OK, love anniversaries. Today is the 100^th anniversary of the assassination in Sarajevo (where have we heard that name before?) of Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The actual trigger-puller was Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb dupe of an ultra-nationalist, underground Serbian movement called “Union or Death!” popularly known as the “Black Hand”, who in case their name left anyone confused about their intentions, created a logo consisting of a skull, crossbones, knife, vial of poison and a bomb. Today, they’d also have a mushroom cloud. ISIS could take lessons from those guys.

Anyway, in the really super, ultra-condensed, brief version, Franz’s assassination led to Austria declaring war on Serbia, whose allies the Russians declared war on Austria, whose allies the Germans declared war on Russia and because the Russian ally France might then attack Germany, attacked France via Belgium, whose ally England felt compelled to…kaboom! Isn’t simplifying history fun?

Want a good quick read on this? See NYT article “If Franz Ferdinand Had Lived” at http://nyti.ms/1qkpcAh  Want the long form, see, oh, any of a few hundred books, including The Sleepwalkers by Christopher Clark.

So, Gavrilo Princip was arguably the proximal cause of WWI, and this is the anniversary of the start of that debacle. But saying Princip was the cause is sort of like when you have a huge pit full of oil-soaked trash criss-crossed by tightropes over which walk a succession of drunken clowns bearing torches—you know one of the clowns is going to fall and the whole thing’ll go up, it’s only a matter of time. The identity of the specific clown who falls in the pit and triggers the conflagration is just a matter of random, dumb luck. And Europe was full of drunken clowns back in 1914, many of them occupying positions of leadership and authority and had spent the previous 20 years building the pile of oil-soaked trash ever higher. Europe had been headed for a big war for a long time.

We called it “The War to Make the World Safe for Democracy.” Right. War to make the world safe for fascism and mass slaughter it was, leading like a lit fuse directly to the evil-clown rulers Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and Franco and the totalitarian states that took central government rule to levels of control and oppression that the monarchies never even had wet dreams about…And so there was WWII.

So thanks, drunken clowns! 100 million of our best and brightest dead, dead, dead, and many more than that so damaged in body and mind that they could not help create a just and modern society.  Maybe this is a good anniversary to remind ourselves to think twice before we try to bomb and assassinate our way to world peace—it’s often a little hard to tell what might really happen. Are you listening John McCain?

Happy anniversary.