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.
ADAM HOCHSCHILDAnd American soldiers were the victims of these things in Spain, American volunteers. So this war was really a testing ground for Hitler.
More Adam Hochschild Quotes
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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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Work is hard. Distractions are plentiful. And time is short.
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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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I can certainly sympathize with writers who don’t want to put themselves or their loved ones at risk.
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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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Five years ago, who would have thought this possible?
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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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I 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.
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Zachary Macaulay, who once traveled on a slave ship across the Atlantic, taking notes.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Even [Ernst] Hemingway, perhaps the most intentionally non-political of American writers, became passionately partisan during the Spanish Civil War.
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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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Mussolini, in 1935, went and then in the next year, conquered Ethiopia, acquiring himself a colony.
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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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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
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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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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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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.
ADAM HOCHSCHILD