Revelation 17:1
Revelation 17:11Then one of the seven angels with the seven bowls came and said to me, “Come, I will show you the punishment of the great prostitute, who sits on many waters.
introduces the figure the Watchtower identifies as Babylon the Great — the "world empire of false religion," led especially by Christendom. The "many waters" the prostitute sits on are taken as "peoples and crowds and nations and tongues" (per v15), and the judgment is the destruction of all non-JW religions at Armageddon. The harlot is religious; the beast she rides is political. The Watchtower has historically identified that beast as the United Nations.
The angel will identify the prostitute in v18 as "the great city that has a kingdom over the kings of the earth" — not "world empire of false religion." Whatever the judgment of Revelation 17 means, it lands on a city, not on Christendom. And the Watchtower's identification of the beast as the United Nations is awkward given that the Watch Tower Society itself was registered as an NGO with the UN's Department of Public Information from 1991 to 2001 — a fact the Society has never publicly explained beyond the disputed library-access defence. The verse opens an interpretation the Watchtower's own history complicates.