An illustration by Achille Beltrame showing the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand (1863-1914), heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. From a cover of the Italian newspaper Domenica del Corriere.
"Shots Heard Around the World"
by Joel Bowman
“It is not to be supposed that the death of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand
will have any immediate or salient effect on the politics of Europe.”
~ The Guardian, June 29, 1914
Buenos Aires, Argentina - "History is a fickle mistress, dear reader. Vague, aloof, deceptive, at times downright devious, she twists and she turns, pouts and prevaricates, to the constant consternation of man. Indeed, so crafty are her ways, that even the paragons of prognostication in the popular press occasionally mistake an elephant for an anvil. Recall the words of a few false prophets:
“Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.”
- Irving Fisher in The New York Times, October 1929
“The truth is, no online database will replace your daily newspaper.”
- Clifford Stoll in Newsweek, Feb 1995
“By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s i
mpact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”
- Paul “Future Enron Consultant” Krugman in Red Herring, 1998
“The impact on the broader economy and financial markets
of the problems in the subprime market seems likely to be contained.”
- Ben Bernanke, as quoted in The New York Times, March 2007
Nor, it seems, is proximity of much aid, whether measured in time or space. The great spiritual anarchist, Leo Tolstoy, observed as much in his magnum opus, War & Peace: “The closer a man is to the center of an event, the less he can judge it; the farther away he is, the more confidently he thinks he understands it.”
The Passing Parade: Even in the moment, his eyes firmly on the prize, finger on the pulse, nose pressed to the salient events of his time, man is often insensible to the parade passing right before him. He understands that causes have effects, of course, that actions have reactions and that one thing follows along from another. He doesn’t need to have misread Hume to call “left ball, corner pocket” with some degree of consequential confidence. Sometimes he sinks the shot... sometimes he buys the next round.
But the moment he leaves the bar and returns to “real life,” simple, linear calculations soon morph into complex, dynamic, cascading equations. Our man quickly finds himself up to his elbows in emergent effects, latent consequences, unintended repercussions and downstream reverberations the likes of which dwell far beyond his eight-ball comprehension.
Not only is he incapable of understanding what is right in front of him, but his ability to discern its historical import is often breathtaking. A spontaneous tea party in Boston... a roguish defenestration in Prague... a bullet whizzing through the air in Sarajevo...And lo!
Nursing a sore head from the night before he wakes to read the news, only to discover a country... a continent... the whole damned world plunged headlong into war! Then, with the cannons blasting and the cavalry charging, the fog of battle settles over what remains of his threadbare modesty, leaving him with a confidence that appears to increase in direct proportion to his blindness. A few crackers from the vault:
“You will be home before the leaves have fallen from the trees.”
- Kaiser Wilhelm II addressing his troops in August, 1914
“We have reached an important point when the end begins to come into view.”
- William Westmoreland predicts victory in Vietnam
at the National Press Club in November, 1967
“Major combat operations in Iraq have ended.”
- George W. Bush May 1, 2003
With such a woeful track record, what then are we to make of events as they unfold in the present, before our very own eyes, in this, the Age of Certainty? Modern man is inundated with no ends of data – real and artificial, intelligent and foolish, useful and extraneous, dangerous and benign, etc. But for all his apps and bots, his hacks and headlines and never-ending newsfeeds, the question remains... Is he any wiser?
We watch with amusement those mandarins of public opinion in the mainstream media, struggling to get their arms around “the narrative.” Like witnessing a man trying to embrace a giant squid, the scene is strange, perverse, and likely to end in injury.
Reporting on the shots fired over the weekend, at the White House Press Gala, the long-disgraced Guardian (quoted up top) was uncharacteristically – ahem – guarded regarding the motivations of the assailant, Cole Allen: “Allen’s motive is still unknown, but a family member who spoke to investigators after the attack said Allen made statements about wanting to do something to fix problems in the world...”
Never mind that Mr. Allen had gone to the considerable trouble of sending his waffling manifesto to multiple family members immediately before embarking on his grand mission, in which he detailed in no uncertain terms his exact motivations. Under the section helpfully subtitled, “On to why I did any of this,” Allen described what he saw as his “role as an American citizen” and even outlined his specific “rules of engagement,” albeit, in his own words, “probably in a terrible format, but I’m not military so too bad.”
The entire diatribe need not be reprinted here, although you can read it in the original New York Post article, as well as in a bazillion other outlets, which wholly reprinted or quoted from the screed throughout the day. And yet, 7 hours later, former President Barack Obama was still mystified as to Allen’s motivation. “Although we don’t yet have the details about the motives behind last night’s shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner...” he wrote on X.
In their transparent attempts to “frame” events in real time, to spin and contextualize and stage manage the news, such that it supports one agenda or another, bad directors affect to guide history with a foresight they simply do not – and cannot – possess.
Had Allen’s bullets found their mark over the weekend, the assassination might have brought down an empire... or rallied its people. It might have kicked off a great global conflagration... or ushered in Pax Americana II. It could have unleashed the whirlwind... or become a storm in a teacup. And while we cannot read the history that was not written, we can observe the enduring nature of political violence throughout the ages, and so expect more of it to come...
God Save the Kings: In the years immediately preceding the murder of Archduke Ferdinand in the summer of 1914, high profile assassinations were common enough to be something of a banality to the casual observer.
Indeed, the 20th Century began with a bang, when the King of Italy, Umberto I, was gunned down in Monza. Then, in 1901 in Buffalo, New York, came the assassination of US President William McKinley, a man for whom the current target du jour has expressed deep admiration.
Next was the Serbian King, Alexander Obrenović, who was murdered in his palace (along with his wife) during a military coup in 1903... then came the regicide of Carlos I of Portugal, who was killed (alongside his son) in 1908 in Lisbon... followed by the assassination of the President of the Dominican Republic, Ramón Cáceres in 1911... then the Spanish Prime Minister, José Canalejas, who was killed in Madrid in 1912... and of course the King of the Hellenes, George I of Greece, whose half century reign came to an abrupt end when he was shot to death in Thessaloniki in 1913.
Given the regicidal bloodbath of the times, perhaps the papers of record could even be forgiven for indulging a little “normalcy bias.” Who was to know what “immediate and salient” effects the Archduke’s assassination would precipitate? We are apt to imbue our own moment in time with a gravitas bordering on the solipsistic. Perhaps we are not so omnipotent after all?
In the second epilogue to his famous tome, Tolstoy used a maritime analogy to explain his own thoughts on the matter: “A man sitting in the stern of a boat, holding a tiller that is not connected with the rudder, and seeing the waves that the boat cuts, imagines that he is directing its course. But he is only being carried along by the movement of the boat itself.” Thus does history unfurl, dear reader… an ongoing triumph of unlikely reality over pedigreed consensus, immune to the flailing machinations of man. Don’t forget to enjoy the ride."
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