Friday 4 October 2013

How A Coffee Killed Tens Of Millions

Life, it is said, can turn on a sixpence but i have been reading an amazing book that showed how a cup of coffee changed the World.
It's 1914 and Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand is being driven around Sarajevo in a open-top car but among the crowd was Gavrilo Princip and several other members of the Black Hand all armed with grenades, keen to assassinate the Austrian.
As the motorcade passes, the first member throws his grenade but misses and injures several pedestrians and the people in the cars behind.
The assassins disperse amidst the chaos and Gavrilo Princip went to a local cafe to mull over the debacle with a hot cup of coffee.
Meanwhile, the Archduke instructed his driver to go to the hospital to visit the people who were injured by the grenade. The driver got lost and drove aimlessly around the streets of Sarajevo until they just randomly happened to pass the cafe where Gavrilo Princip was sitting outside cupping his coffee.
To make it even more of an early Final Destination film, the driver not only drove past the cafe, but realised he was going the wrong way and began to slowly reverse past it again.
Not believing his luck, Princip walked up to the car and shot the Archduke and his wife dead.
This led to World War One which led to German Reparations and the financial crisis in Germany which allowed Hitler to be elected who caused World War 2 and America dropping the Nuclear Bomb which resulted in the Cold War which led to wars in places like Vietnam, Korea and Afghanistan.
Amazing to consider that the majority of the horror and death of the 20th Century may not have happened had Gavrilo Princip sat inside the cafe, had ordered a cold drink instead of a hot coffee he had to wait to cool down or the driver had just kept going or even knew where the hospital was.
Tens of millions of lives turned on that sixpence and it all stemmed from one man wanted a coffee that afternoon.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

and that is the why a mind is a terrible thing... the same logic is being used in regard to global warming.

q

Lucy said...

Climate Change isn't a chain of events that began with a freak meeting killing tens of millions, that's the people who CAN make a change NOT making a change and potentially killing tens of millions.

Anonymous said...

hey, your post was funny. crazy set of circumstances. there was a lot more to it and hitler was gonna do what he was gonna do with or without the coffee

right. climate change is a chain of unrelated events with plausible, but unproven and questionable, connections to a doomsday condition that anti-captitalists and tree huggers think supports taking humanity down their bizzarre path toward equalness

q

Lucy said...

You may be right and all those things may have occurred anyway, no way of knowing of course, but they happened in the way they happened and it struck me as very strange that everything that followed was because one guy went for a coffee. Almost makes you think fate was directing things. All very Final Destination.

Still can't see how Climate Change is in any way connected to it though, you seem to have taken a massive leap from one to the other.

Anonymous said...

Not more of a leap than the climate doomers

Q