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.
ADAM HOCHSCHILDMany of the principle weapons that the Nazis used during World War II had their first trial in combat in Spain
More Adam Hochschild Quotes
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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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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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And he learned a great deal from it about the strengths and weaknesses of these different weapons.
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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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You know, by 1936, Hitler was already talking very loudly about his desire to expand to the east.
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Skinner goes everywhere, from border crossings to brothels to bargaining sessions with dealers in human beings
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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.
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Mussolini, in 1935, went and then in the next year, conquered Ethiopia, acquiring himself a colony.
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You can sense the vast inequalities of Tsarist Russia in [Anton] Chekhov and [Lev] Tolstoy.
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I’m after a snake and please God I’ll scotch it.
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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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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 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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Newt Gingrich seldom misses a chance to note that he is a historian.
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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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Growing inequality is a huge problem, and of course is intimately connected to xenophobia and racism.
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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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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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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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And yet the world we live in-its divisions and conflicts, its widening gap between rich and poor
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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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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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I think in many ways, the Spanish Civil War was the first battle of World War II.
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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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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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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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