Even [ernst] Hemingway, Perhaps The Most Intentionally

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.

Many Of The Principle Weapons That The Nazis Used During World War Ii Had Their First Trial In Combat In Spain - 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. And American Soldiers Were The Victims Of These Things In Spain, American Volunteers. So This War Was Really A Testing Ground For Hitler. And He Learned A Great Deal From It About The Strengths And Weaknesses Of These Different Weapons.

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.

Growing Inequality Is A Huge Problem, And Of Course Is Intimately Connected To Xenophobia And Racism.

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.