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 HOCHSCHILDI 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 HOCHSCHILDYou can sense the vast inequalities of Tsarist Russia in [Anton] Chekhov and [Lev] Tolstoy.
ADAM HOCHSCHILDDitto for her countryman the great playwright Athol Fugard.
ADAM HOCHSCHILDSomeday, 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
ADAM HOCHSCHILDI 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.
ADAM HOCHSCHILDHitler 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.
ADAM HOCHSCHILDLeopold’s Congo is but one of those silences of history.
ADAM HOCHSCHILDAfter 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?
ADAM HOCHSCHILDThe late Nadine Gordimer in South Africa, for example, had a wonderful ability to get her country’s injustices and contradictions down on paper.
ADAM HOCHSCHILDIn 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.
ADAM HOCHSCHILDSpeaking 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
ADAM HOCHSCHILDThe first World War in so many ways shaped the 20th century and really remade our world for the worse.
ADAM HOCHSCHILDEven [Ernst] Hemingway, perhaps the most intentionally non-political of American writers, became passionately partisan during the Spanish Civil War.
ADAM HOCHSCHILDMany of the principle weapons that the Nazis used during World War II had their first trial in combat in Spain
ADAM HOCHSCHILDBecause they wanted a sympathetic ally in power. So I think it really was the opening act of World War II.
ADAM HOCHSCHILDIt sure is a rising tide, and we have a particularly nasty exemplar of it in the U.S., in Donald Trump.
ADAM HOCHSCHILD