Vengeance

On 6/28/1914 a group of seven Serbian extremists attempted to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A hand grenade missed, wounding others in the Imperial party and bystanders. The Archduke escaped injury, but in attempting to visit the hospital where the wounded were taken, the driver made a wrong turn, taking him past one of the conspirators. As the driver backed up to rectify his mistake, the assassin fired into the car, killing the Archduke and his pregnant wife.

from The Wikipedia

After the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914, Austria-Hungary waited for 3 weeks before deciding on a course of action, because most soldiers were on leave to help gather the harvest.[citation needed]
On July 23, assured by unconditional support of the Germans should war break out, the empire sent the July Ultimatum to Serbia, which demanded, among other things, that Austrian agents would be allowed to take part in the investigation of the murder, and that Serbia would take responsibility for it.

Serbia accepted all terms except the participation of Austrian agents, but Austria declared war. A little over four years later, twenty million people were dead, and the Austrian, Russian, German, and Ottoman empires were destroyed. The war also brought the Communists to power in Russia and set the stage for an even more calamitous war twenty years later.

Austria was the initial victim, the principal perpetrator of the war, and, in the end, one of most disastrously affected nations. The urge to take revenge, not just against the perpetrator of a crime, but against his relatives, fellow countrymen, and incidentally associated persons probably has some root in our primitive natures, but in this case it proved enormously costly.

After 12/7/1941 an American admiral in the Pacific declared: “When this war is over, Japanese will be a language spoken only in hell!” I read that somewhere, and after 9/11/2001 found myself thinking that when the coming war was over, Islam would be a religion practiced only in hell. Perhaps more intelligent and more balanced persons can escape this reaction, but most cannot. After a while, those who are slightly intelligent and remember some history can see the folly and danger. Such people decide that the punishment should be reserved for the guilty, and, where possible, be proportionate to the crime.

Politicians and other demagogues may or may not reach this realization, but they know that there is a witless mob eager to respond to calls for mass vengeance, and eager to label and dehumanize anyone with a relationship, however remote or irrelevant, to the perpetrators. Words like “Maccaca” (monkey) or “raghead” do that job of labelling and dehumanizing. So does the more pompous (and consequently, darkly comical) “Islamofascist.”

The combination of real and outrageous grievance, unscrupulous demagogery, and exaggeration or conflation of threats is the perfect potion to prepare a credulous populace for a foolish war. It is our misfortune to have been led into such a war by a demagogue who also turned out to be an idiot, an ignoramus who knows nothing and learns nothing, a fool who can neither admit his mistakes nor correct them.

I hope that we are luckier than Austria.

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