1. the book is being promoted by The Guardian;
2. the book is praised by Professor Christopher Clark at Cambridge University.
Butcher has written in The Guardian today promoting The Trigger. Apparently we have been getting it all wrong. When I read the title of the article I thought what Butcher had to say about The Trigger would begin a revolution. But then I thought, "Hang on. This is The Guardian".
How the first world war began is just too important to get wrong. The millions of deaths, the world order realigned, the unleashing of nationalistic chauvinism, all remain of such cardinal importance that the historical record must be sound. Or so I thought.
So legion are the mistakes in the reckoning of the moment that sparked the fighting – the 1914 Sarajevo assassination of the Archduke – that I felt driven to act.
For a century, people have been getting it wrong, from the first hawkish Habsburg investigators prone to political prejudice, to sloppy BBC documentary research. A recent account of the assassination by Max Hastings (and God strike me down for pointing out mistakes by a man who once gave me a job in journalism) is holey with errors.
So a drive to put this right was one of the forces behind my latest book The Trigger –The Hunt for Gavrilo Princip: The Assassin Who Brought the World to War. Off to the archives I went, panning for nuggets of verifiable fact, sluicing away inconsistency and occasionally uncovering gleaming new material.
[source : Tim Butcher: 'For a century, people have been getting the first world war wrong', The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/14/tim-butcher-first-world-war-began-the-trigger-hunting-the-assassin-who-brought-the-world-to-war, 14th July 2015]
And here is Clark praising the book well over a year ago!!
By contrast, the links with Belgrade are largely excluded from the field of vision. Butcher has surprisingly little to say about Princip and his comrades' long sojourn in Belgrade, where they came into contact with the Serbian nationalist networks that would later supply them with their pistols and bombs. Yet there is good reason to suppose that it was in Belgrade that Princip and his comrades were radicalised: "After he came to Belgrade," Princip later said of one his fellow assassins, "he too took up the same principles". Butcher touches on the role played by "Apis", the notorious head of Serbian military intelligence, but dismisses as implausible Apis's own written claim to have coordinated the plot to kill the archduke. Sundered from their broader Serbian context, the assassinations become a problem the Austrians created for themselves. And Princip's act of murder becomes – as the Yugoslav words on the plaque commemorating the assassination in Sarajevo used to say – the "first step into Yugoslav liberty".
Whether or not one shares Butcher's view of these issues – and given the complexity and secrecy of the groups involved and the paucity of reliable sources, there will always be room for debate – this book is a tour de force. Butcher is a humane but unsentimental observer who creates space for the voices of other travellers who walked these paths before him. No account since Dedijer's The Road to Sarajevo has so vividly evoked the world and inner life of the "undersized, emaciated, sallow, sharp-featured" young man who found himself sitting opposite an Austrian judge on the afternoon of 28 June 1914. And few have captured so thoughtfully the relationship between terrain and history in a country fraught by conflict. Princip is the focal point of Butcher's book, but its true protagonist is a Bosnian memoryscape that shimmers between past and present.
[source : Christopher Clark, The Trigger: Hunting the Assassin Who Brought the World to War – review, The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/30/trigger-hunting-assassin-war-tim-butcher-review-masterpiece, 30th April 2014]
Neither reviews mention the facts that the assassins of Ferdinand were freemasons and had received the material and encouragement from freemasons abroad, and that freemasonry had condemned Ferdinand to death two years earlier and had been looking for willing assassins to carry out their death sentence but had not found them, until Princip and his gang volunteered. And behind all that is the British monarchy engineering the Triple Entente to surround Germany. And when the assassination was successful and nations began to take sides, it was the King of the most militarily powerful nation in the world, Great Britain, who at first indicated to Germany that Britain was going to stay out of the war, while at the same time ordering Sir Edward Grey to get Great Britain in to the war no matter what. This is why Grey cited the 1839 Treaty of London in order to defend Belgium, thus tricking Germany, Russia and France into mobilising for war. Before the war Grey had explicitly written that Belgium was of little concern and unimportant. But as soon as Germany invaded Belgium Grey cited the Treaty of London which Britain was not legally bound to enforce unilaterally.
World War One was engineered to produce the first attempt at a world government, called The League of Nations, that the British monarchy would control as the ultimate form of empire.
But the USA voted not to join. This decision led to the British monarchy and their anglophile Wall Street Hofjuden engineering of WW2 to produce another attempt at world government, The United Nations.
History is dead easy...if you can be arsed. At school I wasn't arsed because we studied the possible murder of two young privileged boys centuries ago. Yeah, dead interesting that. If there was anything to turn you off studying history it would be that.
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