Motivation for the Watchtower Society's alterations has not always been the same. During 1981 and 1982 an ad for Johnnie Walker Red scotch whisky appeared in several major magazines, including the September 1982 Reader’s Digest (certain editions only, p. 37). The ad depicted a red sunset silhouetting a building with two people standing on an elevated porch. It had first been run in the June 29, 1981 U.S. News and World Report, and was copyrighted, according to the liquor company’s staff attorney.

Then The Watchtower of September 15, 1982, appeared with the same picture on its cover (slightly modified—the Watchtower Society’s artist cut off the left edge of the building and removed one of the people from the porch). This misuse of the liquor ad picture was exposed in the October, 1982, issue of Comments from the Friends.

As a result of such publicity the liquor company, Somerset Importers, Inc., contacted Watchtower headquarters through their legal staff. The Society agreed, out of court, to stop using the ad on its cover. So, when the year’s magazines were reprinted as a bound volume at the end of 1982, the cover of the September 15th issue featured a different picture—a landscape showing trees with mountains in the background, predominantly blue instead of red. Foreign language editions—those printed after the U.S. English edition—also carried the new cover. The Watchtower issue with a liquor ad picture on its cover is now a collector’s item.

Compare page 13 of the June 1, 1989, Watchtower with the bound volume reprint of the same magazine. The original issue features a photograph of a married couple over the heading, “God’s Word says, ‘Let marriage be honorable.’” In the bound volume reprinted at the end of the year, a different couple’s photograph has been substituted. Again, no explanation is offered. And, again, reminiscent of The Commissar Vanishes —dictator Josef Stalin's similar altering of pictures — and Big Brother in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Amazingly, the average Jehovah's Witness accepts the altered illustrations without comment and pretends that nothing is wrong — just as did the oppressed populations in Stalin's Soviet Union and in Orwell's nightmarish novel.

Watchtower Educational Center in Hawaii

This listing appears among the business tenants of Mililani Technology Park on that landlord's website at
http://www.planet-hawaii.com/mtp/tenants.htm#Watchtower Bible & Tract

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