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1989. Exactly the year when you would expect such a movie. (1990 in the US.) And now, anti-communists like Putin are happy to accept the exaggerated Stalin numbers. Especially because Stalin still comes in at first place in yearly Russian popularity polls, and Putin is #2. (Then Pushkin, Lenin, Tolstoy, etc.)

There are some very different, yet very detailed accounts of Stalin's death which bear little resemblance to each other. This one seems to make the best attempt at making sense of divergent claims: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3228382/ And of course, Stalin had survived major plots against his person and his reputation, so he had a right to be paranoid. And while I know of no evidence that he had anyone killed, he imprisoned a lot of people, many unjustly. He made many stupid mistakes as a leader, and some resulted in injustice to many. His final days were spent with the four persons from whom his successor would be chosen. None of them trusted each other. Each of them knew that it was possible for the other to form a plot that would remove others from the running. It would be as if Trump had 4 VPs all equally ready and ambitious to take over if Trump was somehow removed from office during his term(s). When one of them, Khrushchev, finally did win out, he went on an anti-Stalin campaign that apparently dredged up anything and everything he could dig up on Stalin. He got General Zhukov to join him (easily one assumes, since Stalin had earlier demoted Zhukov for keeping German war booty as his own property). But Zhukov claimed that he had been talked into promoting anti-Stalin propaganda that included things that weren't true. Khrushchev himself later forgot some of the things he had said (or made up?) about Stalin and contradicted them in later speeches and writing, forgetting how bad he had made him out to be. The point of differentiating himself from Stalin was for consolidation of power, and the ability to dismiss his previous circle of competitors. He even had Baria executed I believe, as the head of the police would have had a lot of potential power and leverage with an eye on the leadership position. Khrushchev even asked that some of Stalin's old enemies get re-established into political life, if possible, even some of those who had plotted against Stalin, if possible. But Zhukov (and others) kept discovering that most of these old enemies really had plotted treasonously against Stalin and therefore couldn't "rehabilitate" them under those circumstances. But this is part of my point. By throwing Stalin under the bus, and going on a no-holds-barred anti-Stalin campaign, you'd think that Khrushchev could have included the fact of millions or at least thousands or maybe even several hundred wrongful deaths attributed to Stalin. The intended rehabilitation of Stalin's prisoners would have been able to accomplish at least a little of this. Instead it was evidently on the order of much less, and Khrushchev couldn't even make much out of these, since their guilt was too obvious. Compare this with the fact that when Stalin dismissed his old chief of police and replaced him with Baria in 1939, that Stalin had at that time released a couple hundred thousand people who had been wrongfully imprisoned, and the executions virtually stopped. Also, to these same points, although we haven't looked at Mao yet, the exact same patterns emerge. Mao made some dumb mistakes too, and some cost a lot of lives (e.g., Three Pests Campaign), but the outrageous claims about 100,000,000 deaths also have no evidence going for them. The political reasons for these same propaganda patterns to have been reused here should be obvious.

I'm not saying that Stalin wasn't like that, only that as more and more documented evidence comes to light, this evidence supports a very manipulated story. What you say here is what I always believed for almost my whole life. If the evidence doesn't support the story I was told to believe when I was in school, then I prefer to look more closely at that evidence. But this doesn't mean he wasn't just as wicked as so many others. A person who kills one, or even none, might be just as evil in other ways as someone who kills millions.

I think this is where people should pay attention in the way you have paid attention to ongoing and current events, even those that seem so innocuous. Agenda 21 may have been exactly the right thing to propose based on the evidence. But the reasons for these proposals, as you point out, are reasons that are extremely dangerous. Even if Agenda 21 was all marvelous and wonderful, it would point out exactly how an imperialist or fascist state could undermine the good intentions. As you say, water shortages are already here in places and are on the horizon for many more. I perceive a purposeful delay in ocean desalination technology and collection of freshwater at places where large rivers empty potable water into oceans. I think it's just one of many areas of potentially imperialist control. Deaths could easily number into the millions or even billions during a great "water" tribulation. Satanic schemes, as you say, seem so easy to plant into the minds of human leaders. The actual events of the great tribulation are supposed to remain unpredictable so that sudden unexpected destruction could truly come at any time like a thief in the night. But there are many options that appear all too visible. You have big names like Bill Gates for example falling into the Malthusian propaganda saying, in effect, that the world has too many poor people to take care of. And although this belongs as a response in the Agenda 21 topic, it can be just as appropriate here. It's the letter that Summers wrote in 1991 about how places like Africa are still "UNDER-POLLUTED." There was a claim that this proposal to dump more toxic waste in third-world countries was a joke, but the context of other speech surrounding this letter shows that it wasn't: Summers, was Chief Economist of the World Bank, and nominated to be the US Secretary Treasurer in 1993. As an aside, he was even a recent president of the college my youngest son graduated from.

This is very true. In fact, when I responded to @Kosonen about Pol Pot / Khmer Rouge, I forgot to mention something important about those MILLION deaths. (Some would say 1 to 3 million.) I believe that we can attribute about half a million of those deaths to the Pol Pot regime itself. The other half million happened when Kissinger and Nixon prosecuted a secret war against Cambodia that ended up bringing Pol Pot to power. Kissinger and Nixon had decided to level a bombing campaign on Cambodia that used up more than one ton of napalm for every single person in Cambodia. It was a bombing campaign matched only by the earlier US terror strikes on North Korea where the effective policy was to bomb every building in the entire country of North Korea that was over a certain number of stories (5?) in addition to a lot of "accidental" carpet bombings of civilians in smaller buildings and houses. This campaign in Cambodia resulted in US terror strikes killing about 500,000 civilians which made it easy for Pol Pot to come to power amidst this chaos, after which he killed upwards of 500,000 more. Remember, too, that this was in the midst of the US led genocide in Laos which killed millions through bombing of civilians.

Just to round out the high-level discussion about communist, totalitarian government in USSR/Russia, I wanted to mention that Wikipedia (in places) even puts the Russian death toll of WW2 itself at up to 40,000,000 fighting Hitler. But when people speak of state-sponsored killing they usually think of Stalin's purges and the famines caused by communist mismanagement. FAMINES Before going into the documentation I should also mention that the famines were a problem, but that there is usually a big anachronism in these claims. It turns out that even haters of communism and haters of Stalin will admit that the famines ended after Lenin's and Stalin's efforts at collectivization, and were virtually eliminated after the 1933 famine. Of course, there was the Nazi destruction of productive land, and the probable Nazi killing of 7,000,000 soldiers and "murder" (via war atrocities) of 20,000,000 more Russians. Nazis even inadvertently starved themselves by heading so far into Russia while destroying local supplies. So WW2 deaths don't actually count as Stalin's "state-sponsored killings" that included famines, not even the WW2-induced famine of 1946. (Stalin was too paranoid to trade machines for food, but when Khrushchev tried this he actually created the so-called "Red Plenty.") Naming the supposed "state-sponsored famines" HOLODOMOR was a deliberately made up word to remind people of "Holocaust" as a new pillar of critique by Nazis, especially in Ukraine. This began mostly starting in the 1970's and 1980's from the Nazi party in Ukraine. In fact, Israel understands the propaganda of Holodomor as "double-holocaust theory," used as a form of Holocaust denial. PURGES This leaves the "purges." USSR was a huge country and there were atrocities and deaths done in Stalin's name. Ironically, many turned out to have been done to undermine Stalin. NKVD officer, Yezhov, got permission in 1936 and 1937 to detain and shoot people over traitorist conspiracies, but as early as 1937 Stalin understood that something was going badly wrong, and he began investigating and punishing people over it. There were many cases of Yezhov and his officers torturing and killing people. By 1939, Stalin put his own favored intelligence officer Beria over the NKVD, dismissing Yezhov and his whole circle of officers, who later admitted that he and they had been working as agents of the Germans to hurt Stalin. When Beria took over in 1939, the "state sponsored deaths" dropped off immediately. And thousands released from prisons were put back in their former positions. In reading some well-documented books, even by anti-communists, I'm seeing the admission that Stalin himself may have not wanted or had any involvement in ANY civilian killings, even when there really were conspiracies, and he really was paranoid about outside plots. These books readily admit that Stalin himself had these perpetrators of crimes punished when plots were discovered. Also, I'm amazed to learn that Stalin remained very popular -- extremely popular -- throughout his regime. This would have been hard to imagine if he had been killing every fourth person in the USSR. Also, there is the fact that United States knew nothing of these supposed Stalin atrocities, or at least documented none of them, in spite of spies who documented so many other Russian problems, even with Stalin himself. The best documented "guesses" of the number of persons "purged" by Yezhov and his officers are maybe 250,000 dead and 400,000 to 600,000 imprisoned. I have not seen a documented book that tries to put the number much over 3 million, which is still terrible. What I think are the most reasonable discussions of the history of Stalin and the USSR put the number between 400,000 and 600,000. But these books show how the confusion and terror over who to side with was part of the admitted plot by German infiltration, through spies and fifth column efforts along the "edges" of the USSR. Although I can't find any evidence of Stalin's own involvement in the state-sponsored deaths, under his regime I can easily see a number between 500,000 and 1 million. BACK TO FAMINES AGAIN Just an aside, but it is very easy to look up some of Churchill's atrocities, where, for example, he purposely starved upwards of four million Bengals, an ACTUAL HOLODOMOR! See, for example, the flimsy arguments that defend Churchill and compare them with the documented evidence in the historical record. For an overview, look at this article in the UK paper, the Independent: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/world-history/winston-churchill-genocide-dictator-shashi-tharoor-melbourne-writers-festival-a7936141.html Winston Churchill has as much blood on his hands as the worst genocidal dictators . . .

Pol Pot's (Khmer Rouge) regime was indeed terrible. So you might wonder why the USA so bitterly opposed his overthrow. It was because Vietnam overthrew Pol Pot, and isn't it curious that after a failed war in Vietnam the US had to go intervene one more time to punish them for making humanitarian headway in putting an end to Pol Pot's atrocities? The US provided both diplomatic and military support for the Pol Pot regime via the "Kampuchea" regime even after it was overthrown. Kissinger was working with China at that time and supported the Chinese invasion of Vietnam in retaliation, and the US responded by blocking IMF loans and putting other monetary and trade sanctions on Vietnam. And we covertly poured millions of dollars of military aid into the new "Pol Pot" regime. If you are asking about the numbers of Cambodians and Vietnamese killed by the Pol Pot regime, I don't yet doubt that the numbers could be on the order of a million deaths. For some interesting reading, you might want to look up the references mentioned in the Wikipedia article here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_United_States_support_for_the_Khmer_Rouge -----------the rest of this post is an excerpt from that article-------------- Cambodia's UN seat As a result of Chinese and Western opposition to the Vietnamese invasion and occupation, the Khmer Rouge, rather than the PRK, was allowed to hold Cambodia's United Nations (UN) seat until 1982. After 1982, the UN seat was filled by a Khmer Rouge-dominated coalition—the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea (CGDK).[1][2] US military and diplomatic support According to Michael Haas, despite publicly condemning the Khmer Rouge, the U.S. offered military support to the organization and was instrumental in preventing UN recognition of the Vietnam-aligned government.[16] Haas argued that the U.S. and China responded to efforts from the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) for disarming the Khmer Rouge by ensuring the Khmer Rouge stayed armed, and that U.S. efforts for merging the Khmer Rouge with allied factions resulted in the formation of the CGDK. After 1982, the U.S. increased its annual covert aid to the Cambodian resistance from $4 million to $10 million.[17] Singaporean diplomat Bilahari Kausikan, recalled: "ASEAN wanted elections but the U.S. supported the return of a genocidal regime. Did any of you imagine that the U.S. once had in effect supported genocide?" In fact, Kausikan described the disagreement between the U.S. and ASEAN over the Khmer Rouge as reaching the threshold that the U.S. even threatened Singapore with "blood on the floor".[18] U.S. support for the Khmer Rouge guerrillas in the 1980s was "pivotal" to keeping the organization alive, and was in part motivated by revenge over Vietnam's defeat of the U.S. during the Vietnam War, according to Tom Fawthrop.[19] A WikiLeaks dump of 500,000 U.S. diplomatic cables from 1978 document shows that the administration of President Jimmy Carter was torn between revulsion at the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge and concern with the possibility of growing Vietnamese influence should the Khmer Rouge collapse.[20]Elizabeth Becker quoted Carter's National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, as acknowledging that "I encourage[d] the Chinese to support [Khmer Rouge leader] Pol Pot ... we could never support him, but China could." However, Brzezinski subsequently stated: "The Chinese were aiding Pol Pot, but without any help or arrangement from the United States. Moreover, we told the Chinese explicitly that in our view Pol Pot was an abomination and that the United States would have nothing to do with him—directly or indirectly."[21][22][23] In late 1975, former National Security Advisor and United States Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told the Thai foreign minister: "You should tell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs but we won't let that stand in our way."[24] Years later, Kissinger elaborated: "The Thais and the Chinese did not want a Vietnamese-dominated Indochina. We didn't want the Vietnamese to dominate. I don't believe we did anything for Pol Pot. But I suspect we closed our eyes when some others did something for Pol Pot."[25]

Agreed. But if they were covering up atrocities in the range of 1 million atrocities, or 100,000 or 10,000 atrocities, then would we be honest to claim without reservation that it must have been 20,000,000 or 40,000,000? What if the very motives for producing those high numbers were for political propaganda purposes? (Making Stalin appear worse than Hitler, or making Stalin's "totalitarian" Communism appear worse than Hitler's totalitarian Fascism, or even a diversion from Churchill's or Truman's atrocities.) Would we want to be playing into the hands of these political motives by repeating numbers as "facts" when those "facts" are admittedly so hard to determine? If the child abuse problem among Jewish Orthodox synagogues turns out to be twice as bad as that of the Catholic Church, but we found some unproven "data" from an anti-Semite source claiming it was 1,000 times worse, would we be quick to start repeating that Jews have it 1,000 times worse than Catholics? Yes. These are the main points I am making, too: Never, EVER rely on Wikipedia or not even a well-documented book that seemed very convincing. Always look at the reputation of the author, and the potential biases of the positions represented, and the purpose of a book or an idea within a book or source. Always look for ideas that are admitted to on all sides especially where they do not fit the usual pattern of the presentation*. Look at the evidence provided from all sides, look up the sources, watch out for bad translations. Use the Biblical two-witness rule! Don't count as a second "witness" people who merely copied from the same source. Be suspicious of anything you can't verify. Be humble and admit what we don't know, but don't assume that not being able to verify something means automatically that it didn't happen. Where there's smoke there's fire, usually, but sometimes it's just a smokescreen. You are right that history has been rewritten when the agenda changes, and this is exactly the topic here. And most important is that last idea I just quoted from you above, when you said: "I lived it - I know what is true and false." Where possible, we must get the view of multiple people who lived through the events in question. There is a tendency to whitewash all religions and institutions because there are always those who wish to say that their form of human government is the best. In the US, as you know, there is even a tendency to whitewash the Democrats and produce "mainstream" news outlets for that purpose, and there is a tendency to whitewash the Republicans and produce "mainstream" news outlets for that purpose. The history of this type of phenomenon in the US goes back at least to the late 1700's. We need to focus on facts and evidence and thereby uncover motives and biases. It's just as important to humbly look at own motives and biases. Another point related to motive is this: Let's say I had thought that Hitler and his government killed 400,000,000 people, and you corrected me and could show evidence that even through all his battles and atrocities that he only engineered the death of 40,000,000. If you were to correct my error, I would not begin ranting about how some people are trying to promote Nazi propaganda, and bring back dangerous German Nazi regimes. So please don't get the idea that I want to live under communism. Sometimes the desire to see a Bible prophecy work out a certain way according to our own human reasoning or private interpretation can be a misleading motive and bias, too. Look at the tiny, tiny percent of supposed Biblical prophecy that ever worked out the way something was predicted in advance. And yet look how absolutely sure the presentations sounded when these predictions were first being made. The last one that ever turned out the way it was predicted was an explanation of the end of the Holy Roman Empire that was made in the late 1600's and which predicted some things that were accomplished by the French Revolution between 1789 and 1799. Because the accuracy was uncanny and 'undeniable,' Russell, and the Bible Students, and even our own JW publications accepted these dates as the correct solution to those same Bible prophecies for half a century. But now, we think they were just coincidences. This leaves us right back to the 0% accuracy in the track record of dozens of prophetic predictions so far. Of course, remaining future predictions could still be fulfilled "exactly to the letter." We just need to be careful, discreet, humble, faithful, and never presumptuous about our expectations.

There is no evidence of this. There is always evidence of wicked, evil governments, of course, and there is always evidence of abuse of power. But the idea that there was anything close to 20 million deaths through deliberate state-sponsored killing with no accountability has no evidence to back it up. Before looking at the more probable numbers again, the background of the policies that promoted these damning numbers should be looked at. The primary goal of course is to make Western-leaning countries condemn communist and socialist governments. We "Westerners" (French, German, British, Italian, American, Australian, etc.) can always extol the theoretical virtues of communism, socialism, and social democracy, but we have been trained to deny that such programs, in practice, can ever truly result in anything but chaos and death. In fact, the Western foreign policy leaders in the United States become positively scared and weak-kneed when they hear anything positive about a socialist country improving the overall state of their economy. If more people are being treated fairly and being pulled out of famine and poverty, the US runs scared. The US and other imperialist nations had probably contributed the most in creating the bad and exploitative economic situation in those countries in the first place. Why do you think the US is quick to try to crush small to medium-sized countries that have no economic power and no real effect on the US? Why crush Grenada, Faulkland Islands, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Laos? Why sabotage Venezuala, Chile, Cuba? Sometimes the reason is clearly admitted by officials. Sometimes it comes through loud and clear in leaked documents. But following WW2, internal state department documents, included the following reasons for some of these interventions and US led terrorism. For example here is the documentation for why we had to crush Guatemala according to a U.S. State Department official in 1954: "Guatemala has become an increasing threat to the stability of Honduras and El Salvador. Its agrarian reform is a powerful propaganda weapon: its broad social program of aiding the workers and peasants in a victorious struggle against the upper classes and large foreign enterprises has a strong appeal to the populations of Central American neighbors where similar conditions prevail." Notice that the threat is that workers and peasants were successful and victorious in agrarian reform and the threat is that they were able to set a good example. Their democratic experiment had to be met with military invasion because, as the US admitted: "social and economic programs of the elected government met the aspirations" [of labor and peasantry and] "inspired the loyalty and conformed to the self-interest of most politically conscience Guatemalans." There are many more such examples of trying to crush and sabotage any state that succeeds at any kind of democracy that doesn't conform to US or Western interests. If even a small threat of a good example that is working to lift more people out of poverty, increase employment, increase health care, increase education, it must be crushed and sabotaged. If the country is too large, the alternative is repeated propaganda. This could even lead to a better understanding of why mainstream US and UK news outlets were running anti-Russia stories every two weeks or so since Trump's and Theresa May's election. But there is now more news of the strength and stability of China's economy and this "threat of good example" has required that mainstream media be fed anti-China stories about every two weeks for several months now. Since they are coming out better in the trade/tariff "war" for now, I wouldn't be surprised to see new anti-China stories every week for a while. And many of these stories have been shown to be without real evidence. The so-called total surveillance in China is nowhere near the level of total surveillance in the United States for example. The ratio of political prisoners is nowhere near the number in the United States. When Apple is caught stealing technology from Chinese smartphones, the US counters with a huge story about an unprovable Chinese data breach, or some other diversion. China steals technology from the US too, of course, but the problem is that it's becoming harder to make these cases against them when China reaches specific levels of technology well before the US: e.g., artificial intelligence levels, robotics, quantum computing and quantum communication, etc. The idea that Chinese can't travel abroad without specific "political" permission, the idea that millions of Muslims are in "concentration camps," or that they are invading Africa as a colonial imperialist military power, and many other such rumors have been foisted in a highly exaggerated manner upon the US and UK and other Western audiences, often discovered with fake evidence and fake witnesses. (Some have been caught.) -- In fact, on the China/Africa situation, even John Bolton admitted that the real problem was that China was treating these countries in such a way that the countries were beginning to side with China against the practices of the United States in those countries. Russia and China have made huge mistakes to be sure. But if we want to be honest and truthful we also have to be careful not to repeat things that are most likely untruths, even if we want to believe them, and they make perfect sense to our world view.

And, naturally, if one tries to trace this quote back to Stalin, they find that it wasn't attributed to him until 1981, and even then it was: "When one man dies it's a tragedy. When thousands die it's statistics." The buildup from thousands to one-hundred-thousand, to millions, to tens of millions, to forty-million, as some kind of "fact," hadn't really happened until propagandists under Thatcher's and Reagan's era. And the repetition of this supposed quote served Western propaganda interests very well. Note especially the Churchill connection in the way that Wikiquotes was able to trace it, as Churchill connections come up multiple times in much anti-Stalin propaganda. Another "strain" of evidence that crops up again here and in other places, already mentioned above, is the idea of taking known "German" and/or "Nazi" ideas and re-attributing them to Stalin. (Many people who completely deny the Holocaust are still happy to report that Stalin killed 40,000,000.) The rest of this post is an excerpt copied from https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin In Портрет тирана (1981) (Portrait of a Tyrant),[1] Soviet historian Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko attributes the following version to Stalin: "When one man dies it's a tragedy. When thousands die it's statistics." This is the alleged response of Stalin during the 1943 Tehran conference when Churchill objected to an early opening of a second front in France. In her review "Mustering Most Memorable Quips" of Konstantin Dushenko's 1997 Dictionary of Modern Quotations (Словарь современных цитат: 4300 ходячих цитат и выражений ХХ века, их источники, авторы, датировка), Julia Solovyova states: "Russian historians have no record of the lines, 'Death of one man is a tragedy. Death of a million is a statistic,' commonly attributed by English-language dictionaries to Josef Stalin." [2] This quotation may originate from "Französischer Witz" (1925) by Kurt Tucholsky: "Darauf sagt ein Diplomat vom Quai d'Orsay: «Der Krieg? Ich kann das nicht so schrecklich finden! Der Tod eines Menschen: das ist eine Katastrophe. Hunderttausend Tote: das ist eine Statistik!»" ("To which a Quai d'Orsay diplomat replies: «The war? I can't find it so terrible! The death of one man: that is a catastrophe. One hundred thousand deaths: that is a statistic!»") [added by JWI: Since 1855, the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs was located in Paris at the Quai d'Orsay from where its diplomats worked. Note here.] Another possible source or intermediary may be the concluding words of chapter 8 of the 1956 novel The Black Obelisk by Erich Maria Remarque: "Aber das ist wohl so, weil ein einzelner immer der Tod ist — und zwei Millionen immer nur eine Statistik." ("But probably the reason is that one dead man is death—and two million are only a statistic." 1958 Crest Book reprint) Mary Soames (daughter of Churchill) claims to have overheard Stalin deliver a variant of the quote in immediate postwar Berlin (Remembrance Sunday Andrew Marr interview BBC 2011) See also Jean Rostand, Thoughts of a Biologist, 1939: "Kill one man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill them all, and you are a god." In an interview given for the 1983 three-part documentary Der Prozeß by Norddeutscher Rundfunk on the Third Majdanek trial, Simon Wiesenthal attributes the quote to the unpublished auto-biography of Adolf Eichmann. According to Wiesenthal, Eichmann had been asked by another member of the Reich Main Security Office during WWII what they should answer would they be questioned after the war about the millions of dead Jews they were responsible for, to which Eichmann according to his own testimony had replied with the quote.

With respect to Stalin, most of the supposed "facts" that made him such a monster were "documented" by Timothy Snyder in "Bloodlands." However, if anyone has ever tried to look up any one of the many accusations supposedly documented, they will find that all of them lead to dead ends. It's a collection of outrageous claims from sources that don't actually exist, sources that are just persons quoting sources that don't actually exist, or sources that merely quote a person making a claim with nothing to back it up. A further look into the "sources" will show that the primary source of most of these claims started with Ukrainian Nazis who were very anti-Semitic and wanted Stalin to look worse than Hitler. In fact, you can trace an anti-Semitic thread even through the sources in the US and elsewhere who were most active in promoting the Ukrainian propaganda during the Cold War. One problem with these sources is that they completely contradict earlier U.S. and even other anti-U.S.S.R. sources that were contemporary with Stalin, and even for many years after. (For ease of discussion I will likely say Russia in place of USSR.) What one really needs to do is look at all the specific ways in which people come up with numbers, and watch historically how these numbers were doubled and tripled, and quadrupled over time. Then watch how various pieces of evidence were manufactured out of nothing, or made to contradict the original researchers who had looked into the same evidence. Even those historians and researchers who were looking for terrible news to undermine Stalin and looked everywhere for all possible means to make him look as bad as possible, even these persons would not have dreamed of the numbers that were later attributed to them and their research. So how does one come up with a number like 40,000,000? Usually one does not blame Stalin directly for all 40,000,000. The quote from above blames 40,000,000 deaths on "atheism and communism." Stalin's purges, the famine he supposedly created, sickness, and war deaths are usually included. The population of Russia around 1937 was likely 160 million. So we are claiming that upwards of 25% of the population was killed by Stalin, either directly or indirectly, due to communist rule, oppression, errors, etc. Of course, including the military deaths from fighting Hitler makes no consistent sense because any other nation who lost much lower numbers fighting Hitler were considered heroic by other Western nations. Russia itself may have lost about 10,000,000 in direct military deaths of soldiers. Wartime deaths often encompass twice that of soldiers themselves due to wartime hardships, and Russia has admitted between 20,000,000 and 27,000,000 million due in some way to WW2. So we can probably already see the basis for some of the propaganda against USSR/Russia/Stalin. People usually add the idea that communism created massive famine, and that Stalin murdered millions in "purges." More to come on the purges and famines soon . . .

This topic might be more appropriate outside the JW Public Club here, but I have a tendency to keep tying things back to our own "JW" take on prophecy, honesty, etc. Obviously, the Scripture almost referenced in the title above is one of three that state: (1 Samuel 29:5) . . ., ‘Saul has struck down his thousands, and David [has killed] his tens of thousands’ But can we honestly repeat the similar assessment about Stalin and Mao? Not picking on anyone in particular because all of us who have been around a while, have seen these claims 100 times, especially since the 1980's. Most recently, I saw a version of this claim in a topic started by Arauna about "Agenda 21" where she included the following statement, in part: If it's true, fine, but if it turns out to be a falsehood, perhaps we should not repeat it, no matter how well it seems to fits into a U.S. agenda to constantly create "bad" news stories about Russia and China. Nor, as JWs, should we repeat it no matter how well it fits our own teaching ministry about man's inhumanity to man, and the inability of humans to rule themselves. Those latter points are still true, but the supposed specific "facts" we sometimes use in order to back up these teachings are not necessarily true. So let's look at what we actually know about Russia and China.

I watched the videos. Also have delved into a site called the North Western Research Institute. This site displays most of the actual quotes that inform the same quotes and points made by Henry Lamb in the first video. https://nwri.org/agenda-21/ The Biodiversity Project and Wildlands Project which are key to this argument are also well-documented on the site. For example: https://nwri.org/the-wildlands-project/background-on-the-wildlands-project/ The second video about the travesties of local governments using code violation law to confiscate money and ultimately property is a separate issue. Once "Agenda 21" has become a buzzword for a conspiracy, it becomes like all great conspiracies so that anything and everything bad feeds into it, and nothing can ever undermine it. A really good conspiracy is somehow "proven" even more strongly by direct evidence against it, or completely unrelated and irrelevant evidence. There are huge contradictions between the second "code violation" video and the core "Agenda 21" conspiracy. But I think there is a real connection between the two, and it should not surprise anyone who has watched the actions of imperialist powers in support of fascist states and "American Interests" (Western corporate agenda). There are many fears about "Agenda 21" which are legitimate, and there is a lot of truth expressed by Henry Lamb. He is also a deceiver, perhaps not deliberately, but it is obvious that he is using some of the quotes completely out of context to whip up fear and support for an activist movement. But there is also a lot to be said for activist movements; these "mini-revolutions" have sometimes been the primary (or sometimes the ONLY) factor in achieving civil rights against those tyrannies who would trample them. (And it's not just a federal, state or local government, but a TYRANNY can sometimes be a Walmart, Google, Verizon, Facebook, AT&T, Amazon, Tesla, Uber, Microsoft, Vatican, International Monetary Fund, Exxon/Mobil, World Bank, Chase Manhattan, Goldman Sachs, and Apple among many others.) After reading much more of the information AGAINST Agenda 21 and looking up the source quotes, I'm convinced that Agenda 21 itself is a good faith effort to do something useful and necessary. In fact, everything in it, sustainability, biodiversity, etc., is a very important part of doing the right thing for all humans based on the very best information that engineers and scientists and researchers can obtain. Revelation speaks of Jehovah 'bringing to ruin those ruining the earth.' Therefore it is also in many ways, a very Christian/Biblical agenda, in its attempt to do the right thing. All of the points taken out of context about percentages of land that should remain wilderness, additional lands that should be marked as wilderness, buffer zones, etc., -- all these points are based on fear-mongering that is completely unrelated to the words of the study. It's not just out of context, it's making up of stuff that isn't even there in the original source material. The studies themselves are designs for 'best practices' for rural and wilderness land use, and will become more and more important as more people die from fires, climatory disruptions, etc. The Morocco Intergovernmental Conference on the Global Compact for Migration is apparently another good faith effort to present to the world the dangers in unmonitored and unassisted migrations. When wars result in mass migrations, for example, more people die from the migration than ever die in the wars. Attempts at genocide have been nearly accomplished through forced migrations. Mankind's history has contained hundreds of examples of fear-stoking about migration, and those fears are sometimes warranted and useful. (Look at what happened to the Native American populations for example, when the Europeans migrated here and forced native populations to migrate long distances unassisted. Look what happened when the U.S. found ways to push Mexicans from their land and finally steal it from them in Texas, Colorado, Arizona and California back in the 1840's.) We should be careful that we don't easily fall for propaganda against "law and order" when this very propaganda is often intended to trick the average person into helping powerful, wealthy "interests" to undermine "law and order" worldwide, for their own benefit.

Not me. And I have no acquaintances at Microsoft. Thanks, anyway. Now, I never thought of Witnessing to these folks. That could be hilarious.

Also, doesn't this belong in Anna's "dark web" prophecy/conspiracy thread?

???? What is this about? Why are you getting a kick out of goading me? Or kicking against my goads, or whatever that scripture says? (Acts 26:14) I know about the fraud(s). My wife gets "mad" at me when I string them along for about 25+ minutes, while doing other things of course. I have tracked about 4 versions of this, and I get calls like this every few days. It turns out that these young men from India will get very mad and start cursing at you, and just can't let it go after you have wasted half an hour of their time and they realize they've been had (in the sense that they finally figure out they are not really making progress in convincing you to part with money and/or offering them full access to your machine/network). Of course, I may have to stop doing this after the reminders in today's Watchtower Study. When they get to the point where they are having you look up supposedly unique numbers in obscure computer files and pretend that this is your license code to prove they are legit, you can act convinced and say OK, I see you are legit . . . . But wait, let me look up and see if it's the same number on my other computer just in case this isn't really unique. . . . I look it up and after about 5 minutes tell them that it's the same number (which it is). Then they tell you that this is because you are on the same network . . . And then you tell them that you tethered/hotspotted your iPhone as the network for this other computer (which I did) . . . and then they tell you it's because you are on the same network again, because they don't have a script for that particular outcome. So you say OK maybe they are right, but there is just one more test to be sure. So you explain that you that you can VPN into one of your employee's work computers which is on a completely different network, and this time ask them if they expect that you will see the same supposedly unique number on this other person's computer on a different network. They know the answer is YES but they can't admit it, so you'd think they would just hang up. Instead 3 out of 4 will start cursing at you at this point, with poorly accented swear words. It's amazing!

Every time I decide to go on a diet, the lettuce is contaminated! Every time I go to Chipotle's they have an announcement that something is no longer being served. The guacamole for a while, then last week when they put up a sign saying they would not be serving lettuce in their burritos/bowls until further notice . . . . . . and now I heard that they've pulled pork again. Oh wait, scratch that . . . [JWI holds an earpiece a little tighter to his ear]. . . I'm just now being told that "pulled pork" is an actual thing. Who knew? So, actually, it's an announcement: Chipotle's: they have "pulled pork" again!

I still don't get why you haven't been yet..... Thinking the same. In fact, one of the first things I thought about was the possibility that the person who told John Butler realized that John might be in a better position to report it than the person who told him, and HOPED that John would report it.

I posted about this just after getting off the phone with someone I knew, but had just recontacted earlier today. The conversation went to a lot of places that I won't go into much more detail about here. As an engineer, he was involved in cleaning up a shale mine (for gravel), buried barrels of waste at Wallkill, suing the previous owners of "International Nickel" at Warwick for remediation (they owned the land prior), an endangered species, air contamination reports, etc. (Actually it was air contamination laws that pushed the printing from Brooklyn to Wallkill in the first place. Wallkill had none.) I even learned that run-off from a cemetery (i.e. launching pad) from old embalming methods can contain arsenic, and other bad stuff. But the brother wanted to make it clear that these were not "scandals" as some might try to make them out to be. The WTS was actually more careful than most corporations about keeping well within the law, and some of the old practices are under different laws today. Whenever a new project is being done, it's a chance to get the owners to fix things according to new law and new knowledge. One reason I had met up with him earlier today is that on Friday, when flushing the toilets in the first floor men's room at Warwick, all the water was brown in all the toilets, even after flushing them. I took a video in case it was a problem, and can post it, but I won't for obvious reasons. I went to the sink and stopped it up with a napkin to fill it and see if it was also affected. It wasn't. I went to a urinal and it was, although less obvious due to shallower running water. Others saw it to, but I doubted anyone would speak up. I ran down to the first lower floor men's room to check it but it was closed. I filled up a cup from the drinking fountain and saw no sign of contamination. Today, I went back and checked both bathrooms. No problem anywhere. I asked the engineer what it probably was, and he told me. Nothing to worry about, by the way.

The GB might be on a pedestal. That will happen naturally, just as it did for Apollos, Paul, Cephas, and some "superfine apostles" back in Corinth. Kind of funny that today I sat in the audience with two members of the Governing Body and two Governing Body Helpers. They did not have special seats. Not one person in the Hall made any special attempt to talk to them. No one seemed nervous around them or tried to impress them. No one tried to take pictures. They talked in groups as normally as anyone else there both before and after the meeting. I know this doesn't PROVE anything, but if it had been different, I would have made a point of how wrong that seemed. I was sitting one row directly in front of one, and I kept checking to see that the crease on the back of my slacks around my knees, calves and ankles still had some "slack," so I honestly seemed like the only person there who might have been a bit self-conscious around them. This same brother only commented once at the WT Study, and the other GB member, not at all. Although their wives made one comment each. (But who's counting?) I do think that other JWs put these men on pedestals more than they themselves TRY to be put on a pedestal.

I see. But this one is even better for those who do "cloud-based" witnessing on the Internet: (Revelation 11:7-12) 7 When they have finished their witnessing, the wild beast that ascends out of the abyss will wage war with them and conquer them and kill them. 8 And their corpses will be on the main street of the great city . . . 11 After the three and a half days, spirit of life from God entered into them, and they stood on their feet, and great fear fell upon those who saw them. 12 And they heard a loud voice from heaven say to them: “Come up here.” And they went up into heaven in the cloud, and their enemies saw them.

You had Rev 1:4 or 1:8 to choose from, and you went with 13:3?? At least the following verse refers to "posts." (Nehemiah 13:6, 11) . . .and sometime later I asked the king for a leave of absence. . . .Then I gathered them together and assigned them back to their posts.

Sorry, won't be to your satisfaction. We'll miss you! So I just talked to someone who worked in the four major NY locations: Brooklyn, Patterson, Wallkill and Warwick. There were water problems with all 4. Patterson was the worst and they had to retrofit the pipes because of the mineral deposits. It was easily predictable according to the engineers, but the expensive outside engineers were quickly replaced with Bethel insiders. There were runoff problems up in Wallkill and no one can pump water from the aquifer there anyway, so they decided on a reservoir instead of the local Wallkill River. In so doing they discovered new problems for engineers to handle (some self-made over the years). The problems in Warwick were resolved after clean-up of the nickel and related minerals, but the lake water is considered very sensitive for several environmental reasons. Much of the planning had to do with level of water usage, where water comes from for fire dept utilization, what goes into the lake, what comes out of the lake. All in all, it was the water. Warwick deals with the Sterling Lake and the Sterling Forest State Park and therefore extends their coverage for Water and environmental issues down into the Greenwood Lake and Sterling Forest Lake where the JW HQ sits. They are already connected by a stream between them, too.

Oh Wait. I really just wanted to say that this particular topic has gone all over the place, but now and then in the JW Public Club it should be possible to discuss the credibility by which we have promoted various political stances and tied them to prophecy. It's true that we've promoted many theories over the years and none have ever turned out to be right - YET! But this doesn't mean they won't all be coming true soon. Still, it's our duty as true Christians to test and prove to pay close attention to our teaching. So a topic that can accept a wide range of issues related to our expectations about prophetic teachings and our expectations about the "sureness" of such teachings might be a good idea. Not for everyone, of course. Some are in different places when it comes to their respect for the time and research put into our doctrines. Some don't like any of our doctrines, but they seem to base it on issues that are not necessarily related to whether we're right on those doctrines. I've explained my position that I love our doctrines on war, Trinity, hellfire, nationalism, new earth, ransom, millennium, etc, but take issue with chronology -- and yet a lot of our prophetic doctrines are loosely based on our chronology doctrines. Setting a rational baseline for what the Governing Body have excelled at rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater should be one of our goals. Dealing with John's criticisms might help some set or reset that baseline.

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