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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.

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
South
Ditto
Paper
Injustices
Late
Countrymen
Example
Contradictions
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Playwright
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Contradiction
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Africa
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Countryman

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Newt Gingrich seldom misses a chance to note that he is a historian.
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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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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.
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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 - 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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Work is hard. Distractions are plentiful. And time is short.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Ronald Reagan perfected the subtler version long ago by talking about welfare mothers - a code phrase for people of colour.
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I'm after a snake and please God I'll scotch it.
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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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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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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.
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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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