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 HOCHSCHILDAnd tens of millions of Americans will feel a similar revulsion for the politicians and generals who were so spendthrift with others’ lives.
More Adam Hochschild Quotes
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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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All of us living in today’s world are facing an enormous crisis – arguably the greatest that humanity has ever faced
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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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Even [Ernst] Hemingway, perhaps the most intentionally non-political of American writers, became passionately partisan during the Spanish Civil War.
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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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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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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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Zachary Macaulay, who once traveled on a slave ship across the Atlantic, taking notes.
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Ditto for her countryman the great playwright Athol Fugard.
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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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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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Work is hard. Distractions are plentiful. And time is short.
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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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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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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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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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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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Leopold’s Congo is but one of those silences of history.
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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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Five years ago, who would have thought this possible?
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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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All over Budapest, statues have been replaced, museum exhibits have been redone, to turn ethnic Hungarians, not Jews, into the prime victims of the Germans during World War II.
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Newt Gingrich seldom misses a chance to note that he is a historian.
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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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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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