Oct 4, 2018 02:55 AM
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obi...story.html
EXCERPT: Walter Laqueur, a German Jew who fled Adolf Hitler and became one of the preeminent intellectuals of his generation, with seminal books dissecting events that shaped the 20th century as well as his own life, died Sept. 30 at his home in Washington. He was 97. [...]
In prolific writings on Russia, Mr. Laqueur predicted the brand of authoritarianism that Vladimir Putin would bring to the country, where other Kremlin watchers had harbored hopes for democracy after the collapse of the Soviet Union. As a Holocaust survivor, Hoffman said, Mr. Laqueur experienced the “worst and the best of mankind.” Although he nurtured an “abiding faith in the power of democracy,” Hoffman observed, he was primed to see “emerging threats to civil society and to the liberal democratic state,” particularly where Europe was concerned.
[...] He analyzed challenges facing the continent, among them a demographic crisis, a stalled spirit of competitiveness and an influx of Muslim immigrants. Among his recent titles on those topics were “The Last Days of Europe: Epitaph for an Old Continent” (2007) and “After the Fall: The End of the European Dream and the Decline of a Continent” (2011).
“Europe will not be buried by ashes, like Pompeii or Herculaneum, but Europe is in decline,” he told the German publication Der Spiegel in 2013. “It’s certainly horrifying to consider its helplessness in the face of the approaching storms. After being the center of world politics for so long, the old continent now runs the risk of becoming a pawn.” He evinced perhaps even less hope for Russia. His views were informed by travels with his wife to see her family in what was then the Soviet Union, where he established contacts at a time when relatively few scholars visited the Communist nation.
[...] Mr. Laqueur often broke with conventional wisdom, nowhere more than in his writings on terrorism. He was credited with debunking myths often repeated by politicians, such as a purported link between poverty and terrorism. “In the forty-nine countries currently designated by the United Nations as the least developed, hardly any terrorist activity occurs,” he noted in his book “No End to War: Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century” (2003). The presence of aggression and fanaticism, he wrote, were far greater predictors.
Mr. Laqueur wrote that “terrorism is relatively cheap and will be with us as long as anyone can envision, even if not always at the same frequency and intensity.” The statement might have made him look the part of a pessimist. But in rational pessimism lay a certain faith in the future. Only pessimists survived the Holocaust, Hoffman recalled Mr. Laqueur saying, because optimists believed Hitler could be controlled....
MORE: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obi...story.html
EXCERPT: Walter Laqueur, a German Jew who fled Adolf Hitler and became one of the preeminent intellectuals of his generation, with seminal books dissecting events that shaped the 20th century as well as his own life, died Sept. 30 at his home in Washington. He was 97. [...]
In prolific writings on Russia, Mr. Laqueur predicted the brand of authoritarianism that Vladimir Putin would bring to the country, where other Kremlin watchers had harbored hopes for democracy after the collapse of the Soviet Union. As a Holocaust survivor, Hoffman said, Mr. Laqueur experienced the “worst and the best of mankind.” Although he nurtured an “abiding faith in the power of democracy,” Hoffman observed, he was primed to see “emerging threats to civil society and to the liberal democratic state,” particularly where Europe was concerned.
[...] He analyzed challenges facing the continent, among them a demographic crisis, a stalled spirit of competitiveness and an influx of Muslim immigrants. Among his recent titles on those topics were “The Last Days of Europe: Epitaph for an Old Continent” (2007) and “After the Fall: The End of the European Dream and the Decline of a Continent” (2011).
“Europe will not be buried by ashes, like Pompeii or Herculaneum, but Europe is in decline,” he told the German publication Der Spiegel in 2013. “It’s certainly horrifying to consider its helplessness in the face of the approaching storms. After being the center of world politics for so long, the old continent now runs the risk of becoming a pawn.” He evinced perhaps even less hope for Russia. His views were informed by travels with his wife to see her family in what was then the Soviet Union, where he established contacts at a time when relatively few scholars visited the Communist nation.
[...] Mr. Laqueur often broke with conventional wisdom, nowhere more than in his writings on terrorism. He was credited with debunking myths often repeated by politicians, such as a purported link between poverty and terrorism. “In the forty-nine countries currently designated by the United Nations as the least developed, hardly any terrorist activity occurs,” he noted in his book “No End to War: Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century” (2003). The presence of aggression and fanaticism, he wrote, were far greater predictors.
Mr. Laqueur wrote that “terrorism is relatively cheap and will be with us as long as anyone can envision, even if not always at the same frequency and intensity.” The statement might have made him look the part of a pessimist. But in rational pessimism lay a certain faith in the future. Only pessimists survived the Holocaust, Hoffman recalled Mr. Laqueur saying, because optimists believed Hitler could be controlled....
MORE: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obi...story.html