When I was in Junior High / Early High School I went through quite the loompanics phase (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loompanics), buying lots of the books available there, including The Poor Man's James Bond, and several volumes of the How to Kill Series.
My stepfather was remarkably chill about it, considering our relationship, but maybe he didn't differentiate between those books and others as he never really understood the value of reading.
At any rate the only thing to come out of it (for those who worry) was that I got several talkings to when a rash of bomb threats hit our school. Maybe that was the first time I ever got put on a list!
on edit: I should probably mention that the books weren't very well written either, but I suppose literary quality was not on the top of their requirements list.
The text links to 'Rise and Kill: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations', which is amazing. It's great at explaining the motivation/reasoning behind the killings of the Mossad.
And the sequel, Claudius the God. Some of the page-turniest yet most glowingly literary fiction you're likely to read!
This was Graves' idea of making a quick buck by dashing off a potboiler, btw:
> Graves stated in an interview with Malcolm Muggeridge in 1965, that he wrote I, Claudius mainly because he needed the money to pay off a debt, having been let down in a land deal. He needed to raise £4000, but with the success of the books he brought in £8000 in six months, thus extricating himself from his precarious financial position. [2]
I like this book called “Assassination” where the author recreates the stories of 12 presidential assassination and assassination attempts using legos.
This is a bit off-topic, but Navalny calling his killer and pranking him into telling all kinds of nasty details of Navalny's own killing attempt is mind-bogging [1]. I am sure this is now part of all secrets services of the world 101 trainings.
Full audio with English transcript: [2].
There is also a bit of background told by Navalny later on, e.g. the name Maxim Sergeevich Ustinov was not really random.
Best to take a look at the submitting usernames before making that assertion. There’s a lot of variety for this domain, mostly from established accounts. It’s a fairly popular website.
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
We went to where North Korea tricked their agents for Kim Jong-nam's assignation.
I expected some sort of back alley brothel, but it was just the number one spot on Tripadvisor.
I think like all these things don't get stuck into a rut thinking the people doing this stuff are amazing or smart. You just need belief in yourself, and probably not even that. I bet Kim Jong-un top assassins had imposer syndrome too. (The on-ground recruits thought they were on a game show)
> "Hitler, uncharacteristically, cut short the speech he was making to go and plan the invasion of France. Had he continued speaking, he would have been blown to pieces in November 1939. That would have surely have been a very good thing because, in the period between that event and the June 1944 bomb plot, two-and-a-half million German soldiers died."
Ah yes, the group of people who were famously killed en masse because of Hitler between 1939 and 1944... German soldiers.
That's a very troubling quote, so I went to the article, hoping it wasn't as bad as it sounded. But it seemed bad in the article, too.
The lead-up alludes to what I suspect was the author's intent, in that way of putting it (i.e., saying the effect relative to some goals of the assassin), but that's really not communicated as clearly as it must be.
I can understand that a writer might miss this communication failure, when in tunnel vision on some narrow point they were trying to make. But I'd hope a professional editor would've caught it. Perhaps there's an understated standard proofreading markup notation like "WTF?!" with a firmly-pressed circle around it. Then the writer would realize their communication mistake, and feel awful about it, but also relived it was caught before publication.
Ideally, that never would've made it to publication without editing. But a small consolation is that at least we readers can learn from the mistake, and be less likely to make that mistake ourselves.
But also need to say, that the numbers are off. WW II cost significantly less than 6 million German soldiers' lifes. The author states that 7 million German soldiers died.
But yeah. Stating the death of German soldiers as the most important outcome from WW II is imho at least problematic. It shows a lack of empathy and historic sensitivity.
> Stating the death of German soldiers as the most important outcome from WW II
Who stated that?
The quote explicitly relates to Elser, whose motive in Hitler's assassination was to save Germany's workers and common people from war.
So mentioning the losses of German "cannon fodder" seems appropriate. Common Germans are what Elser cared about (and failed to save). I see no evil motive or lack of empathy on author's part.
