What makes Gaddafi's death any worse than Mussolini's or Ceaușescu's?

[ButterflyBlood]

What makes Gaddafi's death any worse than Mussolini's or Ceaușescu's?

I mean seriously, I've never heard anyone say the killing of those was a bad thing. I fail to see what makes those fine but Gaddafi some type of horrific atrocity. And please don't try to argue that the joke "trials" either received constitutes due process or a fair trial.

[tblue]

1. I don't celebrate anybody's death.

I would hate myself if I did. Just don't have it in me.

[roguevalley]

21. me either. the people who did it have the burden. I won't help.

I'm sick of death and murder and dying after all these years.

[yurbud]

2. after the crap Bush made up about Saddam, it's hard to take a claims that someone is the boogie man

with more than a grain of salt.

[ellisonz]

3. That's like blinders on a horse.

[KoKo]

26. not really....most of the long time DU'ers here do have the history of Iraq..

in archives and they can pull data out of their files about this.

[geek tragedy]

5. Bush lied about WMDs, not Saddam's status as a genocidal monster. nt

[ButterflyBlood]

6. Plus Gaddafi's crimes were well documented long before Bush

Asshole had it coming just for Lockerbie alone.

[SkyDaddy7]

24. "Asshole had it coming just for Lockerbie alone"

I agree the nutty asshole did have it coming for both Lockerbie & the 1986 Berlin Nightclub Bombing as far as us Americans are concerned...But when it comes to how he treated the Libyan people for over 40yrs I am surprised he was not carved up into bits in pieces once they got their hands on him.

I have not figured out whether folks here on DU are genuine in their claims that Gaddafi is not as bad as he is made out to be & that he death was this horrible tragedy of justice...Or if their utter hatred & disgust for President Obama is the driving force behind the comments? Could be both.

Seriously, what drives people to make post like this I will never understand...
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=433x802238

Gaddafi & Chavez get more respect than Obama does here on DU...SAD.

[whatchamacallit]

8. No we just provided him with the chem weapons and encouraged him

[yurbud]

11. he was not a good guy, but they gilded the lily in other ways too, like the claim that he was

using an aircraft fuselage to train hijackers that was on 60 Minutes before the war. They threw a lot of stuff against the wall to see what would stick.

I don't think they felt constrained by the truth in any sense, and when Washington gets the bug to go to war, that has always been the case. The most recently confirmed example is the tapes of LBJ saying nothing happened at the Gulf of Tonkin, which surprisingly, even George McGovern confirmed Congress knew at the time but kept their mouth shut because it was time for war.

Even Bush's dad hammed it up about Saddam for the first Gulf War with that incubator story that was a complete fabrication by Hill & Knowlton.

If you believe any of our governments pronouncements about countries on our shit list at face value, you haven't done your homework.

[pnwmom]

7. Gaddafi hasn't exactly been hiding under a barrel.

His actions have been there for the world to see -- and to judge.

[MADem]

4. His death was a bit brutal, but it wasn't terribly drawn out.

It appears that he was shot not too long after they grabbed him.

People who are over-eager to grant Ghaddafi the rights he failed to grant his own people are free to hold those opinions, but I'm betting that those who had family who perished by his hand have little patience for giving a murdering asshole the time of day.

[Jim Lane]

13. I don't agree with your "asshole" argument.

You write:

People who are over-eager to grant Ghaddafi the rights he failed to grant his own people are free to hold those opinions, but I'm betting that those who had family who perished by his hand have little patience for giving a murdering asshole the time of day.

This is the kind of case that tests your sincerity in espousing principles. Even murdering assholes have rights, including rights that they themselves fail to grant to others.

Your side of the argument is that of the McCarthy era's strident anti-Communists, who said that the Communist Party wasn't protected by the First Amendment because Communists themselves don't support freedom of speech. The position ultimately taken by the courts (after, admittedly, several false starts) was that freedom includes freedom for the thought we hate. Similarly, our principles of fairness and due process of law include according those rights to those who would deny them to others.

There's no merit to saying that we should judge appropriate conduct in this situation by asking what Gaddafi himself would have done. When I pick my role models, I like to set my sights a little higher.

[MADem]

14. The man is NOT a US citizen. He has no "rights" under our Constitution.

Your McCarthy example is total apples and oranges.

I don't presume to impose US Constitutional law on other nations. Just because that's the way we happen to do it does not mean that others must follow our example. See, there's no "First Amendment" in Libya. They'd wipe their ass on it. It's not their law.

Ghaddafi has the same "rights" that he, as a tyrant crushing the nation of Libya, gave to his fellow citizens--the "right" to be tortured and murdered by whatever SOB happened to wield the most power within the nation at the time.

You live by that shit, you die by it. I will not lose sleep, and it has nothing at all to do with "principles." It has to do with the Golden Rule--and he got himself a fair and well-deserved dose of it, in the land of his birth, where he tortured his fellow Libyans for decades, and used his power to murder others abroad. Fuck him.

[Jim Lane]

15. Your post reinforces my analogy.

You wrote, "You live by that shit, you die by it." That characterizes the McCarthyite mentality.

Of course the First Amendment imposes no restraints on Libyans in Libya. I was drawing an analogy. Your version of the Golden Rule is the same reasoning that was used to deny First Amendment rights to opponents of the First Amendment. You would deny fair treatment of a captured foe to those who would deny fair treatment to a captured foe.

And yes, it does have to do with principles. Following a principle means that you follow it even when it's inconvenient or when there's a strong temptation not to follow it.

I'll assume that you would generally honor such principles as due process of law. It's just that, in this instance, you'd put a higher value on the principle of retribution against evildoers. I wouldn't.

[MADem]

17. Well, no, it doesn't. Not in the slightest. You went on about the First Amendment.

That concept is foreign to Libya. They don't operate under our Constitutional rules.

You also don't seem to understand that "we" didn't capture the foe; the Libyan rebels did. It's not our show. They caught him, they killed him, in accordance with THEIR sense of wartime, battlefield justice.

He lived by the sword of Libya, and died by it, too. Not by the First Amendment or the shenanigans of Jos. McCarthy, who was a blowhard given a platform for much too long, who created suspicion, destroyed careers, and was a bigmouthed bully--not a guy who murdered and tortured thousands of people. The very comparison of the two is hyperbolic in the extreme.


And no one took a golden pistol and shot Joe McCarthy in the head after a revolutionary war, either.

If you didn't hold the pistol to Ghaddafi's head, you can rest easy. I have no compunctions about not giving a shit about how that guy found justice--and despite its truncated process, it was justice-- at long last. He killed a LOT of people in Berlin. He also killed a lot of people on Flt 103. They're still digging up the thousands of "disappeared" in Libya.

I direct my "principles" towards thoughts of those dead innocents and their families.

[Jim Lane]

dupe

[Jim Lane]

18. You and I have different understandings of the concept of "analogy."

Also, you're correct that I didn't personally pull any triggers. Nevertheless, the whole situation is a legitimate subject for Americans to consider, given that our military's aid played a role in bringing about this result.

[MADem]

19. Well, here is my understanding of the term

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/analogy


a·nal·o·gy
    Show IPA

noun, plural -gies.
1.
a similarity between like features of two things, on which a comparison may be based: the analogy between the heart and a pump.

2.
similarity or comparability: I see no analogy between your problem and mine.

3.
Biology. an analogous relationship.

4.
Linguistics.
a.
the process by which words or phrases are created or re-formed according to existing patterns in the language, as when shoon was re-formed as shoes, when -ize is added to nouns like winter to form verbs, or when a child says foots for feet.

b.
a form resulting from such a process.

5.
Logic. a form of reasoning in which one thing is inferred to be similar to another thing in a certain respect, on the basis of the known similarity between the things in other respects.

[DavidDvorkin]

9. Mussolini is a good comparison

It was surely obvious ahead of time that once the rebel soldiers got hold of him, he wouldn't live much longer.

[Jennicut]

10. It is well documented throughout history that brutal dictators mostly

come to a brutal end themselves...or die of old age if they are lucky like Stalin. Nothing new here.

[Jim Lane]

12. There are clear differences.

The United States military played no role in Ceausescu's death. In Gaddafi's case, we didn't pull the trigger on that particular bullet, but we were heavily involved in the whole process. We therefore have an obligation to consider the consequences of our actions.

Mussolini was the leader of a nation with which we were at war (mutual declarations of war, back in the day when that sort of legal formality was still considered significant).

There are colorable arguments on each side of the Gaddafi question, but the Ceausescu and Mussolini analogies aren't all that relevant.

[AngkorWot]

16. Obama's the president and it's a foreign policy success for him.

Seriously. That's the only reason people are whining.

[frazzled]

20. I don't have the heart to even care, because I remember my friend's death

in the Pan Am 103 bombing. And I've never forgiven Qaddafi for it. He was a brilliant recombinant DNA expert who spearheaded major discoveries in the fight against AIDS. He was 35 years old. He was giving a talk in London and trying to get back to his wife. Besides his loss, think of all the AIDS patients who might not have died had his work not been interrupted so brutally. (His research did lead to the major drugs that now keep AIDS from being a death sentence, but they would have been realized much more quickly under his aegis.)

[great white snark]

22. My condolences frazzled.

So much was lost that day but thank goddess you're friend's research was not.

[joshcryer]

23. Wow, what a tragic story, I'm so sorry to hear that. :(

What a loss.

[Arkana]

25. Considering we didn't kill him, I have to wonder.

Mussolini was shot and hanged upside-down in the Milan town square.

My great-great grandmother lived in Italy during the Fascist regime, and she refused to believe he was dead when her husband told her the news. He had to physically take her to see it before she believed him.