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

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.

And that doesnt even take in account how they struggled under Ottoman occupation before that and what exactly fight for a freedom means for that country.
Every moron can read Google nowdays and think they know something. But living in a country that has mentality of dealing with conquerors for centuries is something completely different. It is very easy to be a smartass and judge when you are sitting somewhere safe all your life.
 
And that doesnt even take in account how they struggled under Ottoman occupation before that and what exactly fight for a freedom means for that country.
Every moron can read Google nowdays and think they know something. But living in a country that has mentality of dealing with conquerors for centuries is something completely different. It is very easy to be a smartass and judge when you are sitting somewhere safe all your life.

How many emperors have the serbs shot?
 
From An Incomplete Education, by Judy Jones and William Wilson:

Obviously, blaming World War I on what happened at Sarajevo is like blaming Norman Bates' slasher impulses on Janet Leigh's turning on the hot water. Europe had been on the verge of a nervous breakdown since at least the turn of the century as a result of both family and personality problems dating back to the 1870s. That was when Germany, having just trounced the French in the Franco-Prussian War, started angling for its own place in the sun among the powers of Europe. In order to consolidate the new German position and forestall any thoughts of revenge on the part of the French, Bismarck, then Germany's chancellor, ran around forging secret alliances with anybody who'd let him in the door; specifically the Hapsburgs, who were looking for an ally against the Russians in their attempt to grab a bigger piece of the Balkans, and the Italians, who like the idea of siding with a winner. Virtually everyone else was offended by the Germans, who struck them not only as parvenus, but as too ambitious, truculent, and devious to make acceptable neighbors. Bismarck's Triple Alliance turned an undercurrent of resentment into out-and-out paranoia. Pretty soon France, Russia, and Great Britain had formed, not anything as formal as an alliance (Britain was too determinedly isolationist for that) but an entente cordiale, known thereafter as the Triple Entente, whereby each would pitch in to help out if either of the others was attacked by members of the Triple Alliance. By the early 1900s, every major power had armed itself to the teeth, and Europe was divided into two camps, each nervously waiting for the other to draw first.

In such a high-stress situation, a German unexpectedly scratching his ear might have been enough to set things off, but there was a better catalyst: The Balkans. A cluster of wild, backward countries that had only recently gotten out from under the thumb of the crumbling Ottoman Empire, the Balkans were the object of perpetual rivalry between the Russians and the Austro-Hungarians, both of whom were on their last legs without realizing it, and were, therefore, semi-hysterical much of the time. The Austrians, in particular, had to be a little crazy to keep trying to throw their weight around in the Balkan Peninsula, much of which was inhabited by angry Slavs -- Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Montenegrins and Slovenes -- who, believe it or not, saw themselves as a single nationality and who, being quasi-Orientals who still depended on garlic to ward off vampire attacks, felt closer to the Russians than to the Austrians, who looked down upon them as ethnically inferior.

Thanks largely to the Serbs, who had a tendency to register discontent by forming secret societies and committing terrorist acts, both rival empires were, by 1914, ready to be driven around the bend. An assassination was just the ticket. It was also the chance the Germans had been waiting for. Fed up with being treated, as they saw it, as second cousins, and convinced that the Russians, who had been notoriously unreliable allies up to that point, wouldn't fight, they gave full rein to their ambitions -- and to the military strategy they'd already had prepared for ten years. As for Great Britain, it feld honor-bound to declare war on Germany when German troops invaded Belgium on their way to smash the French. At this point, no one was thinking clearly and everyone was wishing the whole business would just go away. But, as the British historian A. J. P. Taylor noted, politicians and generals had a hard time keeping up with each other's point of view in those days and before they knew it, the heads of state had lost control. "Their sensations, when diplomacy collapsed," wrote Taylor, "were those of a train passenger who sees the express thundering through the station at which he intended to alight."

And that's only what was happening on the surface. Behind all these global neuroses was a new-found conviction, born out of the traumatic effects of Darwinism on human consciousness, that Nature was a struggle for survival of the fittest; that, in the case of people, the fittest meant the best-armed; and that, under the circumstances, war was inevitable anyway. Those who still hoped this wasn't true tended to believe that enormous military strength on all sides would act as a deterrent, and that common sense would surely prevail. Wrong again. Not only was World War I out of control virtually from the beginning, it went on for four years, and it wound up signaling the end of European domination of the world.
 
The Austrians, in particular, had to be a little crazy to keep trying to throw their weight around in the Balkan Peninsula, much of which was inhabited by angry Slavs -- Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Montenegrins and Slovenes -- who, believe it or not, saw themselves as a single nationality and who, being quasi-Orientals who still depended on garlic to ward off vampire attacks, felt closer to the Russians than to the Austrians, who looked down upon them as ethnically inferior.

This indeed, and that closeness to Russia went much further in the future up to this day. Only those born after the civil war brain washed by Germanic loving corrupt politicians dont feel that way. Anyone older and more capable of thinking with their own head still feels we are one nation and naturally closer to our cousins Slavs than mostly Germanic western world.

Thank you for those 2 articles, they are quite different from "BOOO Serbs fired up the WWI and are now flaunting statues of criminals" OP.
 
From The National Interest:

Germany's Superpower Quest Caused World War I

Michael Lind

June 30, 2014


The centenary of the beginning of World War I has revealed a deep divide between perceptions of the war held by the general public and historians, at least in the English-speaking world. Pundits and commentators and politicians routinely opine that World War I was a needless and unavoidable catastrophe, variously attributed to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Serbian terrorist at Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, runaway arms races, imperialism in general, or “sleepwalking” politicians who stumbled blindly into catastrophe. The general impression among the broader public is that nobody in particular was to blame for the greatest conflagration in world history before the Second World War. Literary and cinematic masterpieces like Remargue’s All Quiet on the Western Front and Kubrick’s Path’s of Glory have reinforced the perception that the conflict proved the absurdity of war. The lesson is that war is like catastrophic climate change—a destructive force that must be avoided and for which everyone is partly to blame.

In the Anglophone world, this popular interpretation of World War I has deep roots in strains of isolationism, the international peace campaigns of the early twentieth century, and, not least, Woodrow Wilson’s call for a “peace without victory.” In the European Union, treating World War I as the product of abstract forces like arms races or nationalism is doubtlessly useful in minimizing national animosities.

But unlike the chattering classes, most historians, ever since Fritz Fischer published Germany’s Aims in the First World War (1961), have tended to agree that the major cause of World War I was Imperial Germany’s determination to become a “world power” or superpower by crippling Russia and France in what it hoped would be a brief and decisive war, like the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. Following the Archduke’s assassination, Berlin deliberately used the crisis in relations between its satellite Austria-Hungary and Russia’s satellite Serbia as an excuse for a general war that would establish German hegemony from Belgium to Baghdad. World War I started in 1914 for the same reason that World War II started in 1939—a government in Berlin wanted a war, though not the war it ultimately got.

The secret “September program” of the German government in 1914 envisioned lopping off territory from France and turning Germany’s neighbors into “vassal states” (a term used in the document for Belgium). The 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, negotiated between Germany and the Soviet government that it had helped to install in Moscow, removed Russia from the war, gave Germany the Baltic states and part of Belarus and made an independent Ukraine a German satellite. Put the September program and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk together, and you have a striking vision of a German continental empire as expansive as the one imagined by Hitler—although, unlike Hitler’s genocidal German settler empire, the Kaiser’s empire would have been a more traditional empire of German-dominated vassal states.

Defenders of the “everyone was at fault” interpretation of World War I point out that Germany’s enemies had expansive war aims, too, and that Britain and France carved up the Ottoman empire following the war. But this misses the point. The alliance of Russia, France and Britain was defensive, provoked by Germany’s bellicose drive to become a global rather than merely regional power. There had been numerous Balkan wars in the preceding decades and the conflict between Austria and Serbia could have been confined to the Balkans, if Berlin had chosen that option. Instead, Germany’s rulers used Sarajevo as an excuse to do what it wanted to do anyway: convert itself into a “world power” by dominating Europe through war.

The British historian Niall Ferguson once suggested that if Britain and the U.S. had stayed out of World War I, a Mitteleuropa established by the Kaiserreich might have evolved into something like today’s European Union. Nonsense. Within Imperial Germany, victory would have strengthened the authoritarian militarists and weakened the forces of liberalism and democracy. The political culture would have been not that of today’s bourgeois Germany but that of a Latin American banana republic or today’s Thailand or Egypt, illiberal regimes in which generals and colonels pull the strings.

A German victory in World War I would have created a European superpower which, if less maniacal and murderous than Hitler’s aborted superstate, would have been much more formidable than the Soviet Union. Soviet Russia was a backward nation that controlled the poorest half of Europe during the Cold War. If it had prevailed in World War I, Imperial Germany would have been the most advanced nation of Europe, dominating the richest region in the world.

Would this new superpower, created in a bloody war of aggression by Berlin, have been a status quo power? It seems more likely that the German imperial elite, emboldened by success, would have charged recklessly on to wage cold war against the British empire and against the U.S. in the western hemisphere. In any hypothetical German-American Cold War, Imperial Germany might have mobilized superior scientific and technological resources, including areas like chemistry and rocket science in which it led the world. And unlike the Hitler regime, a triumphant Kaiserreich probably would not have allowed distinctions between “Jewish science” and “Aryan science” to get in the way of developing atomic weapons.

Bismarck’s Germany was a status quo power. Post-Bismarckian Germany was a rogue state. Wilhelm II did not dream of exterminating Jews and enslaving the Slavs, but in his recklessness and radicalism he was proto-Hitlerian. To achieve the goal of creating a German superpower, Wilhelm and his officers sought to cripple Britain and France, by stirring up a global Muslim jihad and to tie the U.S. down by embroiling it in border war with Mexico (the Zimmerman telegram). Last but not least, Imperial Germany successfully crippled Russia by sponsoring Lenin’s communist coup d’etat in October 1917. The Kaiser and his soldiers and diplomats were not prudent Old World statesmen playing chess. They were revisionist radicals, overturning the chess board and stomping on the pieces.

To what end? What was the alternative that was so terrible, so inconceivable, that the Imperial regime and later the Third Reich were willing to plunge the world into two wars that cost a total of 75 to 100 million deaths and devastated Germany in the process? The alternative, unthinkable to the Imperial German ruling class, was that a peaceful, status quo Germany, within its 1871 borders, would be nothing more than the richest country in a rich and peaceful Europe, enjoying cooperative relations with Britain and America.

In his book Mitteleuropa [Central Europe] (1917), Friedrich Naumann—himself a moderate German National Liberal—considered and rejected the option that Germany could be a regional European power affiliated with the Anglophone world:

As a matter of sentiment, and in spite of all the war “songs of hate,” it is easier for us to contemplate a permanent union with the English World-Power [than an alliance with Russia]. In this case we shall become, as one of my friends puts it, the junior partner in the English world-firm, shall supply it with confidential agents and clerks, build ships and send teachers to the colonies, furnish English emporiums with German goods, industriously made and well paid for, speak English outside our own four walls, enjoy English internationalism, and fight the future English battles against Russia…All of this would be regulated, after the English fashion, in quite reasonable and pleasant forms, but our German Imperial history would have become a history of a territory as is to-day that of Saxony or Wurttemberg. A great nation only does a thing like this when nothing else remains to it [emphasis added]. We know that most of the nations on the globe have no choice but to seek such an alliance, on one side or another, but a greater aim tempts us in virtue of our strength and experience: to become a central point ourselves!

Naumann was wrong. Like the leaders of West Germany after World War II and reunited Germany after the Cold War, Germany’s leaders a century ago should have chosen the alternative of being an honored and well-remunerated junior partner in the Anglo-American “world-firm.” Had they done so, the world would have been spared World War I, World War II, and probably Soviet communism and the Cold War, too.

It’s time to retire the myth that World War I was a meaningless, avoidable tragedy while World War II was a just and necessary crusade. World War I and World War II had the same cause—the desire of German elites to use aggressive war to turn Germany from a regional power into a global superpower—and the same result—the defeat of Germany by a defensive coalition of Russia, Britain, France and the United States. If it was right to prevent the German conquest of Europe by the Fuhrer, it was also right to prevent the German conquest of Europe by the Kaiser. What the world needed in 1914 and 1939 was what the world thankfully has today: a European Germany, not a German Europe.
 
"Some damned foolish thing in the Balkans," Bismarck

Unfortunately, by that time, Kaiser Wilhelm had dropped the Pilot.

1890_Bismarcks_Ruecktritt.jpg
 
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.

I do not know how accurate this is, but it is interesting reading none the less. Thanks for posting it. As in most tragic events or accidents, if you break the chain anywhere along the line, the event/accident never happens
 
As in most tragic events or accidents, if you break the chain anywhere along the line, the event/accident never happens

Doubtful. See post #36. Kaiser Wilhelm (as is known from his letters, found after the war -- you can read about that in Paul Johnson's Modern Times) wanted a war, and would have found a pretext for one sooner or later. It was the only way he could see to win Germany a "place in the sun" (i.e., lots of colonies in the sunnier climes, like Britain and France had).
 
I tell ya, if I had a time machine I wouldn't bother with Princip; I'd send a professional assassin to make sure Kaiser Wilhelm died in infancy (by some method that looks like natural causes).
 
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