When Dreams of Peace Were Shattered

VERY few people expected 1914 to be anything other than an ordinary year. The future, in fact, looked uncommonly bright to people in the preceding years. Science was on the advance against disease. And war? Well, as the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano said in February 1991, before 1914 the public “believed that war had been relegated to the furthest recesses of historical memory” and that man was at last living in “an era in which war had been banned by enlightened peoples and governments.”

However, 1914 and the ensuing years had some cruel surprises in store for a complacent humanity. The first was the so-​called Great War of 1914-18 that shattered the dreams of peace. In fact, L’Osservatore Romano called it “the first great carnage of modern history, marked, among other things, by technical discoveries that great scientists of former generations had believed to be devoted to peaceful aims.” The war made a mockery of science as a means to achieve peace; instead, science gave the war its unprecedented capacity for wholesale slaughter.

And when the carnage of war was over, another slaughter began. The Spanish influenza of 1918-19 killed over 20 million people​—far more than the awesome death toll of the Great War itself. Desperate measures were taken; spreading the disease was declared a crime in some countries. Police even arrested people for sneezing in public! But to no avail. Like a hurricane, the disease swept along unhindered until it had spent itself. Entire towns were wiped out. Bodies were stacked up in city morgues.

The era of change ushered in by 1914 left man reeling. His delusions of victory over war and disease, his dreams of a world peace wrought by human wisdom, were left in pitiful tatters. And as things continued to worsen, as the Great War was demoted to World War I by its mammoth successor, World War II, as disease, poverty, famine, and lawlessness continued to erupt in epidemic proportions around the world, historians began to recognize 1914 as a great turning point in human history.

But unlike the world at large, the International Bible Students (as Jehovah’s Witnesses were then known) expected 1914 to be a pivotal year long before it arrived. And in the years since then, Jehovah’s Witnesses have not been surprised to see the world deteriorate into the hopeless morass it has become today. Bible prophecies have helped them to expect these developments and even to see a glorious time of hope beyond. How is that possible? The next time Jehovah’s Witnesses visit you, you may want to ask them about it. Or you can write to the publishers of this magazine.

[Picture Credit Line on page 32]

Redrawn from artwork of Franklin Booth