Adam Hochschild Quotes

For the Russians, the displacement of the Holocaust is calculated and cynical. It's not emotional; they don't care about the Holocaust one way or another. They only care about it insofar as they can use it to manipulate a German sense of guilt.

The venerable Robert E. Lee has taken some vicious hits, as dishonest or misinformed advocates among political interest groups and in academia attempt to twist yesterday's America into a fantasy that might better service the political issues of today.

Many Germans dream of revenge today.

President Trump is, some ways, the personification of a new Bolshevism of the Right, where the ends justify the means and acceptable tactics include lies and smears and the exploitation of what Lenin called 'useful idiots.'

Distorting the history of World War II, denying the crimes of genocide and the Holocaust as well as an instrumental use of Auschwitz to attain any given goal is tantamount to desecration of the memory of the victims whose ashes are scattered here.

Churchill was a brilliant and inspiring rhetorician, but one of the first things he did as the head of the British nation was to put German Jews in jail. Tens of thousands of Jews - who had just been fortunate enough to get out from under Hitler only a few years before - spent the entire war in jail.

Some European countries insist on saying that during World War II, Hitler burned millions of Jews and put them in concentration camps. Any historian, commentator or scientist who doubts that is taken to prison or gets condemned. Although we don't accept this claim, if we suppose it is true... If the Europeans are honest they should give some of their provinces in Europe - like in Germany, Austria or other countries - to the Zionists and the Zionists can establish their state in Europe. You offer part of Europe and we will support it.

For the first ten years, Vladimir Putin was constructing his power structure, and now he's defending it. He's retrenching, mobilizing a shrinking constituency, constructing an enemy that's really scary. It's war. And when you look at the anti-gay campaign, it's a classic case of war rhetoric: demonstrating an immediate and extreme danger.

Instead of confronting its real and difficult problems and grappling honestly with a dark past, Hungary embraced a reactionary government and a self-pitying image of itself as the victimized nation, and went looking for scapegoats in the Roma, Jews, and, most recently, Syrian migrants.

Wealthy individuals bought themselves a radical right party, believing - correctly - that it would cut their taxes and remove regulations, but failed to realize that eventually the craziness would take on a life of its own, and that the monster they created would turn on its creators as well as the little people.

The Gettysburg Adress has been included, of late, in several anthologies of poetry. It actually meets the major requirement of all poetry: It is a mellifluous and emotional statement of the obviously not true. The men who fought for self-determination at Gettysburg were not the Federals but the Confederates.

According to the international organization for migration, more than 1 million migrants have arrived in Europe this year, the most since World War II. Half of them were Syrian.

Did it [cocaine] for about eight years. Not a terribly long time to be an addict I guess, but it is longer than World War II.

Hitler, who founded the Third Reich, who ruled it ruthlessly and often with uncommon shrewdness, who led it to such dizzy heights and such a sorry end, was a person of undoubted, if evil genius. It is true that in the German people, as a mysterious Providence and centuries of experience had molded them up to that time, he found a natural instrument which he was able to shape to his own sinister ends.

As I have said many times before, I was among the first people to experience the German Occupation of France during the Second World War. I was 7-13 years old during the War and did not really internalise its significance.

The Holocaust industry has always been bankrupt. What remains is to openly declare it so. The time is long past to put it out of business.

I think it's fair to say there is a demagogic path that Europeans, South Americans, Asians have pursued, and we know where that leads. It uses xenophobia, it uses paranoia, it uses prejudice, it uses nationalism to really stir people up and to, you know, begin an us-versus-them contrast, which is dangerous and is not something we've had in our politics at a presidential level in America.

We're at a historical juncture: A growing number of people are declaring what has been achieved over the past decades in Europe to be wrong. They want to return to the nation-state. Sometimes there is even a blood and soil rhetoric that for me is starkly reminiscent of the interwar years of the past century, whose demons we are still all too familiar with.

We have lost the good old British spirit. Instead we have American journalism and black-shirted buffoons making a cheap imitation of ice-cream sellers.

The British Union of Fascists, Oswald Mosley's group, the black shirts, they were banned in Britain in 1940. And Max Mosley's dad, Sir Oswald Mosley, ended up spending three years in World War II, 1940 to 1943, interned in the U.K. as basically an enemy of the state. He spent that time in prison, as did Max Mosley's mother.

Tell me of a right wing-induced hysteria of the last 50 years

Every time I hear a political speech or I read those of our leaders, I am horrified at having, for years, heard nothing which sounded human. It is always the same words telling the same lies.

Over the past 40 years, the tradition of Southern progressivism has been somewhat successfully erased by right-wing revisionist historians.

I've looked at all of Hitler's speeches thinking that there's gotta be one where he's 'I'm Hitler!', but there weren't any. His speeches were all about hope and prosperity - he ran on a platform of peace and prosperity. Hitler speeches that makes him sound like a villain are pretty hard to find, he was very detached from what he was doing, he kept himself compartmentalised from it.

I have not always been wrong. History will bear me out, particularly as I shall write that history myself.