"Mistaken kindness" nghĩa là gì?

"cách mạng" chỉ khiến nông dân lười thêm thôi... Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash.

'Mistaken kindness' có mistaken là sai lầm trong ý kiến -> cụm từ này nghĩa là lòng tốt không đúng chỗ.

Ví dụ
In 1933 surgeons (bác sĩ phẫu thuật) discussing stomach cancer (ung thư dạ dày) quoted, approvingly, an old Arab saying that “he is no physician who has not slain many patients.” Concern for patients’ quality of life was castigated as “mistaken kindness.” In 1962, a ward where children were administered multiple chemotherapy (hóa trị) agents was called a “butcher shop.”

As historian Eric Foner writes in Reconstruction, when radical Republicans in Congress considered redistributing land (chia đất) owned by defeated Confederates to former slaves (nô lệ), their more moderate comrades offered arguments like "for the government to give blacks land would be an act of 'mistaken kindness' that would prevent them from learning 'the habits of free workingmen.” Freedmen were begging for land so they could work it for themselves instead of being forced to work the land of their former masters for pitiable wages--former masters who had grown wealthy on generations of slaves' uncompensated (không được đền bù) labor. Still, opponents of land redistribution believed this would make blacks lazy (lười biếng). 

Indigenous (thổ dân, bản địa) people barely warrant a mention in Strangers, as Woodsworth lumps them into a four-page section called “The Negro and the Indian,” wherein Woodsworth promotes Christian proselytization, education and assimilation as the only hope for these “savages”: “Many are devout Christians leading exemplary lives, but there are still 10,202 Indians in our Dominion, as grossly pagan as their ancestors, or still more wretched, half-civilized, only to be debauched.” Woodsworth mused, “the Indian of today is very much nearer to the civilized white than to his pagan ancestor,” which assumed progress he warns has been hampered by “the mistaken kindness of the State.”

Phạm Hạnh

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