The COGs' Selective Amnesia -- Part 2: GTA, LCG and PCG

In the last post we saw how HWA carefully hid the facts about his false prophecies from potential recruits. He started the COGs' selective amnesia concerning the false prophecies.

This habit has been well learned throughout the COG movement. We now turn our attention to COG offshoots that continue this habit.

In 50 Years of Warning from the Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Organization we are treated to quotes dating as far back as 1952 from GTA about how he has been warning the world about the coming of a European superpower. Yet it never mentions that this was supposed to happen by 1975. That from 1953 onwards GTA expected this to occur by 1975.

LCG's "church history" booklet contains a positive portrait of HWA's work and again makes absolutely no mention about 1936, that HWA taught that Mussolini (then Hitler) was the Beast, or 1975. These hard facts are simply erased from their history and hidden from potential recruits.

PCG produced a "special report" of their Philadelphia Trumpet magazine in which we are assured that they have scoured the writings of HWA to show us his "Decades of accurate forecasting" in predicting events years before they happened.

"To begin this project, a team of Trumpet staffers divided up all the Plain Truths on hand and began scouring every article, looking for bold predictions....Our News Bureau then helped us match the prophetic statements we found in the Plain Truth with what actually happened, or is now happening." (Remember)

They probably have Don Tiger to thank for that. A man who sought to preserve HWA's writings with PCG, only to be sued by Flurry and kicked out of PCG.

Clearly they have been reading old Plain Truth issues. One of the articles in this publication is entitled 'Is a World Dictator about to Appear?' which plays on the fact that the first article in the first Plain Truth (February, 1934) has the very same title, 'Is a World Dictator about to Appear?'

Observe this extract from the article cited above:

But the forecast in Revelation 17:10 referred to one revival of the Roman Empire being extant at the very time that the mysterious vision of the book of Revelation would first come to be understood: “and one is ….” Thus it was that Herbert Armstrong came to see that the dictator Benito Mussolini was that one that is, at that time, in the 1930s, prior to and during the onset of World War II.

Notice how the article carefully skirts around the fact that Mussolini was taught by HWA to be the beast who would fight Christ at His return. So while PCG took note of what the title of the first article was they do not tell us there about what HWA actually preached at that time, that Christ would return in 1936, that Mussolini is the beast who will fight Christ at His return, etc.

One will look in vain for any acknowledgment that 1975 happened. That the various 'prescient' quotes cited from the 1950s and 1960s were actually in expectation that these events would be fulfilled by 1975, that the Soviet Union would actually outlast the USA is never discussed here.

This behavior has also been internalized within many COG members as this Weinland Watch post, The 1975 That Never Was, show. Many who entered WCG after the 1975 disappointment had no idea that these things occurred at all.

So we see that the systematic forgetting of the false prophecies and the suppression of these facts are endemic behaviors within the COGs.