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.
ADAM HOCHSCHILDI think in many ways, the Spanish Civil War was the first battle of World War II.
More Adam Hochschild Quotes
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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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It’s tempting to want to blame it all on an easily identifiable target: Muslims, immigrants, refugees, blacks, Jews.
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Zachary Macaulay, who once traveled on a slave ship across the Atlantic, taking notes.
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Compared with how we’ve ducked it in the United States, Canada should be really proud of how you have welcomed a significant number of refugees – far more, in fact, than we Americans have, even though our population is vastly larger.
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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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Mussolini, in 1935, went and then in the next year, conquered Ethiopia, acquiring himself a colony.
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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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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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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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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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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’m after a snake and please God I’ll scotch it.
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You can sense the vast inequalities of Tsarist Russia in [Anton] Chekhov and [Lev] Tolstoy.
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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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And tens of millions of Americans will feel a similar revulsion for the politicians and generals who were so spendthrift with others’ lives.
ADAM HOCHSCHILD