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.
ADAM HOCHSCHILDI 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.
More Adam Hochschild Quotes
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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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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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Five years ago, who would have thought this possible?
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Many of the principle weapons that the Nazis used during World War II had their first trial in combat in Spain
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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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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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Ronald Reagan perfected the subtler version long ago by talking about “welfare mothers” – a code phrase for people of colour.
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Zachary Macaulay, who once traveled on a slave ship across the Atlantic, taking notes.
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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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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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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 think in many ways, the Spanish Civil War was the first battle of World War II.
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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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Growing inequality is a huge problem, and of course is intimately connected to xenophobia and racism.
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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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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’m after a snake and please God I’ll scotch it.
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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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It’s tempting to want to blame it all on an easily identifiable target: Muslims, immigrants, refugees, blacks, Jews.
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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 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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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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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 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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Newt Gingrich seldom misses a chance to note that he is a historian.
ADAM HOCHSCHILD