be employed thereafter as “the sword of the Church” in returning the continent to the folds of “Catholic socialism”.
Reminds In Fact:
It is a historical fact that when the Italian Confederation of Labor told ■ Mussolini it could not use his Blackshirts for seizing Rome he went to the Lega Industriale, the Assoeia-zione fra Industrial! Metallurgic! ed Affini and the Confederazione Generale dell’Indu-stria. It is a historic fact that the Nat’l German Employers Ass’n, the Nat’l Federation DECEMBER 22,1943 of German Industry, the Nat’l Chamber of Commerce and the Herrenklub subsidized and paid for Hitlerism. Translated into their nearest equivalent in America, these elements are: our Nat’l Ass’n of Manufacturers, the U. S. Chamber of Commerce, the Associated Industries, and the Associated Farmers.
By smashing the Socialist and Popular parties and destroying labor unions, Mussolini did in Italy what Hitler has done for the financial-clerical elements in Germany and the rest of Europe. In 1929 the pope at Vatican City negotiated his religious and political working agreement with Mussolini, accepting also, besides 750 million lire to be collected directly off the Italian people, one billion lire worth of 5-percent negotiable Italian State bonds, which not only represents one of the biggest investments in Italian Fascism on the books, but is good only so long as Mussolini’s Italy hangs together.—Financial Agreement Between the Holy See and Italy, page 14.
If not the Roman Catholic Hierarchy with its big money principal of the flock, then who is the power behind Mussolini, the murderer of Ethiopia, Albania, Greece, not to mention Spain?
Meanwhile in 1929, after his monkey-shines in the Munich beer hall putsch, Hitler received his first thug-money from Fritz Thyssen, who admits having called together leaders of industry and banking and telling them to employ Hitler to make Germany safe for excess profits, as well as for Thyssen’s “Church”, the Roman religion. In 1932, when Hindenburg and the Prussian landlords became involved in a scandalous fraud over taxes and land subsidies, Hitler offered to suppress the whole mess in return for power. The most powerful political and commercial elements in Germany at that time w'ere organized under the Right wing of the Catholic Centre Party, which party, manipulated
by Catholic von Papen and papal nuncio Paeelli, now pope Pius XII, made the deal by which von Hindenburg was enabled to cover up his own fraudulent corruption in appointing Hitler as chancellor. Within six months from that time this common thug and killer made I^is working agreement, or concordat, i.*with the pope just as Mussolini had made his four years previously. Has not Adolf Hitler by his course of action proved openly that it was these elements that promoted, subsidized and established him in power as the Nazi dictator?
His rise to power had been popular with a lot of people because he had promised the middle and lower classes of Germany the preference in all government jobs, abolition of interest on loans, and that he would break the power of the trusts and cartels and divide up the department stores. Each of these points, if carried out, would have spelled doom for Big Business as well as for a plunderous priestcraft, and might have led to anything in Germany from a liberal Socialist republic to Communism. But these promises were, like everything else that Hitler ever promised them, the fruit of his Jesuit training, lies designed to get control of the people.
As soon as the big industrialists and bankers and the Roman Catholic Hierarchy gave the word, Hitler and his whole gang of Nazis did not hesitate. They instantly annihilated freedom of speech, press and worship (but not freedom of religion), throwing Jehovah’s witnesses to the firing squads and concentration camps to the “Bravos!” of the Hierarchy. (The German Way, May 29, 1938) At the same time Hitler, Goering and Hess issued sharp reprimands against “attacks on business”. Hess quelled all activities against department stores.
By August of 1933 the high hopes of the little people were fully blasted, the middle-class leaders were served a similar fate with Jehovah’s witnesses, while the Fighting League of the Middle Class was simply slaughtered in warm blood. The turnover tax on Big Business was then reduced | percent on all commodities, while for Little Business it was raised 2 percent. Hitler shattered Germany’s precarious ceiling prices, and Big Business raised its prices to match its greed. Two years before the demoniac broke loose upon the world thousands of small business men, no longer able to get prices for their products that would keep them alive, were liquidated; and the total mobilization now taking place in Germany is simply a cleaning up of whatever might be left of small, independent enterprises, so that no one owns any kind of business in Germany to speak of except the princes of Big Business that bought and paid for Hitler from the start. Extend this same situation all over the continent of Europe where even worse things have happened to the middle and lower classes in every country. Add to that the land situation.
Hitler’s greatest bait from the beginning was the promise to give the German masses bigger land grants, or more "living space”. The space these Germans lived on before Hitler was greater than what they have to call their own now, the addition to Germany of all Europe and a huge slab of Asia notwithstanding.
Ten thousand persons own Europe today, practically all the land as well as the industries. Germany being a nation of 80 million people, that means that under National Socialism only one person out of about 8,000 has any voice even in Germany. Soviet Russia’s 2 million Communists rule an empire of 180 million, giving the say-so to one person out of about ninety. The chances of being a somebody appear to be almost ninety times better in Communist Russia than in Nazi Germany!
But, of course, as all the bishops of Fulda will tell you, in Germany there is the blessed privilege of private ownership.. Three thousand Germans own 650 million acres of tillable land among them. Four hundred and fifty men own 1,235,000 acres apiece, or, all put together, these 450 men own 40 percent of all land under cultivation in Germany. One million German peasants subsist on the same amount of land owned by 412 Junkers. Three million families, 60 percent of all those occupied in agriculture in Germany, own on an average about H acres per family. They cannot dispose of what they grow on these rabbit patches, but even before the war each farmer had to deliver all grain, milk, eggs, and cattle ready for slaughter, at prices lower than those he was formerly able to obtain. This is the kind of “living space” that Hitler has won for his people. But this picture of Germany serves only as an example of what has happened elsewhere in Europe.
Then who has gained from Hitler’s rise and conquests? Except for a cantankerous Thyssen here and there who had to be discarded, the money lords and warlords of Europe who subsidized Nazism have gained the most monstrous amount of wealth and power ever accumulated by one clique in history.
As for the Hierarchy that made its working agreement with the chief thug of modern times, what has it gained? Germany was predominantly Protestant, with a minority of 20 million Catholics when Pacelli maneuvered Hitler into power; today Greater Germany has 48 million Catholics, which makes it predominantly Catholic. That is one thing. But here is more. The pope at Vatican City now has under him a Catholic on every throne in Europe, such as was Mussolini in Italy, and as are Franco in Spain, Petain in France, Salazar in Portugal, and so on. Never in the heyday of the “Holy Roman Empire” dark ages was the Roman Catholic religious system more powerful and domineering on the continent than today, thanks to Adolf Hitler.
The Darling of the Warlords
When ordinary bank robbing was in style, six thugs were enough to pull DECEMBER 22, 1843 off the holdup: one sat in the car and kept the motor running; two watched the streets; two went inside to shoot down the cashier and a few bystanders, while the sixth, the nimblest-fingered bandit, looted the safe and money box. But now, instead of an automobile, give the bandits a religious Hierarchy to whisk them away in the skirts of religion, multiply their numbers a few million times, march 100,000 of them together with 18,000 special beat-up men (Gestapo) into a country like Austria and pull a real job. That is exactly what Hitlerism means: thuggery on a totalitarian scale.
According to The Economics of Barbarism, “Very soon after they came to power, leading National Socialists became members of the directories of the big companies, while the chief industrial capitalists became members of the state administration.” As for the Prussian warlords, they were already part and parcel with the financial trusts, so that all together they went, happy as bandits could be, into a dozen Austrias, in the most outlandish yet scientific thugging expeditions ever staged. The leaders of the Nazi war machine are the watchdogs and bloodhounds. The German trusts, of which the warlords are a part, do the robbing and looting. In this manner they have seized more than the entire continent of Europe, and-the problem of getting it back out of their hands is not to be mentioned in the same breath with the, relatively childish task of getting back the loot from a handful of bank robbers.
The Prussian generals, or Junkers, have made superb and thoroughly scientific improvements on the game they played in World War I. In 1914 they backed the kaiser, grew rich out of the war, and survived intact after the kaiser went down. Now they back Hitler, grow far richer out of World War II, and have astonishingly good reasons to expect to survive even more securely after the fuehrer goes down.
As leaders in the big trusts that work hand in hand with Hitler and which have increased in wealth and power immeasurably since 1933, the German warlords have become so solidly entrenched in the political and industrial world that not even the disaster of a military ^defeat, no, nor even the loss of personal glory, seems to affect their position. An example of this has already been witnessed in the ease of Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau, who “died” out of the military picture back in 1941 when he could not pour enough Germans over piles of his own dead to take Rostov. What of thatT—only a nasty lot of human blood spilt. But as for money, which is all that matters, Walter was and, of course, still is well supplied. He inherited an abundance of it from his old man, who was an executive and director of the Rheinmetall-Werke.
Von Waldegg and Son-in-Law
Then there is Admiral Heusinger von Waldegg, a director of Krupps’ Germania shipyard in Kiel, Who is going to take apart the Krupp empire from under men like von Waldegg when this war ends? Von Waldegg5 s son-in-law, by the way, winds a crank in Goebbels’ lie-factory which “inspires” the German people to keep shooting away to win the war to win the world, after which they will settle down in their ‘living spaces” to be royally served by all the “lesser” races of humankind.
General Thomas, head of the Military Economic Staff, sits on the board of Rheinmetall side by side with Catholics Kloeckner and Bosch of I. G. Farben, Strauss of the Deutsche Bank, and other influential bankers, all of whom are Leaping treasure together for the last days’ while heaping is good. Also on the Military Economic Staff is General von Hannekan, who expects to live long like a prince after Hitler is gone, by reason of having gotten himself appointed director. of a number of firms outside Germany, seized in some of Hitler’s robber-raids across the earth.
Of course, we remember the gallantry of cavaliers Benito and Adolf, who crusaded to the aid of Franco in Spain, where they destroyed “Bolshevism” and turned Spain backwards into the tender, mercies of Catholic Socialism. The Roman Catholic Hierarchy’s official account of this teamwork is detailed in the N.C.W.C. pamphlet Insurrection in Spain. General Quarlimonthad charge of “Saint” Adolf’s Nazi forces in Spain. One reason why the Spanish Republic was so teetotally murdered can be laid at the feet of Quarlimont. His brother is a director in a number of firms, but, above all, in the' Metallgesellschaft A G, a subsidiary of I. G. Farben, which holds extensive interests in Spain. Had not General Quarlimont done a bang-up job of silencing a pestiferous Spanish citizenry who wanted to enforce constitutional laws against foreign cartels that were sucking Spain’s lifeblood out of her, Quarlimont’s brother, along with certain gentlemen from Britain, would have lost much business in Spain.
Otto Stuelpnagel, commander of Paris, has a brother Joe who draws dividends from the enormous German Cellulose Trust, and personally owns one of Germany’s wealthiest and most influential newspapers. Besides all this, Joe Stuelpnagel controls (or did once) the Kexhold Works of the Waldhof Combine on Lake Ladoga as well as the Procope firm of Viborg. Asa result of the Soviet-Finnish peace treaty of 1940, both these concerns came under Soviet management. But as one system of totalitarianism has proved to be about as efficient as another when it comes to operating war factories, Stuelpnagel should not worry about the welfare of any business of his that Stalin takes over.
A Nazi Once Told the Truth!
General Ritter von Leeb draws big dividends as a director iri the Goering Trust, which is within itself a “green
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- bay tree” spreading branches in every industrial section of Europe and, no doubt, beyond. Air Marshal Goering’s is the most magnificent industrial empire in existence. Founded in 1937 with a * capital of 5,000,000 marks for the exploitation of low-grade ores in Germany, . the Hermann Goering Works increased t their scope so rapidly that in one year
• they multiplied their capital to 400,
000,000 marks. Goering boasted to Balbo of Italy that the Works were destined to become “the greatest industrial enterprise in the world”. Though it sounded like 3 whopper, for once a Nazi must have told the truth. The Goering combine controls the chief ore, iron, steel and oil industries in Austria; the Skoda Works and the Brno armaments works plus# iron, steel and manufacturing . plants in Czechoslovakia; the French Schneider-Creuzot works; the Sudeten-German mines; as well as 80 percent of the steel production and 50 percent of the locomotive production of Rumania; not to mention Belgium’s Koenigs and ■ Laurahuette mines; nor the De Wendel ore resources in Lorraine and Luxemburg. Nor is this all. Hermann Goering personally is the largest private owner of forest lands in the world.
How easy would it be, or how desirable to this world in general, to dissolve the 250 financial organizations which Senator O’Mahoney’s TNEC Report exposes as owning and controlling the United States? Much harder would it be to dissolve their counterparts, the financial trusts in Europe, which are even stronger and more powerfully entrenched in the political and military elements of this world than Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, ALCOA, or Ford. These elements under Nazism have transformed in an appalling manner the face of Europe, as Communism transformed the face of Asia. And as long as European economics remain in the hands of totalitarian warlords and trusts, they will continue to produce a military machine that holds the earth in terror. But let the Nazi economic setup be suddenly disorganized with Hitler’s military defeat, for example, and all Europe will be plunged into a nightmare of famine, disorder, and the maddest confusion that ever a continent experienced. Not that the peoples of Europe should or could endure much longer the oppression of this frightful system; yet so diabolical is the scheme which scientific thuggery has put across that no matter if Hitler personally is liquidated, the men behind him fear no earthly powers that might soon dislodge them from their entrenched position.-—M. C., Tennessee.
Nicotine Wanted
ONCE upon a time nicotine was literally a drug on the market. Now there is an estimated shortage of 300,000 pounds. The reason is an unprecedented demand for nicotinic acid, a “B” vitamin needed to fortify white flour. M. J. Copley, R. K. Eskew, and J. J. Willaman of the United States Eastern Regional Re-■ search Laboratory, Philadelphia, have undertaken research to find more extended industrial uses for tobacco. Until recently the million pounds of nicotine DECEMBER 22, 1943, recovered annually in this country were used in insecticides. Now new and more efficient nicotine insecticides are sought to replace derris and pyrethrum. A jump from 10,000 pounds of nicotinic acid produced in 1940 for the treatment of pellagra to an estimated. 300,000 pounds for flour fortification this year has used up supplies of nicotine, the best known material for making nicotinic acid.—New York Times.
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* The Mysterious Deliverer
MOVED by the holy spirit of God operating upon their minds, the holy prophets of Jehovah God testified of the coming of the great Deliverer, foretold by Jehovah God himself in the garden of Eden before fallen man’s expulsion therefrom. The prophets prophesied both of the Deliverer’s sufferings and of His glory that would follow; but they did not understand the meaning of their own prophecies. (See 1 Peter 1:11,12.) Hence the matter was a mystery or divinely-kept secret to them. Even the angels of heaven desired to look into these things, but were not permitted to understand. God’s purpose was to keep the matter hidden in secrecy until'. His own due time to reveal the great truth.
Then came Jesus, whose coming was announced shortly beforehand by John the Baptist; and He was pointed out as the one who would take away the sin of the world. Jesus chose His disciples and they walked with Him. And He taught them for three and a half years; but they did not understand the great mystery. They expected Jesus to be made an earthly king and hoped that they might be with Him in the kingdom, probably in His official cabinet, because the mother of James and John asked if one son might sit on His left and the other on His right hand in the kingdom. When He was put to death they were greatly disappointed, mystified, and in great distress.
Even after His resurrection the faithful apostles did not understand His mission, and this is shown by their words to Him on the day that He ascended to heaven. Acts 1:6-9 reads: “When they 16 ‘ therefore were come together, they asked . of him, saying, Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again’the kingdom to Israel? And he said unto them, It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power. .,'. But ye shall receive power, after that the holy [spirit] is come upon you: and : ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judiea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth. And when he had spoken these • things, while they beheld, he was taken up; and a cloud received him out of their sight.”
In obedience to Jesus’ command, these faithful disciples went to Jerusalem to the place known as the “upper room”, and there waited. Ten days passed, and then it was that the holy spirit, the invisible force from God, was visited upon them; and, true to Jesus’ promise, .the disciples, began to understand that He must be King at God’s right hand.
Jesus had now ascended on high and presented the merit of His sacrifice before Jehovah. The acceptance of this was manifested by the pouring out of the holy spirit upon His disciples who had been His consecrated followers for three and a half years. Doubtless the angels of heaven now began to know something about the great mystery. What joy must have been in heaven when Jesus Christ appeared before the Father and preseated the merit of His sacrifice and was received by Jehovah! Surely the heavenly host must have sung His praises. They had beheld Him triumph- . ing over death and the grave and being now exalted to»a position in heaven next to the Father. It must have been a great joy to the heavenly host, even as to Jesus himself the contemplation of it had been a great joy: “Who for the joy that was set before him, endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.” (Hebrews 1.2’: 2) What joy must have filled the hearts of. His disciples when they began to understand the mys- .
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■ tery of God and to see how wonderfully He had led them and their fathers before them, preparing them now f6r the revelation of this great truth ’
In due time Saul of Tarsus, who became Paul the apostle, was illuminated and understood. Then he wrote: “Who now rejoice in rhy sufferings for you, and fill up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ in my llesh for his body’s sake, which is the church: whereof I am made a minister, according to the dispensation of God which is given to me for you, to fulfil the word of God; even the mystery which hath been hid from ages and from generations, but now is made manifest to his saints: to whom God would make known what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles; which [mystery] is Christ in you, the hope of glory.” Here, at Colossians 1: 24-27, the apostle, emphasizes the fact that this mystery of God is now made known only to the saints. The term “saints” means “purified ones”, which purification comes through receiving the merit of Christ’s sacrifice and devoting themselves -wholly to the interests of God’s kingdom.
The word “Christ” signifies “anointed one”. Anointing means designation to official position in God’s royal organization,1 and such anointing is, not with literal oil as in the case of Israel’s priests and kings of old, hut with the . holy spirit of God. Christ Jesus is the instrument or channel of God for the blessing of believing humankind; and the first ones to receive the blessings through Him are the members of His body or church. (Acts 3:25,26; Galatians 3: 8, 9) All thereof being Anointed, The Christ is composed of Jesus, the great and mighty Head, and the 144,000 members of Ills body. (Revelation 7: 4-8; 14:1, 3) Christ Jesus is the head, and the church is His body. It is not unusual to speak of a body of men with a general at their head. Just so, the apostle says of The Christ: “And he [Christ Jesus] is before all things, and by him all things consist. And he is the head of the body, the church: wffio is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead; that in all things he might have the preeminence. For it pleased the Father that in him should all fulness dwell.”—Col oss slans 1:17-19.
The apostle Paul thus uses a human body to illustrate The Christ, the great mystery class; the Head representing Jesus, and the other members of that organized body representing those who are of His church. “For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ. Now ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular.”-—1 Corinthians 12:12,27.
Christ Jesus is designated in the Scriptures as “the seed of Abraham” according to God’s promise. “Now to Abraham and his seed w’ere the promises made. He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ.” (Galatians 3:16) Then showing how the members of the church are adopted by Jehovah God as sons and given to Christ Jesus and thus made a part of the “seed of Abraham”, the apostle addresses himself to the church of God, the followers of Christ Jesus, and says: “For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus. For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ. And if ye be Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.” (Galatiaps 3:26,27,29) Thus Christ Jesus is primarily “the seed of Abraham”, and the members of his church are associates with him and are adopted as part of the seed. Church means those called out to an assembly unto God; and so the period from Jesus’ first coming down till His second coming and destruction of the Devil’s cursed organization is the period employed by Jehovah God for the selection of the members of the church who are associated with Christ Jesus in the Kingdom.
A Jewish Study of the Two World Wars
A MAJOR difference between the present war and the previous World War is to be found in the diametrically opposite sets of ideas that motivate the two warring camps today, a condition which did not exist in the previous war. In the | beginning of the First World War, the same social economic system known as capitalism existed in all the belligerent countries. None of them had in the beginning of the war a consciousness of any need to change the social or political system. True, later, Wilson’s Fourteen Points introduced a new idealism into the camp of the Allies, especially because of the hope which they held out for the liberation of subdued nationalities, in advocating the principle of self-determination. Still, both sides were fighting essentially for possessions and influence, and not for a new social world order.
In the present war, however, we have three different groups of countries, two of which are lined up in self-defense against the third, the aggressor. Communist Russia, ruled by a dictatorship, is allied with the democracies, fighting together against Fascism and the Fascist way of life as represented by the Axis partners, Germany, Italy and Japan. The present war has been characterized by President Roosevelt as “a war for survival" because Fascism, to use the all-inclusive term for both Fascism and Nazism, is a social revolution of crude force and coercion intent on stamping out any way of life which denies the absolutism of the State, and concedes the principles of human equality and freedom, even in theory. It is a revolution that know’s no limitations of geography or moral restraint.
True, democracy, as we know it, and communist dictatorship, signify different economic and political systems, but they at least share certain basic values and outlooks in common. Indeed, many freedoms have been denied or curtailed in the Soviet Union, but the fact remains 18
that Comnfunist Russia has been striv-’<. ing in its own way to raise the level of education and security of all the people dwelling within its borders. For Communism, at least in theory, accepts human equality as a basic principle of conduct. The Soviet Union is the one country in the world where anti-Semitism and all racial discrimination have been officially outlawed. Moreover, the Communists, unlike the Nazis, do not accept dictatorship as the ideal form of government; they consider it as a transi- ' tional stage on the road to Socialism. For these reasons, it is sincerely hoped, by many, that the present comradeshipin-arms between Russia and the other members of the United Nations will lead to genuine co-operation between the democracies and the U.S.S.R. along lines specified in the Four Freedoms.
The Fascist Axis—A New Kind or Adversary
Fascism, on the other hand, is a complete repudiation of the democratic way of life based on freedom, and of the very assumptions of any equality of rights by individuals or groups, whether racial, national, religious or cultural. Fascism repudiates the ideals of human freedom, equality and brotherhood as undesirable. Instead, it preaches the doctrine of racial superiority, Germany, and Japan each claiming to be the “master race" destined to conquer and subjugate the rest of the world. (Their seeming alliance in this war is merely a temporary marriage of convenience.) Fascism glorifies war as an end in itself and declares brutality and ruthlessness to be the distinguishing mark of the Herrenvolk or “master race”, in its dealing with the other so- _ called “inferior races". . "
Moreover, a “master race" need have no conscience. Lying propaganda, Hitler wrote in his book, Mein Kampf, is a legitimate device, provided it serves Nazi ends. Nothing under Nazism is
consolation -right or wrong, save as it serves the Nazi drive for power. At first Hitler claimed that he only wanted to avenge the wrongs of the Versailles Treaty, and to-have all territory populated by Germans made part of Germany. In addition, he was going to save the world from the "communist menace” and from “Jewish domination”, the twin bogies in his arsenal of propaganda. He made one treaty after another and gave one promise after another, only to break each and every one of them with contemptuous scorn when it suited his purpose. He not only violated his nonaggression pacts with neighboring countries, but after each act of aggression and aggrandizement he brazenly lied to the world, declaring that his newly-annexed stretch of land was his “last territorial demand” in Europe. The democracies, unfortunately, acquiesced in Hitler’s repeated aggressions, even as they had failed to take action against his barbarous treatment of the Jews. As a result, Hitler’s strength and appetite increased with each easy victory until armed self-defense against his continued acts of aggression became inevitable.
For instead of being satisfied with restoring Germany’s “lost provinces”, Hitler continued to demand Lebensraurn, or “living space”, at the expense of others and for the exclusive use of the German “master race". In fact, he claimed the right to the entire planet for the so-called “racially superior Aryan” Germans to dominate and exploit.
When he finally succeeded in embroiling most of the nations of the world in what became for them a war of selfdefense and survival, Hitler, of course, blamed the-Jews for the war, even as he had blamed them for everything else in the past. Following the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Hitler discontinued attacking Communist Russia and Communism, and concentrated instead on denouncing what he termed the Anglo-Saxon democratic “plutocracies”. But when, in June, 1941, in violation of his non-aggression pact
DECEMBER 22, 1»43 with the Soviet Union, he invaded that country, he announced to the world that he was taking steps against the “plot devised by the Jewish Anglo-Saxo.n warmongers and the Jewish rulers of the Bolshevist center in Moscow”.
It should be noted that the present war, which Hitler initiated, is equally the result of the mentality, preparation and w’ill for conquest, of a majority of the Nazi-indoctrinated German people. In this respect the present war is different from the First World War, which was largely precipitated by the Austro-Hungarian and German kaisers and their camarillas of war lords. An index of the hew German mentality can be seen in the. cruel and ruthless behavior of the invading Nazi hordes as compared with the relatively civilized conduct of the German armies in the previous war. The German soldiers of today are, conscious followers of, and zealous warriors for, Hitler’s concept of German world domination. They display the same blind fanaticism and crusading spirit as do the Japanese in the service of their own idolized emperor and his war lords.
A Global and Total War—A New Kind of War
And so today we are engaged in a global and total war testing whether the fascist or anti-fascist and democratic way of life shall prevail. It is a “global war” because, unlike the First World War, it is being fought on every continent and every ocean. And it is a “total war” in that, more than ever before, the battles are fought not merely by uniformed armies but also by civilians behind the lines and by the competing propaganda of words and ideas, including the hate-inciting propaganda of dissension spread by treacherous fifth columnists. It is a total war also in that the fate of tire whole world is at stake. No longer are national boundaries and foreign markets the decisive issues. The crucial issue of this most terrible of all wars is whether the people of the world
19
shall have the opportunity to live a life of their own choosing in freedom, or whether they shall he denied that elementary right and be governed by the dictates of self-styled “master races1’.
The Jewish Stake in This War .. To Jews, however, the war is even of graver import than as a struggle between slavery and freedom. For were the United Nations to lose the war, it would mean the destruction of Jews everywhere, since they would not be allowed by the Nazi victors to live‘even as slaves. The suggestion of Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi philosopher, that a “Jewish reservation” be established by the Nazis at Madagascar (or some other inhospitable and outlandish place), should be considered in the light of past Nazi profession and performance, as another piece of deception calculated to impress the simple and naive with an example of Nazi “humaneness” and thereby mislead them in regard to real Nazi intentions. The fact is that, should the Nazis win the war, other peoples would be allowed to live, albeit as slaves, but Jews would be exterminated. This has been the fiendish boast and promise of the Nazis from the very beginning of their career, and to date this policy has been pursued methodically. Wherever Nazism has penetrated through military conquest or otherwise, Jews have been cruelly murdered en masse.
Anti-Semitism in the First World AVar
The situation is markedly different from that which prevailed during the First World War when anti-Jewish prejudice existed, to a greater or lesser degree, in virtually all the countries engaged in the conflict. Anti-Semitism or anti-Jewish prejudice in action did not exist in the U.S.A., Britaip, France, Italy, Belgium, Holland and the Scandinavian countries. In Germany and Austria-Hungary, anti-Jewish prejudice was still being exploited as an instrument of reactionary political propaganda.
Though it was potentially a great force, it was far from becoming official government policy with a mass base among the people, as has been the case with Nazism. Except for the legal proscriptions which had already existed against the Jews in Czarist Russia and Rumania before the war, there were no special laws of discrimination directed against the Jews anywhere else in Europe. Before and during the First World War, anti-Jewish prejudice and its active form antiSemitism were held jn disrepute in the New World and in the whole of Europe outside of Russia and Rumania. The brutal persecution of the Jews by the Czarist government was the cause of a great deal of embarrassment to the Allies; it prevented many liberals in their countries from giving wholehearted support to the war. In fact, the March 1917 revolution, which abolished Czarism in Russia, granting as it did equality to all, was a tremendous moral asset to the Allied Powers, who were then able to unite on liberal war aims, especially on those epitomized in Wilson’s slogan that the war was being fought to “make the world safe for democracy”.
Democracy’s Failure to Gauge the Nazi Threat
During the past decade, however, the world has been treated to the unseemly spectacle of a powerful government deliberately singling out a defenseless minority, the Jews, as the alleged archenemy of the German Reich and of mankind in general, deserving extinction. The democratic governments took but few and ineffective steps against the instigators and perpetrators of this barbarous policy, or against the spread of anti-Semitic and Fascist propaganda in their own countries. They looked upon Nazi persecution of Jews in Germany as a purely internal affair of the German nation. 'They did not see clearly that anti-Semitism w’as being deliberately forged by the Nazis, not merely into an instrument for power on their own home grounds, but also as a weapon for political penetration and disruption abroad. Neither did they fully understand that anti-Semitism would bring about the destruction not only of its Jewish victims, but that if unchecked it would lead to the destruction of democracy itself.
20
consolation
Nor did the abandonment of the German Jews to their own fate by the democratic governments and the Soviet Union serve as a sop to Hitler, or dull his appetite for power. In fact, by their failure to protest against the cruel policy of Hitler, they helped create a popular illusion that he was all-powerful and that he had to be appeased at any cost, thus contributing to the weakening of the stamina and power of resistance of his potential enemies and victims.
Anti-Semitism—Good Business for Germany—A Recapitulation
Hitler, of course, had his reasons for making anti-Semitism the spearhead of his political structure and ambition, for it served him both as a means and a goal. As a means, it was useful in causing division and dissension among the people in Germany as well as abroad. Through the preaching of anti-Semitism he was able to' win over, first the dregs of German society, and later the impoverished lower middle classes and nationalist-minded elements, thus finding the mass base around whom to consolidate his power. Anti-Semitism was also useful in supplying a nation, smarting under the defeat of the last war, with a convenient scapegoat upon whom to vent its wrath as compensation for a wounded pride. Anti-Semitism 'as employed by the Nazis, in labeling every thing, person or group they marked for destruction as “Jewish”, “Jewish-influ-enced,” or “Jewish-dominated”, helped to unite the broad popular masses on the doctrine of German racial superiority over all other races and nations, a doctrine vitally necessary as a psychological sop to the masses so that they might be armed with a crusading faith, and fortified spiritually for an extensive war of aggression. For although anti-Semitism superficially seems to be aimed only at Jews, it is in reality directed also against the freedom of non-Jews. Furthermore, through the persecution, insulting treatment and torture of a helpless minority, the German people were given evidence of their “racial superiority”. This, in turn, served to brutalize and train them for the ruthless treatment of all other races and peoples.
Anti-Semitism, moreover, constituted a convenient and potent instrument for satisfying the greed of Nazi Party adherents and fighters, through robbing the Jews of their property and livelihood. By insisting that foreign firms doing business with Germany be Juden-rein (free of Jews), the Nazis increased their economic stranglehold, especially upon neighboring countries which depended so much on. Germany’s trade. Such economic penetration then served as- an entering wedge for Fascist and anti-Semitic propaganda abroad, and the Nazi Party, which controlled the foreign trade, was thus able to convert it into an effective instrument of German foreign policy. Furthermore, by thus indicating to native quislings how the economic expropriation of Jews could be made a lucrative source of wealth and power, the Nazis helped create fifthcolumn movements everywhere, with anti-Semitism as their chief stock in trade. Anti-Semitism was fomented by the Nazis not merely as a means for their diabolical ends of capturing power in one country after another, but also as an end in itself. Hitler has time and again sworn to exterminate the Jews.—Research Institute on Peace and Post-War Problems of The American Jewish Committee, New York.
Three Times as Many Clothes
♦ The average weight of a woman’s clothing is 1.8 pounds in the summer and 2.6 pounds in the winter, while a man’s is three times as heavy.
How Catholic Is Italy?
NOW that the newspapers are carrying a lot of folderol about Rome “the eternal city”, it will be helpful to a common-sense and sanely-balanced viewpoint to take note of the religious situa-„ tion in “holy” Italy itself. There Rome S has exercised'the plenitude of its power for many centuries, and the results should be illuminating. Hence the following from an article by Gaetano Salvemini in The Protestant of August-September (1943) is timely.
No greater mistake could be made in approaching the problem of the relations between the Vatican and tomorrow’s Italy than to assume that the whole population of Italy is consistently Catholic, and that therefore no stone ought to be turned in Italy without the blessing of the pope and of the clergy. . , ,
From the religious point of view, the Italians may be grouped in four classes: (I) Non-Catholics; (2) Indiffcrents; (3) Idolaters; (4) Catholics proper. •
To the first class belong not only the 48,000 Jews and the 83,000 Protestants of the 1931 statistics, but all those who, although baptized in the Catholic church, would now make profession of having no religion if they were permitted to do so. An Italian census in which people were asked to state their religion was taken in 1911. In that census 871,000 persons declared that they had “no religion”; 653,000 did not give any answer, but this silence, in all fairness, may be interpreted as an equivalent to the answer “no religion”. . , .
The group of the “Indiffcrents” is formed by people who were baptized in the Catholic church and perform certain external acts of religion, such as contracting marriage according to the religious rite, christening their children, and asking for a religious funeral so as to obtain a regular ticket to heaven. But most of them never go to church, nor do they confess even once a year. In a pastoral letter of February, 1940, Cardinal Lavitrano, archbishop of Palermo, stated that “66 percent of the Italians do not hear mass on religious holidays, and only 12 percent of the Italian men receive communion on Easter”. (New York Times, February 7, 1940) . . .
Most urban workers, when they are not outspokenly irreligious, have this indifferent attitude. It will never be possible for an Italian of this type to understand why a man of sense should lose his temper over the affairs of the pope, while he can go out to breathe the fresh air and play a game of cards during his hours of leisure. Italian folklore is full ’ of stories in which priests, monks and nuns are the objects of derision. The common people of Pome are the most characteristic representatives of this indifference and raillery. ...
The “Idolaters” comprise the mass of the ‘ ■ lower classes of Southern Italy, and Papal States, and a good part of Tuscany. The people of Naples who abuse the image of their patron, San Gennaro, calling him ‘"Yellow Face” when he is slow in performing the miracle of making his blood boil; the peasants of the Abruzzi painted by Michetti and described by D’Annunzio who lick the floor of the sanctuary with their tongues while crawling on all fours toward the miraculous idol; the public woman [harlot] who keeps a lamp ever burning before a holy image in her “workroom”—should these Idolaters be counted as Catholic? . . .
Now we come to the Catholies proper, those who consistently accept the doctrines of the Church and try to conform their conduct to them. . ■
These consistent Catholics are not so “consistent” as the Irish, the Poles, or the French Canadians. Dante severely condemned the attempt made against Boniface VIII by No-garet and Sciarra Colonna, inasmuch as Boniface was the Vicar of Christ; but he reserved a place in Hell for this same Vicar of Christ, inasmuch as he considered him a simoniacal pope . . . not more than one-fifth of the Italian population may be regarded as “Catholic proper”. . . .
Today, even more than eighty years ago, the temper of the Italian people is not such as to countenance any active participation of the Vatican or the Italian Catholic.hierarchy in 'the Italian government. Any post-Faseist government in Italy which put itself under the wings of the Vatican would be of short duration. Whoever, ignorant of the actual Italian conditions, thought that he could build a political regime in Italy with the help of the pope would build on sand. The pope himself would be the most lamentable victim of such a mistake. The only wise thing for Pope Pius XII to do in the present emergency is to abstain from political maneuvering and to hope and pray that the Italians forgive him and his predecessor for their responsibility in aiding and abetting Mussolini arid in the consequent sulferings of their unhappy country.
More About
RECENTLY these columns carried an article entitled “The Talmud Muddle and the Way Out”. Some Jewish readers took offense at the article, which was published for their benefit. They contended that instead of being a disreputably muddle, the Talmud was a marvelous collection of Hebrew literature. Just recently Edersheim’s comment on the subject has come to attention, and it is given here in part for the further comfort and assistance of honest Jewish readers. This Jewish scholar says:
Who that has read half-a-dozen pages successively of any part of the Taimud, can feel otherwise than by turns shocked, pained, amused, or astounded! There is here wit and logic, quickness and readiness, earnestness and zeal, but by the side of it terrible profanity, uncleanness, superstition, and folly. Taken as a whole, it is not only utterly unspiritual, but anti-spiritual. Not that the Talmud is worse than might be expected of such writings in such times and circumstances, perhaps in many respects much better—always bearing in mind the particular standpoint of narrow nationalism, without which Talmudism itself could not have existed, and which therefore is not an accretion, but an essential ■ part of it. But, taken not in abrupt sentences and quotations, but as a whole, if is so utterly and immeasurably unlike the New Testament, that it is not easy to determine which, as . the case may be, is greater, the ignorance or the presumption of those who put them side by side. . . .
And to the reader of such disjointed Rab-DECEMBER 22, 1943 .
the Talmud
binie quotations there is this further source of misunderstanding, that the form and sound of words is so often the same as that of the sayings of Jesus, however different their spirit. For, necessarily, the wine—be’it new or old— made in Judea, comes to us in Palestinian vessels. . . . These two, starting from principles alien and hostile, follow opposite directions, and lead to other goals. He who has thirsted and quenched his thirst at the living fount of Christ’s teaching, can never again stoop to seek drink at the broken cisterns of Rabbinism.
Horse Blood for Transfusions
♦ At the California Institute of Technology “scientists” have used horse blood in transfusion into humans and for serums for immunization against disease. Dr. Dan H. Campbell, of the institute, reports:
We now can use cow or horse blood in transfusions to human [creatures], but the first transfusion sets up a hypersensitivity or allergy in the patient so that a second transfusion is dangerous and may prove fatal. We hope to overcome this in future experiments. Under present methods of immunization, for instance, meningitis germs are injected into a horse. It is these anti-bodies in serums made from the animal’s blood which immunize persons against meningitis. Other serums arc obtained similarly.
The divine prohibition as to eating or partaking of blood does not appear to trouble the “scientists".
The Province of Quebec Consecrated to the Holy Virgin
ON THE thirty-first of May the Province of Quebec was officially consecrated to the Holy Virgin. So we read in a French-Canadian Roman Catholic paper published in Winnipeg, Manitoba. $The consecration was made by Hon. Mr. *Adelard Godbout, prime minister of Quebec, over a radio hookup—no doubt on free time as a donation from the C. B. C., which collects a fee for radio licenses from'all Canadians, Protestant and Catholic alike. For the edification and instruction of our readers we translate the prime minister’s prayer in full:
The Act of Consecration
Translated from Ta Liberte of Winnipeg, Manitoba
From Quebec the prime minister, Mr, Godbout, then consecrated the Province to the Virgin Mary in the following words:
“0 Our Lady, we thy children are happy solemnly to recognize thee to-day as the true and first founder of Montreal,
“And because thou hast deigned still to make thyself the guardian of all oun Province, we desire by an official act (da«.s un acte. bien official') to consecrate it entirely to thee.
“In imitation of the gesture of Champlain, who at his death, made thee the inheritor of all his goods, we choose thee for our sole and perpetual sovereign.
“0 Mary, wilt thou thyself govern our country which abandons to thee all its natural and spiritual riches, that thou mayest dispose of them to the sole glory of God.
“Reign over all our parishes and in each home, making thyself the gentle ruler of them, 0 thou whom we wish to see preside over all our family joys.
“Above all anchor us in the holy traditions that thou hast inspired, thus aiding us better to fulfil the mission that thy Son has given us.
“0 Mary, look upon these one hundred and fifty churches or chapels that we have dedicated to thee and by which we mean to repeat perpetually the rosary of thy glory.
“These one hundred and fifty churches will above all things say to thee, 0 Mary, that thou art at home among us and that our 24
country is thy domain and that we are.thy people, a people of righteousness in a kingdom of grace and purity.
“0 Our Lady, accept this consecration that thy people make to thee, not with our lips only but from the depths of our heart as we bear witness, before the choirs of angels which serve thee, that it is our irrevocable will to belong from henceforth to none but thee.”
In a free country there is no law against private individuals, whether laymen or priests, consecrating their country to their god or their saints. It wrnuld, however,- be exceedingly bad taste for a government officialto perform such an act in public, even though it was made clear that the act was the official’s personal desire and not that of his government. But Mr. Godbout has gone far beyond bad taste; he has committed a public crime against every Protestant in the province of which he is prime minister. Mr. Godbout’s prayer emphasizes that his consecration of Quebec to the Virgin Mary is an official act (dans un acte bien official). According to Mr. Godbout’s act of consecration, all property held by Protestants belongs to the Roman Catholic Church, as do their persons. It was in this fashion that Inquisition fires were lit in Medieval days, and Rome has never relinquished its selfasserted claim to burn heretics. We protest in the name of fair-play and religious liberty against Mr. Godbout’s official act of the consecration of the Province of Quebec.
The theological implications of this French Roman Catholic prime minister’s prayer are revolting and disgusting to the Protestant mind. Mary is “the sole and perpetual sovereign”. Jesus Christ the Son of God is superseded by the Virgin. Or again, read Mr. Godbout’s prayer:
“We bear witness, before the choirs of angels which serve thee, that it is our irrev-
CONSOLAT1ON ocable will to belong from henceforth, to none but thee.”
According to this theology Mary is on the throne—Christ is forgotten. Has Mr. Godbout not read what the Son of God, the One Mediator between God and man, said in the days of His flesh to Mary, His mother after the flesh: “Woman, what have I to do with thee?”
But we do not expect theology from a prime minister even in his prayers, which in any case were doubtless written for him by the hand of a priest.
Tn political circles it is an accepted principle that “elections are not won by prayer”. But in Quebec the proverb does not hold. There elections are wron, if not by prayer, at least by prayers: Roman Catholic prayers recited before men, broadcast by radio with a blare of publicity. Thus did Mr. Lapointe recite .his prayer in Notre Dame. Public prayer in Quebec has become a political instrument to win elections by giving irrefutable proof of supine servility to priestcraft.—The Gospel Witness.
The Sacrificed Freedoms
AMERICAN citizens of British birth, and American citizens of American birth as well, hate to give up any of the four freedoms proposed in the Atlantic Charter: so it is with no surprise that Consolation received copies of letters written to His Majesty George VI, king of the British Commonwealth, sent to him from Modesto, Calif., Anaconda, Mont., New Orleans, La., Jackson, Miss., and Atlanta, Ga. And perhaps more are on the way. They cover about the same ground, but as one of the writers, G. N. Hilburn, architect, Modesto, Calif., states the facts with commendable point and brevity, a few paragraphs from his letter will be of general interest:
Some of the periodicals of the United States of America have stated that freedom of worship and of the press have been banned in the British Commonwealth. These freedoms have been attained by the sacrifice of countless lives throughout the centuries in all nations. The attaining and maintaining of these freedoms is of more importance to the world and will perhaps have more dire consequences, if lost, than the outcome of the present world conflict.
Thus it is with amazement that I note the banning of publications .and of distribution of literature and curtailing of free speech as well as of worshiping the Almighty God with perfect freedom of a minority group known as Jehovah’s witnesses. Regardless of the group, the conviction of any political or religious element curtailing any freedom guaranteed by law smacks of totalitarianism, which is an abomination to the Almighty God and destroys good government.
In November, 1942, the publications of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society were banned in your country. This restriction deprives thousands of your subjects of the results of research of the old Scriptural manuscripts. These results have been compiled with painstaking care and study by the leaders of Christianity.
Most of the writers sent similar letters to Winston Churchill and all of them asked for the relief which it is in the power of these men to give,. if they have the courage to do so. It takes real courage, in these days, to stand up like men against the open and covert demands of the Vatican. The New Orleans writer had this .paragraph:
Does Britain wish to stand responsible before the throne of Almighty God with those described at Psalm 94: 20 “which frameth mischief by a law-” against the proclamation of His Word? 1 trust not.
The Cycle
♦ Rags make paper, paper makes money, money makes banks, banks make loans, loans make debts, debts make poverty, poverty makes rags.—Emerman, in The American Guardian.
“Consolation” Barbershop
AS YOU pass this barbershop, some-.where in Missouri, you are struck by the unusual name, and if not from
Missouri, yet being in Missouri, you want to be shown. Seeing that it appears to be a well-run establishment, you conclude you might as well get your hair cut in a place that is somehow different from the ordinary barbershop. Besides, deep down in your heart you admit you could stand some consolation. You enter. The proprietor welcomes you and you are soon seated and tucked in. Before you have time to ask about the consolation angle, he remarks that while you are having your hair cut you might as well listen to something good. Is this going to be one of those talkative barbers ? you wonder. But no, he directs your attention to a phonograph conveniently placed and starts a record. You cannot help but listen and, as this is no mere chatter, your interest is aroused. Besides, your curiosity concerning the name of the barbershop is answered. It was consolation to listen to something so helpful apd Scriptural. You always did have respect for the Bible. But there is more. The barber introduces you to some Watchtower literature, and inasmuch as this literature contains more information along the lines of the talk you have just heard by phonograph, you conclude you want some. How much is it! It is not sold, the barber informs you. You may have this book on a contribution of 25c. (You thought it would cost you at least two dollars.) Also, you decide to take with you a copy of Consolation and of The Watchtower, at 5c each. You leave the barbershop minus your worries and your superfluous hair. You know you are going to enjoy reading the book and the magazines. The day looks brighter as you step out of the door.
The Quartermasters of Bataan
♦ The quartermasters of Bataan kept the food trucks going as long as there was any food. They threshed the rice crop of Bataan and milled it. They slaughtered every head of cattle, every cavalry horse, and every pack mule. They set fish traps. They boiled and reboiled coffee grounds. They obtained -salt by distilling sea water. They buried the dead, kept the death records, and cared for the refugees. Many were killed, and all the rest are prisoners of war. But they are men. ’
Echota Cotton Mill Management Despises Constitution
Her father was discharged from his job because she loved God and did what she behoved was right about saluting a flag.
WE LIVED in the Echota mill village at Calhoun, Ga., for nearly three years. Our little girl, Wynelle Everett, having reached school age April 8, 1942, entered the Echota school the opening of the following term. Her mother brought her the first day and filled out the entry blank, etc. The next day, during the morning program that is carried on at the school, Wynelle did not salute the flag. The teacher noticed it, and, as their way of salute was to place the right hand on the left side and say the pledge of allegiance to the flag, she said, "Put your little hand up here, hon.”Wynelle 'said, “We don’t believe in that.” The teacher said she would not make her, then. The following morning I brought her to school and the teacher, Miss Logan, told me about it. She said Wynelle made it so plain to her that she knew we had taught her. T told her why we don’t salute flags and that in some places they expel children from school because of not doing so. I didn’t know whether that would be the case here or not. She said the board would meet that night and she’d find out if she could let Wynelle come on to school. Then I gave her five God and the State booklets, nno for each of the teachers there, and one for the superintendent. 1 showed her our pledge, on page 28 of the booklet.
The next morning Wynelle’s mother and 1 both went with her. The teacher was very kind and said the superintendent had said it would be bad to deny her an education, so let her come on to school, and if that was our belief, to just let Wynelle remain silent. 1 told Miss Logan, the teacher, that I was glad that they still saw freedom of speech and of worship.
But someone carried the matter to IT. E. Jones, the president of the mill where I work. On Tuesday of the following week I was fired. Nelson, the superintendent of the mill, came to me and mentioned about my child’s not obeying one of the ordinances of the school. I told him why we did not salute flags. So he let me go at 5: 30. I told him I was sorry he didn’t still see freedom of speech and of wor-sliip of God according to the dictates of conscience. I witnessed to a number of people I had never witnessed to before. I got my notice of separation. It stated, “Discharged because he would not permit his daughter to salute the American flag at the schoolhouse.” This I tried to get them to change, because 1 merely wanted tin? truth. But they would not change it. They told me they didn’t have a thing against my work.
By the Lord’s help we are not suffering in the least from what they did to us there; we rejoice that we were counted worthy to suffer shame for His name. —Jewell E. Everett. ■
Progress in Louisiana
EADERS of this magazine know that in No. 480, issue of February 9,1938, under the title '''Tampering with the Ten Commandments", there was given complete evidence that the Roman Catholic ^Hierarchy has omitted, ignored and covered up the second commandment of Almighty God and then split the tenth one into two parts to conceal the crime against God and man. Once in a while somebody finds out about this, as is disclosed in the following, which appeared in the Baton Rouge StateTimes of January 15, 1942:
10 Commandments Pjmqle Replaced Witn Corrections
Shreveport. La., Jan. 15 (AP)—-Last summer, with formal ceremonies and with a number of ministers [priests, or course,—Ed.] in attendance, the Caddo parish police jury unveiled a bronze plaque purporting to be the Ten Commandments in the corridor of the parish court house.
Today the plaque was removed by order of the police jury house committee after it was discovered that the plaque was erroneous.
The second commandment had been omitted and the tenth commandment had been divided into t(wo and all but the first bore the wrong numbers. A new plaque will be installed.
Spiritual Food in Chicago
♦ "St. Christina Church, 1.1005 S. Homan Ave., November 12, 1940. Dear Friend: Turkeys—Turkeys—Turkeys. Twenty-five large turkeys. The best money can buy. Will be rallied in St. Christina Hall, 11031 S. Homan Avenue, Tuesday night, November 19, at the unbelievable low price of two cents a Bingo card. Less than a week away. No one in Chicago will give you such a bargain. Just spread this choice bit of newrs around town. Start a parade of your friends to the biggest turkey raffle in town. Two cents a Bingo card. No one else will offer such a bargain. Sincerely yours, Father RebedeauA
1944 CALENDAR NOW AVAILABLE
“TEACH ME TO DO THY WILL; FOR THOU ART MY GOD.”
Psalm 143:10 is the 1944 yeartext which headlines this attractive new calendar. Beneath the yeartext is a beautiful multicolored picture blended into an opened Bible as a truly fitting background and portraying a most constructive thought, that of studying and teaching God's Word. This picture alone will be an inspiration to view daily in your home , throughout the year. The calendar pad attached beneath the picture contains two months on each leaf and announces the bimonthly testimony periods for 1944 and the service themes of the alternating months, with supporting Scripture texts. This feature adds greatly to the value of the calendar.
You may now obtain this new calendar by sending in the coupon herewith, together with a contribution of 25e per copy; or five will be mailed to one address on contribution of $1.00.
WATCHTOWER 117 Adams St. Brooklyn 1, N.Y.
Please send me Q| a copy of the 1D44 Calendar. I enclose 25e. ] | 5 copies of the 1944 Calendar. I enclose $1.
Name............................. Street ...............................
City ............................... State ............................. .. .
Presenting “This Gospel of the Kingdom”
Manuscripts and Versions of the Hebrew Scriptures
(In Three Parts—Part 2)
THE men who copied the Hebrew Scriptures were called scribes, or Sopherim. Mention has already been made in Part 1 of this article of the 15 extraordinary points of the sopherim, namely, fifteen words or phrases in the Hebrew text marked by dots above and below. What is the meaning of such is stated in the Masorah in the margin. Some of these extraordinary points do not affect the'English translation or the interpretation; but others do so and are of importance. For example, Genesis, 16: 5, in the Masoretic text, reads: “And Sarai said unto Abram, My wrong be upon thee: I have given my maid into thy bosom; and when she saw that she had conceived, I was despised in her eyes: the Lord judge between me and thee.” The word “thee” has the extraordinary points, and the Masorah in the margin says that the text should read: “The Lord judge between me and her." Rotherham’s Emphasised Bible translation also reads this way, and in a marginal footnote he adds: “So it should be”; and cites Dr. Ginsburg as authority. Genesis 18; 9 reads: “Where is Sarah thy wife?” but according to the Masorah it should read: “As to Sarah thy wife ...” Rotherham’s translation also so reads, and his footnote reads: “So it should be”; citing Ginsburg. The Masorah on Genesis 33: 4 omits Jacob’s kissing Esau; and Rotherham’s translation agrees, and his footnote says “and kissed him” should be omitted. Deuteronomy 29:29, according to the Masorah and as given in Rotherham’s, should read: “The secret things and the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children unto times ageabiding, that we may do all the words of this law.” The words ‘"belong unto Jehovah our God” have the extraordinary points, denoting their spuriousness; and Rotherham puts those words in brackets, and his extended footnote adds: “When these words are cancelled,” says Dr. Ginsburg, “we obtain the sense —‘The secret things and the revealed things belong to us and to our children for ever if we do all the words of this Law.’ That is, the secret things, or the doctrines which have not as yet been revealed . . . belong to us and our children, or will be disclosed to us, if we do all the words of this Law which have been revealed to us. . . . ”
Also, Psalm 27:13 should read: “I believe that I shall see the goodness of Jehovah in the land of the living.” Rotherham’s footnote thereon reads: “The conditional word [“unless”] with which,- in the Masoretic text, this verse opens, is dotted above and below as spurious, and should accordingly be omitted. It is not found in some manuscripts, nor in the Septuagint, Syriac, Vulgate [versions]. ‘The italic words I had fainted, both in the Authorized Version and in the Revised Version, are an exegetical gloss’.—Ginsburg’s notes.” The other cases of these extraordinary points of the sopherim are: Genesis 19:33, 35; 37: 12;^Jumbers 3:39; 9:10; 21:30; 29:15; 2 Samuel 19:29; Isaiah 44:9; and Ezekiel 41:20; 46: 22.
It is well known with what superstitious fear the religious Jews regarded the pronouncing of the name Jehovah, lest they should be guilty of violating the commandment to take it not in vain. This doubtless accounts for it that in the pre-Masoretic Hebrew texts the sopherim altered “Jehovah” to “Adonai” (meaning “Lord”) at 134 places in the body of the text; besides some 17 or more places where they changed “Jehovah” to “Elohim” (meaning “God”) in the printed text. The Masorah gives the official list of these. Some instances of these are here considered. In Genesis 18: 3, where Abraham is addressing the three angels of Jehovah God visiting him, it should read “Jehovah”, and not “My Lord”, as in the King James English version Bible, Likewise, at verses 27, 30, 32 it should read “Jehovah” instead of “the Lord”, By the changes the sopherim evidently meant to avoid having Abraham address Jehovah’s representatives by God’s own holy name. Likewise, at . Exodus 4:10, 13 and 34: 9, where Moses is addressing Jehovah’s representative it should read “Jehovah”, instead of “my Lord”. The same is true at Judges 6:15 and 13: 8, and at Genesis 19:18; and at Genesis 20: 4 the Rotherham translation footnote comments on the expression “O my Lord” and says: “Some codices: '0 Jehovah.’—Ginsburg notes,”
On Isaiah 30:20, which reads: “Though My Lord should give you bread in short measure and water in scant allowance, yet will thy Teacher not hide himself- any more, but thine eyes shall ever be looking on thy Teacher,” the Rotherham footnote says: “Some codices (with three earlier printed editions): ‘Jehovah’ (instead of ‘Adonay’).” On Psalm 2: 4, reading: “He that sitteth in the heavens will laugh, My Lord will mock at them,” the Rotherham footnote reads: “Some codices (with two earlier printed editions [one of them, the first edition 1477]) have ‘Jehovah’.” On Psalm 110: 5, which says: "My Lord, on thy right hand, hath shattered in the day of his anger kings,” the Rotherham footnote reads: “Hebrew: Adonay. Some codices: ‘Jell ovah.’ ”
Passages where “Jehovah” in the Hebrew text was changed to “Elohim” (meaning “God”) are: 1 Chronicles 13:12; 14:10,11, .14,16; and Psalms 14:1, 2, 5; 53:1, 2, 4, 5. According to this Psalms 14:1 and 53:1 originally read: “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no Jehovah.” On Psalm 53: 6, reading: “When God bringeth back the captives of his people Jacob shall exult, Israel shall be glad,” the Rotherham footnote s says: “Some codices (with Aramaic, Septuagint and Syriac): ‘When Jehovah.’ Compare Psalm 14: 7.”
The sopherim, or scribes, are also charged with making at least 18 emendations, according to a note in the Masorah at several passages in the Hebrew Bible manuscripts. These, however, are typical of possibly more, because the emendations are not the same ones in all codices. The Siphri, on Leviticus, brings to light 7 passages; the Yalkut, on the whole Hebrew Scriptures, 10; the Mechilta, on Exodus, 11; the Tanchuma, on the Pentateuch, 17; while the St. Petersburg Codex gives 2 not in any of the above, namely, at Malachi 1:12 and 3:9; where the Rotherham translation is rendered accordingly and has explanatory footnotes.
The Rotherham translation of Genesis 18:22 reads: “But Jehovah was yet standing before Abraham”; concerning which the footnote reads: “So it should / be. ‘It was deemed derogatory to the /C Deity to say that the Lord stood before *j Abraham. Hence in accordance with the above rule to remove all indelicate expressions the phrase was altered by the Sopherim.’ — Ginsburg’s Introduction.” Rotherham also has interesting footnotes on 2 Samuel 20:1; 1 Kings 12:16;
Such emendations were made long— before Christ, and were made because the original readings affect or touch upon the divine Person, Jehovah, indelicately, it was thought. Rotherham gives his translation according to the original, unemended text at Job 7:20; 32:3; Ecclesiastes 3: 21; Ezekiel 8:17; Hosea 4:7; Habakkuk 1:12, and Zechariah 2:8, on all of which texts he has footnotes; besides footnotes on Numbers 11:15; 12:12, and Job 1:5,11; 2:5,9.
The book The New World, page 274, paragraph 1, gives us an instance of this. It says concerning Job 32: 3:
Elihu had particular wrath against those three religionists who had tried to break Job’s integrity and had not answered him with truth so as to vindicate Jehovah God on the issue; '
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CON SOL AT IO M
. ‘'because that they found not a response, and condemned God.” ([Job] 32: 3) So reads the Rotherham version, and with this the comment of the Catholic Bible also agrees, saying; "Almost all the Rabbins assert that the origi-r nal copiesread Jeftova, ‘the Lord;’ (H.) and that the Masorets changed it, to avoid the apparent blasphemy; as if the three friends had rendered themselves guilty by not answering Job.” The marginal comment of Rotherham’s version agrees with the Catholic and says: "The context shows that the original roading is preferable.” .
The Masorah also gives us a list of 32 passages which have different readings according to an important codex and which are called “Severin”. This codex contained the Pentateuch (or the five books of Moses) and is understood to be one of the manuscripts that the Boman general Titus brought away with him from Jerusalem’s temple as spoils and which were deposited in the royal palace at Rome, about A.D. 70. This codex was handed over to the Jewish community at Rome, about A-D. 220, by
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Emperor Severus, who built a synagogue for the Jews there and which synagogue was called after his name. Each of the above 32 passages is called a Sevir. Some of these “Severin” affect only the spelling of words and have no real instruction in them. Some passages of them agree with the Greek Septuagint version and the Targum of Onkelos and Jerome’s Latin Vulgate. There are 14 such Severin in Genesis, 3 in Exodus, 3 in Leviticus, 5 in Numbers, and 7 in Deuteronomy. The Severin reading at Genesis 3: 21 omits the words “of. skins” from the statement concerning coats God made for Adam and Eve; Genesis 18:21 reads “their outcry”, which a Rotherham footnote says is “manifestly the primitive and better reading”; Genesis 25:33 reads “ware” instead of “birthright” in connection with Esau’s sale to Jacob; and Leviticus 15: 8 speaks of “running” water. It is thus seen that such Severin passages affect the sense of the Scripture verses involved.
(To he continued)
Sebring Denies Freedom of Worship
ALL Americans should be interested to know that in the city of Sebring, Fla., not only is freedom of worship denied, but even the right to work for a living, and in the employment of the United States Government itself. The Highland County News sets forth the astonishing facts:
Everyone in Sebring who has heard of the case knows the man was discharged because of his religious belief and the reason given [that he was suspended for distributing literature] is only to sidestep the issue. The man in question is a good citizen from a good family, was always courteous and efficient as far as patrons of the office were concerned and. has an excellent moral reputation.
In the past we have had postal clerks here who did not have such moral reputations and postal employees who engaged in other pur-DECEMBER22,1943 suits while drawing pay as postal employees, but who were not discharged.
Without regard for the man or his religion, an organization as big as the postal service should not stoop to religious persecution. If a person in this community who happens to have a religious belief which is agreed with by only a very small minority can be fired, the same can happen to a Methodist, Baptist, Catholic or Jew in another community.
We must admit that the person who has the moral courage to stand up for his religious beliefs in the face of such overwhelming odds is the type that has made this country a great country. They breed brave men and women. Belief in God and what we commonly refer to as our religious beliefs is what keeps man from being a beast. No man should be deprived of his livelihood in public or private employment because of his religion. • i
IT IS NOW RELEASED!
1944 YEARBOOK
OF JEHOVAH’S WITNESSES
Has the prancing beast of total war frightened the servants of God into taking cover and being silent? Did the world-wide proclamation of Jehovah’s New World during the last year decline due to mounting difficulties? Jehovah has declared that “of the increase of His [King’s] government and peace there shall be no end”, and this has been unmistakably proved true during the service year of 1943. By reading the truly astounding and clearly presented report by the president of the Watch Tower Bible & Tract Society on the service activities of free education of men of good-will you will discern that, without a doubt, the Lord Jehovah is ■with His people, leading them victoriously through the increasing opposition now challenging them in their stand for freedom.
The global activities of the Lord’s army of over 100,000 fighters for the New World, and the results attained, are covered in this thrilling new Yearbook. The faithful onward march of the servants of Jehovah, in every section of the earth, is revealed in the pages of this book. It shows also their determination to continue holding forth and teaching God’s Word of truth, and the record of this bold stand' will be an encouragement to all freedom-loving people.
Additionally, of great importance is the section of this book containing the daily texts and comments for the year 1944, taken from The Watchtower. Hence this yearbook will be a daily reminder of the Lord’s Word. Its 384 pages are bound in a gold-embossed sturdy brown cover. A copy will be mailed to you postpaid upon a contribution of 50c.
'IIIll.'i:I:I,I;il:|'Hi liiiiimill i ri i.iiriurri iiiiiimni irri i iiun'ii.i 11 |i|i||i||| l |:| l i II I'liHI i I.I IJHIilJI'i i !■ I'lii:il:i■■ i-i:III!IIliil'I'I'I i iimimi'i in iii iimuri i i;i;ini 11 iijhiii:l;in?l>irifll 11 liIIliliuiljhlj|'i’i'luiii'nl; 11 itltiilMililurlhmIhiHJlfNfiuliniuMTtM
WATCHTOWER, 117 Adams St., Brooklyn 1, N.Y.
Please send me a copy of the 1944 Yearbook of Jehovah’s witnesses, for which I enclose a 50e contribution.
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