06.28.14
A precocious ten-year-old tells us how the world would have changed had Franz Ferdinand and Gavrilo Princip been friends. You’ll weep for humanity.
In the rush for clickbait and eye-ball grabbing, the Culture of Lickspittle reduces everything to imbecility. The United States did not enter World War I until 1917, about two and a half years after the assassination. And, relatively speaking, its military played only a minor role in the fighting that characterized the war. There is nothing in the American experience, for instance, that comes close to the Somme and Verdun.
But today, for the sake of web hits, its Franz Ferdinand (or Gavrilo Princip) Day. Far easier to digest than Barbara Tuchman, who is dead, anyway, and would have been lousy at web SEO.
Voila, ABC News:
Assassination That Started World War I like ‘Game of Thrones’ Script
The shot that killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand 100 years ago today – which started a bloodletting that didn’t stop until 10 million people died and four empires were ruined in World War I – had all the elements of an exaggerated “Game of Thrones??? script.
Yep, 10 million people dead sure is kinda easy to picture after watching some popular tv show with a dwarf who shoots his dad in the toilet with a crossbow for the season finale.
Mike Ozanne said,
July 8, 2014 at 7:19 pm
We still suffer from the view that this conflict was an accident or the result of societal pressure. In reality we had war in 1914 because it was the policy of some of the parties, not necessarily the “bad guys” , to bring one about. Revision of European Borders not being otherwise possible.