Monday, August 28, 2023

The red hand and the Black Hand

Gavrilo Princip, like John Booth, was part of a political assassination-conspiracy, to oppose imperial interests on behalf of a racial interest. It happens, for the fin-de-siecle Balkans, that a similar conspiracy existed within an interested government. That government was Servia's (sic), and its conspiracy called itself "Unification or Death", led by one Dragutin "Apis" Dimitrijević. History remembers it as The Black Hand.

However it might be that the Black Hand's conspiracy aimed elsewhere than at Austria's government. This is a theme of modern Serbian revisionism; most-prominently John Zametica's Folly and Malice. Mark Cornwall wrote a fairly-detrimental review.

Zametica and Cornwall can read the documents; I cannot. All I can really do is to point to others. In that respect, Cornwall says that Zametica got ahead of his, er, -ski's. (Sorry.) If the book was reframed as a take on what the Black Hand was actually conspiring to do, the book would have worked.

What was the Black Hand doing? Frankly, they were Hezbollah. They were a wicked band of deepstaters who were trying to murder their way into power in Serbia. Zametica's point: not in Bosnia. There'd be time for that eventually; but in the meantime, Apis wasn't sure that killing this particular Austrian noble would end up well for Serbs' interest. We may read one relevant paper here; there exists also Zametica's review of Miller-Melamed's Misfire.

Zametica thought that Young Bosnia's real core was in Croatia.

Where Cornwall parts ways is that when you're running a conspiracy of evil men, some evil men are going to do evil outside your scope. Bosnia offered an opportunity to git money, through arms-trading across the border. One brother Serb to another; to hell with orders.

So maybe the Black Hand wasn't red-handed with Habsburg blood, but it seems either way those hands weren't clean.

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