“this kind of stupid thing is what dragged the world into WWI.”
The Archduke was a relatively harmless guy—and the assassin was a bona fide Serbian nationalist—no evidence that anybody had to put him up to the task.
World War I was just one insane blunder after another—by both sides.
Princep was part of the large and influential terror group Young Bosnia, a part of the Serbian Black Hand. A group determined to create a Greater Serbia. Ferdinand was targeted because he was expected to greatly modify Austrian treatment of their minorities when he ascended to the throne. There were as many as five assassins waiting for him that morning in Sarajevo.
Oh, absolutely… Don’t get me wrong. I am not a World War I conspiracy theorist about the causes. It was pretty straightforward to me in retrospect that the only people that really wanted to go to war at that time were the Germans…France, Belgium, England, they weren’t really interested in going to war,
But the Germans were, they had a plan.
What made it all worse was all the entanglements and alliances (like NATO and SEATO) which insured that once one party was dragged in, everybody was dragged in except us.
And then we got dragged in later.