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.
ADAM HOCHSCHILDYou know, by 1936, Hitler was already talking very loudly about his desire to expand to the east.
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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Zachary Macaulay, who once traveled on a slave ship across the Atlantic, taking notes.
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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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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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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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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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I’m after a snake and please God I’ll scotch it.
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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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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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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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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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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.
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Newt Gingrich seldom misses a chance to note that he is a historian.
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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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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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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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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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Skinner goes everywhere, from border crossings to brothels to bargaining sessions with dealers in human beings
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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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You know, by 1936, Hitler was already talking very loudly about his desire to expand to the east.
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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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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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I can certainly sympathize with writers who don’t want to put themselves or their loved ones at risk.
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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?
ADAM HOCHSCHILD