Um ensaio interessante sobre os fatores que precipitam uma guerra: estruturais e contingentes, inevitáveis, ou por puro acaso.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Who Triggered World War I and the Fall of Troy?
It’s hard to say why wars happen. The words dispute and conflict get thrown around a lot. It might be a territorial dispute over a piece of land that starts a war, or a conflict over who has the right to rule it. It’s a simple enough explanation: when two groups of people can’t peacefully resolve a material dispute, they turn to violence.
You’ll also find psychological explanations for war. Here, war is some deeply embedded instinct which brews for a long time in the depths of the human psyche, before it bubbles up to collective consciousness and explodes into the world. It’s not a bad way of thinking about it either, and there’s some scientific evidence that supports the idea that it’s in our nature to go to war. See: the case of the Gombe Chimpanzee War.
A third explanation for war, aside from the political and the psychological, is one that defies rationality. It’s the idea that wars are a product of fate, decreed by “the gods”. It’s just one of those explanations that feels like a cop-out, like it’s not an explanation at all but a way of holding our hands up and saying “we don’t know how it happens.”
But if you take a close look at one particular war, World War I, and the role that one man and one freak accident had in starting it, you may feel that there’s more to the “fate explanation” than meets the eye.
Funnily enough, a similar twist of fate breaks the truce of the Trojan war and leads to the fall of Troy in Homer’s Iliad. The Trojan War and World War I are different in lots of ways. For one thing, one is mostly fictional and the other is very real. But they’re similar in other ways, and one of those is that fate, destiny, or “the gods” seemed to play a big role in making them happen.
When Gavrilo Princip Shot Franz Ferdinand
World War I was one of the deadliest conflicts in human history. It paved the way for World War II, the atomic bomb, the rise of fascism and communism, and the deaths of tens of millions of young men. It’s an event whose significance is hard to overstate, and it may not have even happened if it weren’t for a coincidence.
In the summer of 1914, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated by Serbian rebel Gavrilo Princip.
After the assassination, Austria-Hungary issued a humiliating ultimatum to Serbia, Serbia ignored the ultimatum, Austria-Hungary invaded Serbia, and a network of interlocking alliances was triggered which pulled all the forces of modern Europe into The Great War.
But the assassination of Franz Ferdinand did not originally go to plan. He was visiting Sarajevo to give a speech in the Town Hall, and six assassins were positioned along his motorcade’s route. They planned to kill the Archduke as he drove past and waved to the crowd.
The first assassin choked and didn’t pull the trigger. The second assassin hurled a grenade but missed the Archduke’s car. His grenade hit another car in the motorcade instead, seriously injuring some members of the Archduke’s entourage, but leaving Ferdinand himself unscathed. The car sped off to the Town Hall after that, and the rest of the assassins, including Gavrilo Princip, missed their shot. For a moment it seemed like peace would reign, but the moment didn’t last long.
Later that day, Franz Ferdinand delivered his speech and left the Town Hall. He decided to pay a visit to the people who had been hurt by the assassin’s grenade that morning. His driver was instructed to head to the hospital, and as they were driving, the driver incorrectly turned right at the Latin Bridge into Franz Joseph Street. General Potiorek, who had been riding in the car with them, shouted at the driver to stop and turn back. The driver slammed the breaks, and the engine stalled. The car happened to stop just outside of a cafe called Schiller’s Delicatessen, where none other than Gavrilo Princip had been standing. The heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire was a sitting duck. Gavrilo Princip took out his pistol, walked up to the stalled vehicle, and shot the Archduke and his wife at point-blank range.
If the driver hadn’t taken a wrong turn, if the engine hadn’t stalled, and if it hadn’t stalled right outside Schiller’s Deli where Princip happened to be standing, Europe may not have slid down the slippery slope to WWI.
When Pandaros Shot Menelaus
Now let’s turn our attention to another war, which predates the first World War by thousands of years — and is mostly a work of fiction.
Everybody and their grandpa apparently knows the story of how the Trojan War started. Paris, the prince of Troy, took Helen from her husband Menelaus, the king of Sparta. Menelaus and his brother Agamemnon raised the armies of Greece, and they besieged the city of Troy. They wanted to kill every Trojan in the city and return Helen to Greece.
As Homer’s story goes, the Greeks had been besieging the city of Troy for nine years with no success. Try as they might, they weren’t able to penetrate its walls. After so many years of fighting, in Book IV of the Iliad, a truce was struck between both sides. They agreed to a ceasefire on the following condition: Menelaus and Paris would fight man-to-man, the winner would take Helen, and the Greek army would sail home.
It sounds like a sensible solution. Thousands of unnecessary deaths could be prevented. But the gods would not have it so, they had a different plan in mind.
Aphrodite, who had soft-spot for Paris, protected him from Menelaus’ spear and carried him off to safety. The soldiers were dumbfounded, where had Paris disappeared to in the middle of the duel? The truce had been agreed on the condition that Paris fight Menelaus to the death, and they demanded that he come back and finish the fight.
At this point, Athena descended on the battlefield and appeared to an obscure soldier of the Trojan army by the name of Pandaros. “If you dare send an arrow at Menelaus you will win honour and thanks from all the Trojans, and especially from prince Paris.” she said to him. “He would be the first to reward you very handsomely if he could see Menelaus mount his funeral pyre, slain by an arrow from your hand.”
Pandaros’ heart was persuaded. He took his bow from its case, notched an arrow, drew the string to his chest, prayed to Apollo, and let the arrow fly towards Menelaus. Menelaus was also favoured by the gods, so the arrow only hit his belt buckle. It wasn’t enough to kill him, but it was enough to draw his blood in front of the entire Greek army, and so it was enough to break the truce and resume the war.
This is how Homer tells the story of the gods decreeing a fate of war upon humans by persuading one man to take drastic action.
War and Fate
If it wasn’t for Athena persuading Pandaros to shoot Menelaus, the truce wouldn’t have been broken, and Troy may not have fallen.
If it wasn’t for the Archduke’s car stalling in front of Schiller’s deli where Gavrilo Princip happened to be standing, Austria-Hungary wouldn’t have issued the July Ultimatum to Serbia, and World War I may not have started.
To what extent does fate play a part in the great events that shape human history? The rational mind says: none. Everything boils down to either political conflict or psychological disturbance. If we could only resolve peacefully any dispute over land or governance, if we could only overcome the animalistic war-waging chimpanzee within, then there would be no more war.
But what if there were forces beyond our control, forces barely within reach of our imagination, which guide and manipulate us towards war, when all we want is peace? To the Ancient Greek mind, this is self-evidently true. Man is powerless before the gods, who hold his fate in their hands. To this, the modern mind says that the gods are nothing but a creation of man, and it is he who holds them in his hands.
The way I see it, there is such a thing as fate, but we’re not totally powerless against it. We can to an extent become masters of our own destiny, but only with great effort. If our fate is to wage war after bloody war, and human history demonstrates that it is, then we have to do whatever we can to wrestle our future from its grip. We have to be aware of it and to pay attention to it, otherwise we might unknowingly become its victims simply because we dismissed that such a factor could even exist.
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