Well, brucie, there is no rule that perfectly fits all situations, is there? But does one have to kill an Adolf Hitler or a Saddam Hussein to stop them from doing harm? Nope. One simply has to deprive them of the power to do harm. Saddam is at the moment deprived of such power, and I see no need to kill him. What good would it do? If it satisfies various people's thirst for vengeance, is that necessarily a good thing? I don't think so, but those people will not see it my way.

The Allied powers would very much have liked to take Hitler alive, in order to try him in a spectacular fashion before the whole World, and then execute him, as they did some of his underlings and some Japanese officers. It seems odd to me that people want to take someone alive, only so that they can later kill him ceremonially after going through all kinds of legal machinations first, but I think it has something to do with the sadistic urge in people. They want to glory in the examination, humiliation, and slow destruction of their chosen antichrist, prior to actually destroying him. This is not admirable. It's sadistic.

Does the sadism of the wrongdoer justify further sadism by his captors?

The Allies were discomfited by the fact that Hermann Goering committed suicide with a hidden poison pill that he bit down on just minutes before his scheduled execution by hanging! This is really ironical. The man ended up dead in any case, but they didn't like it that he did it on his own schedule instead of theirs!

What it was really about was POWER. Who had the power there, was the question. If Hermann Goering still had the power to take his own life, then he felt that he was in charge of the decision, and his captors felt left out of the loop of decision-making.

And that is all rather silly, isn't it? Sounds like a big battle of fragile egos to me.

I tend more toward a Japanese viewpoint, as follows: If a captured enemy would prefer to honorably take his own life, then why not let him?

But that requires having some belief that the captured enemy (or anyone) is deserving of such honor...something that is a given, as far as I'm concerned, regardless of how much I disagree with what that enemy may have done.

- LH