By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Pioneer Journal
When I was a university student, many moons ago,
few courses in modern history were without a book, or at least
a number of scholarly articles, by Walter Laqueur, assigned as part of our
readings. Laqueur, who died
Sept. 30, at the age of 97, was a giant in his field.
A German Jew who
fled Adolf Hitler’s Germany, he was part of an era when
historians wrote on a broad range of topics and countries. All
these issues and places in one way or another had affected his
own life.
At the time of
his death, Laqueur was a retired professor at Georgetown
University and chairman of the International Research Council
of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in
Washington.
He was born in
Breslau, the city that is today Wroclaw, Poland, on May 26,
1921. He was 17 in 1938 when he left Germany days before the
Nazi-led Kristallnacht pogrom against Jews and managed to gain
entry to the British mandate of Palestine as a student. His
parents perished in the Holocaust.
Laqueur worked as
a journalist in Israel before moving to London in 1955, where,
along with another eminent historian, George Mosse, he founded
and edited the Journal
of Contemporary History and other publications.
From 1965 to 1994
he was director of the London-based Wiener Library for the
Study of the Holocaust and Genocide, a leading archive and
repository of documents.
Some of Laqueur’s works will remain classics,
including his 1972 A History of Zionism and A History of
Terrorism, published
in 1977. Both remain in print and are as relevant as the day
they were published.
A History of
Zionism traced the movement from its beginnings, with the
emancipation of European Jewry in the wake of the French
Revolution, to 1948, when the Zionist dream became a reality.
In A History of
Terrorism Laqueur described the
trajectory of political terror from nineteenth-century Europe
to the operations of
various Middle Eastern and other groups today.
The book was a companion to Guerrilla Warfare, published that
same year, which sought to provide a critical interpretation
of guerrilla theory and practice throughout history.
He wrote dozens of other books, on a wide array
of subjects, including antisemitism, Communism, fascism, the
Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, the Cold War,
and the Soviet Union.
When the USSR
disintegrated in 1991, Laqueur predicted the emergence of “an
authoritarian system based on some nationalist populism.” And
this indeed came to pass.
Putinism: Russia and its Future with the West,
published in 2015, explained how three
long-standing pillars of Russian ideology -- a strong belief
in the Russian Orthodox Church, a sense of Eurasian “manifest
destiny” and a fear of foreign enemies -- continue to exert a
powerful influence on the Russian people.
Laqueur’s last book, The Future
of Terrorism: ISIS, Al Qaeda, and the Alt-Right, written with
Christopher Wall, was published this year. There, he cautioned
that the Islamic State’s short-lived successes in creating a
caliphate demonstrated that “true believers now have a model
that they can hope to achieve and acquire, because it has been
done.”
When he visited
his boyhood home after the Second World War, he wrote in his
1992 memoir, Thursday's Child Has Far to Go, “the world I had
known as a boy no longer existed, and as I tried to remember
the people I had known when I was 16, I realized that most of
them had died a violent death.
“Some were killed
in the ruins of Stalingrad,” he added, “others in Auschwitz,
some in 1948 in the battles for Palestine.”
No one could call Walter Laqueur a starry-eyed
idealist. In his long and productive life, he had lived
through too many historical tragedies to assume that there was
a “right side of history” and that the world was becoming a
more just and peaceful place.
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