Hacker News Reader

Comment by wtbob | Hacker News Reader

> Even today, more than a century on, this story will not fail to move new readers, giving many of them strong pause for thought, especially in those parts of the ‘civilised’ world where the barbarous and blundering practice of slaughtering our fellow-citizens is still carried out.

Or, y'know, the just and appropriate practise of executing those who deserve it, because it would be unjust not to. E.g. Gavrilo Princip, the young man indirectly responsible for more deaths than any other human being in history (17 million in WWI; 9 million in the Russian Revolution; 5 million in the Holodomor; 80 million in WWII; 30 million in the Chinese Revolution; plus many, many more) deserved to hang more than perhaps any other man in history, and yet … he didn't.

View on HN

Are you attributing all these wars to this one single guy? I know these wars are related, but putting all the blame just on him seems a bit... unfair.

G Princip was a dumb guy who was used by Serbian military intelligence who were trying to incite violence for their own ends. The chief of Serbian intelligence Dragutin Dimitrijević had extensive experience with murdering rulers: he played a key role in the 1903 Serbian coup, where king and queen not merely murdered, but butchered with body parts thrown onto the street. Dimitrijević financed, radicalised and guided G Princip.

Dimitrijević was key part of Serbia’s power structure at the time.

It seems to be the case that the Russian military attaché in Serbia, Viktor Artamonov, financed Dimitrijević plans. Whether St Petersburg knew about this is unclear, but why would Artamonov use his private money to pay for foreign terrorism?

Russian intelligence had been able to read Austro-Hungarian diplomatic ciphers for a while before the war, so it is likely that St. Petersburg was aware of what Vienna’s probable reaction to the assassination would be.

So no, it wasn't just G Princip.

Today organisations like ISIS use dumb and angry youths like G Princip.

So person who assassinated an Archduke from a country that occupied his is - dumb?

Well, that is insult to many freedom fighters and with your logic creating of US is "revolutions of dumb people". For your information (I suggest go read because you obviously didn't) - Austria wanted a war, the assassination was just a good cause for them. The assassination happened in Bosnia (in territory they annexed) but they gave ultimatum to other sovereign state (Serbia) to conclude investigation with their own force on a soil of independent nation - I wonder what would happen if Turkey wanted to send its own investigators to conclude independent investigation of dead Turk in Germany.

For Serbs G.Princip was freedom fighter - Bosnia historically was Serbian land (Raska), most of muslims come from Serbs converted to Islam, and today half of Bosnia is entity called Republic of Srpska - Austria really had no business to be there in first place.

Most countries historically 'belonged' to somebody else.

If the Turkish ruler (rather than a random Turkish citizen) was killed in Germany than clearly Turkish authorities would be invited to help with the investigations. There was a relevant recent event when the plane of the Polish president crashed in Russia [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Polish_Air_Force_Tu-154_c...

Oh, sure, he doesn't deserve all of the blame. But the brutal murders he perpetrated were the instigating event for almost all of 20th century history. Without WWI there'd have been no WWII, no Communist revolutions, no Cold War, no Korea, no Vietnam, no Holocaust — it's unknowable what an alternate history of the 20th century would look like, because the Great War completely and utterly shattered Western civilisation.

Yeah, he was a tool of others. But he was the one who pulled the trigger: the spark that ignited in the primer of his pistol cartridge is still burning.

Your reasoning is simple terrible and shouldn't be on HN at all. Ever.

With your logic we could just say "Wars simple happen because of humans - so first humans on Earth are responsible for all wars".

Go educate yourself a bit before just commenting.

You do realize that historians agree that WW1 would happen even if there was no assassination of Archduke? It was just casus belli and not the reason for WW1.

The sparks happened before with two Moroccan crises, German naval buildup, etc. It's much more complex than your simple view.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com