The first World War in so many ways shaped the 20th century and really remade our world for the worse.
ADAM HOCHSCHILDHow 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
More Adam Hochschild Quotes
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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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You know, by 1936, Hitler was already talking very loudly about his desire to expand to the east.
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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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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 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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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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Mussolini, in 1935, went and then in the next year, conquered Ethiopia, acquiring himself a colony.
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Growing inequality is a huge problem, and of course is intimately connected to xenophobia and racism.
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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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Ditto for her countryman the great playwright Athol Fugard.
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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 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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One 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.
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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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And American soldiers were the victims of these things in Spain, American volunteers. So this war was really a testing ground for Hitler.
ADAM HOCHSCHILD