Getting a Woody about snipers

I don't have a dog in the fight in the debate arising out of Clint Eastwood's new movie "American Sniper." I may get to see it at some point, but there are plenty of good movies coming out that I haven't and won't see.

Over in bien pensant land, we are supposed to outraged about it, though. Michael Moore explains:

So there!

The invaluable Walter Russell Mead found this bit of inconvenient history:

That's Woody "This Land Is Your Land" Guthrie, paying tribute to a Russian woman, Lyudmila Pavlichenko, who was a sniper who felled over 300 Nazis in Odessa and Sevastopol. The lyrics extol her virtues and her marksmanship:

Miss Pavlichenko's well known to fame;
Russia's your country, fighting is your game;
Your smile shines as bright as any new morning sun.
But more than three hundred nazidogs fell by your gun.

I would imagine that at least one of the nazidogs was somebody's uncle, but we'll leave that aside. It's possible that she was actually a coward, but Woody Guthrie didn't think so. I'd even argue that he was a little smitten:

In your hot summer's heat, in your cold wintery snow,
In all kinds of weather you track down your foe;
This world will love your sweet face the same way I've done,
'Cause more than three hundred nazzy hound fell by your gun.

For her part, Miss Pavlichenko offered no apologies for her performance, even appearing in the United States in 1942 to build support for the war efforts on the Eastern Front:

Just two months after leaving Sevastopol, the young officer found herself in the United States for the first time in 1942, reading press accounts of her sturdy black boots that “have known the grime and blood of battle,” and giving blunt descriptions of her day-to-day life as a sniper. Killing Nazis, she said, aroused no “complicated emotions” in her. “The only feeling I have is the great satisfaction a hunter feels who has killed a beast of prey.”

To another reporter she reiterated what she had seen in battle, and how it affected her on the front line. “Every German who remains alive will kill women, children and old folks,” she said.“Dead Germans are harmless. Therefore, if I kill a German, I am saving lives.”

Better yet was what she said in Chicago later in the tour:

Her time with Eleanor Roosevelt clearly emboldened her, and by the time they reached Chicago on their way to the West Coast, Pavlichenko had been able to brush aside the “silly questions” from the women press correspondents about “nail polish and do I curl my hair.” By Chicago, she stood before large crowds, chiding the men to support the second front. “Gentlemen,” she said, “I am 25 years old and I have killed 309 fascist occupants by now. Don’t you think, gentlemen, that you have been hiding behind my back for too long?”  Her words settled on the crowd, then caused a surging roar of support.

Woody Guthrie had a sign on his guitar:

It says "This Machine Kills Fascists"

I don't know about you, but if you need a fascist killed, you'd have better luck caling the sniper, regardless of what Michael Moore thinks.