On June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary was shot and killed in Sarajevo, Bosnia. The killer was motivated by politics: a Serbian nationalist done with the empires of old. In some ways, the ambition to disrupt achieved its aim. The murder set off a chain reaction of diplomatic failures, retaliations, military alliances, and the eventual full explosion of the Great War, the first total war in world history.
By total, we mean involving the whole of civilian society in most nations at once, not just soldiers but everything and everyone, which meant of course conscription of civilians and resulting mass death. The human toll is beyond comprehension: 9–15 million dead and 21 million wounded. Looking back more than 100 years later, it is apparent that this event ended the progress of civilization from hundreds of years earlier, shattering economic and political systems profoundly and turning back the clock on human rights.
What ended up worse than the war was the peace. The Versailles Treaty left so much unresolved in terms of territory and debts that events in Europe gradually unfolded into a second great war, and both ended up being rebranded, World War I and II, with awesome death and destruction all over the world from which we have yet fully to recover.
Those two calamities closed a chapter in the history of civilization. It’s so obvious when we look back now at the old world, with its magnificent architecture, music, explosive prosperity, and innovations. The palpable and near-universal optimism of the late-19th century turned into a grave darkness and sadness over the state of the world, and this came to be reflected in the art and philosophies of the 20th century, with the emergence of nihilism, pessimism, and overall aesthetic grimness as the dominant forms.
We’ve yet to recover fully from those two calamities, as well as the war and terrorism that followed.
This entire history has been resurrected into new relevance this week. There was an attempt on the life of Prime Minister Robert Fico of Slovakia. It appears that he will recover. Just a few days earlier, he was in the news for having issued a decisive no on signing the World Health Organization treaty (or “agreement”) that attempts to codify the lockdown-until-vaccination plan for dealing with new pathogens.
Fico called the treaty a pharma-backed racket and had previously denounced the major pharmaceutical companies for manufacturing dangerous products and imposing them on the world population. He said that he values his nation’s democracy and wants his own country to be in control of its health decisions.
