Who Says One Person Can't Make a Difference?

Well, then I would say they should take a look at this man. His name Gavrilo Princip. An ethnic Serb born in Bosnia, he moved to Sarajevo for his schooling. He drifted into nationalist organizations, first the Mlada Bosna (Young Bosnia), and from there was eventually recruited into the Ujedinjenje ili Smrt (literally translated as Union or Death but more commonly known in English as the Black Hand).

Once a member of the Black Hand, he was trained in the ways of terrorism. The goal was the overthrow of the Austro-Hungarian rule over the Serbs and the establishment of a Pan-Slav state. Eventually it was decided that further this, a decision was made to strike at the heart of the entity that was seen as oppressing the Serbs: the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Princip and the rest of the assassination team went to Sarajevo in time for the visit of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife. After the rest of the team had bungled the attempts, pure luck dropped the Archduke's car into Princip's lap as he was trying find some food after missing his chance earlier. (And in a weird quirk, Archduke Ferdinand was unpopular with the rulers of the Empire because he was advocating giving the Serbs an enlarged voice in the Empire.)

Anyways, with a pull of the trigger, Princip set in motion the events that would lead to the start of the First World War. In four years, the conflagration would reshape the balance of power among the world's Great Powers. Gone would be the Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires. Imperial Germany would cease to exist with the abdication of the Kaiser.

The war also brought about the creation of a number of nations, some still in existence, such as Iraq, Czechoslovakia, and the U.S.S.R. In effect, many of the current problems in the Middle East can be traced back to decisions made by the British and French governments who, even in the midst of a life and death struggle with Imperial Germany, showed a propensity to supporting operations to expand their colonial empires. This culminated in the Sykes-Picot agreement which divided the Middle East. (Note, when dividing up a good portion of the world, use a good scale map and do not make the marks in green crayon.)

But just as profound, there would be a change in the way that war was viewed. Prior to 1914, war was viewed as something beneficial, not to be shied away from. Yes, there was an acknowledgment of the human costs. This disappeared in the mud and blood of the Western Front. Following the war, it was the works of Wilfred Owen, Sigfried Sassoon and Robert Graves that took hold, rather than Ernst Junger's writings. Instead of the old view of war, there was the development of the way that war and conflict is popular today: War is bad, that it is to be avoided at all costs.

If Princip had not been there, or decided to just give up on the plot altogether, the world would be a very different place. The Russian Empire might not have fallen, and Bolshevik-style communism would not have risen to hold sway over so much of the world. Hitler would possibly have lived out his life as a paper-hanger and failed painter. Perhaps the Austro-Hungarian Empire would have survived, being reformed along the lines of the heir apparent in 1914, Archduke Ferdinand, to become the Austro-Hungarian-Serbian Empire.

A lot of things happened because one person managed to kill two people on June 28, 1914 in Sarajevo.