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.
ADAM HOCHSCHILDOne of my favourite contemporary fiction writers is a Texan, Ben Fountain. His extraordinary novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Half-Time Walk, all takes place within the half-time show at a Dallas Cowboys football game.
More Adam Hochschild Quotes
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The Messerschmitt 109 fighter plane for example, the Stuka dive bomber, the 88 millimeter artillery piece, which could be used both for antiaircraft purposes and also shelling on the ground.
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Ditto for her countryman the great playwright Athol Fugard.
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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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The first World War in so many ways shaped the 20th century and really remade our world for the worse.
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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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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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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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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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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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Even [Ernst] Hemingway, perhaps the most intentionally non-political of American writers, became passionately partisan during the Spanish Civil War.
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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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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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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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