Principles

A hundred years to the day since Gavrilo Princip brought a sudden end to the long, leisurely world of the nineteenth century, and ignited the cascading chain reaction which was the twentieth. Princip's murderous one-man rebellion - carried out for the cause of establishing an independent and unified Yugoslavian state - would, over the course of the century, first see his dream fulfilled as an indirect effect of his action, then see it bloodily dissolve as more long-term lines of causality rippled to their conclusions. And just as the world was waking up from that rather unfortunate nightmare, it got another nasty kick up its axis from a few more young men with an oh-so-important cause and an Allah-may-care attitude towards the only life they'll ever have. We're not done feeling the effects of that one yet, and won't be for a long time. Still, the teenage-boys-playing-martyr forecast is looking reasonable for a century from now, so maybe we should just keep all budding disciples of Princip - or "Principles", as I like to call them - out of harm's way until then?