Cracked History

Russia invading Ukraine threatens to cause a war such as Europe hasn't seen in decades. Biden is imposing sanctions, and hopefully NATO can help too. Putin can't be allowed to just annex more countries, and remake some kind of Russian Empire. I remember the Bosnian War in the 1990s, and can only hope this war won't be as catastrophic as one of the World Wars.

In the meantime I've been watching historical TV fiction like Young Indiana Jones and The Gilded Age, featuring real people like Teddy Roosevelt and Clara Barton as characters. I have the DVDs of Young Indiana Jones, and the special features include historical documentaries about the famous people and events included in the episodes. They even had young Indy meeting the daughter of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and falling in love with her. One of the documentaries explained the history of the Habsburgs, Ferdinand's marriage to Sophie, and their assassination in Serbia. His uncle the Emperor Franz Joseph was kind of heartless about it, basically glad that his nephew would not inherit the throne of Austria-Hungary. Franz Joseph apparently preferred a different heir. But that assassination snowballed into an international crisis and the Great War. He didn't live to see the end of the war, or that his precious Austria-Hungary would collapse.

Even the recent movie The King's Man gives its own revisionist take on World War I, re-crafting it as a spy thriller and comic book action movie. Thus, Ferdinand's assassin Gavrilo Princip becomes a member of an international conspiracy led by the mysterious Shepherd. The supervillain's Flock aims to start a war to destroy European monarchies (and England in particular). I found it interesting that this fictional story did keep the fact that there were multiple attempts on the Archduke. He and his wife Sophie survived an attempted bombing on their car ride before unwisely going out again that day; they wanted to visit bombing victims in the hospital. They happened to drive near a cafe where the assassin Princip took the opportunity to shoot them. That is a real chilling part of the history, even though the writers inserted their own characters into it. Also, the movie has a fairly ridiculous concept of Orlando Oxford being a pacifist while secretly operating a spy ring that plots to poison Rasputin. Oxford's son Conrad meanwhile wants to fulfill his duty by joining the war, not wanting to be called a coward. For a movie starring a British hero, it's not afraid to show a concentration camp from the Boer War. (To think, Conan Doyle wrote a pamphlet defending Britain's actions in this war! What a thing to be knighted for!) Oxford also flashes back to some war atrocities in Africa I think, when he decided to leave the army for the Red Cross. We also hear about the Zimmerman telegram, and Oxford quotes Wilfred Owen's poem Dulce Et Decorum Est when mourning the bloody horror of the war. It's a weird mix of real history and fiction.

But I hope that current world leaders do remember the mistakes of the past, and can try their best not to repeat it with our current war.