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 he learned a great deal from it about the strengths and weaknesses of these different weapons.
More Adam Hochschild Quotes
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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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Ditto for her countryman the great playwright Athol Fugard.
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Work is hard. Distractions are plentiful. And time is short.
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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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I can certainly sympathize with writers who don’t want to put themselves or their loved ones at risk.
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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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You can sense the vast inequalities of Tsarist Russia in [Anton] Chekhov and [Lev] Tolstoy.
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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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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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Newt Gingrich seldom misses a chance to note that he is a historian.
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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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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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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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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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Five years ago, who would have thought this possible?
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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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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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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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Skinner goes everywhere, from border crossings to brothels to bargaining sessions with dealers in human beings
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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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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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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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Even [Ernst] Hemingway, perhaps the most intentionally non-political of American writers, became passionately partisan during the Spanish Civil War.
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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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And yet the world we live in-its divisions and conflicts, its widening gap between rich and poor
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