After reading William Pfaff’s Feb. 7 column, “Humbled Russians seek restored pride with pan-Slavism,” I can only conclude that he longs for the days of Nazi Germany.
His contentions that the Germans invented pan-Slavism, and that Princip’s assassination of the Austrian archduke at Sarajevo was an example of Serbian terrorism, are complete absurdities and nonsense.
Pan-Slavism was a grass-roots Slavic philosophy caused by Prussia’s defeat of Austria-Hungary in the 1866 war which resulted in Austria-Hungary’s expulsion from the South German Confederation, and the German empire’s subsequent support of Austria-Hungary’s aggressive expansion into the Balkans. After all, it was Bismarck who stated that Bohemia in German hands would mean war without mercy or truce with the Empire of the Tsars.
As for the assassination, it was a direct result of Austria-Hungary’s illegal grab of Bosnia, which had been wrestled from the Turkish Empire by a coalition of South Slavs and Greeks during the first Balkan War, thus preventing the South Slavs from uniting into one nation.
Should Mr. Pfaff need further proof of these facts, as to how far the Pan-Germans were willing to go to dominate the Slavs, I recommend that he research the Zagreb and Friedjung treason trials.
