Are we witnessing the beginning of World War Three?

 

My whole life, "World War Three" has always been shorthand for total nuclear annihilation. It became an expression, like hell freezing over, or when pigs fly. 

For most of us common folk, it wasn’t a reality. It didn’t have any literal meaning. The theory was that, once one nuclear missile was launched, all of them, in every country that had them, would be launched, leading to total global annihilation. We learned expressions like “nuclear winter,” and “mutually assured destruction.” Surely no one would actually do that, we reasoned. The way we dealt with that unimaginable threat was to move it, in our minds, to the level of a nightmare, fantasy, and finally to several Hollywood storylines, which only went to prove that it was unthinkable. 

There surely would never actually be a World War Three, right? And when the Berlin Wall fell, we told ourselves, ‘See? Nothing to worry about.’

Albert Einstein famously said, “I don’t know what weapons will be used in World War 3, but World War 4 will be fought with sticks and stones.”

But what if Einstein was wrong?

The problem with making WWIII the ultimate bogeyman is that it minimizes the millions of lives lost and the massive destruction that has happened over and over again since the end of WWII in places like Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Panama, Grenada, the Falkland Islands, Kenya, Cyprus, Ireland, Bosnia, Kosovo, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Congo... ‘At least it wasn’t World War Three, right?’

Winston Churchill and other notables have said, ‘Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.’ Putin and I are the same age, so I know he remembers Winston Churchill. But neither of us was alive back when Hitler was more than just ink on the pages of a history book.

World War I wasn’t called that while it was going on. Initially, it was simply called “the July Crisis.” But then other players joined. Russia threw its weight behind Serbia, prompting Germany to back Austria-Hungary, which caused Britain and France to join the Serbs and Russians against the Germans. By the end of 1914, it was being called the World War. You can read a column I wrote about the first World War, and the Church's involvement in it, here.

When Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, no one immediately announced WWII. A week later, when Time magazine used the term ‘World War II’, it was in a speculative sense, similar to the way I used the term World War III in my headline. But it caught on.

So far in the current crisis, Putin has thrown a significant military attack at Ukraine, killing thousands, similar to how Hitler threw his “blitzkrieg” (lightning attack) at Poland. Ukraine’s president Zelensky has warned that if Ukraine falls, Putin will push into Poland, Moldova, Finland, Sweden and Norway, as well as points south. Turkey must know it is a desirable target as well because of its control of access into and out of the Black Sea. Talking heads have opined that Putin won’t resort to nukes unless he feels that an enemy invasion onto Russian soil threatens Russia’s “soul”, its identity as a nation. And it’s not World War Three unless it goes nuclear, right? Right?

The majority of the world’s governments have strongly condemned the attack on Ukraine. They are sending money and weapons to Ukraine, freezing Russian assets, squeezing off shipments of goods into Russia, and refusing to buy goods from Russia. As I noted in my previous column, Russia was voted out of the Human Rights council at the U.N., and some nations have called for Russia's removal from the Security Council. On the other hand, Russia does have some allies in Belarus, Armenia, Iran and Syria, who might back Putin's push into other countries.

 At what point would we start calling it World War Three?

If you’ve read this column before, you know the focus is, not simply world events, but how those world events fulfill Bible prophecy. Does the current situation have anything to do with Bible prophecy?

Jesus foretold as part of his sign of “the last days” that people would see wars. ‘So what,’ you may say. ‘There have always been wars.’ True. But notice how he worded it in Matthew 24:6. “You will continually hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not frightened, for those things must take place, but that is not yet the end of the age.” (Amplified Bible)

There were wars in Jesus’ day. He knew there would continue to be wars until the ‘end of the age.’ That’s why he gave a multi-part sign. But note how he continued: “For nation shall be roused up against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in diverse places.” (Luke 21:10,11, Haweis NT) These have been dubbed ‘the Big Four’ features of the sign of the last days: war, famine, pestilences (like the pandemic) and earthquakes. 

The huge war between England and France in the late 1700s/early 1800s had many believing they were seeing the Big Four. that conflict between Wellington and Napoleon drew in Spain, Portugal, Germany, Russia, Denmark, Sweden, Austria, America and other countries. Accompanying the war was famine as farmers became soldiers and fields were left uncultivated, and soldiers stripped the foodstuffs from the countries they ravaged. Pestilence rose in the form of widespread diseases among the soldiers in the camps on both sides, which quickly spread to nearby civilians. There was even an earthquake in Crete that killed 2,000 people. 

But Bible scholars knew something was still missing.

In Matthew 24:14 Jesus added one more detail to watch for: “This good news of the kingdom will be preached throughout the whole world as a testimony to all the nations, and then the end of the age will come.” John Calvin who lived in a turbulent time in the 1500s wrote that “to this day not even the slightest report concerning Christ has reached the Antipodes [what came to be called Australia] and other very distant nations.” Matthew Poole, a Bible commentator who wrote in the late 1600’s, recognized that ‘all nations’ meant the entire earth.  “Though the Holy Scriptures, and ecclesiastical historians, give us a somewhat large account of the gospel being preached in Europe, Asia, and in Africa, yet we have little account from any of them of its being preached in America.” In 1706, Matthew Henry wrote, “The gospel shall be preached, and that work carried on ...so that all nations, first or last, shall have either the enjoyment, or the refusal, of the gospel.” In the mid-1850s commentator Campbell Morgan wrote: “Some claim that this has already been done, and that therefore the end of the age is necessarily close at hand. This conclusion is open to grave doubt.”

Is there still ‘grave doubt’? In the century-and-a-half since Morgan’s time, the good news has literally reached every nation. The Bible is the most widely translated book in the world, by a huge margin. The most widely translated website on the internet is jw.org, whose entire mission is the preaching of the good news of the kingdom.  

Another reason to give thought to World War Three: serious students of the Bible are watching for the fulfillment of Paul’s words at 1 Thessalonians 5:3. “For when they shall say: Peace and tranquility; then sudden destruction will come upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape.”

The greatest cry of peace in recent history was the end of World War 2. And that obviously was not the fulfillment of 1 Thessalonians 5:3, since the end didn't happen afterward... Perhaps because Matthew 24:14 had yet to be fulfilled. But that is no longer the case.

If this war in Ukraine grows into World War Three, could the announcement of the war's end be the expected cry of peace?

Time will tell. Click here to go to Part Two.

Bill K. Underwood is the author of several books, all available at Amazon.com. You can support this site by purchasing a book.

Jehovah's Witnesses and Civil Rights

Summarized from the book Judging Jehovah’s Witnesses by Shawn Francis Peters:

It was a common sight under the Nazi regime for the “custodians of the law to look on half approvingly while youthful gangsters destroyed the fundamentals of liberty under the specious text of patriotism,” wrote an editorial in The Washington Post. However, it continued: “That such tolerance of brutality should be permitted in the near neighborhood of Washington is something to think about.”

What was the Post talking about? On the night of June 14, 1940, 50 rioters in Rockville, Maryland, invaded a Kingdom Hall directly across the street from the Montgomery County Police Headquarters. The criminals destroyed chairs, typewriters and records and vandalized the building while two Montgomery County police officers looked on.

As the month wore on, attacks continued across the country. An attack in Richwood, West Virginia, was extraordinarily brutal. Witnesses Stanley Jones and C. A. Cecil moved to Richwood on June 28 to preach. They were stopped on Main Street by state trooper Bernard McLaughlin, who took them into custody at the state police barracks. Members of the American Legion post soon arrived, including a Nicholas County sheriff’s deputy, Martin Catlette. Though the Witnesses managed to talk their way out of the detention with little more than insults, the trouble wasn’t over.

Joined by other witnesses they returned to Richwood, only to discover that the room they’d rented the previous day had been ransacked. They left to report the incident to the mayor, hoping to explain their work and debunk the rumor that they were disseminating “communistic literature.” Before they found him, however, deputy Catlette found them.

Catlette detained them in the mayor’s office. While the chief of police, Bert Stewart, guarded the door, Catlette telephoned several fellow Legionnaires and summoned them to the office, ordering them to round up the other Witnesses in town. After hanging up the phone he told the Witnesses, “You don’t know what you’ve gotten yourselves into. You’ll know you’ve been to Richwood.”

The group of Witnesses, all gathered at the mayor’s office, tried to maintain that the Supreme Court had specifically upheld their right to worship by distributing literature in public. When one of the Witnesses tried to quote a verse from the Bible, Catlette slapped him and ordered him to shut up.

The deputy then removed his badge, saying, “What is done from here on will not be done in the name of the law.” He forced the Witnesses to surrender their possessions. A whiskey bottle was passed around among the Legionnaires. Someone brought two guns; another brought a rope.

Catlette tied the right hand of each of the Witnesses to the rope. The vigilantes began forcing the victims to ingest large doses of castor oil. When one of the Witnesses resisted, they forced him to empty an eight ounce bottle. When Cecil questioned Catlette’s right to detain them, he was forced to drink two bottles. (He and several of the victims were later hospitalized, urinating blood.)

The nauseous Witnesses were marched outside, where a large crowd had gathered. Catlette recited the preamble to the American Legion’s constitution and led the gathering in a flag-salute ceremony. Ironically, part of the document read by Catlette urges Legion members, 

“to make Right the master of Might, to promote peace and goodwill.”

The Witnesses refused to salute the flag. The crowd grew to more than five hundred. Another Legionnaire, Lee Reese, addressed the crowd. “We’re carrying on this demonstration to show the people of Richwood that if anyone is in sympathy with the work [the Witnesses] are doing, there’s room for them on the end of this rope, and they will go out of town with them.” A woman protested that they deserved a fair trial. Reese responded by threatening to add her to the rope.

The mob marched to the city limits, where the vigilantes had taken the victims’ cars. The vehicles had been vandalized with swastikas and epithets such as “Hitler’s spies” and doused in castor oil.

The Witnesses lodged a complaint with the Justice Department.

The United States Justice Department had established a Civil Rights Section in February, 1939. However, the Attorney General at the time, Frank Murphy, pointed out soon after that “the authority of the Federal Government in this field is somewhat limited by the fact that many of the Constitutional guarantees are guarantees against abuses by the government itself, not infringements by individuals.” Furthermore, the Civil Rights Section’s meager resources proved to be as debilitating as its narrow mandate. The department consisted of fewer than 10 attorneys and a handful of clerks.

Hundreds of complaints were brought to the CRS by Jehovah’s Witnesses during the 1940s, but in nearly every case the unit concluded that it either lacked jurisdiction, or that the victims’ unpopularity would make it impossible to get an indictment or a conviction.

The Richwood case was no different. The U.S. attorney for Huntington, West Virginia, Lemuel Via, had no desire to institute criminal proceedings against Martin Catlette and the other assailants, believing it was an unwinnable case.

After nearly two years of wrangling among the FBI, Via, and high authorities in the Department of Justice, the Civil Rights Section’s insistence on prosecution finally carried the day, and U.S. Attorney Via was persuaded to bring the Richwood case before a federal grand jury. Via insisted, however, that he be back-stopped by an attorney from Washington. Perhaps he was leery of appearing to side with the Witnesses.

The grand jury largely ignored most of the evidence and refused to return an indictment. Convening just a few months after Pearl Harbor, the jurors were unsympathetic and openly suspicious of the victims.

But the CRS wasn't ready to quit. They convinced Via to perform an end run around the grand jury. Initially, charges had been brought under both Section 51 and 52 of Title 18. Both outlaw conspiring to “injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any citizen in the free exercise or enjoyment” of rights guaranteed by the Constitution. However, Section 52 refers to doing so “under color of law.” The Civil Rights Sections' lawyers determined that if the federal government abandoned all the section 51 charges – which meant dropping the charges against the Richwood citizens who were not employed by the sheriff’s department – they wouldn’t need an indictment. They could go straight to trial with charges against deputy Martin Catlette and Chief of Police Bert Stewart.

The ploy worked. Tried before Judge Ben Moore in a federal court in Charleston, West Virginia, Catlette and Stewart were convicted under Section 52. Fines were imposed on both men - $1,000 for Catlette, $250 for Stewart.

Catlette tried to claim his action of removing his badge meant he had not acted “under color of law” but the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed, and Catlette was sentenced to 12 months at the federal prison camp in Mill Point, West Virginia.

For a man so bitterly opposed to the Witnesses doctrines, the punishment must have seemed especially harsh. The majority of the inmate population at Mill Point prison camp was composed of Jehovah’s Witnesses, imprisoned for their conscientious objection to military service.

 [To get the book "Judging Jehovah's Witnesses" click here...] 

 

 Bill K. Underwood is the author of several novels and one non-fiction self-help book, all available at Amazon.com.You can help support this site by purchasing a book.

The Church's role in World War One

 

 

In July, 1914, the shots were fired that began World War One. Gavrilo Princip, the nineteen-year-old Serbian who fired the fatal shots at Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, may have been the bullet but the Vatican was the gunpowder.

Are things actually getting better?

 

“There are Lies, Damned lies, and Statistics.”

Mark Twain attributed that remark to Benjamin Disraeli, but there is no record of Disraeli’s ever having said it. Perhaps it was one of Mark Twain’s ‘lies.’ A commenter on my previous column, however, has made great use of statistics.