It was a messy, bloody war, and the time has come to memorialize and remember it, although a letter to the editor of the British newspaper The Guardian in 2012 from Diana Francis suggested that "militarism and nationalism combine to make a pretty toxic ideology that our young people would be better off without, as would the rest of us. War is the scourge of humanity and we should be not celebrating but lamenting."

While it took a month of diplomatic maneuvering after the incident, World War I began in Sarajevo, Bosnia, on June 28, 1914, with the gunning down of the relatively obscure Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria by a member of a pan-Serbian nationalist group; today we might call them Serbian militants.

Canadian author Margaret MacMillan, writing in The Globe and Mail, observed the assassin, Gavrilo Princip, is regarded in Serbia as an heroic figure, with memorial statues in Belgrade. "In the rest of Bosnia," she wrote, "he is usually described as a terrorist."