Princip’s action was the trigger for a four-year catastrophe that eventually became known as the Great War or the World War. Later events forced a renaming, and it became the First World War or World War One.Posted on 06/30/2014 9:53:14 PM PDT by rmlew
One hundred years ago today a Bosnian Serb named Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie. The grand duke — the heir to the Austrian throne — was shot while traveling in what would today be called a motorcade. He was paying an official visit to Sarajevo in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which was then a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Princip’s action was the trigger for a four-year catastrophe that eventually became known as the Great War or the World War. Later events forced a renaming, and it became the First World War or World War One.
Four and a half years after that summer day, Bosnia, Austria-Hungary, and the entire traditional political order of Central and Eastern Europe had ceased to exist. The German, Austrian, and Ottoman Empires were no more. Austria and Hungary were no longer politically conjoined. The Russian Empire had been ejected from Central Europe, and its tsar had been replaced by a cabal of Communist revolutionaries whose murderous brutality would have made even the most bloodthirsty of the tsars blanch. Independent states sprang up where for centuries none had existed. Yet the variegated statelets of the Balkans were cobbled together into a single artificial entity called Yugoslavia whose weakness and instability suited the interests of the victorious Western Allies who created it. In contrast, the remains of the Ottoman Empire were carved up into political entities with arbitrary boundaries drawn by the same Allies, once again according to their own state interests.
And so the world that we know today was created out of the ashes of the one that preceded it. The arrangements made by the victors after the Great War maintained and exacerbated earlier tensions while removing the inhibitions imposed by the now-discarded imperial structures. The result guaranteed an eventual reprise of the Great War. Armies and paramilitaries and revolutionaries and partisans rampaged across Europe in one direction or another, over and over again, until the entire continent had been soaked in blood, all except Sweden and Switzerland — which served as arms factory and banker, respectively, for the belligerents.
Gavrilo Princip’s gunshots opened the door to the charnel house known as the 20th century. The Great War was billed as the “war to end all wars”, but instead it ushered in a never-ending war. Cold, lukewarm, or hot: that war is still with us today, a hundred years later.continued
Obama may be the last orgasm of Marxism; The last vestige of the 20th Century’s violent cycle. We can only have faith and stand by our principles.
Western Civilization may well have been mortally wounded that day. Fabian socialism, Cultural Marxism, the USSR , fascism , and Nazism were all borne or allowed to thrive because of this day.
He is not he last but the first going forward. Keep vigilante.
I doubt he is the last
Exactly!
Fate says a lot about this event in 1914.
Fate is the fact that the Crown Duke....upon birth...was number four down the list to become the Crown Duke. He had three relatives ahead of him...and all would dead...thus leaving him as the unlucky guy to inherit the job.
Fate is the fact that Ferdinand was probably the most prolific hunter that ever lived. He tracked his “kills” and it’s believed that he had around 300,000 game kills by that day in 1914. He was considered an absolute authority on guns and hunting....with few matching his abilities.
Fate is the fact that he’d already been attacked once on this day in June....deflecting a grenade of sorts as it was thrown at the vehicle. The vehicle behind him was the one that took the blunt of that attack. Those folks were rushed to the hospital and he actually went and attended with them.
Good article! Thanks for posting it!
Very good article and comments (here & there). The slaughter of individuals continues. Anti-truth, anti-freedom, anti-individual, anti-life collectives rage on.
A very good read, and well-written. Excellent comments following.
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