6/25/2023 0 Comments The Trigger by Tim Butcher![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() For Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia, Princip was a nationalist hero who anticipated the Slav unification project under communism for Hitler, Princip was an upstart Serb who undermined the imperial might of Austria. The political left and right alike have sought to manipulate the truth of what happened in Sarajevo. A hybrid of travel and history, The Trigger gets inside the mind of the assassin and seeks to understand Balkan geopolitics on the eve of the first world war and after. Tim Butcher, who reported on those wars for The Daily Telegraph in Britain, has written a superb account of Princip and the nature of his political grievance. It resulted in the collapse of the double-headed eagle empire run from Vienna and a vastly expanded Serb-ruled state that was only finally dismantled in the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. Princip’s was the most successful assassination in modern history. His aim was to liberate swaths of the future Yugoslavia from the Austro-Habsburg yoke and create a State of united South Slavic countries. The teenage Princip himself did not foresee world war. Few had reckoned on such a long, drawn-out saga of futility and wasted human lives. The 1914-1918 conflict killed and wounded more than 35m people, both military and civilian, through poison gas, starvation, shell fire and machine gun. The assassination set in motion an unintended chain of events that culminated in carnage such as the world had never seen. ![]()
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