Opinion of Gavrilo Princip

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

HP.  You don't try to bring down a reactionary system by killing the only good person inside of it.  His reason for killing the archduke was literally because the archduke wanted a confederation of sorts that would appeal to the various nationalities within the empire. 

It would be a lot like a Radical Republican assassinating Lincoln because he didn't go far enough with his plans for reconstructing the South and ensuring equality for African Americans.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

I just happen to be towards the end of a documentary about Ivan the Terrible right now.

A Monarchy can certainly be progressive relative to the situation in which he hinds himself. If you are asserting modern values into a past situation, well then of course not.

King William III surrendered to Parliament cirtical powers regarding the collecting of taxes and the appropriating of money as well as to sign a declaration of rights. He personally hated Parliament, but he was Dutch and all he cared about was defeating France and as long as it kept England in the War adn on his side, he was perfectly willing to sign of on political rights and permentently remove any chance of regression to the days of Absolutism in the country. William was as Conservative as they come (save for the alleged homosexuality), but it is hard not to deem him progressive, at least regarding democracy of gov't, compared to his predecessor.

Tsar Peter the Great was certainly committed to ripping apart the traditions of of Muscovite Russia and dragging the country kicking and screaming into Western technology and customs. 

Tsar Alexander II was on the verge of created a legislature when he was blown up by a bomb, having already freed the serfs twenty years earlier.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Vile human scum who indirectly caused virtually all the evils of the 20th Century and a bloodthirsty Serbian ultranationalist like Milosevich to vote.

rofl

The GREAT MAN 'theory' of history really needs to die.

Yes really.

ANd more to the point why do we blame this random Serbian teenager when we could easily blame the incumbent archduke for itching for an excuse to kill more Serbians, the powder keg of alliances that was set up between the superpowers of Europe in the preceding decade that made such a major war a possibility to begin with, or how about we blame the sandwich maker at the cafe that Princip stopped at before the Archduke and his crew decided to go down the wrong street (Princip's successful assassination was actually possible because of several other botched attempts at the Archduke that happened like literally twenty minutes before he shot the guy and the Archduke decided to go to the hospital to visit the wounded people from the bomb attempt).

Hell, none of this would've been possible if that Idiot King Pekah didn't conspire against the Assyrians.

The problem is that road leads you down another dangerous path in history, that of things being destined to happen the way they did. Often that is not the case and another individual would produce a different result. Would any other Tsar then Peter have modernized the way that he did? Would a General other than Washington have managed to achieve the same success in the Trenton-Princeton campaign? So many events that changed the course of history occured because of the creativity and individual choices of people. I think that, whilst it cannot be the sole factor, it cannot be eliminated entirely.