And it's a whole different world.



From Eyewitness to History

The Assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, 1914:

Hairpin turns. History. Hmm. Sounds familiar, for some reason. Back to the present day...

Right around this time, the Nazis were eradicating the Czech village of Lidice for harboring his assassins. Another few hundred slaughtered people, most of whom had nothing to do with that assassination. Not that being innocent ever saved anyone.

Last edited Sat Jun 28, 2014, 11:39 AM - Edit history (1)

Sarajevo, June 28, 1914


Prague, May 29, 1942


Dallas, November 22,1963

To change the course of humanity.

while Heydrich died on June 4, he was ambushed on May 29.

Inspired many torturers in the present day, evidently:

"So far you have been treated as an officer and a gentleman, but don't think that this will go on if you don't behave better than you have done. You have two hours left in which to confess everything. If you don't, I shall hand you over to the Gestapo, who are used to dealing with such gangsters and criminals — you won't enjoy their methods a bit."

To Captain Sigismund Payne Best, as quoted in The Venlo Incident (1950) by Sigismund Payne Best, p. 41 (via Wiki)

Most importantly: As you wrote, Benton D Struckcheon, many innocent people died on account of his assassination.

with the World they way it was, if the nations were just waiting for any event to set off the war. And this was just the trigger.

the United States might not be looked at as the leader of the free World and we may have never had the economy we had due to World War II. Well since most of us were not around then, I don't know if it would have been better or not. I do know that we would be a very difference United States of America without World War II especially. We would probably not be as advanced in various industries like technology and manufacturing. The woman's movement may not be as advanced as it is today (although more needs to be done). And quite a few things would be difference for our country.

WWI.
What ever the outcomes, I can't see the deaths of a hundred million people as acceptable. (combined WWI and II)

In the sense that the assassination HAD to make all of that happen. Leaders, and other people, were making choices.

My own pet theory, though, is that the period from around 1875 to 1914 was very stable, relatively, (lots of the usual small wars here and there, occasional financial turmoil, but nothing continent-wide and certainly nothing global) and that stability lulled everyone into thinking none of their actions could possibly lead to any sort of catastrophe. Combine that with the usual glorification of war, and you've got the correct combination in place for stumbling right into disaster.

The assassination of the Archduke was a carry over from the Balkan Wars (First & Second), which was a carry over from ongoing conflicts between Russia and the Ottoman Empire, which was a carry over from.....

Too much history to cover and no real time to do it. Interesting how many of those same conflicts from 100's of years ago are still in play today, i.e. Russia wanting a warm water port.

I'm reading an interesting history by Max Hastings called Catastrophe 1914, in which he pretty much lays the blame for WWI on the German general Moltke. He was pushing for war before 1914, he just needed an excuse. A lot of wars need a tipping point. WWII needed Pearl Harbor for us to get involved and GW needed 9/11. Moltke is a name that should be more prominent than the Archduke Ferdinand.

and it says that at the end of his life he put together a pamphlet that detailed how Germany entered the war, allegedly to show that it was more down to chaos than warmongering. The pamphlet was lost, as the Germans thought it was too "nasty", and his wife published a watered down version.
Without his first hand account, I'd be reluctant to finger him. I know from reading some histories that there's some British historians who think the Germans were out to start a war, and that WWII was inevitable regardless of Versailles. But you have to take that with a grain of salt, since Germany was Britain's principal rival in the imperial rivalry all the European powers had going.

Of course there were many factors, but the assassination in and of itself was just an incident, not as relevant as behind the scenes war-mongering. Moltkes first hand account could hardly be anything but deflecting. I wouldn't ascribe an ounce of truth to GW's first hand account of his going to war.

Still, a British source has to be taken with a grain of salt. Just sayin.

With time, more personal diaries are uncovered and different points of view postulated, so that the modern historian can make better arguments regarding cause and effect. As for Britain, they certainly did not want war, so there's no deflection there.

We wouldn't have this whole ISIS mess on our hands today if not for what happened at the end of World War I.

http://www.historyfiles.co.uk/FeaturesEurope/WWI/1918_Conclusions01.htm

The Allies lost no time in betraying the Arabs who had been promised independence in return for rebelling against the Turks, and colonised them instead in order to exploit their oil reserves. The artificial nation of Kuwait was carved out of Iraq under a puppet emir so that its considerable oil reserves could be preserved for western exploitation. That would have its own blowback in 1990 when Saddam Hussein decided to re-take the territory for Iraq (the First Gulf War). And that would lead to the 2003 Iraq invasion (the Second Gulf War) and the ongoing war, which has its own part to play in the economic collapse the world over today.


http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2001/10/whats_osama_talking_about.html

In his videotape broadcast, Osama Bin Laden made two references to "80 years." The first: "What America is tasting now is only a copy of what we have tasted. Our Islamic nation has been tasting the same for more than 80 years, of humiliation and disgrace, its sons killed and their blood spilled, its sanctities desecrated." Later, Osama repeated the temporal reference, saying "the sword fell upon America after 80 years." What's he talking about? What happened around 80 years ago?

It's impossible to be certain from such an oblique reference, but here's a plausible (albeit speculative) theory: Bin Laden is referring to the Sykes-Picot agreement, which divided the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire between the British and the French after World War I. Osama's prime goal is said to be the restoration of the Islamic caliphate, and the Sykes-Picot agreement may signal, to Bin Laden, the collapse of Muslim political and military power.

And, unfortunately, they do not care to know it.

When one views the sectarian violence in the middle east that has been raging for centuries, not to mention the petty tribal rivalries, the idea of a Pan Arabia is wishful thinking, or a nightmare.

The sectarian violence may have deep roots, but it wasn't raging nonstop. The Ottoman Empire kept things under control. The artificial lines drawn when the French and British divided up the Middle East -- not to mention the foreign rulers they imposed on their new puppet states -- didn't help. And the reimposition of colonialism was not only a betrayal but an insult.

Sunnis and Shi'ites were living quite peacefully together in Baghdad until the US invasion. This latest mess is all ours.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1918_flu_pandemic

The 1918 flu pandemic (January 1918 – December 1920) was an unusually deadly influenza pandemic, the first of the two pandemics involving H1N1 influenza virus. It infected 500 million people across the world, including remote Pacific islands and the Arctic, and killed 50 to 100 million of them—three to five percent of the world's population[3] —making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in human history. . . .

To maintain morale, wartime censors minimized early reports of illness and mortality in Germany, Britain, France, and the United States; but papers were free to report the epidemic's effects in neutral Spain (such as the grave illness of King Alfonso XIII), creating a false impression of Spain as especially hard hit — thus the pandemic's nickname Spanish flu. . . .

Investigative work by a British team led by virologist John Oxford[13] of St Bartholomew's Hospital and the Royal London Hospital, identified a major troop staging and hospital camp in Étaples, France as almost certainly being the center of the 1918 flu pandemic. . . .

The close quarters and massive troop movements of World War I hastened the pandemic and probably both increased transmission and augmented mutation; the war may also have increased the lethality of the virus.

http://upload.democraticunderground.com/1014835239

I'm sure there's more to it than I understand but to me the man is not someone to be celebrated.

account is @WW1FO. They're tweeting all the events leading up to Britain's entrance into the war on Aug 4. Should be fascinating.

to go back further, an event even smaller may have triggered Gavrilo Princip to join the group that he did and carry out the assassinations of Ferdinand and his wife Sophie.

Thanks for the thread, Benton D Struckcheon.

It was down hill for Monarchies.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

I learned a couple of things in this thread, and was inspired to research and learn more. Excellent informative posts here. Kicked and recommended.

Great thread.

Ferdinand and Sophie not been assassinated.

people would have been in charge.

Caused more death and destruction to humankind than any other single incident I can think of - and literally changed the course of global history.

That was the date of the Wannsee Conference

but that was one of the many events set in train by today's anniversary.
The thing is, even the people alive at the time realized the importance of what had happened. Not on this date, but when the consequences began to become clear in August:

He was a little off: when all was said and done, large parts of the inhabited world across the Eurasian, not just the European, continent were reduced to rubble. The Holocaust was the event that killed more people than any of the others, and did so with industrial deliberateness, but the grand toll in lives was many times the number taken by it, as hard as that is to imagine.

The leaders of the empires of Europe were so completely incompetent and intent on protecting and projecting power that every move they undertook made matters worse in a rapidly cascading fashion. The idiocy is so clear that when reading the book, you keep hoping that someone would step up and say "Stop the stupidity!".

The only leader who acted with some intelligence and concern for humanity was Albert l of Belgium. Unfortunately, no one else with any power had the mother wit to think out their actions or constrain their massive egos and he did not have enough of a power base to prevent disaster that continues to haunt us today.

The book is incredibly shocking and eerily reminiscent of the the neocons here in the USA. That the most educated people of their day could act with such abandon of rational thought, is dismaying and disturbing for the future of humanity. The same type of ego-centric idiocy has reverberated through out history, but is manifested most recently in the science denialism of the conservative movements across the globe.

The act of the assassin would have been a vilely misguided tragic act of murderous protest, if not for the massive stupidity of the monarchs and military men of Europe.

I am currently watching the BBC documentary "The Great War" on YouTube.

The horrific nature of that war seems to be pretty much lost to history. The casualty figures are pretty staggering.

And, as your OP mentions, the consequences of that war led to even more death and suffering for decades to come.