Adam Hochschild

“Forgetting one’s participation in mass murder is not something passive; it is an active deed. In”

— Adam Hochschild

“Two missionaries found one post where prisoners were killed by having resin poured over their heads, then set on fire. The list…

— Adam Hochschild

“He had all the bushes and trees cut down around his house at Bokatola so that from his porch he could use…

— Adam Hochschild

I think that, in almost all human beings, there is buried a profound tribal instinct that makes us very susceptible to being…

— Adam Hochschild

“More than 80 percent of the uranium in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs came from the heavily guarded Congo mine of Shinkolobwe. The”

— Adam Hochschild

“Whenever Mosley was heckled at one of his rallies, he stopped speaking and searchlights focused on the heckler as jackbooted men beat…

— Adam Hochschild

“remembering how the United States and Europe have protected their investments by supporting rapacious African dictators like Mobutu, we must speak of…

— Adam Hochschild

“The others had been driven into the desert to die of thirst (the Germans poisoned the waterholes), were”

— Adam Hochschild

“His health grew worse, probably exacerbated by the myriad of hovering doctors eager to give their famous patient all the latest treatments:…

— Adam Hochschild

“The rebel militias, the Congo’s African neighbors, and many of their corporate allies have little interest in ending the country’s Balkanization. They…

— Adam Hochschild

“So many engineers were seized that factories came to a halt; so many railway men died that some trains did not run;…

— Adam Hochschild

“The others had been driven into the desert to die of thirst (the Germans poisoned the waterholes), were shot, or—to economize on…

— Adam Hochschild

“When Leopold wrote that the precise frontiers of the new state or states would be defined later, [German Chancellor] Bismarck said to…

— Adam Hochschild

“Nelson W. Aldrich of Rhode Island. Aldrich, a multimillionaire, a card-playing partner of J. Pierpont Morgan, the father-in-law of John D. Rockefeller,…

— Adam Hochschild

“Lieutenant General Lothar von Trotha, who issued an extermination order (Vernichtungsbefehl): “Within the German boundaries every Herero, whether found with or without…

— Adam Hochschild

You know, by 1936, Hitler was already talking very loudly about his desire to expand to the east. Mussolini, in 1935, went…

— Adam Hochschild

Things have gotten openly more extreme in the last few years. I was lecturing in Hungary, whose prime minister, Victor Orban, is…

— Adam Hochschild

Some 2,800 Americans went to Spain [during the Spanish Civil War], and it was, by far, the largest number of Americans before…

— Adam Hochschild

“It was several decades later that I encountered that footnote, and with it my own ignorance of the Congo’s early history. Then…

— Adam Hochschild

In his fierce, bold determination to see the lives of modern-day slaves up close, Benjamin Skinner reminds me of the British abolitionist…

— Adam Hochschild

I think in many ways, the Spanish Civil War was the first battle of World War II. After all, where else in…

— Adam Hochschild

“In the Soviet Union, for example, shooting or jailing political opponents at first helped the Communist Party and then Josef Stalin gain…

— Adam Hochschild

One of my favourite contemporary fiction writers is a Texan, Ben Fountain. His extraordinary novel, Billy Lynn's Long Half-Time Walk, all takes…

— Adam Hochschild

“In the American South, there are hundreds of Civil War battle monuments and preserved plantation manor houses for every exhibit that in…

— Adam Hochschild

“Morel made particularly effective use of photography. A central part of almost every Congo protest meeting was a slide show, comprising some…

— Adam Hochschild

“Savages are dangerous neighbours and unprofitable customers, and if they remain as degraded denizens of our colonies, they become a burden upon…

— Adam Hochschild

“Affonso tried to do something as difficult in his time as in ours: to be a selective modernizer. He”

— Adam Hochschild

“Casement quoted an African proverb: "A man doesn't go among thorns unless a snake's after him—or he's after a snake." He added,…

— Adam Hochschild

“the idea of independence and self-government in Africa was voiced by almost no one, except for a few beleaguered rebels deep in…

— Adam Hochschild

“Thousands of refugees who had fled across the Congo River to escape Leopold’s regime eventually fled back to escape the French. The”

— Adam Hochschild

“In any system of terror, the functionaries must first of all see the victims as less than human, and Victorian ideas about…

— Adam Hochschild

“today’s Namibia. The killing there was masked by no smokescreen of talk about philanthropy. It was genocide, pure and simple, starkly announced…

— Adam Hochschild

“Sorry, but they’re burning the State archives.” The furnaces burned for eight days, turning most of the Congo state records to ash…

— Adam Hochschild

Even [Ernst] Hemingway, perhaps the most intentionally non-political of American writers, became passionately partisan during the Spanish Civil War.

— Adam Hochschild

“At one meeting in Chicago an old woman who had been born a slave tried to donate her life savings to the…

— Adam Hochschild

“This would mean, according to the estimates, that during the Leopold period and its immediate aftermath the population of the territory dropped…

— Adam Hochschild

It sure is a rising tide, and we have a particularly nasty exemplar of it in the U.S., in Donald Trump.

— Adam Hochschild

“to speak, as Leopold’s officials did, of forced laborers as libérés, or “liberated men,” was to use language as perverted as that…

— Adam Hochschild

The first World War in so many ways shaped the 20th century and really remade our world for the worse.

— Adam Hochschild

“One British missionary was asked repeatedly by Africans, "Has the Savior you tell us of any power to save us from the…

— Adam Hochschild