第3巻第1章 英国への帰国
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v.3,chap.1: Return to England In addition to those who consider all war wrong, there are those who object to the particular war that they are asked to fight. This happened with many people at the time of the Korean War and later in regard to the Vietnam War. Such people are punished if they refuse to fight. The law not only punishes those who condemn all war, but also those who condemn any particular war although it must be obvious that in any war one side, at least, is encouraging evil. Those who take this position of objecting to a certain war or a certain law or to certain actions of governments may be held justified because it is so doubtful that they are not justified. Such considerations, it will be said, since they condemn the punishment of supposed malefactors, throw doubt upon the whole criminal law. I believe this is true and I hold that every condemned criminal incurs a certain measure of doubt, sometimes great and sometimes small. This is admitted when it is an enemy who is tried, as in the Nuremberg Trials. It was widely admitted that the Nuremberg prisoners would not have been condemned if they had been tried by Germans. The enemies of the German Government would have punished with death any soldier among themselves who had practised the sort of civil disobedience the lack of which among Germans they pleaded as an excuse for condemning Germans. They refused to accept the plea made by many of those whom they condemned that they had committed criminal acts only under command of those in superior authority. The judges of Nuremberg believed that the Germans should have committed civil disobedience in the name of decency and humanity. This is little likely to have been their view if they had been judging their own countrymen and not their enemies . But I believe it is true of friend as well as foe. The line between proper acceptable civil disobedience and inacceptable civil disobediance comes, I believe, with the reason for it being committed - the seriousness of the object for which it is committed and the profundity of the belief in its necessity. |
(掲載日:2009.06.21/更新日:2011.12.25)