Opinions vary as to who was the deadliest figure of the twentieth century. Was it Lenin? Stalin? Or Hitler? Perhaps Mao? The ghost of Karl Marx?
My vote is for Gavrilo Princip, the nineteen-year-old assassin who unleashed all of the above. On the twenty-eighth day of June 1914, with a Serbian-nationalist plot to kill the heir to the Austro-Hungarian thrones on the verge of failure, one would-be assassin had failed to act, a second had missed, and the third, the ringleader, found himself bypassed by the imperial motorcade.
Then, in a rush of bad decisions, faulty communications, and general uproar, the archduke’s open car returned on the wrong route then stopped five feet from Princip. The teenaged “mastermind” was armed with a 9mm Browning semi-automatic pistol. He got off two shots before being stopped. One round struck the archduke, the other his duchess, both of whom died shortly thereafter.
One kid with one pistol and two rounds plunged the world into humanity’s darkest century (at least, since the fourteenth and the Black Death). Two bullets sparked a devastating war that collapsed four empires and left at least five others weakened. That war empowered the Bolsheviks, rendered Germany susceptible to Hitler, embittered the French population, enabled the rise of dictatorships from Hungary and Romania to Italy and Spain—and then precipitated an even deadlier global conflict than the Great War.
Princip’s two bullets exposed the weakness of European empires, inspiring independence and liberation movements from the African continent to the Far East. Japan read the changed world as an opportunity to build its own empire.
Warfare became total. Two atomic bombs—considerably more powerful in raw terms than Princip’s two 9mm rounds—destroyed entire cities. The Cold War began, and two terrified sides played bloody chess through proxies. Embattled new states emerged. Old hatreds rose from the not-quite-dead.
In the Holocaust, industrial scale and principles were applied to the attempted extermination of a great religion and all its practitioners. Elsewhere, internal massacres took the lives of tens of millions, from Soviet purges to Mao’s Great Leap Forward and his disastrous Cultural Revolution.
Ideologies rose, butchered madly, and collapsed.
And, somehow, wildly against the odds, human freedom ultimately expanded.
One young hothead, two bullets, and two deaths. Has any assassin known to history had so vast and gruesome an effect? Has any individual of any rank, anywhere, ignited so many deadly conflagrations?
So much for another product of the last century, the Left’s insistence that the great-man theory of history was nonsense, that all events emerged from the unconscious will of human collectives.
Gavrilo Princip proved that it didn’t even take a great man to change history—just a punk with a pistol.
