Work is hard. Distractions are plentiful. And time is short.
ADAM HOCHSCHILDDitto for her countryman the great playwright Athol Fugard.
More Adam Hochschild Quotes
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Ronald Reagan perfected the subtler version long ago by talking about “welfare mothers” – a code phrase for people of colour.
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I think writers can respond by writing about the refugee crisis, by looking at problems faced by migrants, by trying hard to portray them as the human beings that they are.
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It’s tempting to want to blame it all on an easily identifiable target: Muslims, immigrants, refugees, blacks, Jews.
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Because they wanted a sympathetic ally in power. So I think it really was the opening act of World War II.
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Things have gotten openly more extreme in the last few years. I was lecturing in Hungary, whose prime minister, Victor Orban, is an example of this trend.
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I think one thing writers can do is point out that you don’t have to say openly racist things, like [Donald] Trump, to be a racist or a xenophobe.
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In the form of man-made global warming; one can’t be neutral at such a moment. It’s like claiming to be neutral if you’re living in Germany in 1933.
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If your real wages are declining, your job is at risk, you fear your children will be worse off than you are
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I can certainly sympathize with writers who don’t want to put themselves or their loved ones at risk.
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All over Budapest, statues have been replaced, museum exhibits have been redone, to turn ethnic Hungarians, not Jews, into the prime victims of the Germans during World War II.
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In Canada, the U.S. and most of Europe it may be easy to take political stands, this is something for which you can be forced to pay with your life, or your freedom, in many other parts of the world, from Iran to Russia to Pakistan to China.
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Hitler and Mussolini jumped in on the side of Francisco Franco and his Spanish nationalists, sent them vast amounts of military aid, airplanes, tanks and Mussolini sent 80,000 ground troops as well.
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Many of the principle weapons that the Nazis used during World War II had their first trial in combat in Spain
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And tens of millions of Americans will feel a similar revulsion for the politicians and generals who were so spendthrift with others’ lives.
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Even [Ernst] Hemingway, perhaps the most intentionally non-political of American writers, became passionately partisan during the Spanish Civil War.
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You can sense the vast inequalities of Tsarist Russia in [Anton] Chekhov and [Lev] Tolstoy.
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And American soldiers were the victims of these things in Spain, American volunteers. So this war was really a testing ground for Hitler.
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No one has better summed up the American appetite for spectacle, the link between sports and politics, and the absolute madness of George W. Bush’s Iraq War.
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How many really great writers are there who are totally non-political? You can hear the French Revolution in the poetry of [Percy Bysshe] Shelly and [John] Wordsworth
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Zachary Macaulay, who once traveled on a slave ship across the Atlantic, taking notes.
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To bring us this vivid, searing account of the wide network of human trafficking and servitude which spans today’s globe.
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Ditto for her countryman the great playwright Athol Fugard.
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Five years ago, who would have thought this possible?
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I’m after a snake and please God I’ll scotch it.
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Leopold’s Congo is but one of those silences of history.
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It sure is a rising tide, and we have a particularly nasty exemplar of it in the U.S., in Donald Trump.
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