GERALD Warner better go back to school and study history before he freely revises it to suit his own agenda.
In his column ‘Did Britain really have to be in the war to end all wars’ last week he makes several hideous mistakes. Or worse, deliberate omissions.
The truly injured party was the Serbs, not the Austrians. Missing from his article is any mention about the assassination of the Serbian king three years prior to the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand.
It is apparent by this racist slur at the Serbs that the writer believes it appalling to kill an archduke but acceptable to liquidate a Serbian king as Austria and their Croatian vassals were highly implicated in the murder of the Serbian king, especially Ante Pavelich, who headed the first independent state of Croatia (1941), a Nazi puppet state.
Also missing from the facts is that Serbia was internationally recognised at the Congress of Berlin (1876) as an international nation with one exception. Austria would be the protectorate of Bosnia for 44 years. When it came time to return Bosnia to the Serbs, Austria and the archduke refused.
As though this was not insulting enough, the archduke went to Sarajevo on the most sacred holy holiday of the Serbian people, Vidovdan, the commemoration of the Battle of Kosovo when the Serbs lost 77,000 victims and the loss of their nation to Ottoman slavery for 412 years.
If I were alive then I would have assassinated the archduke myself.
It is also insulting that Gerald. Warner makes no mention of the fact that the Serbs lost 52% of their adult male population in the Second World War and 22 years later lost 1.4 million of their citizens to the Nazi hordes.
The Serbs have paid dearly for their freedom from the Austrian Empire - a corrupt government that deserved to be destroyed.
William Dorich, Los Angeles
