二つの言語文化

どちらが良いとか悪いとか、即断・独断することなしに、下記の二つの言語文化について考えてみたい。

われわれ日本人の行き方として、自分の意見は意見、議論は議論といたしまいて、国策がいやしくも決定せられました以上、われわれはその国策に従って努力するというのがわれわれにかせられた従来の慣習であり、また尊重せられる行き方であります。

（「東京裁判」で、なぜ個人的に反対していた国策に従い続けてきたのかと検察官に問われた小磯国昭元首相の発言）
丸山真男 (1964) 「超国家主義の論理と心理」『現代政治の思想と行動』未来社　20ページより。

Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify supression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears. ... Those who won our independence by revolution were not cowards. They did not fear political change. They did not exalt order at the cost of liberty. To courageous, self-reliant men, with confidence in the power of free and fearless reasoning applied through the process of popular government, no danger flowing from speech can be deemed clear and present unless the icidence of the evil apprehended is so imminent that it may befall before there is opportunity for full discussion. If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.

Louis Brandeis, in the Whitney v. California case in 1927. This opinion is sometimes regarded as the most eloquent American rhetoric of freedom.
Quoted from A hero of American Justice. By Anthony Lewis. The New York Review of Books. February 11, 2010. P. 32

【広告】　というわけで言語教育を振り返るには、『リフレクティブな英語教育をめざして』と『危機に立つ日本の英語教育』をぜひお読み下さい(笑)｡

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