The last great historian: Walter Laqueur and political violence

In July 2018, a mere 3 months before his passing, Walter Laqueur penned an article titled, ‘The Generation That Shaped Our Understanding of the 20^th Century is Gone.’¹ This essay, a eulogy to many of his contemporaries who had died in the previous years, was a fitting piece to celebrate not only his friends and colleagues, but also his own legacy. Some of the figures he discussed were niche scholars, writing the early histories of Europe after World War II. Others like Bernard Lewis and Zbigniew Brzezinski were celebrated throughout their entire lives, remaining in the public eye for decades, and playing the role of public intellectuals who quibbled over current affairs and gave answers when the public needed them. Walter, always a humble man, only inserted himself into the piece as an observer, letting the stories of others exemplify what this generation had given and what the world had lost. What he left unsaid though is that he was able to write this essay not only because he was the last of the generation, but because he himself was a closer approximation to the platonic ideal of a public intellectual, knowledgeable in a myriad of subjects and actively participating in the most salient debates of the past 80 years. In a career that began in the 1940s, Walter Laqueur had the mental agility and acuity to write with eloquence on everything from Russia and the Middle East to terrorism and insurgency. In the process, he not only anticipated many of the challenges confronting the world, such as the rise of religious terrorism, he also furnished the intellectual framework upon which these subjects are studied, helping establish numerous fields as viable subjects of inquiries that have grown by engaging many of Walter’s original insights.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the field of political violence. For scholars of this tradition, Walter Laqueur’s extensive analyses on insurgency and terrorism are not merely canon, but in many ways, collectively represent the genesis of the field. Before Walter published Guerrilla and Terrorism in 1976 and 1977, respectively, with a few exceptions like Brian Jenkins and Richard Clutterbuck, the field was notorious for lacking intellectual rigor. Sir Michael Howard put it best in his review of Guerrilla:

[the field of political violence] has probably been responsible for more incompetent and unnecessary books than any outside the field of sociology. It attracts phoneys and amateurs as a candle attracts moths. When an experienced historian like Dr Laqueur announced his intention of tackling it, his admirers could not conceal their qualms. Could even he more than flounder in this Serbonian bog? The answer is that he can and does, with a mixture of massive learning and brisk common sense.²

What Walter gave to the world in both books was the first systematic treatment of either subject, all done so in his rational and massively accessible prose that was never wanting for clarity. And upon arrival, they made an immediate impact. They were the first to give an objective historical survey of the evolution of violent non-state actors dating back to antiquity, and they also gave important starting points for a variety of subtopics in political violence through their extensive overviews of terrorist and guerrilla doctrine, organizational models, sociological tendencies, and discussions on strategies. For a field rife with inconsistencies and for attracting ‘phoneys’ as Sir Michael phrased it, Walter gave coherence, giving a clear standard upon which quality research in political violence could be evaluated.

And of course, such monumental books did not come without controversy. As Walter himself wrote in The Age of Terrorism, the decision to treat guerrilla warfare and terrorism as two wholly different subjects provoked immense criticism from those who often treated both subjects as one in the same, arguing he did too much to underplay the validity of terror groups as revolutionary movements capable of forcing change.³ Walter’s response was that history shows that there is a noticeable difference between both forms of violence and efforts to fuse terrorism and guerrilla warfare create analytical distortions of how they operated. Others criticized him for refusing to conflate violence by non-state actors with state terrorism, to which he responded by describing the difference in character and motive, noting the obvious differences. No matter how much people strained the definition of terrorism, repression by Stalinist Russia was incomparable to the actions of the Red Brigades or the Red Army Faction. With his willingness to engage his critics, Walter’s works became the firmament for the study of political violence.

In Guerrilla, for instance, Walter Laqueur went about challenging much of the faulty edifice behind studies of guerrilla warfare. After the American debacle in Vietnam, this literature was in a decrepit state. Walter saw that much of the extant studies focused on individual case studies or were instead concerned with the counterinsurgent experience, very rarely paying attention to the actual guerrillas in combat. In the cases when scholars focused on guerrillas themselves, too much emphasis was placed on Mao, as if he were the true progenitor of all guerrilla movements or if his ideas could be adapted to all circumstance outside of China. This myopia lead to incorrect beliefs, helping create the mystique of the invincible guerrillas. Walter, of course, understood all this to be false. He explained that ‘guerrilla warfare has not only been practiced since time immemorial, its doctrine too is by no means of recent date,’ finding that much of its tactical logic had emerged by the 1800s, with Mao’s most important innovation being his exploitation of Marxism to organize the masses, something done previously but under the aegis of different ideologies.⁴ But even then, he took issue with those who believed Marxist movements were the main impetus for the insurgencies that erupted after WWII. He pointed out that almost every movement from the FLN in Algeria, the EOKA in Greece, and the Vietcong in Vietnam were driven first and foremost by patriotism and nationalism. This held true as well in the insurgencies that emerged in Latin America, a region that underwent decolonization a century prior and had many guerrillas with a left-wing bent.⁵

Walter also warned about lazy generalizations or efforts to find universal laws from few examples of conflict, something he expanded in his subsequent publications. He noted that the linkage between poverty and insurgency was not exact, with many of the poorest countries in the world having yet to experience massive political conflict.⁶ He did not dismiss this hypothesis and others like it blithely. Rather, he thought they were useful in explaining some cases of violence but could not be applied to the entire universe of guerrilla warfare.⁷ But he also recognized that the tradition of guerrilla warfare had shown certain traits or patterns that were common occurrences throughout time, reflecting the pragmatism that enveloped this form of combat, which he listed towards the end of Guerrilla.⁸ These are now often repeated in counterinsurgency manuals, showing their continued validity. But Walter always wrote with a dose of humility and skepticism, something he invited his readers to do, explaining that these principles should be considered probabilities and not necessarily truths; guides that should be dismissed when fact failed to conform to expectation.

What gives the book its strength, much like all his works, is that Walter Laqueur never constructed arguments a priori, finding historical cases that justified his hypotheses and beliefs on the subject. Through his historical survey of every known guerrilla group up until the era, Walter Laqueur let the experiences of the fighters speak for themselves, reminding his readers that war was a human affair that was inherently messy. Reducing such conflicts to scientific principles deprived scholarship of its core subject. This applied just as much to the insurgents themselves, who engaged in much mythmaking about their accomplishments without considering their own history and limitations. Towards the end of Guerrilla, he wrote that ‘the historical record shows, to repeat once again, that nineteenth-century guerrilla wars invariably failed to achieve their objectives…[and] guerrilla war against domestic rulers has succeeded in the past – with one exception – only during a general war or immediately following it, with the collapse of central state power.’⁹ And even then, the groups that succeeded had outsized support from another actor, suggesting that guerrilla warfare could only succeed within certain conditions, such as occupation by foreign governments lacking the ability to respond with indiscriminate violence against rebels. When governments were immensely repressive, no matter how corruptly or illegitimately they behaved, they never had insurgencies.¹⁰ And it was not a factor of good governance; they simply eliminated any threat to their power. This was certainly the case with Syria under Hafez al-Assad who brutally repressed the Muslim Brotherhood in Hama. And as the age of decolonization ended and increased urbanization rendered guerrilla warfare’s inherent strengths from the countryside irrelevant, Walter foresaw the eventual decline of guerrilla warfare. He did caveat this point by noting that in situations of conquest or instances where religious actors could foment unity, insurgencies were likely to emerge, and his hypotheses have been borne out by the experiences in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.¹¹

His writings on terrorism were equally groundbreaking, and in many ways, are much more influential. Over several publications, including Terrorism,¹² The Age of Terrorism,¹³ and No End to War,¹⁴ Walter was one of the first to dismiss the link between poverty and terrorism, noting that throughout history, those engaged in the practice were usually well-off and educated. He expanded on this point in the Future of Terrorism, explaining how the 9/11 hijackers and other terrorists in the years after proved this point that he first made in the 1970s, but which was roundly dismissed by policymakers for nearly 30 years.¹⁵ He did not fault organizations like the UN wanting simple answers to a complex problem by attributing terrorism to poverty, but he thought energies for addressing the challenge should at least be grounded in historical reality. As far as Walter was concerned, poverty reduction was a good unto itself that should occur independent of a counterterrorism policy.¹⁶

Walter’s observation about the intimate link between technology and terrorism also remains prescient. In his numerous books, he described how terrorists have always had technological acolytes since the days of Karl Heinzen and Johann Most, believing that the next revolution would coincide with the next revolution in arms. For instance, Heinzen, one of the originators of modern terrorist doctrine, placed particular stock on poison gas and Congreve rockets to equalize the battlefield and foment revolution.¹⁷ Walter, however, recognized human limits and was always a skeptic in the actual capacity of terrorists to destroy societies, especially when they operated in such small numbers. He did recognize the inherent danger in the increasing access to the technologies behind weapons of mass destruction, remarking that only through these could terrorists destroy the world.¹⁸ The risk was not just that these weapons might fall into the wrong hands, but also the very nature of terrorism was changing. Walter noted the constant avoidance of mass killings exhibited by terrorists for over a century, starting with the Narodnaya Volya. This changed by the mid-1980s and 1990s when he, alongside Bruce Hoffman, began warning of the dangers posed by religiously inspired terrorism.¹⁹ In 1994, Aum Shurikyo used Sarin in the Tokyo underground, and extremist Islamic terror groups with large capital were forming in the Middle East. As he explained in his final book, published a few months before his death, terrorists once saw their goals as occurring here on earth. By moving from politics into religion, the ultimate prize was now found in heaven, making the spilling of innocent blood tolerable, if not desirable.²⁰

Walter Laqueur was also quite fastidious about the problem of defining terrorism, describing the ontological dead ends it created for scholars. In his mind, the search for steadfast definitions distracted from broader concerns that could be resolved with practicality and common sense.²¹ The history of terrorism showed that since its beginnings, its character has always been in flux. Definitions, Walter wrote, were always going to be proven irrelevant for either being too general to be of any practical use or for being specific enough that they would lose meaning in a few years. This is something Walter pressed in his final book, noting how unprepared the public was for Islamic State to engage in its state-building project through the use of terrorism even if there were indicators of it coming.²² Walter of course did not want to give license to subjectivity, writing that ‘even if a universal definition of terrorism was beyond our ken, it did not mean that anyone could define terrorism as he or she wanted, in a totally subjective way, unless of course, the aim was to provide an ideological justification of terrorism.’²³

And this final point was of great importance to Walter, for more than being a historian of these events, he was often direct witness to many tragedies inspired by people manipulating ideology for evil ends. He survived the Holocaust by the skin of his teeth, fleeing his native Breslau the night before Kristallnacht, marking the last time he saw his parents who were murdered in Treblinka. He later was present across the street from the King David Hotel the day the Irgun bombed it. These experiences made him wary of those that found in ideology reason to commit harm to others, criticizing defenders of terrorism in the 1970s who emphasized its left-wing and anti-colonial character without taking into account that in the past, terrorism had been used by rightist and nationalist groups alike.²⁴ Again, his realism proved correct, with the emergence of religious terror groups in the 1990s, and more recently, with the emergence of individuals inspired by right-wing ideologies in the United States and elsewhere.

Even when he was not writing directly about insurgency and terrorism, his other efforts informed these subjects greatly. In Black One Hundred, he wrote about the right-wing nationalist terrorists that plagued Russia in the early 20^th century and how this foreshadowed the rise of Vladimir Putin.²⁵ And in Putinism, Walter explained Russia’s activities in Eastern Europe and why it relied on the use of state-sponsored insurgent warfare.²⁶ His books on Europe carried a similar warning, noting the identity crisis the continent’s Muslim population might face in reaction to European leader’s inability to integrate or assimilate these populations and how this might inspire discontent leading to violence.²⁷ These books and others, seemingly tangential to political violence, captured Walter’s unique ability to unify disparate threads, making connections others missed, to create consistent narratives of the world as it was, not as people wanted it to be.

This overview of Walter’s contribution to political violence does him a great disservice, as it only captures a small portion of his brilliance. And what makes Walter’s contributions even more remarkable is that he did so without having a university degree. The contours of his life were filled with tragedies from an early age, forcing him to sacrifice his dreams and hopes of being an athlete in the 1940 Olympics or of studying at university for the sake of survival. After fleeing Germany, he arrived in British Mandatory Palestine where he toiled away in a Kibbutz. Always finding the bright side of a dreary situation, Walter befriended the Russian emigres and the local Arabs working the fields, who taught him Russian and Arabic, which greatly benefited his academic career. Like a good historian, he built upon what came before, and used these experiences to land a job as a journalist, reporting on the terrorist incidents of the era, and later becoming famous for breaking the story that the emerging Jewish state would be called Israel, and not Yehuda as some speculated. He would later survive the siege of Jerusalem in the 1948 war, being one of seven journalists out of an original 28 that came out the rubble alive.²⁸ He leveraged his firsthand experience of seeing the Arab armies fight into a book that captured the attention of American national security establishment, opening doors for him to work in Europe and the United States. Over the next decades, he would hold prestigious academic appointments at Harvard and the University of Chicago, serve as director for the Weiner Library in London, consult for the Pentagon, and later teach the first course ever taught on terrorism in the United States when he finally settled at Georgetown University and CSIS (Center for Strategic International Studies). His productivity never diminished, publishing many celebrated books even after retiring from his professorship at Georgetown. To say his life is the stuff of legends is quite the understatement.

Towards the end of his essay referenced at the beginning, Walter noted that ‘when a generation disappears, a new one will take its place, [but] sometimes there is a void.’ With his own death on 30 September 2018, he provided the coda to a generation that survived Hitler and the holocaust, the Soviet Union and the Cold War, and who helped us navigate the early years of the war on terror. And with his death, this final sentence takes on greater poignancy. For while the world around us unravels and engulfs us in unforeseen chaos, there is a yearning for a voice that can offer clarity and hope, reminding us that even in the darkest times, there is a means for survival and for good to triumph over evil. Walter’s death marks the end of this great generation, and I am not sure that among the current generation, there is a voice like his that can reassure us by bridging the gap between the truths of the past and the uncertainty that awaits us. Yet, Walter always the practical one, once told me that voices like his have been quite common throughout time and others like him will replace him. But until that voice emerges, we should not fret nor blink before the void; Walter Laqueur’s writings remain with us and will continue being those indispensable guides to truth.

Notes

1. Laqueur, “Understanding of the 20^th Century is Gone.”

2. Quote from the Sunday Times (London) book jacket, Laqueur, Terrorism quoted in Hoffman, “In Celebration of Walter Laqueur’s 90^th Birthday,” 667–671.

3. Laqueur, Age of Terrorism.

4. Laqueur, Guerrilla, 384–390.

5. Ibid.

6. Laqueur, Best of Times, 173–177.

7. Ibid.

8. Laqueur, Guerrilla, 393–404.

9. Ibid., 385.

10. Ibid., 390.

11. Laqueur, Best of Times, 179–180.

12. Laqueur, Terrorism, 137–138 .

13. Laqueur, Age of Terrorism, 157–160.

14. Laqueur, No End to War, 11–13.

15. Laqueur and Wall, The Future of Terrorism, 125.

16. Laqueur, Best of Times, 181.

17. Laqueur, Terrorism, 26–27.

18. Laqueur, The New Terrorism, 49–78.

19. Laqueur, “Postmodern Terrorism,” 24–36 .

20. Laqueur and Wall, Future of Terrorism, 121–122.

21. Laqueur, Best of Times, 188–189.

22. Laqueur and Wall, Future of Terrorism, 235–236.

23. Laqueur, Best of Times, 189.

24. Ibid., 182–183.

25. Laqueur, Black Hundred, xvi.

26. Laqueur, Putinism.

27. Laqueur, Best of Times, 198.

28. These experiences were recounted to the present author over five years during which he served as Walter Laqueur’s research assistant and later his co-author.