It would definitely be an informative experiment with a time machine if one would go back and halt the assassination of the arch duke or whatever it was.
The Europe of world war one was a continent of heavily militarised, imperialist, nationalist fiercely independant states, that were the most powerful in the world. Today, the total armies of europe probably dont equal that of america. Were nothing like world war one.
invert, that wouldnt work for two reasons, no 1, that was just what set it of, stopping him dying would only have delayed the war and more importantly, if he didnt become famous, the band that was named after him (franz ferdinand) might not exist, and that wud suck
We're still in the French Revolution. That is what triggered off the chain of events: French Revolution--> Napoleon--> Unification of Germany and a thousand other tiny monarchial wars--> Rise of republics--> WWI--> Russian Revolution/Rise of USSR--> WWII--> Cold War and worldwide commmunist revolts (North Korea comes to power)--> Collapse of USSR--> Middle Eastern instability--> War on Terror and North Korea. History is one beautiful and crazy trip.
It was the way that WWI ended which, arguably, shaped the rest of the century. The Treaty of Versailles utterly humiliated Germany. Take a nation looking for somebody to get back at, add the abject squalor of the Depression, and toss in the antipathy toward Jews that was common throughout much of Europe for centuries but raised to an artform by the Germans. If Hitler hadn't come along to start WWII, someone else would have. Without Germany nipping at Stalin's heels, reminding Russia of its frightening encounter with Napoleon, the nation might have devoted more of its GDP to making communism work and less to militarization. Without WWII, Japan wouldn't have had to withdraw from China and Mao might have been stopped in his tracks. The Republic of China would surely have done to Japan what China did to all of its conquerors from Genghis Khan's Mongols to the Manchus: passively assimilate them, dissipate their might and their gene pool, and rise up again as its Daoist/Confucian/Buddhist self, none the worse for the wear. The world might be a much different place if the Treaty of Versailles had been toned down a bit.
History is a crazy run of dominoes. Good point Fraggle. That should have been said sooner. The beginnings of WWI obviously have less effect on history than it's ending. It's a lesson in what humiliation can push a people to do. And chances are we would have gotten over more of the effects of WWII if the whole atomic superpower cold war hadn't put a freeze on world dynamics for 50 years.
Maybe the atomic bomb wouldn't even exist. The equations for it were there, but maybe there wouldn't be a bomb. At least the nightmare is over.
But for all the connections pointed out, we arent actually still in WW1. The reverberations are felt for decades after such events, but what we have now is not WW1. Alain, I would assume you are in Scotland or know some scots/ have been listening to Radio 1, since you know of Franz Ferdinand.
WE're still suffering the aftereffects of inventing thwheel/fire/agriculture...fill in as you please...
If you're talking about the band, they're getting semi-popular in the States. Frag - maybe ... but Stalin was a paranoid, ruthless motherfuck, regardless of what was goin' on in Germany. And technically speaking, communism, at least accoridng to Marx, couldn't work in Russia without a world revolution, which didn't happen, and without the communal villages serving as a foundation, which didn't happen.
Of course, there's no sure way to tell how an alternative history might have worked out. But one paranoid, ruthless MF has got to be better than two or three -- or four, counting Mao, who might never have gotten in power if WWII hadn't happened and the Japanese retained control of China. Talk about ruthless, they would happily have used whatever force was necessary to suppress the revolution, something Sun Yisen and Jiang Jieshi probably would not have done or at least weren't competent enough military leaders to pull off. It worked well enough that without the constant sabre-rattling from outside, Stalin might have contented himself with administering a single huge communist country that was succeeding. I had an aunt and uncle who emigrated to the USSR in the first years of the Great Depression, and they were sincerely amazed at how well the Russians were doing while the rest of the world was falling apart. Of course, Stalin's purges started about that time and my uncle had the big mouth and bad luck to get caught up in one of them. But Hitler was setting an example. Political phenomena are like bacteria, they seem to spread through the ether. Without the model (and competition) of fascist repression, Stalin might have gone with the flow and been a bit less ruthless. I know that's a dream and there's no way to tell, but there's also no way to say for sure that it's wrong.
