It Was 100 Years Ago Tomorrow

[Valin]

Shot In The Dark
Mitch Berg
6/27/14

 

It was 100 years ago tomorrow that Gavril Princep, a Serbian anarchist, killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. It’s an event that your junior high history teacher told you started World War I. Your teacher was right, in the same sense that a buckling road “causes” a sinkhole.

 

And if you’ve been following my “World War II – Fact And Myth” series marking the seventieth anniversaries of key events in World War 2, you may not be shocked to know that First Ringer and I – frustrated historians, both of us us – are going to be rolling out a similar series, “World War I – Fact and Myth”, touching on the same sorts of events in the First World War at their 100th anniversaries. The series will obviously overlap for the next 15 months or so – which makes perfect sense, since they really were two different phases of the same war. Indeed, much of what is going on in the Middle East, Eastern and Southern Europe today is directly tied to what happened in World War I.

 

So that works.

 

Of course, it also means a fair amount of re-reading World War I history for both of us!

 

 

Also see VDH

[Draggingtree]

POSTED ON JUNE 28, 2014 BY STEVEN HAYWARD IN CHURCHILL, HISTORY

“THE DREAD SIGNAL OF ARMAGEDDON”

 

Today is the 100th anniversary of Gavrilo Princep’s assassination of the Archduke Francis Fertinand and his consort in Sarajevo, what Churchill called “the dread signal of Armageddon.” We’re about to start a four-year palooza of commemorations of the signal episodes from the Great War, including lots of chin-stroking about whether something like it could happen again in the heart of Europe (or on the periphery, like, say, Ukraine). I offered a few of my own thoughts about this over at Forbes.com back in January. Among other things I wrote in January was this:

 

“European disarmament—the great windmill of the 1930s—is coming to pass by degrees, the result of welfare-statism more than authentic Kantian pacifism. Before long most of Europe won’t be able to fight each other even if they wanted to. (Better watch out for those old Russians, though. They didn’t get the memo from Brussels.)”

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/06/the-dread-signal-of-armageddon.php

[Draggingtree]

June 28 A Century Ago

 

By Hunt Tooley

Saturday, June 28th, 2014

 

Franz Ferdinand was a difficult person in many ways. Dark. Angry at times. He became heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary when his cousin, Rudolf (whose tutor was the father of the Austrian School of Economics, Carl Menger) died in an apparent murder-suicide with his young mistress in 1889. The death of Rudolf was only one of many tragedies in the Habsburg family in the two generations leading up to World War I. Besides the cases of consecutive heirs to the throne, Franz Josef’s glamorous wife, Elisabeth, died at the hands of an assassin in 1898. There was also the rancor over Franz Ferdinand’s marriage in 1900 to Sophie Chotek, whose prestigious pedigree was not quite prestigious enough for the House of Habsburg. The two married in 1900, but only on the condition that Sophie not appear as Franz Ferdinand’s consort on occasions when he was appearing in the capacity of heir to the throne. She would not receive the title of Empress, and any son would not be eligible to succeed to the throne.

 

This is to say, Franz Ferdinand was facing somewhat more than normal family pressures. http://bastiat.mises.org/?p=9773

[Draggingtree]

Did Carl Menger Start WWI?

By Mark Thornton
Saturday, June 28th, 2014

 

On the 100th anniversary of the start of WWI this unlikeliest of antidotes comes to us from Forbes and Mark Hendrickson.

 

As we mark the 100th anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, and the eventual start of World War I later this summer, it is fascinating the way individuals affect history and history affects individuals.

 

Anecdote #1:

Here’s one that I doubt you’ve heard before: The founder of the Austrian school of economics, Carl Menger (1840-1921), might have altered the course of events in a way that made possible the double assassination in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. Let me explain:

 

Franz Ferdinand might not have been the heir to the Hapsburg Empire in 1914 if his cousin, Crown Prince Rudolf, had lived to be 65. However, Rudolf had committed suicide at the age of 40 a quarter-century earlier. The reason for that suicide has been the subject of speculation ever since, and the Wikipedia entry on Rudolf lists 14 productions in film and theatre that have included Rudolf as a character. The most widely accepted explanation is that Rudolf was depressed because his father was insisting that the crown prince, who was married, end his relationship with a younger woman. However, there might have been another major cause for Rudolf’s depression.

I heard this from my mentor, the late Hans Sennholz, http://bastiat.mises.org/?p=9873