Achieving Good Government the Right Way

“OUR weapons were rubber cudgels, lead-lined clubs to destroy cars, chains and also guns,” relates a former political party worker in Italy. This young man worked for his political ideals in the late 1960’s by violence and “city warfare.” He says that “one of the main objectives of city warfare was to work mischief and then make the blame fall on the opposing political faction.”

But something happened to change this man’s thinking on politics. A young man visited his home and began a study of the Bible with him, which he says “taught me above all, that God ‘has made out of one man every nation of men.’” (Acts 17:26) This formerly violent political agent says that such Bible principles “freed me of the hate I had within me for other men, just because they had a political idea different from mine.” He continues:

“On this point I keep asking myself: How can man ever resolve his problems with politics, when politics itself has created the first problem—the division of humankind? For mankind to get together, the reasons for division must first disappear. With Jehovah’s Witnesses I have understood that this is possible. I have seen blacks and whites getting baptized in the same water; former Protestants and former Catholics, in Ireland, stop hating each other; Arabs and Jews unite together in the same meeting, during the Six Days’ War. And I myself have learned to love those that I had been taught to hate. Nobody can say that the kingdom that Jehovah’s Witnesses long for—God’s kingdom—is utopian, since there already exists an international community united under this kingdom.”