Watchtower & Stalin both alter artwork — Why?

PARADE MAGAZINE (February 8, 1998, pg. 15) tells about Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's practice of having photographs retouched to remove the faces of political figures who had fallen out of favor. Examples are show on the cover of a new book, The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin's Russia by David King (Metropolitan Books-Henry Holt).

The book review in PARADE MAGAZINE explains that the Communist dictator used "the photographer's airbrush as a political weapon." The out-of-favor figures who disappeared from historical photographs were "victims of expert retouching." In PARADE's opinion, this practice showed Stalin's government to be "a cruel regime whose cynicism neglected no details."

Does that book speak about Jehovah's Witnesses? Not that we know of. What is the connection, then? This: The Watchtower Society follows the same practice. And if such a practice leads to certain conclusions about the regime of Josef Stalin, the same practice on the part of the Watchtower leadership may lead to similar conclusions about them.

Who else follows the practice of retouching photographs and artwork as different viewpoints or personalities fall in or out of favor? There must be others, but the only one that comes readily to mind is "Big Brother" in George Orwell's futuristic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. While "Big Brother is watching you" his henchmen are rewriting books and fixing photos:

This process of continual alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals…cartoons, photographs …In this way the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct…mistaken prophecies by Big Brother, have been rewritten a dozen times…without any admission that any alteration had been made.

—Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell (Signet Classic edition)
pages 36-37

Big Brother and dictator Josef Stalin — strange company for a religious organization! Yet the Watchtower Society has placed itself in that company by adopting their methods.

Could some underling be to blame for the doctored artwork in The Watchtower? No, because the leaders claim responsibility in the March 1, 1987, Watchtower (page 15):

Each article in both The Watchtower and Awake! and every page, including the artwork, is scrutinized by selected members of the Governing Body before it is printed...

In fact, although JW publications neither explain nor acknowledge the changes, it is often evident that a high-level decision must have been made to rule a certain hairstyle out of favor or to disqualify individuals from appearing in photographs. Over-the-ears hairstyles on men are replaced in some pictures with short "theocratic" haircuts.

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