Its seemingly inexplicable outbursts of violence-is shaped far less by what we celebrate and mythologize than by the painful events we try to forget.
ADAM HOCHSCHILDAnd he learned a great deal from it about the strengths and weaknesses of these different weapons.
More Adam Hochschild Quotes
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So people at the time really saw fascism not just as an evil but as an aggressive evil that seemed to be spreading.
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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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I can certainly sympathize with writers who don’t want to put themselves or their loved ones at risk.
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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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Newt Gingrich seldom misses a chance to note that he is a historian.
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Zachary Macaulay, who once traveled on a slave ship across the Atlantic, taking notes.
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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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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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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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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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A pioneer in this genre [ writing about the refugee crisis] : the book A Seventh Man, by the great John Berger, decades ago evoked the lives of migrant workers in Europe.
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The Messerschmitt 109 fighter plane for example, the Stuka dive bomber, the 88 millimeter artillery piece, which could be used both for antiaircraft purposes and also shelling on the ground.
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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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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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I think [George] Orwell is right. There are certainly moments when political differences appear minor, and someone can claim to be non-political or to want to stay out of the fray, but today is not one of those moments.
ADAM HOCHSCHILD