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Oct. 29, 2025 - Dennis Prager Show
34:45
Timeless Wisdom - Learn History with Dennis Prager - Part 6
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Welcome to Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.
Here are thousands of hours of Dennis' lectures, courses, and classic radio programs.
And to purchase Dennis Prager's Rational Bibles, go to DennisPrager.com.
Hello, everybody, and welcome to a history hour, a dedicated hour periodically to the most important subject if you want to understand why we are where we are.
How could you not want to know what happened before?
We didn't enter the world as a newborn world.
We entered the middle of a soap opera, and we need to know what happened beforehand.
So that's why I have a history hour.
I've gotten very positive feedback from you, my listeners, and that's been very encouraging.
What I do is try to feature new books, major new books of history.
And by a sheer coincidence, and I'm very open with my listeners, as my guest will appreciate, and my listeners know this, I tell them exactly even what goes into the sausage making, as they would say, in a restaurant, in the show.
I debated would I do within a few months of one another, two books on the same, largely the same issue, but they're both so good, and the issue is so large that I said, of course I would.
I said to myself, and myself responded very fine.
And so the subject is up there, in my opinion, with one of those great unanswerable questions of why did God invent the mosquito?
And that is, how did World War I begin?
World War II's origins are so simple, and World War I's are so complex.
Why is it important?
Well, I'll ask that of my guest in a moment, but I'll just tell you the following.
World War I was the calamity of the 20th century, the most cruel and bloodshedding century that we have in recorded history.
Had there been no World War I, there would have been no communism and no Nazism, and those were the great mass murdering genocidal regimes and ideas of the 20th century, and they were a witch's brew from World War I. World War I shattered Europe's belief in itself, shattered belief in God, shattered belief in nationalism.
It was, if anything could be said to be all bad, World War I would qualify.
But who's the bad guy?
That's the tougher one.
We'll talk about that.
My guest is Sean McMeekin, M-C-M-E-E-K-I-N, who is an American who is a professor, specifically assistant professor of history at Koch.
That's K-O-C with a little squiggle beneath the C. It's Turkish.
He's at a university in Turkey, Koch University, where he's professor, assistant professor of history, and he's considered a star among young historians.
So, Professor McMeekin, welcome to the Dennis Prager Show.
Well, thank you so much for having me on.
It's a pleasure to be here.
I appreciate that.
The book is July 1914.
Now, remember, folks, in June 1914, Archduke Ferdinand, the man who was going to be the next, what would be the title, the next Kaiser, the next what?
Well, Kaiser would simply be the German version of what we would call emperor.
Okay, the next emperor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire is assassinated in Sarajevo in Serbia by Serbian extremists.
And that leads to the horror of World War I. And what he does in his book is he just concentrates on the next month.
What happened in the next month following that assassination?
So let me begin with the big questions, and then we'll get into more specific details.
I guess I'll begin at the end.
Who do you blame?
Well, yeah, that that is the big question, I suppose.
And I think there's there's something human about the desire to have someone to blame.
You know, every Hollywood movie likes to have a villain, you know, if it is that sort of movie.
It simplifies things.
It gives you someone to root for, it gives you someone to oppose, someone to boo or to hiss.
And in the Second World War, it wasn't terribly hard to find those villains.
In the first, it wasn't impossible.
Certainly until recently, the general view, at least in most of the Western countries, has been that the Germans or the Germans and the Austrians kind of together were to blame for provoking the conflict.
I don't really quite agree with that.
It's not that I want to absolve them of any blame.
I think you couldn't possibly look at the events and say that Germany and Austria-Hungary were not primary actors in the drama.
They clearly were.
But one has to distinguish between the policies of some of the powers and the outcomes.
It's just to say the outcome, to say that it was the German desire to create a world war in which Germany would be massively outgunned and outnumbered with the British Empire going against them and blockading them such that it was virtually impossible to fight.
I just don't see that as logical or really very convincing.
So I do spread blame around.
To simplify, I do put more blame on the Russian side than has kind of been traditional among historians.
Also, to some extent on the French side.
The French have often been described as the most passive of all the actors in the July crisis.
And I don't really believe that.
Perhaps we can go into the question in a bit more detail as we go.
Yeah, okay.
So why did the whole West essentially blame Germany?
You're not the only historian to say it's unfair and unhistorical to blame Germany primarily.
Why did that narrative ever develop?
Well, it's often been said, and again, it's not entirely untrue, that history is written by the winners.
And so to a large extent, I think we're still influenced by the fact that the Germans and the Austro-Hungarian side lost the First World War.
And so the dominant voices have tended to come from the Western powers, particularly from Britain, sharing a language with the United States.
Of course, the English language literature has always had a certain tilt in that direction.
Interestingly, this wasn't always as true of the American literature on the war.
Back in the 1920s and 30s, there are a number of American historians who actually did tend to take a more balanced view of the conflict.
They weren't as directly wrapped up in it.
It was not as emotionally wrought as it was for the English.
But that began to change after the Second World War, the experience of the United States.
Because of the way the Germans were viewed.
Okay.
So let me these questions have always vexed me.
So let's so as hard as it is for me emotionally, do I have to intellectually acknowledge that the Germans had a right to resent the Versailles Treaty?
Well, it's interesting you ask this because the Germans were actually paying reparations as recently as 2010.
In fact, they made the last reparations payment sometime around October or November of that year, just about less than 20 years.
From World War I?
From World War I. So the question is by no means a dead one.
Recently, it was actually to some extent even live even in financial terms.
I don't know whether we need to have a specific feeling today, but I think one can understand something of this tremendous revanchist spirit which arose in Germany after the First World War because of the reparations.
One doesn't have to be an apologist for Hitler or the Nazis to understand.
No, that's why I said there were no reasons for the Germans to actually resent the treaty.
Right.
Yeah.
Okay.
So and why was it in the interest of France and Britain to so blame and punish the Germans?
Because otherwise all of their losses and suffering were for naught?
That that's the emotional or one might call it the moral side.
But there was a material side as well.
So much of the war had been fought on specifically French soil.
The Western front as we call it was of course mostly in France.
You know parts of it were also in in what is now Belgium, Flanders and so on.
But the the bulk of the damage in kind of material terms to farmland, to livestock, industrial plant, all of this happened in northern France.
And so the French felt like they actually needed the money.
And in fact there were huge tussles between the French and the English after the war about just how badly to punish the Germans.
The French felt like they had fought and bled the most, they had lost the most, and they literally wanted to be paid.
I mean, they wanted to milk Germany.
So in their case, there was a material element.
But you're right to focus on that kind of moral-emotional side, because in some ways that may have been even stronger as a motivating factor.
We'll be back.
We'll be back in a moment.
This is a history hour, Sean McMeekin, the book, July 1914, just one month leading to World War I. Hello, my friends.
Welcome back.
This is a History Hour, periodic, dedicated hour to the great subject of history.
It's riveting history, especially when delivered by people like Sean McMeekin, the assistant professor of history at the University of Koch in Turkey, an American who's been teaching there for quite some time now.
I'll have to have him on about Turkey now that I have a good American resource there.
But we're talking about his just published and highly acclaimed book, July 1914.
It's of course up at dennisprager.com on one of the greatest in importance and fascinating subjects.
Why did that terrible, terrible, terrible war take place?
So, all right, I went to the end.
Who's to blame?
Let's go to the beginning here.
So in June, what was the actual date of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand?
It was on the 28th of June, which is an interesting anniversary because for the Serbs who were kind of the primary actors in plotting the assassination, it was an anniversary of their great defeat on the battlefield of the Blackbird Field, as we would translate it in English, to the Ottomans back in 1389.
What's interesting, though, is it was a military defeat, and this was a particularly kind of Serbian perspective.
In the course of losing, the Serbs had actually assassinated the Ottoman Sultan on the battlefield.
So they had committed a kind of heroic act of resistance, even in losing.
And this was not insignificant because, in fact, this was kind of an ideal for many nationalist Serbs.
You know, that is this almost a symbolic act of assassination.
They actually reenacted, in fact, they were reenacting that assassination on the very same day that the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated.
I think people would be fascinated to know, and this is the sort of how does history work itself out.
So two questions here.
One is, so the Serbian extremists assassinate the heir to the emperor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire who's visiting Serbia at the time.
Right.
Now.
Well, they were visiting, actually, it was not Serbia.
It was Austrian territory.
Bosnia-Herzegovina was disputed.
That is, the Serbs cause.
Oh, that is important.
I'm sorry.
That is very important.
You're right.
But the Serbs laid claim to that area.
Right.
On the basis of large what we call irredentism.
That is, there were many Serb nationalists.
Correct.
They wanted a greater Serbia.
Right.
So two questions.
One, the Serbs who supported the assassins, and of course the assassins themselves, would they have been pleased in 1919, would they have been pleased with what they had accomplished?
Well, to some extent, yes.
Something of a greater Serbia was, in fact, created by the First World War.
It wasn't called Greater Serbia.
It was called Yugoslavia.
But in many respects, it was a Serbian-dominated little empire.
It was kind of a client state of the West, which had been created literally by force of arms of the West, because Serbia had actually lost in the war.
Not unlike Romania, actually, a neighbor.
It's interesting.
Just by choosing the right side in the war, whether or not you actually won any battles, you ended up in the post-war settlement.
If you were on the right side, you would gain something.
And the Serbs clearly gained a great deal.
This Yugoslavia existed for most of the rest of the 20th century.
It was a Serbian-dominated state.
Wow.
Now, did they want a world war or do they only want get the Austro-Hungarians out of Greater Serbia?
I don't think a World War is what they wanted.
No, they wanted the Austro-Hungarians out, clearly.
It wasn't exactly clear what their vision was as far as the exact nature of the state to follow.
But no, they didn't want a world war.
So during the World War, do you think that these Serbs were scratching their heads thinking, wow, we started this?
I'm not so sure.
I mean, one of them, Gavrilo Prinship, the actual assassin who pulled the trigger, was actually interviewed.
He was a a sickly lad.
I mean, he basically died in his prison cell.
He was interviewed, though, right before he died, and he was just asked, you know, do you regret this?
And he said, well, no, you know, if I hadn't done it, the Germans would have found another excuse.
So he was a believer in the German War Guild case.
I don't think he had a bad conscience necessarily.
All right.
So now I think it would help my listeners to just tell us how who stacked up on what side.
At the end of June, you have the Serbian assassination of the Archduke of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Who are Austro-Hungary's allies, and who are the Serbs' allies?
Well, you'd think this would be a simple question to answer.
At least in the first instance, you can get the big ones right.
Germany, quite clearly and obviously, was allied to Austria-Hungary.
Serbia was very much a client state of Imperial Russia or Tsarist Russia, the Russian Empire.
Which I just might add sees them as sort of kin.
Is that correct?
Something like blood brothers.
I even heard this.
I was in Moscow during the Kosovo War in 1999, and the phrase was still current, that is, blood brothers.
Yeah, and people should know they use the same alphabet for their languages.
Right.
Yeah, the languages are similar.
You have the Orthodox religion in common.
So you have a lot at stake.
That's not to say their interests were identical in all senses, but yes, there's a very close sense.
All right, so the big.
All right, so hold on.
So I want my listener to get this as clearly as possible.
So, on the Austro-Hungarian side, you have at least Germany and Austria, and on the other, you have Serbia and Russia.
Yes, and France is only a slightly smaller remove from Russia.
After this, things get a bit more complicated because forgive me, forgive me.
Why is France allied with Russia?
Well, that is a very good question.
Largely for fear of Germany.
This alliance dated in a formal sense back to 1894.
To some extent, it was owing to the inept diplomacy of Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had kind of to some extent blown up Bismarck's delicately constructed diplomatic system.
But in just raw power terms, you have rising German power in the center of the continent, which seemed to threaten France.
The Germans had fought a war against France in 1871, which had created the German Empire, 1870, 71, the Franco-Prussian War.
Russia was increasingly concerned by this large new neighbor.
And so this alliance was very much directed against Germany.
The Russians also had concerns about Austria-Hungary.
Now, those were not necessarily shared by France, which did not have a border with Austria-Hungary.
And Britain?
Britain was slightly aloof, but not as aloof as many British politicians like to pretend.
Most of the British public had no idea that there were, in fact, close military discussions that had been going on between the British and the French going back almost a decade.
They certainly did not view Russia as an ally.
There had been a colonial agreement with Russia to put to bed certain old tensions back in 1907.
But for most of the 19th century, Britain and Russia were strategic adversaries.
Something that there's a phrase that the English like, they called it the Great Game.
It was in some ways a bit like the Cold War, a struggle for influence over Central Asia, the routes to British India, and so on.
So it was much more recent, and many people in Britain still had a deep distrust of the Russians.
Britain, however, had already begun at least some discussion.
All right, hold on.
We'll continue with that in a moment.
I just want to reintroduce and remind everyone I'm speaking to Sean McMeekin, the professor who was written July 1914.
Hello, everybody.
This is A History Hour, periodic, dedicated hour on the Dennis Prager show to understanding how our world formed.
And if you don't understand World War I, you can't understand anything.
Everything came from it.
Everything terrible, I should say.
Fascism, Nazism, Communism, the Holocaust, World War II, the communism in China, the 65 million killed by Mao there.
I mean, we're talking because a couple of men assassinate an archduke.
I mean, it just shows you the power of individuals to shape history, by the way, almost always to the bad.
It's harder for an individual to shape history for the good.
It's just the way life goes.
And the latest book, terrific new book on this, July 1914 by Sean McMeekin, who teaches history at a university in Turkey, the University of Koch-KOC.
What is the little squiggle below it called?
Not a circumflex.
What is it called?
Sidi, I believe, copied from the French, although the effect is different.
It's like a ch.
Yeah, it makes a ch.
It's K-O-C, but it's pronounced Koch.
So we were talking about the sides, folks.
So remember now, the Austro-Hungarian heir to the throne is visiting an area that the Serbs want to be part of Greater Serbia.
And he is assassinated by Serb extremists.
Serbia's big ally is Russia.
And Austro-Hungary's big ally is Germany.
And then France has been afraid of Germany for years, this up-and-coming huge Central European power.
So they're allied with Russia to stop German influence on the continent.
And the last question I asked was Britain, and Britain naturally would have been, you were pointing out, quite suspicious of the Tsar.
Remember, folks, this is not yet communist.
This is the Tsar at the last Tsar as the head of Russia.
But nevertheless, Britain sides when and with whom.
Well, not until really the very last moment.
I mean, at least if you go by the actual policy statements and the diplomatic correspondence and so on.
The posture of Britain throughout the July crisis, right up to the very end, is that of a neutral power, at the very least, a power meant to be impartial in trying to mediate between the other sides.
Now, the Germans had a legitimate complaint by the end that Britain had not been in any way, shape, or form impartial, which is actually true.
They really had not been.
They had not been forthcoming before the crisis about the extent of their military collaboration with France between the two armies.
They had also not been forthcoming about negotiations with the Russians regarding certain naval matters.
That is the public posture of the British government, which was to some extent.
I mean, this may have been the self-image of British diplomats.
They like to see themselves as mediacors, as brokers.
But in practice, the British gradually and then towards the end a little bit more strongly began taking the Franco-Russian side.
Why?
Well, that's still kind of the question today.
I guess the traditional answer is that German power, the threat of German hegemony on the continent, and or this notion of German war guilt and German aggression, this is what justified the decision of the British Empire to go to war.
There are a number of British historians.
The most famous of them is Neil Ferguson, who you might often see on television commentating on various affairs.
And he wrote a book about 15 years ago, you know, arguing on a slightly different method, but he was kind of looking more at cost-benefit analysis.
And he was just saying, look, it really wasn't worth it.
It was kind of a mistake.
And there are many people in Britain who have always been at least willing to argue that position, which remains somewhat controversial.
I personally think it's actually harder to argue the opposite position.
I don't see how Britain benefited unless one just looks at the fact that, yes, the British did ultimately expand the empire in the Middle East.
It's not something they were thinking about doing in 1914, but that is what they did do by the end of the war.
Yeah, but that was because of the collapse of the Ottomans.
It had nothing to do with Germany.
Right.
It had nothing to do with Germany.
So it was a kind of unintended consequence of everything else, which, to my mind, actually also reflects how little the British understood what was really going on in 1914.
You know, there is an argument to be made that a lot of the war was ultimately about the backwash of the decline of Ottoman power.
That is to say, in the Balkans, at least primarily if you're looking at Sarajevo, if you go to visit Sarajevo today, it's interesting.
It's actually a more Islamic city than it was for most of the 20th century, since the recent war.
It had an Ottoman past, which has actually kind of come back to the forefront today.
All right, we'll continue with that in a moment.
And the book is July 1914.
What were the results?
Why did it happen when we come back?
Hi, my friends.
This is A History Hour on the Dennis Prager Show.
And within the span of, I'd say, a half year, it's a second book that I am featuring on the roots of World War I because it's so good and because so that is the book is so good and because the subject is so important.
It is titled July 1914.
It's an American historian, Sean McMeekin, who has been teaching in Turkey for a number of years at the University of Koch.
Now, since you are discussing this one unbelievably important and fateful month, I'm going to challenge you to do something very difficult, obviously, and that is to summarize in almost bullet point what happens after the June 28th assassination by the Serbs of the Archduke who is the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
So that's step one.
What's step two?
Why are we moving toward a world war?
Well, okay, the first step is the reaction in Vienna.
And now there's a war party there that has long seen Serbia as a problem, represented predominantly by the chief of army staff, Conrad, Wilklem, to simplify things.
Now, Conrad had never gotten his way before, but now this event triggers a kind of emotional response, and many of the other members of the government are willing to go along.
There's one, however, who stands opposed, the Hungarian minister-president.
His name is Tizza.
Now, it's largely to win over Tizza that a mission is sent to Berlin to see what the Germans will say.
This is what leads to the famous and somewhat notorious so-called blank check.
The idea being that the Germans more or less gave an open, unsigned check to the Austrians.
They could fill it in for whatever amount they wanted.
That is, we will support you, whatever you do.
It's more or less what happened.
It's slightly simplified.
The Austrians, though, take a long time to get their act together.
Now, again, again, the Russian policy, almost a month has passed.
So wait, so wait.
So this is the war party meaning war against the Serbs.
war against the serbs exactly okay now why wait all right so wait a minute why What the hell do the Germans care about Serbs?
They care.
Well, it's not that they care about Serbs per se, but they realize that the reason the Austrians have been so hesitant for so many years to go to war with Serbia or to do anything particularly aggressive regarding Serbia, because Serbia had actually fought two wars in the recent past and had enlarged its territory, was, of course, fear of Russia.
So the German role, at least in the ideal scenario that they're laying out in Berlin and Vienna, is to kind of put a scare in the Russians so they won't intervene.
They don't necessarily want the Russians to intervene.
That, in some ways, is what the real argument comes down to, is did they actually think the Russians would intervene, or were they hoping that the Russians...
And by Russians intervening, that means aid the Serbs in fighting the Austro-Hungarians.
Right.
And so waiting.
So the next stage in the military sense comes with the Russian response.
You know, that is to say, the claim on the Russian and then the French and the British side is that Russia simply responded in this legitimate way to defend her ally against Austrian aggression.
We mobilized against Austria-Hungary only.
We call this a partial mobilization, so the Germans had no case for war.
I mean, I'm not the first historian to notice this, but there are serious holes in this story, which is to say that when the Russians mobilized, they mobilized against Germany, too.
Yeah, okay.
Who fires the first shot?
The Austrians fire the first shot at Serbia, not against Russia.
So is it fair to say that they started the war?
It's certainly fair to say that they started a war.
I'm not sure I would agree that they started the world war.
The reluctance to fight Russia was so extreme in Vienna that the Germans had to intervene repeatedly simply to get the Austrians first to mobilize against the Russians and then literally to almost turn and wheel around an entire army group, a corps, to go fight the Russians because there was no desire in Austria-Hungary to fight Russia.
So they did start a war.
That is to say, they started what they hoped would be.
All right, so one minute.
So the Austro-Hungarians fire back after the assassination of their Archduke at the Serbs.
That prompts two things to happen.
The Austro-Hungarians to get, quote-unquote, a blank check of support from Berlin, and the Russians to mobilize.
Except that the Austrians didn't fire until much later.
They sent the ultimatum first.
That was almost a month later, on the 23rd of July.
The response, Serbia actually mobilized even before Austria did.
So even to say that Austria fired first is in some sense problematic.
I understand.
They did fire first and symbolically.
But what was interesting was that they had just told the Germans they wouldn't actually be ready to go to war with Serbia until the middle of August.
So they kind of surprised even their own allies, simply by shelling Belgrade.
That was on the 28th.
So with all your knowledge, who could have stopped this?
At what point?
Well, there are a number of men who could have stopped it.
It would have been easy for either the emperor in Austria or the foreign minister in Austria to call a halt to the war party and to say, you know, look, this is too dangerous.
The Germans could have stopped it.
The Kaiser very nearly did stop it.
In fact, Kaiser Wilhelm II, when he actually read Serbia's rather cleverly worded response to Austria, which was by no means an acceptance of the terms, but it was meant to sound as conciliatory as possible, the Kaiser actually began to favor a policy of mediation.
And he, in fact, ordered his diplomats to intervene.
However, those orders did not reach Vienna until after war had been declared on Serbia.
So the Kaiser not only could have intervened, he actually tried to intervene, but failed because of circumstance.
The Chancellor in Germany, Betzmann Holweg, also could have, but did not intervene.
In fact, to some extent, he bears a greater responsibility than the Kaiser because this last-minute peace initiative, he actually watered down key terms, thus making them less likely to lead anywhere.
And finally, you have the British, and Sir Edward Gray is sometimes seen as a man who could have or should have mediated somehow.
It's possible that it would have been harder, though.
What was Edward Gray's position?
Well, again, not political position.
What was his post?
Sorry, right.
He was what the British call His Majesty's Foreign Secretary, meaning what we might call him.
Okay, so he was the Foreign Secretary.
Right, the Foreign Secretary.
And all right, we have one more segment.
When exactly did Germany invade Belgium?
German troops actually crossed over the Belgian frontier very early on the day of August 4th, 1914.
All right.
Well, we'll be back in a moment.
July 1914, perhaps the most important month in modern history.
Hello, my friends.
Final segment of this edition of A History Hour.
And the book is July 1914.
The author is a professor of history at the University of Koch in Turkey.
He's an American, Sean McMeekin.
You look up, you'll see how highly respected he and the book are.
I have to tell you, I have an emotional reaction to all of this because, and I know it for many reasons, but one is when you tell me about July 1914 and the movement to World War I, I'm actually rooting for somebody to stop it.
It's so stupid, obviously.
But I'm still thinking, oh, it's like watching a movie.
You know the end, but you still hope something will stop it.
You know, who will prevent John Wilkes Booth from entering President Lincoln's balcony seat?
It's just – and the other thing is I assume that your position is nobody expected anything close to what happened that we know of as the First World War.
They certainly didn't expect a calamity on the scale of the First World War.
I think, though, it's a little bit of an exaggeration in the other direction to say they had no idea what was coming.
If you look at their remarks, there's definitely a lot of talk of, oh, the civilization of Europe will be extinguished.
Oh, there will be a monstrous slaughter.
Sir Edward Gray says the lamps are going out.
That's right.
That's a famous yes.
Yeah.
There's a great sense of foreboding.
I mean, in the case of Sir Edward Gray, what's so fascinating is that his own eyesight was literally failing at the time, and he played a significant role in the events, by no means for the better.
But he's one of the men who could have intervened, possibly.
All right.
One final question.
And there are so many others, it's always painful to me to draw these things to a conclusion.
But when a young Brit, or for that matter, a young Frenchman, signed up to fight, what did he think he was fighting for?
Well, I think in the case of the French, they thought they were fighting a war to defend the fatherland against German aggression.
In the case of the British, it's a little bit harder to say.
Probably notions of honor and decency might have entered in.
Right, right.
Just this notion that it was the right thing to do for.
Well, that's why so much idealism has been extinguished in Europe.
The book, my friends, is July 1914 and it reads like a novel, as many say.
Sean McMikin, it has been a pleasure, and I'll talk to you about Turkey soon.
Well, thanks so much for having me on.
You're very welcome.
This has been Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.
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