Exposing Actions of High-Handed Officials to Public View

It was deemed beneficial to inform people in some areas as to what their local officials were doing. In Quebec, when the courts subjected Witnesses to procedures reminiscent of Inquisitional tribunals, a letter was sent to all the members of the Quebec legislature setting out the facts. When that brought no action, the Society forwarded a copy of the letter to 14,000 businessmen throughout the province. Then the information was taken to the editors of newspapers for publication.

The Gestapo intensified their efforts to crush the activity of Jehovah’s Witnesses. After mass arrests in 1936, they thought that perhaps they had succeeded. But then, on December 12, 1936, some 3,450 Witnesses who were still free in Germany blitzed the country with a printed resolution that clearly stated Jehovah’s purpose and set forth the determination of Jehovah’s Witnesses to obey God as ruler rather than men. The opposers could not understand how such a distribution was possible. A few months later, when the Gestapo belittled the charges made in the resolution, Jehovah’s Witnesses prepared an open letter in which they unsparingly named the Nazi officers who had fiendishly abused Jehovah’s Witnesses. In 1937, this letter too was given wide distribution in Germany. Thus the deeds of wicked men were laid bare for all to see. This also gave the public opportunity to decide what course they personally would pursue regarding these servants of the Most High.—Compare Matthew 25:31-46.

Global Publicity Brings Some Relief

Other governments too have dealt harshly with Jehovah’s Witnesses, prohibiting their meetings and public preaching. In some cases these governments have caused the Witnesses to be forced out of secular employment and their children to be barred from the schools. A number of governments have also resorted to physical brutality. Yet, these same lands usually have constitutions that guarantee religious freedom. With a view to bringing relief to their persecuted brothers, the Watch Tower Society has frequently given worldwide publicity to details concerning such treatment. This is done by means of the Watchtower and Awake! magazines, and these reports are at times taken up by the public press. Many thousands of letters making appeals in behalf of the Witnesses then flood into the offices of government officials from all over the world.

As a result of such a campaign in 1937, the governor of Georgia, in the United States, received some 7,000 letters from four countries within a two-day period, and the mayor of La Grange, Georgia, was also deluged with thousands of letters. Such campaigns were likewise conducted in behalf of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Argentina in 1978 and 1979, Benin in 1976, Burundi in 1989, Cameroon in 1970, the Dominican Republic in 1950 and 1957, Ethiopia in 1957, Gabon in 1971, Greece in 1963 and 1966, Jordan in 1959, Malawi in 1968, 1972, 1975, and again in 1976, Malaya in 1952, Mozambique in 1976, Portugal in 1964 and 1966, Singapore in 1972, Spain in 1961 and again in 1962, also Swaziland in 1983.

As a recent example of what is done by Jehovah’s Witnesses worldwide to bring relief to their oppressed brothers, consider the situation in Greece. Because of the intensity of persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses at the instigation of the Greek Orthodox clergy there, in 1986 both the Watchtower and Awake! magazines (with combined international circulation of over 22,000,000 copies) reported details of the persecution. Witnesses in other lands were invited to write to officials of the Greek government in behalf of their brothers. They did; and as reported in the Athens newspaper Vradyni, the minister of justice was deluged with over 200,000 letters from upwards of 200 lands and in 106 languages.