Posted on 03/06/2017 9:52:33 PM PST by aquila48
Colour footage of street scenes of Berlin ca. 1900.
(Makes you pine for the good ol' days)
(Excerpt) Read more at youtube.com ...
I noticed about 20 different types of transportation.
The Little Rascals fire truck was in there.
Nice, thanks!
And it was all started by a single act of a Serbian nationalist named Gavrilo Princip... who is a complete unknown to 99.99% of the people on earth.
How different would the world be today without that single act?
No WWI, No Soviet Union, No Hitler, No WWII, No Cold War, No Vietnam war, No Communist China...
Fantastic! Thanks!
i found this series really insightful (done by the BBC based on diplomatic correspondence)
It shows the events in the 37 days from the Franz Ferdinand assassination to the start of WW1.
The whole thing was a huge surprise to everyone - even the diplomats most deeply involved.
And the striking thing is how the events moved from what was seen as a Balkan flareup to something that none of them could stop.
Oh yeah, don't start me. Princip murdered the one man in all of the world who was capable of, and intended to, address the very issues that caused Princip to shoot him.
There is a school of speculative fiction centered around a time traveler going back to assassinate Hitler, but I think that Princip might be the better target. Before that shot in Sarajevo there was a Romanov dynasty, a Hohenzollern, a Habsburg, a Wittelsbach, and the entirety of the Ottoman empire. Afterward, all ashes.
Bookmarked, and thank you very much. Hitler served at the Somme. One bullet in the right direction, that’s all it would have taken...
“There is a school of speculative fiction centered around a time traveler going back to assassinate Hitler, but I think that Princip might be the better target”
I agree, there would not have been a Hitler without WWI, and no WWI without Princip.
It’s kind of like the bit where a butterfly stirs the air currents that windup a hurricane.
“I’m just betting he’s talking about the Africa and moslem horde that has fallen onto Europe. Just a wild guess.”
Obviously, which is ludicrous. The comment ignored the wars and communism. The Euros themselves destroyed their cities, populace and civilization before they did that.
This current suicide on their part probably comes from psychological damage from the 20th century. A populace can’t go through horrors like WWI and II and communism without there being long term effects.
Bookmark
“Before that shot in Sarajevo there was a Romanov dynasty, a Hohenzollern, a Habsburg, a Wittelsbach, and the entirety of the Ottoman empire.”
I think these dynasties were a large part of the problem.
War did not serve Germany well.
“It’s kind of like the bit where a butterfly stirs the air currents that windup a hurricane.”
Yep, exactly what I thought too... Life is a chaotic system, and for each seemingly random perturbations you have a feedback mechanism, some positive and some negative.
So for example, before Trump;s election our society was polarized. The election of Trump has made our society even more polarized. So his election has triggered a positive feedback, i.e. one that increases the differences.
It’ll be interesting to see where it leads.
Their decline was, yes, but understand that the newest of these, the Romanov, had been around since 1610, and the rest were centuries older. That was governmental stability for central Europe, however decrepit, and a managed decline such as Ferdinand had in mind would have been far preferable to their simultaneous disappearance within only one year. That shock made all of central Europe, not just Germany, lost and in a power vacuum the world hadn't seen since the fall of the Roman empire. Picking over the ruins were weak elective governments and thugs such as the Bolsheviks and the Nazis.
Part of the perceived weakness of the Romanovs were their attempts at reform - with no war they might have had the time for a graceful landing. With it they had defeat in the field and the Bolsheviks at the door. Germany as a nation was less than a half century old. Turkey had already given power to the Young Turks but with defeat in the field the Sultan had to go. The Wittelsbachs might have stabilized what became the birthplace of the Nazi party had their Crown Prince not been a German field marshal and abdication their only option.
Consider the Balkans, where the war started, fought over by Russia, Turkey, and Habsburg Austria for centuries, suddenly bereft of all three. One might hope that would result in peace, but what resulted was chaos. Those same parties are still fighting over the scraps of empire to this very day.
How different would the world be today without that single act?
Someone or something else would have volunteered for Gavrilo's role in history.
And history would have rolled on ... It would have been different, but not significantly.
www.shorpy.com
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