Ian
priscilla 1Notorious Assassinations
December 18th 2009 06:49
Many well known public figures have been murdered over time, usually for religious, ideological, political, or military reasons.
This article at Life.com covers many of them and below is a selection.
The full article contains many of the most famous assassinations including Abraham Lincoln, the Kennedys, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and more.
Franz Ferdinand (1863 - 1914), Archduke of Austria-Este and probable heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, traveled in a motorcade to reach the Sarajevo Town Hall on June 28, 1914, where seven members of a Serbian nationalist movement called the Black Hand waited to intercept his carriage with bombs. Only one was thrown, and it missed; an agitated Ferdinand complained, "I come here to visit, and I get bombs thrown at me!" Leaving the venue in his car, Ferdinand was shot in the jugular vein by Gavrilo Princip, who wished to right the earlier failure. Ferdinand and his pregnant wife Sophia both died in the attack, and the ensuing Austro-Serbian hostility is widely credited with sparking World War I.
A leader in Lenin's 1917 October Revolution (pictured here around 1940), politician, and theorist Leon Trotsky (1879 - 1940; born Lev Davidovich Bronstein) led the opposition from the left flank of the Communist Party against Joseph Stalin in the wake of Lenin's 1924 death. Coming up short, he was exiled in 1929. On August 20, 1940, NKVD agent Ramon Mercador tracked Trotsky down in Mexico, and struck him in the skull with an ice axe. Trotsky, a 60-year-old man, fought back and spat on his assailant. He died the following day.
Nonviolent revolutionary Mohandas Gandhi (1869 - 1948) fasts for what turns out to be the last time in January 1948. On January 30, he was shot three times in the chest by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu nationalist who blamed him for the violent 1947 partition of Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan, which made both nations independent but led to the slaughter of hundreds of thousands. Having just survived an assassination attempt, Gandhi spoke two days before his death: "If I am to die by the bullet of a mad man, I must do so smiling. There must be no anger within me. God must be in my heart and on my lips."
Among the thousands of mourners gathered in New York's Central Park after Lennon's murder, one asks the pertinent question about the seemingly senseless crime. On December 8, 1980, after a long day sitting for an interview and a Rolling Stone magazine photoshoot, Lennon (1940 - 1980) was gunned down in front of his apartment building. Killer Mark David Chapman then sat on a curb and waited for police to arrive, ultimately claiming that the J.D. Salinger novel The Catcher in the Rye would explain everything. It didn't.
This painting shows the conspirators including Casca, Brutus, Cimber, and Cassius. Caesar's death on the Roman Senate floor on March 15, 44 BC, set off a series of internecine clashes that neither the conspirators nor the Roman Republic would survive.
This article at Life.com covers many of them and below is a selection.
The full article contains many of the most famous assassinations including Abraham Lincoln, the Kennedys, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and more.
Archduke Franz Ferdinand
Leon Trotsky Falls To Stalin
Mahatma Gandhi's Final Fast
Why Was John Lennon Killed?
'Et Tu, Brute? Then Fall, Caesar ...'
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