If you are a tyrant with an extended period of totalitarian rule over an oppressed people, there seems recently to be a tendency for you to realize the End of Days ignominiously down a rabbit hole.  Saddam Hussein in 2003 was discovered hiding in a underground pipe absurdly demanding an interaction with the president of the United States upon capture. Today the dramatist African king of kings was discovered in a similar rabbit hole and, despite his pleas, meted out  a more acute sentence by his captors.   There is a certain sympathy that develops with  a surrounded individual who faces ruthless justice, no matter the circumstances.  The president for life  of Romania Nicoli Ceausescu came back from a state trip in 1989 to discover Romania had determined to significantly shorten his tenure of life president to something more like president of the week.  The Italian Caesar Mussolini at the end of World War II had his fascist rule end hanging naked upside down from a lightpole in a definitive end to the fascist experiment.  Today the tyrant Muammar Gaddafi of Libya was pulled from a rabbit hole  by combatants in the fight for his home town in Libya and the long rule of the king of kings was ended with a bullet to the head, his body paraded like a lifeless puppet by jubilant executioners.

     It is easy to feel some sympathy, perhaps a tug of regret in the digusting way his mortally injured body was paraded like a clown corpse for amusement.  It is doubly ironic to reflect that the powers that  contributed to his downfall fairly recently supported his nation’s nomination to the head of the United Nations Human Rights Council, bought his oil, turned their heads to his violent suppresion of his own people the Berbers, his ruthless military adventures in North Africa, and the decades log support for the most radical of terrorist activities. Well, no surprise regarding the hypocritical actions between nation states should be contemplated.  Its been going on as long as there have been nation states.  Gaddafi has played the west for decades like a fine fiddle, brandishing the victim card, while carrying out a targeted program of some of the most cowardly and vile actions against innocents.  Watching the balding old man on video today paraded like a mannequin almost made one forget all that.

    Careful focus regarding this man’s legacy causes the sympathy to fade very rapidly, however.  The singular event that makes his humiliating treatment today gratifying was his direct role in the massacre of innocents , in the perpetrated mass murder he achieved over Lockerbie Scotland in 1988.  Stung by President Reagan’s direct attack for his earlier attempt to  mass kill US servicemen in a Berlin  nightclub in 1986, Gaddafi hungered for revenge and in typical cowardly fashion determined a means of indirect slaughter against the citadel of democracy, the United States.  Through his agents, Gaddafi  had a pressure sensitive bomb placed on the Pan Am  New York to London flight on December 21st, 1988, the bomb exploding just prior to the Boeing 747’s decent over Lockerbie, Scotland, resulting in the horrific slaughter of 243 passengers and 16 crew members. The destruction of innocents included 189 American and 43 British citizens as well as citizens of 19 other nations, as well as 11 individuals on the ground from falling debris.  The tyrant never saw any irony in continuing to interact with the countries whose citizens he had murdered for spite, and in a particularly onerous hypocrisy, the British government who had lost so many in this attack, gave Gaddafi last year the ultimate triumph by releasing the bomb-maker from British prison for “medical” reasons, soiling forever the memories of all the innocents who died in the horrific terrorist attack.  The deaths included high school students, artists, musicians, authors, and business officials, all cut down in the prime of life by this vainglorious clown.  It was weeks before all the spewed body parts could be identified and removed from Lockerbie gardens and rooftops.   Gaddafi always took special pride in his moment in the sun as an unstable state terrorist, and nothing in his future years, the cozy relationships with other humanity stalwarts such as Mugabe, Assad, Chavez, Arafat, and Farrakan, seemed to fulfill for him the sense of triumph that he felt when he was a party to the special killing fields he achieved over Scotland.  The price to so many for the world kowtowing to this cowardly bully was immeasurable and the bully’s death decades later doesn’t come close to evening the score.

     For Lockerbie alone, the despoiling of the tyrant’s pathetic worldly vessel performed today is simply insufficient.  No matter how the end was inappropriately reached, or what eventually replaces this pathetic figure, the End, like those of Hussein, Bin Laden, Zarqawi, and Awlaki , and hopefully soon, Assad and Mugabe, can’t come soon enough.  Sic Semper Tyrannis.