Sic Semper .  .  .

Tyrants come and go, sometimes dying in their beds, but more often than not dying at the hands of long-suffering subjects or conspirators. Hitler (1945) shot himself while the Red Army closed in on his bunker. Nero (68 a.d.) cut his throat before he could be beaten to death. Stalin (1953), after suffering a stroke, probably died because his underlings were too frightened to summon a physician. Samuel Doe of Liberia (1990) was tortured before he was executed; Doe, in turn, had tortured his predecessor William Tolbert (1980) before murdering him.

AP / SergeyPonomarev

The Scrapbook was reminded of these melancholy facts by the grisly last moments of Libya’s Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, who seems to have been shot in a minor skirmish, dragged wounded from a drainpipe, beaten by rebel fighters, and dispatched with bullets to the head and chest. Few mourn the loss of Qaddafi, but more than a few seem to have been shaken by its manner. “You never like to see anybody come to the kind of end that he did,” President Obama told Jay Leno on the Tonight Show. Not since the swift trial and execution of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceau-sescu and his wife (1989) has summary justice so captured the attention of the world. 

In The Scrapbook’s view, this is probably the consequence of modern technology. When Robespierre was overthrown and executed during the Terror (1794), there were no cameras to record the event, or telegraph wires to disseminate the news. But the sight of the dead Mussolini (1945) hanging upside down beside his mistress​—​duly chronicled on film​—​gave the civilized world a moment’s pause. The fact that Qaddafi’s last moments were recorded on video for posterity has contributed to a certain official unease, and the inevitable calls (from U.N. headquarters and Amnesty International) for an investigation and possible prosecution for war crimes.