100 years ago today Archduke Ferdinand was killed, sparking World War I

Which makes me want to respond to you. . .you . . .you . . .uhoh, ugh, ugh. . .

Does that make sense to you?
 
Serbs are known for shooting their emperors when they disagreed with them.
Not like the rest of us Yugos who just bow and grovel and put up with them :rolleyes:
 
The Insane Clown Car Posse Assassination Conspiracy that Ignited World War I



You just can’t make this stuff up, they say, and when it comes to the conspiracy to assassinate Archduke Ferdinand on his visit to Sarajevo 100 years ago today, no imagination in Hollywood would be capable of drawing it up.

Not surprisingly, some details of the plot and the assassination are in dispute. Were the conspirators really part of the shadowy Serbian intelligence agency known as The Black Hand? Or were they local recruits that allowed the Black Hand some plausible deniability? There are also minor discrepancies in how the plot unfolded.





But most agree on the broad outline of the conspiracy — which makes the fact that they actually pulled it off all the more remarkable.

The archduke announced the trip ahead of time and helpfully published a map of the motorcade that would take the royal party to a ceremony at city hall. He rode in an open car with this loving wife Sophie and basked in the cheers from the large crowd along the way.

There were 7 assassins in all. Boys and young men burning with nationalistic fervor who saw knocking off the heir to the Hapsburg throne as a signal for a general revolt. While long on patriotism, they were short on training, planning, execution, and courage. Looking at them from the distance of 100 years, it seems remarkable that this inept, awkward, not-very-bright group of teenagers could pull off the assassination of the young century and throw the world into chaos.

The fact that they did is an example of serendipity and coincidence that boggles the mind today.

There was minimal security — not even 100 police along the motorcade route. But even that paltry number was enough to deter at least 4 of the would-be assassins who chickened out without firing a shot.

One assassin was foiled by a jammed pistol. Another tossed a crude homemade bomb at the archduke’s car that Ferdinand fended off, which caused the device to land in back of the car on the street, injuring several bystanders when it exploded.

The bomb thrower, Nedeljko Cabrinovic, began to run toward the river, swallowing poison before he jumped in trying to drown himself. Unfortunately for him, the water was only inches deep and the poison only made him sick. He was hustled off to jail while the motorcade continued.

Here’s where serendipity makes an appearance:


The furious archduke arrived at City Hall, where the mayor of Sarajevo delivered some totally inappropriate remarks that were written before the assassination attempt.

The archduke snapped, “What kind of welcome is this? I’m being met by bombs!” Then he wiped the blood off his prepared speech and addressed the crowd.

Afterward, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne got back into his motorcade with his wife, Sophie. They had decided to visit the hospital to see the people who were wounded in the bomb attack.

But no one told the driver.

At that fateful intersection, the car was supposed to go straight — but it turned right. A general in the motorcade shouted, “You’re going the wrong way!”

And the driver stopped the car … right in front of assassin number seven.

Assassin number seven was 19 year old Gavrilo Princip. He was crestfallen that he and his comrades had failed in their attempts to kill Ferdinand and decided to visit a local deli to drown his sorrows in a bottle of beer and a sandwich.

The driver’s wrong turn changed the course of history. At that exact moment, Princip was emerging from the deli and not 4 feet away was Ferdinand’s car – conveniently stopped and with no bodyguards in evidence. Princip leaped upon the running board and pumped two shots into the car, hitting both Ferdinand and Sophie. They would die within minutes.

A conspiracy planned and executed by incompetent amateurs ended up completing the task of assassinating Archduke Ferdinand by simple dumb luck and remarkable coincidence.

Thirty seconds either way and Princip would have missed his opportunity. If the mayor had taken 30 seconds longer in his remarks, Princip would have been denied. If the driver had gone the right way, Ferdinand would have probably lived to ascend to the Hapsburg throne. You can point to a dozen scenarios where a few seconds would have made the difference and Princip would have missed his rendezvous with destiny.

But it wasn’t to be.

They unveiled a statue to Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo yesterday. Honoring a terrorist says more about Bosnian Serbs today than it does about what the nation was like in 1914. One man’s terrorist may be another’s freedom fighter, but even if you believe that, it takes a certain amount of obtuseness to celebrate an act that led to the death of 40 million people.
 
"Boys and young men burning with nationalistic fervor..."

The key passage. Europe was undergoing a wave of National Socialism which included a back to nature component which was really hard on the Jews. It would not have taken much of a spark because of the lines drawn by previous wars.
 
It's the small things. They likely wouldn't have been assassinated if their driver hadn't missed a turn.
 
It's the small things. They likely wouldn't have been assassinated if their driver hadn't missed a turn.

There was a reason for the backup assassins.

The assassination of Tsar Alexander II was similar, it didn't cause a war, but the aftermath lead to the Russian revolution. Luckily he had already freed the serfs and sold the US Alaska.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_II_of_Russia#Assassination
Some sources say every bridge the Tsar could have taken that day had at least one prospective assassin on it.
 
There was a reason for the backup assassins.
Right, but the first one that tried was a failure, he couldn't even kill himself, and if the driver had taken the turn he was supposed to they would have no longer been on the advertised motorcade route, so it's highly unlikely they would have been killed.
 
Right, but the first one that tried was a failure, he couldn't even kill himself, and if the driver had taken the turn he was supposed to they would have no longer been on the advertised motorcade route, so it's highly unlikely they would have been killed.

Maybe not that day...
 
Someone is going to turn this into Obama bashing in 3...................2....................1..................................
 
Honoring a terrorist says more about Bosnian Serbs today than it does about what the nation was like in 1914. One man’s terrorist may be another’s freedom fighter, but even if you believe that, it takes a certain amount of obtuseness to celebrate an act that led to the death of 40 million people.

Only you have no damn clue about Bosnian or any other Serbs.
I just love when Americans go all self righteous on countries they havent even heard about yesterday.
If it wasnt for Princip and Ferdinand there would be something else causing that same war, wars dont start out of one single incident. And while you are at waving your judgement all over the place, do you even know what was going on there after that assassination? Like 80 years ago, 20 years ago? Oh but wait, it didnt affect your precious country so why should you care. :rolleyes:

Honoring Gavrilo Princip is such a minor thing compared to everything what was and is still going on in ex-Yu.
 
Someone is going to turn this into Obama bashing in 3...................2....................1..................................

Well, someone should...

...because, you know, he is black.

There...

...you now have the reason you were begging for to bring the thread your way.

Yw, Boobs.
 
Only you have no damn clue about Bosnian or any other Serbs.
I just love when Americans go all self righteous on countries they havent even heard about yesterday.

Before you get to emotionally carried away about what others don't know, and while you attempt to still play some homey authority on the subject...

...could you at least grab a shovel and take care of this pile of your crap:

Serbs are known for shooting their emperors when they disagreed with them.
 
From Salon:

Sunday, Jun 29, 2014 02:30 PM EDT

Ghosts of an assassination: The chaotic history of Franz Ferdinand’s demise

When Franz Ferdinand was killed 100 years ago, few could have anticipated the ripples it would send through history

Henry Grabar


In June, magnificent roses bloom in the Sarajevo valley, from residential gardens on the hillsides down to the river and the city center. Apple-size blossoms bow over the iron railings of the stately Ashkenazi Synagogue; a few blocks across the Miljacka River, thorny rose bushes rise in the courtyard of the 16th-century Baščaršijska Mosque. The flowers struck me, when I visited earlier this month, as a kind of unifying emblem in a city famous for its sometimes-fractious diversity.

Ask anyone here what a Sarajevo Rose is, though, and they will point you not to the park but to the pavement, where you can still see the scattered pockmarks left by mortar bombs during the Siege of Sarajevo. More than 11,000 people were killed during that 44-month battle, which, when it ended in 1996, had become the longest siege of the modern era. During the first two years of fighting, Bosnian Serb militias launched an average of 329 mortars a day at Sarajevo, damaging 97 percent of the city’s building stock. Each mortar that hit the pavement left a cluster of scars that, when filled in with a reddish resin, became known as a Sarajevo Rose.

It’s a double meaning that speaks neatly to the way in which the city’s charms have been tarnished by war, its legacy laced with violence. Like Vedran Smajlović’s violin performance in the charred core of the National Library, or the wooden Olympic Stadium seats repurposed to construct coffins, the rose is a symbol of both triumph and pain.

A nearby intersection also harbors a dual symbolism. On this street corner, on June 28, 1914, a 19-year-old Bosnian Serb named Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sofia, setting in motion a chain of events that led to the First World War.

Today, the adjacent museum labels it “the street corner that started the 20th century.” But that simple historical phrasing is a recent innovation. Over the past century, this unremarkable stretch of sidewalk has hosted a half-dozen memorials, each expressing the contemporary political attitude toward Princip’s deed.

In 1914, this street corner changed history. Since then, it has reflected how history changes.

The fundamental question plaguing this historic site, and one that still paralyzes Bosnia today, is whether Princip and his accomplices were terrorists or heroes. Most of Europe has been firmly of the former mind since 1914, while Serbs in particular have always considered the assassination a noble blow against imperial oppression. This little street has lurched between those interpretations, an urban symbol whose impact has reached not just Bosnians, or Yugoslavians, but global political leaders like Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler.

The only story that can be told without caveat or argument is the story of the killing itself. Franz Ferdinand, the nephew of the Austrian emperor Franz Joseph I, toured Sarajevo with his pregnant wife on June 28, 1914. The royal couple survived an initial assassination attempt, in the form of a grenade that bounced off their open-top car and exploded behind them. But later, on their way to visit the wounded at the hospital, their car halted in front of Princip, who shot the archduke and his wife at close range with a semi-automatic Belgian pistol.

That sidewalk was put into political service shortly afterward, on June 28, 1917, when the Austro-Hungarian rulers of Bosnia dedicated the Spomenik Umorstvu, or the “Monument to Murder.” In this wartime shrine, a bronze relief of the archduke and his wife was suspended by putti between two 30-foot columns.

The next year, Austria-Hungary fell, Yugoslavia was born, and the monument was dismembered. The medallion now rests in the basement of the nearby Art Gallery.

Yet the new South Slav kingdom — as Paul Miller, a professor of history at McDaniel College, has shown in a new paper – was initially reluctant to use the stones of Sarajevo to confront the European consensus. When, in 1930, Yugoslav authorities finally commemorated the incident with a small inscription noting that Princip had “proclaimed freedom,” they immediately faced international opposition from public figures who considered the assassination a despicable casus belli – not a justified act of anti-colonial rebellion. Churchill called the memorial an “infamy,” and the associated outrage convinced Yugoslavia to disown its own dedication ceremony.

The Nazis, however, did not look kindly on even this modest celebration of local nationalism. Just days after they entered Sarajevo in the spring of 1941, Nazi officers removed the tablet and presented it to Adolf Hitler as a 52nd birthday present, a symbolic tribute from a conquered city.

Four years later, power shifted again, pulling this street corner along. The postwar Yugoslav plaque, unveiled at an elaborate state ceremony in May 1945, was dedicated “as a symbol of eternal gratitude to Gavrilo Princip and his comrades, to fighters against the Germanic conquerors.”

The adjacent Latin Bridge was renamed for Princip, and in the coming years, a concrete cast of Princip’s footprints was embedded in the sidewalk, inaugurating one of the world’s more macabre photo ops. Tens of thousands of visitors (see Page 17) posed as Princip, mimicking an act of murder within living memory.

Some Yugoslavs were always uncomfortable with the consecration of the murder, as Miller documents. But Princip’s legacy was contested even among his acolytes. Was he a martyr for a South Slav state, the harmonious vision realized in Tito’s Yugoslavia? Or did he envision the creation of a more ethnically focused Greater Serbia?

“Because there was an ambiguity about what he was fighting for,” says John Paul Newman, a professor of Yugoslav history at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, “he’s become to some extent a blank slate.”

In 1992, as Bosnia descended into a war that essentially pitted Bosnian Serbs against Croats and Bosniaks, both sides came to see Princip as a Serbian symbol — and his corner of central Sarajevo as a symbolic prize. As Bosnian Serbs laid siege to the city, the municipal government restored the “Princip Bridge” to its original name, the Latin Bridge.

The famous cement footprints disappeared soon afterward – but no one can quite say how.

An employee at the neighboring museum told me that they were obliterated by Bosnian Serb explosives, a version of events that has also been reported by Reuters. Fran Markowitz and Anne Marie du Preez Bezrob, in their books about Sarajevo, allege that Serbian nationalists stole the footprints. A third story (recounted by Christopher Hitchens, among others) is that Princip’s footprints fell victim to popular rage, pried from the sidewalk by angry crowds. Finally, it’s possible that the city of Sarajevo made their effacement a municipal priority, a kind of declaration of the new politics of the city.

There is something remarkable about this, that the true fate of this most famous site has so quickly vanished beneath a set of hazy parables. But the facts we forget matter less than the stories we remember. If the history of Princip’s corner is a microcosm of Sarajevo’s own, then perhaps these competing tales – each with its own political implications – compose a fitting account of those chaotic years.

Today, the commemoration comes as close to objectivity as it has in its hundred-year history. A simple plaque installed in 2004 reads, “From this place on 28 June 1914 Gavrilo Princip assassinated the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sofia.” There is no mention of the repercussions. A reproduced cast of the famous footprints lurks in the shadows of the museum.

The centenary commemoration this week has been slightly more elaborate, and naturally, more divisive. Even a conference of historians could not rise above the fray. In a gesture of peace, the Vienna Philharmonic plays in Sarajevo on Saturday, the culmination of a two-week series of local events. But the Serbian half of Bosnia has declined to participate, opting for a more celebratory take on Princip’s legacy.

Even without the fraught politics of Princip, the assassination that changed the world is a complex inheritance for Sarajevo. It is a famous mark of violence on a city that is trying to put that reputation behind it. But it is also a reminder, from a troubled and tiny nation that has at times struggled to remind the continent of its existence, that its history is Europe’s own.
 
Translation:

I, as usual, have no actual knowledge to offer on the subject...

...so allow me to throw this c&p up against the thread wall to highlight that fact.


What's happened in your life, 0...

...that's completely erased any pride you ever had a shot of possessing?
 
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