For a moment, let us all sit back, close our eyes and try our best to recall a time, not so long ago in the grand scheme of things, but long before any of us had been graced with life and sentience. A time of change, of prosperity and poverty, of unfettered nationalism, but, most of all, it was a time of hope. Hope of a new world free from the petty violence of the past, one built from strong international and commercial binds, a new world in which war between nations was almost unthinkable. Yes, let us all try to imagine a time not all too different from our own, but still cloaked in the sepia-tinged phantoms of the past.
I am talking, of course, of the year of 1914, specifically the 28th of June, where in the streets of Sarajevo, a young man by the name of Gavrilo Princip shot and killed the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of the Austria-Hungarian Empire. A death that sparked over four years of bloody, relentless, and ultimately pointless fighting which resulted in the deaths of over 9 million combatants. In it's time, it was dubbed the Great War because it was believed that after such a horrific war, the world would never see its like again. Of course, as we all know, our optimistic ancestors were very, very wrong.
Although the war did not officially start until the 28th of July, the assassination is seen as the spark that ignited the conflict. Some historians may argue that if Princip had not pulled the trigger, another would have or a different spark would have set flame to the kindling, but Princip gets the dubious honor of being the man who restructured and rearranged the borders and nations of the world with a single gunshot.
So, as overshadowed as it may be by its sequel sibling war, let us all remember and never forget the Great War that saw so many nations pulling themselves grudgingly through blood-soaked and body-littered fields into the modern world. It was a war that saw the collapse of countless monarchies, the fracturing of multiple empires, an end to imperialism and colonialism, the rise of the United States as a world power, the rise of Communism in the Soviet Union, and the establishment of many Middle Eastern nations that continue to be wracked with conflict to this day. While ISIS-lead militants march across the sands of Iraq clamouring for a dissolution of the Sykes-Picot created borders, let us never forget how the ramifications of a single shot can continue to ring out for over a hundred years.
Topic: The shot heard around the world on the 28th of June... (Read 580 times)