Listening to The Rest is History’s new series on the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and it’s as good as I hoped. Humanizes the guy, reveals the shitbirdery of his family and Hapsburg colleagues, and also explains why his assassination saved millions of birds.
/2 Now really looking forward to them covering the slow-motion car crash that is July 1914 which is an absolutely terrifying story of our inability to stop terrible things from happening
Important thing to remember is it was a deterrence failure, not a diplomatic one. Austria and Germany wanted an excuse for war with Serbia and Russia, and the murder gave it to them. They couldn’t be talked out of it, only deterred by stronger force. The force wasn’t convincing enough.
