Each night I dreamt one and the same dream: I was an anarchist, wrestling with the police.[1]
Gavrilo Princip, a member of Mlada Bosna (Young Bosnia), talking about the time just before the Sarajevo assassination
We live in an era of the onslaught of the ruling class conducted at all fronts, hence no wonder it is so easy to detect tendencies toward criminal reinterpretation of historical events, accompanied by revisions of history fashioned on the day-to-day necessities of bourgeois politics. Anniversaries, along with other commemorative festivities organised around various events of history, are such occasions when we can percieve this dark tendency inherent to the system in the most blatant of ways; these are the situations in which the ideology of the ruling class crystalises. Marking the centenary of the assassination of the archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and, shortly afterwards, the beginning of the WWI, are particularly revealing examples in this sense.
Without a proper understanding of the historical context. it is not possible to grasp the events that took place a hundred years ago, just as this understanding is not possible in the case of Ferdinand’s assassination without a proper understanding of the specifically Yugoslav character of this context. The error one should avoid in the most careful manner, if one aims at scientifically tackling the matter of analysis of historical happenings, consists in projecting one’s own views and values on the past and making faulty analogies with contemporary events. Unfortunately, today we witness precisely this type of proceeding, infused with a large quantity of forgery and unverified information, day-to-day juggling with the facts of history, tentative recuperations of the attitudes of revolutionaries and their inclusion into the context of Serbian nationalism by the current regime in Serbia and also of the racist stance on the part of some Western European intellectuals and institutions, not forgetting indeed the bizarre coining of non-existant links with events from the recent wars in the Balkans. One should keep in mind that nationalism, as a new phenomenon, was rather amorphous throughout this period and that national, confessional, as well as political notions, which were supposed to be opposed each to other, in fact, coexisted and only at the moments when diverse affinities engaged in overt conflict in the minds of the people the issue of choice between these emerged.[2] This also stands for the movement of the Yugoslav revolutionary and national youth prior to 1914. Undoubtedly, having as their primary focus the position of the unification of South Slavs, the ideas of social justice, federalism, anti-clericalism, anti-parliamentarianism, and anarchism also played a notable role in forming the awareness of younger generations in Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia and Hercegovina, which were then ruled by the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy.
