良い例と悪い例

hands-off（無干渉の）という言葉がTOEICで使われた場合、「金は出すが口は出さない」といった良い意味合いで使われていました。

The town leased the property back to the Playhouse for the next 25 years as a hands-off landlord. In addition, town residents raised a significant amount of money in donations through their Save Our Playhouse campaign.

（オックスフォード）
hands-off
dealing with people or a situation by not becoming involved and by allowing people to do what they want to
a hands-off approach to staff management

コリンズの英語辞書で紹介されていた用例も良い意味のものです。

（コリンズ）
He was a hands-off type of manager, fairly popular with the staff, whom we rarely caught sight of.
Magnus Mills THE SCHEME FOR FULL EMPLOYMENT (2003)

悪い例として使われていたのをたまたま発見したのでご紹介します。第２次世界大戦中、中立の立場を貫く国際赤十字を“hands-off policy”とクオーテションマークで囲い、強制収容所での悲惨な出来事を告発しなかったことを非難しています。

‘Ravensbrück,’ by Sarah Helm
By WALTER REICHAPRIL 7, 2015

There were numerous truly admirable women in Ravensbrück — for example, those who shared their meager rations with others — but there were also individuals who became guards and informers, or who preyed on other prisoners sexually. Helm describes the “hands-off policy” of the Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross, which resisted speaking out about the death camps or the “euthanasia” gassings. She gives us glimpses of Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, who was the overseer of the concentration and extermination camps and the architect of the Final Solution. Himmler had a particular interest in Ravensbrück, partly because his mistress bore their baby at a nearby clinic.

単語に意味があることは確かですが、ニュアンスは文脈によって決まることは意識しておきたいです。

現在の問題を何かとナチスに結びつけることをそろそろ止めないかと書いているFTのコラムがありましたので合わせて紹介します。日本でも何かあると戦前の動きだと非難しますよね。

May 1, 2015 11:02 am
Stop these WW2 comparisons
Simon Kuper
‘Memories of the war have shaped our responses to everything from the Viet Cong to today’s jihadis’

One day soon, robots will write politicians’ lines for them. It won’t be hard. When the US negotiated its recent nuclear deal with Iran, it was plain which analogy political opponents would choose: Britain’s appeasement of Hitler at Munich.

Britain’s appeasementに関してはこのブログで何度か紹介しているチェンバレン首相の融和策です。

（オックスフォード）
Neville Chamberlain
(1869-1940) a British prime minister (1937-40) and son of Joseph Chamberlain. He is mainly remembered for his policy of appeasement. He signed the Munich Agreement in 1938, trying to avoid a war against Germany and Italy, but said that Britain would defend Poland if Germany attacked it. This led to the start of World War II. He left the government soon after Britain entered the war, when British forces were defeated in Norway.

このミュンヘンの過ちを繰り返すなという態度は朝鮮戦争、スエズ危機、ベトナム戦争、イラク戦争と戦争に駆り立ててきたといいます。コラムニストは現在のイランは世界覇権への野心はないのだからヒトラーとは違うではないかと冷静にみています。

Similarly, almost nobody now defends the euro by saying it prevents renewed European war — although one of the currency’s fathers, German chancellor Helmut Kohl, thought exactly that. Only Greek tabloids continue to find Nazism in today’s Germany.

However, the Munich analogy does still influence western foreign-policy debates. The Korean war, the Suez invasion of 1956, the Vietnam war and both Iraq wars all began amid warnings against appeasement. Memories of Munich made the US and UK more warlike right up to 2003.

In fact, analogies with Munich are almost always misleading. Criticise the Iranian deal by all means but don’t compare it to Munich. The point about Hitler wasn’t simply that he was a tyrant. He was a tyrant with a massive army and global ambitions, unlike Saddam Hussein or today’s Iranian leaders.

そもそも第二次大戦も善と悪との分かりやすい対立ではなかったではないか、スターリンのソ連は連合国だったではないかと、もっともな指摘もしています。

But even the second world war wasn’t entirely a clash of goodies and baddies. When I asked a Finnish historian whether Finns were ashamed of having fought alongside Hitler, he asked me whether Britons were ashamed of having fought alongside Stalin. Touché, I thought.

アメリカがヨーロッパの出来事を何かとナチスに結びつけるのは、ヨーロッパといえば世界大戦の頃の知識しかないためかもしれないとしています。といっても、最近は

Americans in particular tend to view contemporary Europe through the prism of the second world war. The late British historian Tony Judt once told me why: it’s the only period of European history still widely known in the US. Today’s jihadi threat to European Jews is therefore often likened to Nazism. Instead, the jihadis need to be understood in contemporary terms: as a murderous minority opposed by European states and almost all citizens.
. . .

欧米では世界大戦の連想は下火になってきて、今はイラク戦争との連想が使われるようになっているようです。今でも世界大戦の連想を使っているのは中国のようです。

But in the west, analogies with the second world war are finally fading. The Iraq war has recently taken over as the main historical reference in arguments about potential new wars.

Nowadays, it’s in China where the second world war overshadows the present.

自分が気に入らない政策に対して、絶対的に悪いとされているものを持ち出して非難するのは議論の余地なく非難することですから、卑怯なやり方とも言えます。