Watching the World
Jehovah’s Witnesses and Concentration Camps
● The book Crystal Night, authored by Rita Thalmann and Emmanuel Feinermann, documents a history of Hitler’s concentration camps. While the book primarily relates the persecution of the Jews, it also gives some information on Jehovah’s Witnesses in the camps. It states:
“Set apart from the other barracks were special isolation barracks for disciplinary treatment. These were occupied mostly by the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who wore brown [actually, purple] triangles and refused to give the Hitler salute or to undergo military service. Often their refusal to abandon their pacifist religious convictions resulted in death.
“Historians of the Third Reich may perhaps have exaggerated the extent of the German Churches’ ‘resistance’ to the National Socialist regime, but few have mentioned the martyrdom of the 5,911 Jehovah’s Witnesses arrested by the Nazis. More than two thousand perished in concentration camps.”
After describing life at the Buchenwald camp where 2,250 Jews were prisoners, the book states that there were “300-400 Jehovah’s Witnesses” there “who were particularly helpful to the Jews and even shared their bread rations with them.”
Money and War Weapons
● “International arms sales, after surging for more than a decade, have leveled off and quite possibly begun to decline,” states The Wall Street Journal. What accounts for this? “Market saturation” is one reason given as well as “burdensome foreign debt and depressed commodity prices . . . along with past buying sprees that have filled up arsenals and sated weapons appetites.” The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimates that last year’s worldwide exports of major weapons were about $13.5 thousand million.
Pope Praises Soldiers
● “Pope John Paul II said today that military service was compatible with Christianity, telling soldiers from 24 countries they could regard themselves as ministers of security and freedom,” reported New Zealand’s Auckland Star. He then went on to praise the soldiers by saying: “The morality of your profession, dear soldiers, is linked to this ideal of service for peace in the national communities and still more in the international context.”
Changing China
● “Possessed of exit visas and fortunes too enormous to be confined by the nation’s borders, 50 jetsetters from rural Hebei province will fly to Tokyo next week, the first rustics of the New China to vacation abroad at their own expense,” reports Toronto’s Globe and Mail. The cost of the trip is $3,530 (Canadian), about “20 times the average annual income” in China. How could they afford it? The report says that a few peasants, “unleashed from collective grain farming by the Government of Deng Xiaoping, have prospered in sideline occupations—chicken ranching, tractor repair, basket weaving.”
“United” Church Divided
● “United Church sharply divided over ordination of homosexuals,” read the headline in The Toronto Star. Opinion is sharply divided on this question because “some see homosexuality as a sin and ask if Canada’s largest Protestant denomination still upholds moral standards.” The General Council will decide whether to accept or reject a former “report that concludes homosexuality, in itself, is not a barrier to ordination.”
Lee Langner, choir director at Ottawa’s Emmanuel United Church, says that by ordaining homosexual ministers the church has strayed from the Scriptures, and he has decided to leave. Few have taken this “dramatic step,” but it was reported that one in ten writing to the church has threatened to quit if the ordaining of homosexuals as ministers is adopted at the General Council meeting.
Bride Price
● A decree by the government of Temotu Province in the Solomon Islands states that “$600 is the maximum price that can be charged for brides.” Why was this action taken? Because nearby Papua New Guinea “raised wife prices to $3,000.” The law states that anyone paying more than $600 for a bride faces three months in jail and a $90 fine.
Sexual Activity and Hepatitis
● Dr. James Maynard, from the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, said that the number of persons listed as hepatitis-B carriers is increasing at the rate of 2,000 per year in Canada and 20,000 in the United States. It is estimated that worldwide about 200 million people are carriers. Chronic hepatitis is the cause of 80 percent of the world’s liver cancer cases according to Dr. Maynard, who adds: “It is second only to cigarette smoking as a major, known cancer-causing agent.”
Dr. Maynard says that this hepatitis is largely spread through sexual relations, with the risk increasing in direct relation to the number of sex partners. He also asserts that every year the individual homosexual runs a 25 percent risk of becoming infected. By the age of 40, studies show, 85 percent of homosexuals have been infected.
American Check Writers
● Americans wrote more than 40 billion checks last year. That averages over 100 million checks a day, according to banking industry figures. It is reported that 130 million Americans have checking accounts. What was the total amount of the 40 billion checks written last year? Over a trillion dollars.
Why Moon’s Conviction?
● According to the report in the Detroit Free Press, clergyman Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Church, “was convicted in 1982 of filing false income tax returns, sentenced to 18 months in prison and fined $25,000.” Although Moon has fought his case clear up to the U.S. Supreme Court, this high court denied a hearing of the case. Because a bank account is in Moon’s name, the government says it was his money and was, therefore, subject to taxation. Moon began his prison stint on July 20, 1984.
World’s Deserts Spread
● “Six million hectares [15,000,000 a.] of land are being lost to desert each year and a further 21 million hectares [52,000,000 a.] are being rendered unproductive,” according to a report in The Gazette of Montreal, Canada. In spite of a United Nations environment program aimed at fighting their spread, the world’s deserts are threatening to engulf huge new areas of land. Principally the areas are the Sahara, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Latin America and Australia, and the encroaching deserts affect about 850 million people. The problem, says the report, “lies in the misuse and overuse of land, and in overgrazing, deforestation, overcultivation and poor irrigation.”
Valium Tranquilizers
● “An estimated seven million people [in Britain] take Valium and other so called ‘minor’ tranquillisers each year,” reports the London Daily Mail. The Valium tranquilizer drug was made in 1959, and it was said that as a muscle relaxant it was “ten times more effective than Librium.” It was supposed to remove the sharp edges of emotional anguish while enabling a person to carry on a normal life.
The report adds, however: “Far from softening the cruelties of 20th-century life, it is claimed, tranquillisers can hook people—especially women.” The Wolfson Unit of Clinical Pharmacology estimates that about a quarter of the patients taking benzodiazepines for four months become dependent on them. Effects produced are listed as: insomnia, anxiety, depression, panic attacks, nausea, blurred vision and muscle pain.
Chopstick Dilemma
● Many young Japanese people are growing up without knowing how to use chopsticks, or hashi, properly. As reported in The New York Times, a Ministry of Education report showed that only 48.4 percent of the elementary school students surveyed stated that they knew how to use the implements correctly. Concerned over the situation, the Tokyo Police Department is giving its recruits a crash course in the etiquette and use of chopsticks. And, for a fee of almost $80 (U.S.), one can obtain a three-month course of instruction in using hashi. “Trainer chopsticks”—with loops to show children where to put their fingers—have been devised and are being sold in record numbers. One college professor who has studied the matter estimates that over one third of the Japanese 30 and younger are incompetent when it comes to the use of chopsticks.
New Phone Code
● Beginning September 1, 1984, New York City gained a second telephone area code. “New York City is running out of available access lines [telephone numbers],” New York Telephone District Staff Manager Charles Herndon told Awake! “A second area code will double the number of access lines for the city.” With only one area code, the demand for new numbers would exceed the supply by early 1985. Presently, New York City has 4,200,000 telephone numbers—one phone number for every 1.7 persons!
The New York City borough of Brooklyn is being served by the new 718 area code. (It was 212.) This means that starting September 1, to reach the world headquarters of Jehovah’s Witnesses from outside Brooklyn, Queens or Staten Island, you must first dial 1, then area code 718, and the number 625-3600.
Refugees Ignored
● “Refugee officials are troubled,” reports The New York Times, “by what they say is a growing tendency by passing ships not to help Vietnamese fleeing their country by boat.” Recently, at least 40 passing ships, some coming as close as 10 yards (9 m), apparently ignored the pleas of a boatload of Vietnamese refugees trying to make their way across the South China Sea. As a result, 68 out of the 84 refugees in the boat died because of starvation, thirst or disease. Refugee officials say that captains of passing boats are unwilling to lose time in transporting refugees to the nearest point and dropping them off. The drop-off time alone often takes four or five days.