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(Cont. from Page 16/10/94D).

The Society bought One Clark Street in 1967. Proceeding under the 1969 rent regulations which permitted landlords to evict tenants when apartments were required for the landlord's use, the Society served eviction notices on the building's 42 middle-class families, many of whom were paying a monthly rent of only $150. The Society offered to pay relocation expenses required under law; but the tenant's response was "Where are we going to move to?"... By 1971 only 12 of the original tenants remained the rest had departed because of the constant harassment, according to the testimony of one resident before the Brooklyn Supreme Court. Dr Harlow Fischman, a biologist, testified that he had complained to the city agencies and the Watchtower Society about loud noises, filth, and lack of services. As tenants moved out, young male headquarters workers moved in, converting apartments into dorms. Doors of apartments undergoing conversion remained open, according to the tenants; the halls were liberally coated with plaster dust. From time to time there were electricity blackouts, the tenants alleged, and no heat or hot water. One young mother remarked, as she departed for the suburbs, "These are the people who are going to transform the earth into a paradise, right? So far they've succeeded in turning a lot of people some of them old and sick out of their apartments." (Pg.86,87). Does The Christ advocate such behaviour? No, he does not.

On August 10, 1974, 100 tenants of the 480-room hotel at 25 Clark Street, most of them middle-aged and elderly working people, were served eviction notices so that the owner‑operator of the residential hotel could rent five additional floors to the Watchtower Society, which already occupied five floors of the shabby but still elegant hotel. Some of the tenants uneasily speculated that the management of the hotel wanted them out so that the property could be sold to the Watchtower Society. The Society's spokesman, Jerry Molohan, denied that the Witnesses were planning to buy the Towers. On November 19, 1974, he said, "I know of no plans to do so. What the future holds I don't know. At the moment it's the hotel's problem, not ours." Early in 1975, the Watchtower Society bought the Towers Hotel. (Pg.87,88).

From Chapter 6.

In Transition.

On October 2, 1914, Charles Taze Russell entered the Bethel dining room. "The Gentile Times have ended, their kings have had their day," he rumbled. "Anyone disappointed? I'm not. Everything is moving right on schedule." [Yearbook 1975, p.73]. Thirty-six years previously, in 1878, a small band of Russellites had had to explain why they had not then been taken to heaven, since 1874 had marked the beginning of Christ's invisible presence in the spiritual "Temple of Jerusalem" and the economic panic of 1873 had been the first death spasm of a dying world. Once again, in 1914, they found themselves having to account for failure. In 1879, Russell had predicted that an international nihilist-Communist-anarchist uprising would begin early in 1914 and that this period of turbulence would be followed, on October 2, 1914, by the establishment of God's kingdom on earth and the calling of the "living saints" to glory. When this did not happen, many of Russell's followers, according to his apologists, "grew sour" and left the organization. (Pg.107). The shocking thing about the published erroneous predictions of JWs is that they offer them in book form to the public and still teach from them! They still don't correct them even when their errors are made public!

The Witnesses' accounts of their travails during World War 1 reflect a parochialism. They view Rutherford's conviction on the charge of espionage and his nine-month imprisonment in the Atlanta penitentiary as proof of a special relationship with God; they ignore the fact that clergymen of all denominations were sent to prison sometimes for doing nothing more than reading the Sermon on the Mount. (Pg.113).

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