Vidovdan

Today is Vidovdan.

Gavrilo Princip sends his regards.

Remembering Vidovdan

Today is St. Vitus Day (Vidovdan), the anniversary of the 1389 Battle of Kosovo and the 1914 Sarajevo tyrannicide, among other things.

Personally, I think more people ought to heed the object lesson that is Austria-Hungary, which used the events of Sarajevo as a pretext for the long-desired war to conquer and crush Serbia - only to self-destruct four years later.

Gavrilo Princip sends his regards.

Injustice Corrected

Speech of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, President of the Russian Federation, on Monument Hill, Moscow, August 1, 2014 (source)

WW1 Memorial at Poklonnaya Gora, Moscow (source: Kremlin.ru)

Friends,

A century ago on this day, Russia found itself obliged to enter World War I. Today, we are unveiling this monument to its heroes – Russian soldiers and officers. We are unveiling the monument here on Poklonnaya Gora, a site that preserves our grateful memory of Russian military glory and of those who at various moments in our country’s history have defended its independence, dignity and freedom.

The World War I soldier and his comrades in arms have their place of honour here too. It was the fate of many of them to later fight again on the frontlines in the Great Patriotic War. These experienced veterans inspired and brought out the best in the young soldiers and passed on to them the traditions of military comradeship and brotherhood and the traditions of military honour.
The Russian army’s great values and the heroic experience of the generation who fought in World War I played a big part in our people’s spiritual and moral upsurge at that moment. This was a generation that was fated to go through not just the difficult trials of the first global world war, but also the revolutionary upheaval and fratricidal civil war that split our country and changed its destiny.

But their feats and their sacrifices in Russia’s name were forgotten for long years. World War I itself, which the rest of the world calls the Great War, was erased from our country’s history and was labelled simply ‘imperialist’.

Today, we are restoring the historical truth about World War I and are discovering countless examples of personal courage and military skill, and the true patriotism of Russia’s soldiers and officers and the whole of Russian society. We are discovering the role Russia played in that difficult and epoch-changing time for the world, especially in the pre-war years. And what we see reflects very clearly the defining features of our country and our people.

Vienna's Big Lie

From Tim Butcher's June 28 article in the Daily Telegraph (emphasis added):

Princip was caught within seconds of firing his pistol, his bid for martyrdom doomed when the dose of cyanide he stuffed down his throat failed to kill him.

Two weeks short of his 20th birthday, Princip was too young to be executed as Austro-Hungarian law said the death sentence could only be given to criminals aged 20 or more. Instead, he was jailed, sentenced to 20 years solitary confinement with the condition that one day a month he was to receive no food. He died in a prison hospital on April 28 1918, his body so badly ravaged by skeletal tuberculosis that his right arm had had to be amputated.

Over the last century his voice has rarely been heard, drowned out by more powerful forces, not least Vienna which was desperate to use the assassination as a pretext to attack its small and potentially troublesome neighbour, Serbia. For this to work, Austria-Hungary worked to represent Princip and the assassination plot as the work of the Serbian government. And this alone is perhaps the greatest misrepresentation of the truth about Gavrilo Princip, with the historical record containing no convincing evidence to support the claim.

Wilfred Owen wrote of the patriotic invocation dulce et decorum est pro patria mori as "the old lie'', but I have come to see an even greater lie at the founding moment of the First World War. It is the lie used by Vienna in its deliberate misrepresentation of the Sarajevo assassination. On its hundredth anniversary, now is high time to straighten the record.

Butcher is the author of "The Trigger: Hunting the Assassin Who Brought the World to War", published June 3 by Grove Press. 

Deutschlandlied in Sarajevo

I used to enjoy the Vienna Philharmonic's New Year's Concerts. Having been raised in an atheist society, I never stopped to wonder why a traditional concert in the capital of a staunchly Catholic thousand-year empire was held on January 1, rather than, say, Christmas Day. Then I found out the tradition was established in 1938, by none other than Josef Goebbels.

Another revelation came last year: a Bosnian-born journalist tracked down the photograph showing Adolf Hitler gazing at the marble plaque honoring Gavrilo Princip - the Bosnian Serb who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914 in Sarajevo. A modest monument, funded privately, the plaque had been put up in 1930. Within days of the Nazi occupation in 1941, the plaque was taken down and presented to Hitler as a birthday present. He had it displayed at the same museum as the railway car from Compiegne in which Germany had signed the armistice in 1918 - and where he insisted the French sign their surrender in 1940.

(Heinrich Hoffmann/Bayerische Staatsbibliothek MĆ¼nchen/Bildarchiv)

In 1914, warmongers in Vienna used the assassination (ironically, it was the Archduke who had kept them in check) to launch a war of extermination against Serbia, which eventually destroyed the Hapsburg empire instead. Attempts have been made to blame the Serbs and Serbia for the Great War ever since.

The latest round of revisionism came as the centenary of the war approached. On June 28, mainstream media throughout the West carried stories about the "Serbian" assassin of the Archduke and his wife (Sophie Chotek was killed accidentally; Princip was aiming at General Potiorek, the hated military governor of Bosnia) and the assassination treated as the actual cause - and beginning - of the war. This fits the current narrative of (Western) European unity - under the Atlantic Empire - fighting the "evil" Russians and "troublemaker" Serbs, but it has little to do with the truth.

Twisted Projections of Conjured Present

Just as I warned back in January, the race to blame the Great War on the Evil-Serbs-and-Russians (properly pronounced in the same breath) is on.

Austrian view of the Serbs in 1914, now the Anglo-American mainstream

In the New York Times' Sunday Book Review, Reuters editor Harold Evans gave a glowing review to Christopher Clark's "The Sleepwalkers", which blames Serbia for "expansionism" and "terrorism," and Russia for "creating a narrative to justify taking up arms", by "shift[ing] the moral onus from the perpetrator to the victim." Naive France and gullible Britain got suckered in, and thus the Great War began.

This is, of course, patent nonsense. The French wanted a war of revenge for 1871, and this seemed as good an occasion as any. Britain chose to go to war, and while Sir Edward Grey couldn't imagine the actual horrors the war unleashed, his famous comment about the "lamps going out all over Europe" more than suggests he was aware something horrible was about to happen. Does that sound like being suckered in by the wicked, wily Russians to you?

Barbara Tuchman began her "Guns of August" with the parade of European royalty at the 1910 funeral of  Edward VII of England - "on history’s clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again."

Clark, on the other hand, opens his book with the 1903 May Coup, which Evans gleefully cites in gory detail:

"King Alexandar and Queen Draga, betrayed and defenseless, huddle in a tiny closet where the maid irons the queen’s clothes. They are butchered, riddled with bullets, stabbed with a bayonet, hacked with an ax and partially disemboweled, their ­faces mutilated beyond recognition and the bloody half-naked remnants tossed from the royal balcony onto the grounds."

Those horrible Serbs, murdering their defenseless king that way! Such savages! Let's set aside the inconvenient fact that the squeamish Brits were busy at the time setting up concentration camps for Boer civilians. Clark doesn't explain why the Obrenovic king was killed, as such hatefacts would interfere with his precious narrative. So the reader doesn't get to understand the heavy-handed absolutism of the Obrenovics, their servitude to Austria at the expense of their country and people, and the long string of abuses and humiliations heaped on both the ordinary Serbs and the military. His marriage to Draga Masin, a rich merchant's divorced daughter who went so far as to invent a pregnancy to appear likeable, was just the last straw. While I can't in good conscience approve of the method of their dispatch, they well deserved to be overthrown.

But Clark needs to show that Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijevic "Apis" was an evil, murderous conspirator who deliberately started WW1 out of his Serb nefariousness, so the context of the May Coup, Austria's abusive relationship with Serbia, and just about everything relevant to the situation gets shoved aside.

He does, however, cite "historians of gender" to argue that all of the politicians involved were men, and had masculinity issues. Such depth of analysis! Lest he be considered insufficiently postmodern, Clark also deems Austria's ultimatum to Serbia - long considered a standard of shamelessness and bad faith - as “a great deal milder” than the 1999 NATO ultimatum to Serbia. Considering that Rambouillet was patterned after the Austrian ultimatum, and that its purpose was to make the war inevitable, I'd say Clark missed the point by such a wide margin here, he ended up shooting himself.

This is technically supposed to be a review of two books, Clark's and Sean McMeekin's "July 1914", but Evans spends most of his time on Clark. I get the impression McMeekin was brought along to make the case against Russia. He had previously written a book called “The Russian Origins of the First World War,” and Evans relies on him to make the claim that "Russia’s crime was first in escalating a local quarrel by encouraging Serbia to stand up to Austria-Hungary and then accelerating the rush to war."

So, if only Austria had been given a carte blanche by the rest of Europe - as it had by Germany - to curb-stomp the "terrorist, expansionist" Serbian savages, there would have been no WW1 - and perhaps Britain would still bestride the world. What a load of hummus.

I can understand the lament over world empire lost. I can understand the desire to blame the perennial Other - the Orthodox Slavs - for the myriad of sins of the Catholic and Protestant West. I even understand the twisted projection of conjured present - with Serbs as the arch-villains the white-knighting humanitarian West needs to defeat to save the Muslim damsel in distress and win her affections - to a traumatic event a century prior; in both cases, facts are discarded or suppressed when they interfere with the narrative.

But when the modern Anglo-American historians and politicians end up sounding like Kaiser Wilhelm - whom Clark cites at one point as saying, "Stop this nonsense! It was high time a clean sweep was made of the Serbs,” - then one can only conclude they represent a civilization that has deeply lost its way.

Praising the Darkness

The good folks at Britic (a British Serb magazine) kept in mind my warning about the likely revisionism of the Great War in the run-up to its centennial, and noticed this atrocity perpetrated by the BBC:

Bosnia 1908… Austria annexed Bosnia in the Balkans. This annoyed Serbia, which wanted to take over the area. Russia wanted to help Serbia, but had to back down.
Balkan Wars 1912-1913…Serbia and other countries in the Balkans conquered most of Turkey’s land in Europe. Serbia became a powerful country, and said Austria-Hungary was its next target.
Assassination of Franz Ferdinand 1914…The heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary was shot by Gavrilo Princip, a young Serb terrorist, in Sarajevo in Bosnia.

This is from the Beeb's "bitesize" study sheet for secondary school students (ages 14-16) taking their GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education) tests. Bite-size, indeed - more like highly condensed, Grade A horse manure the kids are liable to choke on.

What is quoted above aren't so much distortions, as outright lies. The Balkans Alliance didn't "conquer" anyone's land, least of all Turkish, nor did Serbia ever say "Austria-Hungary was its next target" (though Austrian propaganda certainly did). And if Gavrilo Princip is a terrorist, then that word has lost all meaning.

It's bad enough that the Serbs and Russians are being cast as the villainous aggressors against the virtuous Turks, Austrians and Germans. The BBC obviously needs reminding, though, that these were the very Central Powers that Britain fought against in that war. Didn't anyone get the memo about the reason everyone wears a poppy on their lapels around November 11?

It is one thing to wish Britain had stayed out of the war (as Niall Ferguson does in "Pity of War"), but look at the questions the BBC is having the students ponder:

Think about the events that increased tension across Europe and the consequences of these events. Can you think which event(s):

1. Made the British public hate the Germans.
2. Made France think that Germany wanted to destroy its empire.
3. Showed that the British thought Germany wanted to challenge the British navy.
4. Made Austria-Hungary determined to destroy Serbia.
5. Made Russia determined to support the Serbs.
6. Made Austria-Hungary frightened of Serbia.
7. Made Britain think Germany wanted to destroy its empire.
8. Made Germany determined to stand up to France and Britain.

Take a second to parse the questions, the way they are phrased. Don't they generate an impression that the fault here was really with Britain and France, for being paranoid about Germany, and with Serbia and Russia for threatening the Austrians? That the Germans, Austrians and Turks were acting merely out of legitimate self-defense? Considering that the New York Times recently referred to the first Entente victory over the Central Powers as "infamous," this is dangerously close to crossing the lines of coincidence and happenstance, and seriously suggesting enemy action.

As European powers entered the war in August 1914, Sir Edward Grey famously said, "The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our time." Just as well he didn't live to see the day the British would actually praise the darkness.

The Enduring Schism

One reader asked for my comment on Ralph Raico's essay on the Great War, recently posted on the Mises Institute site, and featured on Antiwar.com. It is the same essay that Justin Raimondo mentioned in late June, which I addressed in my column three days later.

Though I have written about the Great War before - here, for example, also here and here - I've decided to do it again, because I've just noticed something that's been there all along. Namely, for all their mutual enmities, the Western Europeans - Catholics, Protestants or secularized descendants of both - always seem to have a common attitude towards the Orthodox Europeans (Serbs, Russians, Romanians, Greeks, and even Bulgarians). Even while fighting the Muslims - from the Seljuks and Arabs of the Crusades to the Ottomans and Mamelukes later - the West continued trying to crush the Orthodox, sometimes even prioritizing it (e.g. 1204).

"Serbia must die" - Austrian cartoon from 1914

I've written a lengthy essay about this for Antiwar.com, which should be posting today. It goes over the Balkans Wars, the history of Catholic persecution of the Orthodox before, during and after the Ottoman conquest, and ends with the Great War. It's an issue that needs to be clarified, because what we're seeing today is the same sort of pattern coming from the West: Russia is the enemy, the Other - and the Serbs are Russians Lite, who need to be crushed because their stubborn resistance might give others ideas.

I don't know whether Raico's tendency to blame Russia and Serbia for daring to resist Teutonic aggression is a function of this othering of the Orthodox, or the inexplicable sympathy for Austria-Hungary that many libertarians have, probably originating with Ludwig von Mises.  In any case, both Raico's arguments and the language he uses (not qualifying "Greater Serbia" as a canard, for example) suggest that he swallowed the Austro-Hungarian narrative hook, line and sinker.

And we're still dealing with the legacy of Austro-Hungarian identity politics. Croatian identity, for example, was set up under Habsburg aegis as Catholic and militantly Serbophobic. This eventually led to the genocide perpetrated by the Croatian state between 1941-45, with the blessing and participation of Catholic clergy.

Serb leaders involved in the creation of Yugoslavia in 1918 did not understand that those who identified as Croats and Muslims did not consider the Serbs their kin, but rather their inferiors. Becoming Catholic (in Austrian-held lands) or Muslim (in Turkish-held lands) meant escaping the life of oppression and contempt in which the Orthodox Serbs were held by both empires.

Whether it was called "one people, three faiths" (under the Kingdom) or "brotherhood and unity of nations and nationalities" (under Tito), it was a lie. Close to a million Serbs paid with their lives for believing that lie in 1941-45, while another million was displaced and tens of thousands died in the 1990s. Yet all too many believe it even now, just as they continue to fawn at the West that rejects them as the Other. Such people are beyond help.

The rest? The choice they have is the same today as it ever was: renounce their identity and embrace another (Croat, Bosniak, Montenegrin, "Kosovarian", "Vojvodinian", etc.) to be accepted by the current imperial powers, or stay true to their roots and be oppressed. But oppressors come and go, and those who give up their identity never seem to gain happiness that way. Only hatred.

Missing the Point

Pat Buchanan opens his analysis of the Mumbai attacks today by describing the 1914 Sarajevo assassination as "arguably the most successful act of revolutionary terror."

I don't disagree with Buchanan's main argument - that the goal of the Mumbai terrorists was to provoke a war between India and Pakistan - as much as his callous characterization of Princip, and putting him in the same category as the Mumbai attackers and the 9/11 jihadists.

Was Princip really a terrorist? Take just this common-sense definition of terrorism from Wikipedia:

Most common definitions of terrorism include only those acts which are intended to create fear (terror), are perpetrated for an ideological goal (as opposed to a lone attack), and deliberately target or disregard the safety of non-combatants.

By these standards, the Sarajevo attack was terrorism only if we stretch the definition. Its purpose was to influence policy through violence, yes - Austria had been occupying Bosnia-Herzegovina against the will of most of its population for almost 40 years at that point, and had illegally annexed it in 1908. But fear didn't enter the picture. The group Princip belonged to ("Young Bosnia") wasn't firebombing schools or buses or marketplaces; they targeted the Austrian military, in the persons of its inspector-general, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and Bosnia's military governor, Oskar Potiorek, who rode in the car with him. The civilian death - Ferdinand's wife, Countess Sophie Chotek - was entirely accidental; Princip was aiming for Potiorek, but he was a lousy shot.

Murderer he may be, but Princip is not a terrorist.

Buchanan also errs by claiming that, by provoking the war that destroyed Austria-Hungary, the assassination "succeeded beyond the wildest dreams" of its plotters. But all evidence points to this being a completely unintended consequence.

First a little historical background here. Bosnia and Herzegovina were two provinces of the Ottoman Empire (with a majority Christian population) that were placed under Austro-Hungarian occupation at the 1878 Congress of Berlin. Contrary to the provisions of that Congress and against commonly accepted law of nations at the time, Austria annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908, and administered them directly as crown lands. Obviously, this was not well received by a large Serb population, which wanted to unite with the independent kingdom of Serbia to the east.

"Young Bosnia," the organization to which Gavrilo Princip belonged, was a revolutionary society dedicated to freeing Bosnia-Herzegovina from Austrian rule and the unification of South Slavs with Serbia into a common state (following the models of Germany and Italy from the latter part of the 19th century). One of their sponsors was the "Black Hand", also known as "Union or Death," a secret society of Serbian army officers first involved in assassinating the last Obrenović king in 1903. As is obvious from their name, they also wanted the unification of South Slavs.

Now, there's a clear difference between advocating national liberation and wishing to destroy the empire that's holding one's compatriots in thralldom. The Balkans Alliance (Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria and Greece) that successfully defeated the Ottoman Empire in 1912 did not seek to destroy the said empire - merely to liberate the lands and peoples in the Balkans they claimed as their own. Similarly, the Black Hand or Young Bosnia - and especially the Serbian government - never thought of destroying Austria-Hungary. They were certainly interested in liberating the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes who lived under its rule. Whether the Croats and Slovenes actually wanted to be liberated is another story.

Considering that Serbia has just emerged from two years of war, it is downright foolish to assume its government was eager to fight Austria. On the other hand, elements of Austrian establishment (such Conrad von Hoetzendorf) wanted a war with Serbia rather badly, and were prepared to seize upon any pretext. They found the death of Ferdinand, who had actually kept them in check, extremely useful.

Citing Buchanan again:

"While Serbia suffered per capita losses as great as any other nation, she ended the Great War as the lead nation in a Kingdom of the South Slavs embracing Slovenes, Croats, Bosnians, Albanians, Montenegrins, Macedonians, and Hungarians. The Habsburg Empire at which Princip had struck had vanished."

Serbia lost over half of its male population to the war. One might even argue its losses per capita were greater than any other participant in the war. And while it emerged as the dominant force in the new kingdom (soon renamed Yugoslavia) after the war, that was far from a triumph. Within just a few years, Croats began to resent being removed from the Habsburg orbit. This resentment resulted in a crippling political conflict within Yugoslavia, and led to the horrific genocide perpetrated by the pro-Nazi regime of Ante Pavelić between 1941 and 1945.

Furthermore, in 1918 there was no such nation as "Bosnians," or Montenegrins, or Macedonians. People in what are today Bosnia, Montenegro and Macedonia considered themselves Serbs, Croats, Turks, even Bulgarians. It was Communist social engineering and propaganda that manufactured them into distinct "nations" - while destroying the Serbian sense of nationhood in general. I've argued elsewhere that the creation of Yugoslavia was the greatest disaster that befell the Serbs in their history, worse even than the Ottoman conquest. I shan't elaborate on that here and now, but it needs to be noted for the sake of context.

So, the event that Mr. Buchanan claims was in the same category as the 9/11 or the Mumbai attacks wasn't actually terrorism; its consequences were unintended; and it did not profit its organizers anywhere near what is commonly believed. For what it's worth, I'd appreciate historians and commentators like Buchanan not to mislabel and misinterpret it.

The Last Christmas

Antiwar.com today has a whole section dedicated to the Christmas Truce of 1914. Four months into the Great War, German, British and French troops in the trenches spontaneously ceased killing each other and spent a day exchanging gifts, playing football and caroling. Afraid that the truce might end the war altogether, generals on both sides ordered the resumption of hostilities and threatened punishment against anyone who even contemplated a truce again. The war went on for three more years, killing millions and mortally wounding European civilization.

Out of its ashes arose the Versailles system, a conflicted Middle East, a vengeful (soon to be Nazi) Germany, and the Soviet Union. Twenty years later, Europe was finished. What exists today is the pale shadow of a once-great civilization, a decadent, nihilistic, post-modernist mess. The mere mention of Christmas has become forbidden in the "tolerance"-obsessed statist anti-culture that is the West today.

The Communist experiment has nearly destroyed eastern Europe. Conflicts created by the post-1918 partition of the Middle East are fueling a global resurgence of Islamic jihad. The American Empire, which arose from World War Two and scored a Pyrrhic victory in the Cold War, is now bleeding itself to death all over the world.

In some ways, that day in 1914 was perhaps the last true Christmas in the West.

There is no going back to that time, of course. And, given that the men who stopped the truce and willingly took their countries to war were a product of that time as much as the soldiers who caroled together after four months of trying to kill each other... I would say that's a good thing. But if there is to be a future for European civilization, we must come to a realization that the past 92 years have not been "progress," but rather a tragedy of some magnitude.