Theos-Talk Archives (November 1995 Message tl00167)

Liesel

LD
I found it rather incongruous that a pamphlet most of whose
contents deal with defending HPB against being maligned should
begin with a foreword maligning CWL. Why is it wrong to malign
one person & but not equally wrong to malign another? Maligning
is insidious whenever it's being done. It injures the person it's
done to the person who's doing it & the person who reads or
hears about it. It succeeded in turning me off right away

JHE
To malign is to speak harmful untruths about another person.
If G.R.S. Mead was speaking the truth about CWL then he cannot
be said to be maligning him. One the other hand if Mead was
saying untrue things in the belief that they were true one could
not say that Mead was acting with the intent to malign. Mead
knew CWL for a number of years. He was one of the members of
Olcott's 1906 London committee formed to question CWL concerning
the accusations made against him by the parents of several boys
in Chicago. Therefore Mead was able to speak from first hand
knowledge concerning CWL. Mead was principled enough concerning
his opinions of CWL that he resigned from the TS in 1908 when
Besant brought Mr. Leadbeater back into the Society.
Perhaps it would help if you read the pamphlet with the
knowledge that Mead genuinely believed that CWL was an evil man
and wished to warn other people concerning him.

LD
Moreover I find all this defending people who matter against
people who don't matter in the least rather useless & of little
interest. I myself don't need to be convinced of HPB's
genuineness & I think most present-day Theosophists don't
either So why drag up all this junk?

JHE
Because all of the "junk" was never resolved. When HPB was
discredited by the Coulombs Olcott elected to ignore it and he
also prevented HPB from taking them to court. Olcott decided to
ignore it and said that it would all blow over and be forgotten.
It never did blow over and it has never been forgotten. My
guess is that if Olcott had stood up for HPB and HPB was allowed
to bring her charges of slander against the Coulombs it would
have been forgotten. But the public perceives an accusation that
is answered with silence to be an admission of guilt.

Jerry HE

------------------------------------------|Jerry Hejka-Ekins
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