Whowuddathunkit.
Who thought that the assassination of a relatively minor Hapsburg would start a major world war?
Whowuddathunkit.
I tend to agree with the Hapsburg analogy. Course, it doesn’t help that from 1905 on....the Kaiser was fully developing his war strategy and this merely served as a trigger to run his ‘short-term war’. All the way through the end of 1914....the top level of the German government felt it’d all be over by the summer of 1915, and it would be chiefly mounted against Russia. They guessed wrong on almost every single detail.
“Who thought that the assassination of a relatively minor Hapsburg would start a major world war?”
yes, that’s always the thing, isn’t it?
I’ve never made a serious study of WWI, but I’ve read enough about it to conclude that it is unlikely I’ll ever understand it.
And it was the end, the very end of the world as it had been (with minor erruptions like the American and French revolutions) for hundreds if not thousands of years.
In a way we may still be living in its upheaval.
So, yes, while I don’t think it’s likely that what’s happening in Ukraine will affect us, I wouldn’t rule it out.
To start a fire you need a flame source, tender, and the right fuel. The assassination of Arch Duke Ferdinand was the flame source only because relatively minor players under the Kaiser wanted it to be. By controlling what information the Kaiser saw and changing or not delivering his instructions it was minor functionaries behind the scenes that made the fire start.
The disturbing parallel here is the incompetent people around our president coupled with his incompetence and magical thinking that may lead us to an armed confrontation with a nuclear superpower. Apparently our ambassador to the Ukraine was in the streets meeting with revolutionaries. Imagine if Russia’s ambassador openly supported the Occupy crowd and suddenly the Occupy crowd had man pads and millions of dollars. We would automatically assume that Russia supplied the money and the weapons. If the ambassador really did that then the ambassador should be brought back to face charges. An ambassador represents the United States and, from a political perspective IS the United States. Although the US might support protesters politically in the US they should never actively meet with dissidents of a “friendly” power on that power’s own soil. An ambassador gathers information about the situation and reports. Anything else exposes the country they represent to retaliation.