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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, it's tempting to want to blame it all on an easily identifiable target: Muslims, immigrants, refugees, blacks, Jews.

Adam Hochschild

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Adam Hochschild
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: October 5
Author
Historian
Journalist
University Teacher
Writer
New York City
New York
Blacks
Easily
Refugee
Blame
Muslims
Worse
Wages
Risk
Immigrants
Identifiable
Fear
Jews
Declining
Jobs
Target
Refugees
Children
Tempting
Real
Jew

More quotes by Adam Hochschild

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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. Ditto for her countryman the great playwright Athol Fugard.
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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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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 you can sense the vast inequalities of Tsarist Russia in [Anton] Chekhov and [Lev] Tolstoy.
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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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You know, by 1936, Hitler was already talking very loudly about his desire to expand to the east. Mussolini, in 1935, went and then in the next year, conquered Ethiopia, acquiring himself a colony. 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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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.
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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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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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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 - 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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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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Work is hard. Distractions are plentiful. And time is short.
Adam Hochschild
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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.
Adam Hochschild
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I'm after a snake and please God I'll scotch it.
Adam Hochschild
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Newt Gingrich seldom misses a chance to note that he is a historian.
Adam Hochschild
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Growing inequality is a huge problem, and of course is intimately connected to xenophobia and racism.
Adam Hochschild
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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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Ronald Reagan perfected the subtler version long ago by talking about welfare mothers - a code phrase for people of colour.
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And yet the world we live in-its divisions and conflicts, its widening gap between rich and poor, 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. Leopold's Congo is but one of those silences of history.
Adam Hochschild
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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.
Adam Hochschild
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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 - you've got politicians in power or vying for power who are taking tactics and elements of their appeal from the playbook of fascism.
Adam Hochschild