In his fierce, bold determination to see the lives of modern-day slaves up close, Benjamin Skinner reminds me of the British abolitionist of two hundred years ago
ADAM HOCHSCHILDIt sure is a rising tide, and we have a particularly nasty exemplar of it in the U.S., in Donald Trump.
More Adam Hochschild Quotes
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You’ve got politicians in power or vying for power who are taking tactics and elements of their appeal from the playbook of fascism.
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You can sense the vast inequalities of Tsarist Russia in [Anton] Chekhov and [Lev] Tolstoy.
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The late Nadine Gordimer in South Africa, for example, had a wonderful ability to get her country’s injustices and contradictions down on paper.
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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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Leopold’s Congo is but one of those silences of history.
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After all, where else in the world at this point did you have Americans in uniform who were being bombed by Nazi planes four years before the U.S. entered World War II?
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Skinner goes everywhere, from border crossings to brothels to bargaining sessions with dealers in human beings
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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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I think in many ways, the Spanish Civil War was the first battle of World War II.
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I’m after a snake and please God I’ll scotch it.
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Mussolini, in 1935, went and then in the next year, conquered Ethiopia, acquiring himself a colony.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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The first World War in so many ways shaped the 20th century and really remade our world for the worse.
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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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I can certainly sympathize with writers who don’t want to put themselves or their loved ones at risk.
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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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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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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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Ditto for her countryman the great playwright Athol Fugard.
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