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In Reply to: Please explain what you can... posted by Carol on August 25, 2004 at 15:39:23:
I’ll try to answer as far as my experience went. First, any Home that was doing anything secret would be considered a 'selah' Home. This covers everything from Berg’s own ultra-secret Home at the top to the CROs (continental) offices, the local National leadership’s Homes all the way down to the local Pubs Home like, eg, the Home for French translators.
Berg’s Home would have been fully funded by WS money & the most secretive. CROs offices would also have been fully funded by WS money & very secret, as would the Worldwide Finances Home for laundering money. But I suspect that the Homes of the National Leaders were funded by money from their own country, though probably they were assigned a budget by WS, and could take no more than they were told to—though you know some unsavory leaders skimmed the cream when they could get away with it. But since they collected the tithes, they would take what they were allowed before sending the rest to the continental CRO office, who would send it on to the Family finance man. I forget the finance man's name, but he was the same guy for about 20-some years as far as I know.
The further down the chain the ‘selah’ Home was, the more they were partially funded by their own funds & not just WS money. Some National translator’s & pubs homes I lived in sent us out litnessing every week to help raise their own funds. And the less vital the Home was, the less secret & selah they were & the less they were funded by WS.
As far as leaders, there was usually one top dog (about half men, half women in my experience) who absolutely ruled like Hitler tho depending on personality they could be benign at times. But a lot of the stuff like changing leaders through democratic elections, etc. was simply not done in the Homes I was in, no matter how low on the selah WS chain. You always knew the leaders in the Homes were appointed from above. There was nothing democratic about it & disobeying them was like disobeying the National leader personally. It was more of a dictatorship with less freedoms in WS Homes and I’m not even talking about the increased paranoid security, the very close reading of mail in & out, etc.
I can’t speak for James Penn, but the Homes I was in, even if you were a talented PR person or translator or editor, you didn’t have a lot of authority. Sure if you name was known as the national translator or the PR officer, if you ever met someone from a regular field Home they looked at you in awe, but you had no real authority & didn’t make the decisions. The Home’s appointed leaders made those decisions & they were in close communication with the Hitler chain of command above them & woe to you if you stepped out of line.
Even if a person was not responsible for making & enforcing the decisions from above however, there is still the issue of responsibility for translating the MLs into a national language & affecting a whole nation by it, or by being a PR person whether it was at the top in WS Homes or in a local country. This is a whole other issue, since a top WS spokesperson like Penn would bear more responsibility than a local PR spokesperson in Thailand. But there were all kinds of PR spokespersons for the Family especially during the time of the raids (what they call ‘Persecution’) & every one of the PR spokespersons including many SGs saw it as their duty to boldface lie. In fact, all Family members for that matter knew it was their duty to lie to the public.
Penn was not the only PR person who finally got disgusted with lying. For Family members who were forced to do PR lying (at whatever level) the rate of getting sick of it & leaving the Family as a result was almost 100%. That’s what I’ve heard. Nobody likes to lie but many people including SGs were ordered to do it & being loyal Family members they did it, but it got to all of them in the end because outright lying as the first line of defense was the kind of ‘dirty work’ that woke a lot of people up.
