The Next War
Ken Raines
"The great battle of Almighty God will grow in intensity. Fiery destruction will reduce Satan's organization to a burnt-crisp ruin." (The Watchtower, May 1, 1939, p. 136.)
A little known "prophecy" of the Watchtower Society [Jehovah's Witnesses] during the Rutherford period concerned what they believed the "next war" would be like and how it would be fought. This started in 1923 or so when they were pointing to 1925 as the date when the kingdom of God would be established on the earth. Before Paradise was to begin, the battle of Armageddon would occur. A (final) war would precede and lead up to it. The Society believed this "next war" would be fought in the air with unmanned electrical airplanes dropping chemical or germ bombs. In 1923 for example they said:
The next war will be fought in the air with gas and microbe bombs as the weapons.... The next war will aim to kill all classes, men, women, children, and at any distance from the front.1
That this coming war fought with microbe bombs from the air would be the precursor to Armageddon and the coming Paradise in 1925 is demonstrated by public comments made by Rutherford. In the Royal Albert Hall in London on April 26, 1925, he gave a lecture based on his 'Millions' talk. In reporting on what Rutherford there said, The Golden Age stated:
The speaker then demonstrated the fact that all forward-looking men are expecting the collapse of our present civilization. He quoted excerpts to this end, especially some from the pen of Mr. W. G. Shepherd, the noted war correspondent, to show that even now the great powers of Europe are preparing for chemical warfare on a colossal scale. He declared that by airplane raids the great cities of the world could be destroyed in a night; and that no flesh could possibly escape from the rain of poison gases which would fall upon the helpless inhabitants of the world's centers of commerce. But it was not his wish, he said, to frighten his audience, but to forewarn them of Christendom's doom.... Old Testament Scriptures were then read to show that terrible as the impending disaster will be, yet it will not last long; that millions will survive the catastrophe; and that upon the ruins of the old order of human civilization will be erected the glorious Messianic kingdom...2
The lecture, The Golden Age said, was not reported on in the press, but afterwards a reporter interviewed the "Judge" for the London Daily Herald. It was titled,
MR. RUTHERFORD EXPLAINS
"Millions Now Living Will Never Die"THE NEXT WAR
Final Time of Trouble on the Earth
In the interview Rutherford said the next war would be fought in the air and that it would be the last.3 For some time after 1925 the belief that the "next war" would be a poison gas affair that would lead to Armageddon persisted in The Golden Age. For example, an article titled "The Prohibition of Poison-Gas War" appeared in the April 21, 1926 Golden Age. They reported that:
The general commission of the International Conference for the control of the traffic in arms has endorsed unanimously the text of the protocol regarding chemical and bacteriological war, the signatory powers ratifying the confirmation of the treaties previously made.... The wording prohibits explicitly the use of gasses with suffocating, poisoning or similar effects, as well as all means of bacteriological war.4
They were not impressed by this ban, but said:
There still prevails with many the illusion that the next war will begin like the previous one, after a fashion of historical lawlessness, diplomatic tension... mobilizing of armies, enlisting of reserve troops and making ready their equipment, skirmishing at the front.... But that is an empty and meaningless illusion.5
They say that the previous war was a war that masses of people participated in that gradually became a "machine-war." It was stopped prematurely by God. The next war would be a renewal of the previous one and would be a poison-gas affair:
That renewal, when it comes, will be the poison-gas war, the chemical war, that will perfect the machine war and thereby overcome it: the war will make an end with man as having a will, as a living organism,.... The poisonous vapors of hellish swamps, the benumbing gases from deep chasms of the earth,... all these places where natural death lives, are as nothing compared to the pestilential infection that will then commence.
Does one really believe that in the next war the armies will draw up in battle-array? Does he dare to doubt that, even before the official declaration of war, unmanned, electrically propelled air squadrons, loaded with vast quantities of poison-gas, will make the enemy's country a desert?6
They then say that the idea of the next war being like the last with soldiers marching to a "front" is a "ridiculous illusion" and "hallucinations of a better past." They then say:
... the next war will be a completion [of the last] and therewith an annihilation! There will be poison and explosion everywhere, beneath the whole canopy of the heavens; and soon there will be nobody living on the earth that could give it a name. If there were a little more imagination in the world, it would be superfluous to suggest these things.... Poison will be mechanically wafted forward and backward by unmanned airplanes, going up into the atmosphere and descending to the earth.7
In a later article that year The Golden Age printed the following reference to the coming gas war:
There may be no conspicuous resort to chemical warfare until the crusade against the Zion state terminates in catastrophe and a universal homicidal mania obsesses mankind. The world will be reckless of consequences then, eager only to kill and burn. A masculinized womanhood will be as savage as the men. Then may be realized the horrors previsioned in No. 172 of THE GOLDEN AGE, under the caption, "Prohibition of Poison Gas War." Then smiling madmen from hidden power stations may by radio direct the course of unmanned airplanes and aerial torpedoes which dart hither and thither broadcasting destruction, and pandemonium will break loose.
The compact, thickly-populated, highly-industrialized centers of civilization will be drenched with gases, bathed with liquid-fire and sown with bacteria. Unquenchable conflagrations will overspread the sky with a blanket of smoke, almost impenetrable to light, hiding the orbs of day and night and the constellations, reacting on the human mind to plunge it into hopelessness and gloom. Perhaps some previous preparation will have been made of elaborate subterranean tunnels and chambers in anticipation of this awful time.... The Day of Fire may be intended with a literal as well as symbolic significance, reducing great areas of the earth's surface to the condition described in Jeremiah 4:23-27. Of course the planet itself would remain intact, though the crust might be subjected to unprecedented seismic convulsions. After all, does not the literalness of the Deluge of Waters seem to afford a precedent for expecting a literal Day of Fire?8
The Golden Age continued to print news items about the horrors of a gas-war.9 For example, in a 1927 Golden Age there appeared three news items on page 365 dealing with poison gas warfare. The first item said:
Probably most of those now living will die by poison gas, when the time comes. The best for suffocation is phosgene, which can be carried by the wind far and wide, suffocating all. Mustard gas burns the flesh off.... If the supply of these runs out, there are the disease microbes to fall back on. But the trouble is that when the time comes we shall have to take whichever kind is handed out to us; and none of them seems to look very good.
The second item was about the nations trying in vain to outlaw poison gas warfare and the third item furthered their paranoia about the coming gas war:
... there is one chemical, a late product of the World War, that could incapacitate a soldier if a single drop of it happened to be merely picked up by the heel of his shoe. Imagine this liquid scattered over No Man's Land in place of the barbed wire entanglements of the last war.... it could not be traversed; and no infantry could advance toward the retreating army.
I do not know when this poison-gas war fixation ended. It was certainly not an accurate prediction of the next war. The next war, while certainly horrible enough, was not fought in the air with electrical, unmanned airplanes dropping poison gas and microbe bombs. It certainly didn't result in Armageddon, the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth or wipe man off the face off the earth as a "living organism."
Notes
1 The Golden Age, July 4, 1923, p. 614.
2 The Golden Age, August 12, 1925, p. 721.
3 Ibid., p. 722.
4 The Golden Age, April 21, 1926, p. 454.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid., p. 455.
8 The Golden Age, June 2, 1926, p. 551.
9 See also The Golden Age, October 1926, p. 47.
