[Leica] RUSSIAN KGB leica?"

[msmall at infionline.net (Marc James Small)]

At 09:05 PM 4/11/06 -0400, Walt Johnson wrote:
>
>Some where in your history class you might have done a bit of napping?  
>Stalin was quite familiar with pulling a trigger and his German 
>counterpoint ( I trust you mean Adolph and not Marlene Dietrich)  had 
>his heinie shot off more than once. Again, it seems as if you are 
>confusing them with our own hero/leaders. Most of whom were hiding under 
>the bed when everyone else was busy "defending democracy".

Hmm.

I'm relatively familiar with the histories of both and cannot recall a
documented instance when either ever killed anyone themselves.  Stalin's
pre-Revolution activities were as a seminary student and then as a bank
robber but, when he was captured by the Okhrana (the predecessor to the
NKVD which Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinzki, for whom the FED camera is named,
the NKVD in turn leading to the KGB and the present agency whose initialism
I cannot recall at the nonce), Stalin was not charged with any death but
only as a bank-robber of revolutionary bent and then went to Siberia, where
he was exiled to a remote village and didn't even try to escape unlike most
of the other Old Revolutionaries.  Once the Revolution occurred, Stalin was
released, went to Petrograd, and fell in with the Social Democrat Party
leadership.  After that, he certainly never shot anyone.  So, no, I doubt
if Stalin ever personally killed anyone but, then, the same can be said of
Luciano and the Teflon Don.

Hitler joined the Bavarian Army on the outbreak of the First War and went
through basic and unit training.  Before his unit reached the Front, he was
assigned as a runner, a position he held through the War.  Runner did not
carry firearms save for a pistol and there is no record that Hitler ever
fired a shot in combat, though he was a brave, daring, and efficient
transporter of missives, a sort of Hermes of the West-Front, to draw in a
Leica allusion to an otherwise OT discussion.  From that point onwards, his
life is too well documented to say that he ever killed anyone, though he
did order than this Alsatian bitch, Blondi, be put down a day or so before
his own death to ensure that the cyanide capsules which Eva Braun intended
on using in her suicide would work.  That is probably as close to death as
Hitler came after 1918.

Of the Nazi and Soviet leadership, none save for Goering and Hess were
combat veterans to my memory.  Khruschev might have personally shot Beria
or that might just be one of the myths the Fat Man tried to cast upon his
legacy but he certainly ordered him killed.

We have to reach back a far piece in US history to find a President who
actually killed someone.  Jackson and William Henry Harrison might well be
the only ones to have done so, though Teddy Roosevelt is another
possibility.  McKinley spent the most of hte Civil War as a Mess Sergeant,
which gave him little opportunity for physical combat.  Oh!  Truman!
Perhaps Truman did -- he was the Commander of a Field Artillery Battery in
the AEF in 1918 and might well have pulled a lanyard or two, turning some
Landsers into primordial ooze at a range of a klick or two, so he never got
to see the efficacy of his action.  But I have no proof of this.
Certainly, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush
I, Clinton (hovering under the bed, as you note), and Bush II never killed
anyone.

Marc


Marc

msmall@aya.yale.edu 
Cha robh b?s fir gun ghr?s fir!

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