"It was 90 years ago this week that a young Serb nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, assassinated Austrian-Hungarian heir to the throne, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, and his morganatic wife Sophie, during their state visit to Sarajevo. This event triggered off a diplomatic chain reaction known as the July Crisis that culminated in the outbreak of the Great War, the most tragic event in the history of mankind. That war destroyed an imperfect but on the whole decent and well-ordered world, and opened the floodgates of hell. Bolshevism, Fascism, Nazism, the second round of 1939-1945, the Holocaust, and the ruins of civilization we now live in, are all the fruits of the summer of 1914.(...)Four awful years later President Wilson’s Fourteen Points—the device that was allegedly meant to end the war—espoused the principle of self-determination. It threw a revolutionary doctrine thrown at an already exhausted Europe, a doctrine almost on par with Bolshevism in its destabilizing effect. It unleashed competing aspirations among the smaller nations of Central Europe and the Balkans that not only hastened the collapse of transnational empires, but also gave rise to a host of intractable ethnic conflicts and territorial disputes that remain unresolved to this day.(...)
Two decades after Wilson, burdened by Clemenceau’s untenable revenge of Versailles, Europe staggered into a belated Round Two of self-destruction. After 1918 it was badly wounded; after 1945 mortally so." SARAJEVO REVISITED, by Srdja Trifkovic, chroniclesmagazine, July 2, 2004
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