A DT custom

One of the various irritating features of the DT print edition (I don't know whether the same applies at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/) is the use of a striking or sensational headline to catch the eye to cover an article which is mainly sober and sensible in tone and does not provide much support to the headline at all.

There was an example of this on 28th June, 'The lie that started the First World War', which caught my eye as I was at that time in the throes of reading Clark on that very subject (see 15th July), my reading of which was that the Serbian government was involved in the assassination, fairly directly at middle management level and by default at senior management level. That Serbia was the sort of place where there was political violence, a culture of political violence, of a sort not seen in this country for hundreds of years, this coupled with the belief that the plum growing country called Serbia had a God given mission to absorb by whatever means lay to hand any land where ethnic Serbs had ever lived, never mind anyone else who might also have been living there at the time or subsequently. I associate to the 16th century fanaticism of the Castillian Spanish which resulted from their long wars against the Moors.

Half of the article was biographical material on the successful assassin (one of a number out on the day), making him into a clever young man from a hard rural background drawn to struggle against the axis of evil of the day (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btkJhAM7hZw), viz the Austro-Hungarian empire. The other half was about his victims.

All in all little enough to justify the headline assertion that the Serbs were misrepresented & innocent victims and I prefer to stick with the Clark version.