The Watchtower Lied About Secular Confirmation of 1914. Here’s the Proof.
This topic deeply disturbed me, and no doubt many other Jehovah’s Witnesses who began piecing things together before ever leaving the organization.
It’s now 2025. My parents are elderly and unwell. They’ve spent their entire adult lives loyally serving an organization that has made one false promise after another. Like so many others, they got baptized under the firm assurance that they would never grow old - that they would live forever in youthful, perfect health.
That promise wasn’t vague. It wasn’t “just a probable hope.” It was taught as truth and fact, direct from “God’s organization”.
*“*We can be equally sure that, of the generation alive in 1914, some will see the major fulfillment of Christ Jesus’ prophecy and the destruction with which it culminates...”
— Awake!, October 8, 1973, p. 19
This promise was continuously pedaled by "God's organization" for decades.
But this particular Awake! article is infamous in the exJW community, not just for the false promises - but for the deliberate manipulation behind it.
So it's pretty obvious from the above chart and content, that in that article the Governing Body was assuring JWs that many who were alive in 1914 would still be alive when Armageddon came. Again, this is not the only article, the Governing Body had been promising this for literally decades, but this particular article is especially disingenuous which I will explain next.
The Governing Body included what appeared to be a clipping from The World magazine, a secular publication supposedly validating Charles Taze Russell’s prediction that something world-shaking would happen in 1914. The implication? Even the media recognized Jehovah’s Witnesses were right. Except… that “article” (below) wasn’t journalism at all.
Unsuspecting JWs reading this article at the time would be thinking "Wow this IS God's organization, even an independent newspaper is confirming they were right!" Well firstly, the World War started in July 1914. This article was published in August. Except was it an article? Or was it something else. To get to the point, this was a full-page advertisement paid for by the International Bible Students, who ran a lot of paid advertisements like this in newspapers leading up into 1914.
And the part of the original advertisement the Watchtower writers cut off was this top section that says "END OF ALL KINGDOMS IN 1914"
Russell hadn’t predicted a world war at all. Reading his publications of the time, it's clear he predicted Armageddon - the end of Christendom and all human governments. He certainly never once stated that Matthew 24 and the composite sign was to be fulfilled in 1914, which the Awake article claims.
The Watchtower didn’t just misquote. They deliberately sanitized the ad to make it look like external proof of divine backing, that they predicted the first world war, when in fact it was internal propaganda disguised as validation.
This was the kind of material my parents were shown when they dedicated their lives to the organization. Not speculation. But carefully constructed deception from the very people who claimed to speak for God.
The original 1973 Awake! article is on jw.org but it's a curated version of the original and of course they haven't retained the advertorial because this is the most damning part which the exJW community has successfully exposed.
So yes, there’s anger in this community. And if you weren't raised a JW and reading this, hopefully you can see that anger toward the Watchtower organization is not without reason.
Posted Aug 4, 2025, 11:14 AM UTC