re: Knowing What we Know now, does Gavrilo Princip pull the Trigger?

Yes, Serbs are douchebags.

Signed,
Croatian

No argument there. 2000 years of douchebaggery. Great gramps got outta there while the gettin was good.

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Think of everything that came of it- the space race, the cold war, nuclear deterrants, Berlin Wall, finally a diminished Russia post Cold War that is looking to return to its old glory (Crimea/Ukraine). Definitely all things still affecting us today.

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The biggest thing that I've gathered from post-WWII is technology. I mean look at the Cold War. NASA came from it, computers, satellites, etc.

But from WWI I think culturally it changed the world and sparked the technology that defined WWII and the rest of history.

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Judging by present-day life, does Gavrilo Princip pull the trigger?

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That's a great question. The absolute truth of the matter is of course we'll never know. However, and this is just my own opinion based on what I know of the man, I think were he able to see the world that came as a result of his fateful pull of the trigger I think he'd still do it. I say this because of two things. First, he absolutely hated not only the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he hated all empires. Yes he was a "Serb Nationalist" as he himself professed. But in addition to this, much like all of his co-conspirators, he was also influenced by both Anarchist and even early Communist thinkers and writings. So in short, he was a man who wanted to watch the world burn because to him, the world as it was in 1914, was corrupt and he wanted to see the whole social system torn down and remade.

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A general European ware had been brewing since the 1870's. Sarajevo was merely the trigger. If it hadn't started there, it would have started somewhere else.

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In hindsight you're correct. What's ironic though is right up until the moment armies mobilized and starting marching on their respective frontiers, most of the European leaders and great minds of 1914 considered the idea of a general European war to be impossible. Remember that in 1914 it had been just one year shy of a century since Europe had seen anything like what was to come in WWI.

You had to be 20 and he was like a week away from his 20th bday

Well ya that's what I said Darth

Communist/Anarchist =/= wanting to see the world burn

I don't buy that his hatred of the then-current socio-political systems around him was to the extent that he'd sign off on roughly 20 million deaths to tear it down. But who knows?

Princip had TB, which was fatal back then. That's why the Black Hand picked him to carry out the assassination: he was a dead man, regardless.

The real issue here is that with the secret alliances, no one had anyway to know that they were about to unleash WWI. Nationalistic strife in the Balkans was nothing new and considering that the Serbs are still taking pot shots today, despite having full knowledge of what happened then, I'd say that Princip or the rest of them wouldn't have given two flying shits then.