It’s tempting to want to blame it all on an easily identifiable target: Muslims, immigrants, refugees, blacks, Jews.
ADAM HOCHSCHILDIts seemingly inexplicable outbursts of violence-is shaped far less by what we celebrate and mythologize than by the painful events we try to forget.
More Adam Hochschild Quotes
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Ditto for her countryman the great playwright Athol Fugard.
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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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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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You know, by 1936, Hitler was already talking very loudly about his desire to expand to the east.
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Speaking of Germany in 1933, I don’t think you can remove yourself from politics when, in so many countries – the United States, Poland, Hungary, and many others
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Skinner goes everywhere, from border crossings to brothels to bargaining sessions with dealers in human beings
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The first World War in so many ways shaped the 20th century and really remade our world for the worse.
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One of my favourite contemporary fiction writers is a Texan, Ben Fountain. His extraordinary novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Half-Time Walk, all takes place within the half-time show at a Dallas Cowboys football game.
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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 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.
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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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I’m after a snake and please God I’ll scotch it.
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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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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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Someday, I have no doubt, the dead from today’s wars will be seen with a similar sense of sorrow at needless loss and folly as those millions of men who lie in the cemeteries of France and Belgium
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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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Five years ago, who would have thought this possible?
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Work is hard. Distractions are plentiful. And time is short.
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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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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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And yet the world we live in-its divisions and conflicts, its widening gap between rich and poor
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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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Growing inequality is a huge problem, and of course is intimately connected to xenophobia and racism.
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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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No international court can ever substitute for a working national justice system. Or for a society at piece.
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