Sarajevo on my mind

 

[Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the Hapsburg heir, and his wife minutes before their deaths.]

If we’re in a rerun of 1938 and Vladimir Putin = Hitler, then obviously we must avoid negotiation (“appeasement”) and quickly reindustrialize to save decency and democracy. 

But what if we’re actually reliving a different historical period, say, 1914?

That was an era in which the last round of extended European bloodletting—the Napoleonic wars—was a distant memory, already a full century in the past. Those disasters were ancient history. Governments were afraid of revolution at home (1848, 1871, 1905, etc.) but not too worried about a little inter-state dust-up. They knew how to handle those.

A lot has been written about how Europe stumbled into WorldWar 1 and how no one had anticipated the enormous destruction that followed. Given that human beings haven’t changed much, we can imagine that Europe’s leaders, then as now, were confident of their respective strengths, determined not to be pushed around by [insert enemy country X], and bursting with patriotic, martial spirit. No doubt they had all read The Iliad in the original Greek. 

What sparked the Great War was the assassination of the heir to the Hapsburg throne and his wife by a Serbian nationalist. “The killing put both Austria-Hungary and Russia, which saw itself as the Serbians’ protector, in a bind. Neither one of them wanted to back down and appear weak.” Can’t appear weak! Rival alliances mobilized; armies faced off; ultimata issued forth; war ensued. But that was then.

As it turned out, stopping the war turned out to be a lot harder than setting it off. It ground on for 4 years and left 20 million dead out of a European population of some 500-plus million.

We’re not quite 100 years removed from the last cataclysm, the bloodletting of the 1940s that killed another 60 million. But hardly anyone alive today lived through that as a conscious adult.

From watching our leaders sleepwalk us towards the next round, I guess they’re comfortable with the vastly increased destructive power of modern weapons. Nukes, introduced in 1945, have remained taboo since then, but from the way world leaders talk, they’re back in play, just in case. After all, there are 8 billion of us now—maybe they’re relaxed about knocking that down to 7, a masspopulation cull as a sort of greening event, something to get us closer to Net Zero—meaning emissions, of course, not people. 

Israel is said to have a couple hundred nukes,  and many commentators say they’re not doing well at present. In any case, it’s hard to see what “success” might look like for them. A million dead Palestinians? Two million? Expulsion of the rest into Jordan and Egypt? Provoking a war between Iran and the U.S.?

All these rosy scenarios lead to a regional conflagration, and it seems that our Christian Zionists are cool with that. Armageddon is supposed to bring on the Rapture, so that’s exciting since it will mostly occur several thousand miles from Oklahoma. Maybe that’s what got them out of their seats 58 times at the recent Nuremberg rally.

And hey, assassination is back! Just like in 1914! Yes, assassination is an okay thing to do if you’re a U.S. client state. We certainly practice it ourselves when we feel the need. No one on our side is bothered by the latest iterations visited on Lebanon and Iran. It’s just policy: we kill our enemies. What could go wrong?

Probably nothing. No doubt cooler heads will prevail.

And yet, I got Sarajevo, June 28, 1914, on my mind.