Word: laqueur
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...another word on the unspeakable, yet another theory about the incomprehensible? The answer, as always, depends upon the speaker. In The Terrible Secret (Little, Brown; 262 pages; $12.95) the man in the witness stand is necessary and impeccable. At the beginning of his phosphorescent volume, Historian Walter Laqueur quotes a war correspondent in 1945: "It is my duty to describe something beyond the imagination of mankind." That something was the archipelago of Europe's death camps, where Nazi virulence reached its terminals: the medical experiment, the gas chamber and the crematorium...
...Today it seems difficult to understand the incredulity. For if more than 6 million Jews, gypsies and other "undesirables" perished in the camps, how was it possible to keep the Final Solution a secret from their neighbors, from soldiers and intelligence agents and the foreign press? In part, says Laqueur, with a screen of euphemisms and evasions. Even in Germany, Jews were not executed, they were officially "resettled," "removed," given "special treatment." Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Minister for Propaganda, told loyal journalists how to respond to investigations of the Final Solution: Cite British atrocities in India...
...Salvador and Namibia. All of this can be broadly defined as terrorism, Dyess claimed, be cause it "creates a climate in which terrorism flourishes." Despite Dyess's attempt to soften Haig's accusation, it set off a sharp debate. Said Georgetown University Professor Walter Laqueur, an expert on terrorism: "I sympathize with Haig's sentiments, but I regret the lack of precision in his words. It is very difficult to know what he means...
...gingerly French attitude toward the Soviets raises a larger question. In a sharply worded critique of French foreign policy in the June issue of Harper's, Historian Walter Laqueur charges that "France suffers not so much from a surfeit of nationalism as from a lack of faith, or a land of defeatism trying to masquerade as an unemotional strategy." Laqueur concedes that "there is a Gaullist tradition in modern French history, but there is also the heritage of Vichy, and it is not at all certain that the Gaullist tradition has prevailed of late. Contemporary appeasement has many guises...
...some times fascists, as in Germany and Italy) intent on rescuing old native virtues from alien influences, or of Communists, or of nationalists (in Ireland, for example). Elements of all three have been at work in Iran. But now the contradictions of the types must be sorted out. Says Laqueur: "The Iranian revolution does not exist. There exist various groups, each of which says, 'We caused the revolution, we are the legitimate heirs.' " The resolution may take months or years. After a period of chaos, it becomes easy to imagine, a variation of the Brinton model might start...