Headlines around the World

29 June 2014

Sunday

A Century of Industrialized Warfare:

Headlines around the World

The day after Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo, the event was headline news all over the world, reaching all the way to Klamath Falls, Oregon, where The Evening Herald, a local newspaper that published from 1906 to 1942, boldly proclaimed that the assassination may lead to war. They were right — more right than they knew.

The role of telecommunications and the media in the first global industrialized war was central, and this was revealed hard on the heels of the role of terrorism in the actual assassination. Still in our time, the role of the mass media in breathlessly reporting terrorism plays a central role in the 24/7 news cycle, shaping both public policy and public opinion, which latter, in mass societies, plays a driving role in events. Mass man and mass media feed off each other and escalate events, sometimes in destructive ways.

In an earlier age, it might have taken weeks for the news to travel around Europe, and months to make it around the world, but the technologies of newsprint (invented by Charles Fenerty in 1844), Linotype machines (invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler in 1884, the same year the Maxim gun was invented), the telegraph (first demonstrated by Samuel F.B. Morse in 1844, the same year newsprint was invented), transoceanic telegraph cables (the first completed in 1858, which failed shortly thereafter, but after several attempts regular transatlantic telegraphy was established in 1866), and the wireless telegraph (patented by Marconi in 1896, but preceded by a long train of antecedent science and technology), a nearly instantaneous global communications network was established and continually improved from that time to the present day.

With a global communications network in place, news of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand was known around the world within hours of its occurrence, and global industrial-technological civilization responded as quickly with headlines and official responses to the assassination. Belgrade wired its official condolences for the killing to Vienna on the 29^th, in England King George V decreed seven days of mourning, and then in Russia Czar Nicholas II, in a kind of grief one-upmanship, ordered twelve days of mourning.

Serbian Prime Minister Nikola Pašić publicly renounced the Black Hand terrorist organization that was behind the assassination, even while Milan Ciganovich, a Serbian state railway employee who was also spying on the Black Hand for Pašić, was smuggled out of Belgrade by Pašić and sent to Montenegro. Despite official condolences wired to Vienna, when several days later the Austro-Hungarian government asked whether the Serbian government had opened a judicial inquiry into the assassination, the response was that, “nothing has been done so far and the matter is of no concern to the Serbian government.”

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