Truth and Justice cannot be sacrificed for Reputation
Richard Salbato
In 1894 a
French army officer, Alfred Dryfus, was wrongfully
convicted of treason. When the Commanders of the army realized he was innocent,
they decided to hide the fact in order to protect the reputation of the army.
They believed it was better to sacrifice one man than to harm the reputation of
the army.
In
Zola published
in all the papers of
The same
problem happened to
My open
accusations against those who have abortions slanders those
people. My public stand on the sin of homosexuality slanders those who support
it. I call Obama the worst president in history and that is slander.
When is slander a sin?
This brings up
the question. When is slander a sin or not a sin? When, like the examples
above, are we required to slander someone, or our silence becomes a sin.
The answer to
this is easy to say but hard to see. We are always required to reprimand (point
out) the sins of others and they are required to point out ours. However, this
is private and face to face. Even this can be slander if it is not true or even
if justice is not the motive.
If, however,
these sins (theirs or ours) harm others and continue to do so, we are commanded
to expose this publicly. It is easy to see the examples above but sometimes it
is not so easy. There are very few sins in the world that do not affect other
people.
The father who
walks away from his family believes he is only affecting his life but we all
know the effects it has on the family he left. The student who does not want to
learn thinks this only affects his life, but when he becomes a burden in the
rest of society it affects everyone. When the glutton ends up in the hospital
society pays the bill.
When a man does
a simple thing like smoking weed, he thinks he harms no one. But that simple
thing has killed more people in the drug war between
One simple way
to know slander is the civil law of libel. It is not libel if it is the truth.
On the otherhand for the Catholic it can still be a
sin even if the truth, if it does not harm anyone. For me it is hard to find
any sin that doe not harm others.
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Note:
For your
interest, this is the life of Emile Zola
I have never
read his other books so I don’t know if I agree with them or not.
In 1898 Zola
intervened in the Dreyfus Affair—that of a Jewish French army officer whose
wrongful conviction for treason in 1894 sparked a 12-year controversy that
deeply divided French society. At an early stage in the proceedings Zola had
decided rightly that Alfred Dreyfus was innocent. On Jan. 13, 1898, in
the newspaper L’Aurore, Zola published a
fierce denunciation of the French general staff in an open letter beginning with the
words “J’accuse” (“I accuse”). He charged various high-ranking
military officers and, indeed, the War Office itself of concealing the truth in
the wrongful conviction of Dreyfus for espionage. Zola was prosecuted for libel
and found guilty. In July 1899, when his appeal appeared certain to fail, he
fled to
Zola’s final
series of novels, Les Trois Villes
(1894–98; The Three Cities) and Les Quatre Évangiles (1899–1903;
The Four Gospels) are generally conceded to
be far less forceful than his earlier work. However, the titles of the novels
in the latter series reveal the values that underlay his entire life and work: Fécondité (1899; Fecundity), Travail
(1901; Work), Vérité (1903; Truth),
and Justice (which, ironically, remained incomplete).
Zola died
unexpectedly in September 1902, the victim of coal gas asphyxiation resulting from a blocked chimney
flue. Officially, the event was determined to be a tragic
accident, but there were—and still are—those who believe that fanatical
anti-Dreyfusards arranged to have the chimney
blocked.
At the time of
his death, Zola was recognized not only as one of the greatest novelists in