Thus Always to Tyrants – We Wish

Mick Stockinger beat me to the Latin rendering which still adorns Virginia’s state seal showing the Goddess Virtue standing over a defeated (and presumably dead) tyrant.
It is a phrase losing its meaning; the trial and execution of Saddam Hussein is an anomaly. In an article completely undermining its headline “Death, Exile Come with Being a Dictator” the author mentions 19 dictators, other than Saddam Hussein, but only two of these were executed (then again, we all die eventually so the headline writer is technically correct). Many twentieth century dictators never answer for their crimes:

India's independence leader Mohandas K. Gandhi said dictators "can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall." That hasn't always proven true. Russia's Josef Stalin, North Korea's Kim Il-Sung, China's Mao Zedong, Spain's Francisco Franco, Albania's Enver Hoxha and Syria's Hafez Assad all died in power. Augusto Pinochet of Chile arranged a comfortable retirement before handing over power. The global record of bringing tyrants to justice has been mixed.

Of the two executed dictators noted in the article, Nicolae Ceausescu and Samuel Doe, neither received public trials like Saddam.

One dictator, Charles Taylor (Liberia) is awaiting trial with the International Criminal Court in The Hague virtually guaranteeing no death sentence will be involved. Even arriving at a verdict seems beyond this court’s capabilities - Slobodan Milosevic died during his on-going multi-year trial.

What were the fates of some of the other deposed dictators?

Idi Amin, who as president of Uganda ordered the massacre of thousands of his countrymen and impoverished his people, managed to get away to Libya after neighboring Tanzania overthrow his regime in 1979. Amin later settled in Saudi Arabia, where he died in 2003.

Ethiopia's Col. Mengistu Haile Mariam escaped to Zimbabwe in 1991 as rebels led by ethnic minority Tigreans closed in on his capital, ending a 17-year dictatorship notorious for its bloody purges…Mengistu has a luxury villa, bodyguards and a pension - payback for having provided Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe with arms, money and training facilities during the 1972-80 war to end white rule in former Rhodesia.

Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier of Haiti used his family's longtime ties to France to escape retribution when the Haitian military ousted his regime in 1986.

First posted at UNCoRRELATED