Doesn't make torturing them useful

I disagree, but not enough to be very loud about it. I think they're largely indistinguishable and the way capitalist companies and power structures are organized, with each level of managers deliberately obscuring and diffusing responsibility, means they're much less likely to command the loyalty of partisan fighters. They're not kings or warlords. they're CEOs, part of an entire class of useless MBAs who are almost completely interchangeable. Tsar Nicholaus and his family were powerful symbols of the Russian state and some people really would be willing to take great risks to secure them, even if they only viewed them as a symbol of legitimacy. I don't think America has any partisans who would make a daring raid to rescue Zucc or Bezos (maybe Musk but the antique troll face mask and the convoy of exploding cars would reveal their plan before they could do much harm). In addition American capitalism is so ruthlessly individualistic that it doesn't inspire that kind of selfless, courageous loyalty. Even Trump, the best demagogue America has going, can't bring out any real number of fighters. The proud boys actually engaged in hand to hand street fighting never seem to have amounted to more than a few hundred people, and only seemed more prevalent because of media focus (and our own desire for riot porn). I don't mean to say they're not dangerous - One or two people with guns can cause enormous harm, but they're mostly only dangerous to civilians. Unless the real US army is significantly more ideologically motivated than I think they are there's no equivalent to the white army right now. That could certainly change, but I don't think it exists right now and certainly not for tech billionaires.

But yeah, I don't care about shooting them one way or the other. I'm opposed to torture because I don't think it serves a purpose and because indulging in sadism harms the torturer and wounds the, god help me, purity of our cause. Violence is justifiable but there's never any reason to torture and doing it will demoralize more people than it will inspire. It will also normalize torture. Seeing it done at the highest ranks will tell the rank and file that it is an acceptable behavior, and while we can clearly attribute massive suffering to Bezos or Musk, rank and file troops taking revenge on whoever they perceive to be an enemy will inevitable devolve in to massacres and death squads. Add in crowd psychology - Even a handful of sadists can dominate an entire group of people if they're forceful and charismatic enough, and it often takes an exceptional person, like the Warrant Officer who stopped the killing at Mai Lai and ordered his crew cut down the American troops with miniguns if they tried to hurt the people he was rescuing, to intervene. There were many, many, many Mai Lais, but only at Mai Lai did someone force US troops to stop. Once it starts it's almost impossible to stop. Even if you hang the perpetrators it's just as likely other troops, already traumatized by combat, will blame their leaders and the massacre victims for the hanging of the convicted killers rather than take the lesson.

Keep in mind, Cuba only killed a handful of hundred people. Like 300 or 700, I can't remember which. They were Batistas worst guys - The torturers and assassins and death squad guys. When the West Germans Fourth Reich finally got their greedy little hands on the files of the dreaded and omniscient Stasi they apparently only found 7 extrajudicial killings. Not seven thousand. Not seven hundred. Not even seventy. Seven.

When the Nazis surrendered at Stalingrad huge numbers of them died. But when their commanding officer was asked about the deaths he insisted that the Soviets treated them as well as they could. Most of the Nazis died because they weren't on the brink of starvation, they were already starving to death when they finally surrendered and there simply wasn't enough food in the region at that time. A lot of Nazis died in captivity, but from what I understand almost all of them died due to the condition they were in when they surrendered, and due to the horrid scarcity of the war years. As far as I know there was no deliberate program on the part of the Soviets to kill Nazi rank and file troops in any numbers. I was kind of aghast at how lenient the Soviets were with Nazi POWs give the horrible acts of mass murder carried out against Soviet POWs and the innumerable Nazi atrocities. I expected retribution on a massive scale, but as far as I'm aware that isn't what happened. Like don't get me wrong, like 300,000 Nazis died in captivity, but as far as I know it was due to scarcity and privation throughout the USSR in the war years, not any deliberate program of killing. And most of them were eventually repatriated after a few years being held for labor.

And this is under Stalin. Stalin the fierce and terrible 100 billion victims of communism guy. If Stalin of all people can recognize the value of limiting acts of retribution against literal Nazis captured in the course of a murderous siege that slaughtered a million civilians we can too. If the Red Army soldiers who had witnessed their homes and friends and comrades slaughtered by the Fascist war machine can stay their hands and refrain from torturing every Nazi they encounter to death we can too. If we can't be as collected and pragmatic as the people who suffered in the worst conditions in the worst war in human history we're doing something very, very wrong.

If I'm wrong about this, if there was some mass program of torturing Nazis, please correct me. But I don't think there was, and I think we have a responsibility to live up to our comrades who lived through the most horrific conditions imaginable without giving in to blood lust and sadism.

It depends [Puyi] but sure, when it has an extrinsic use that is different

It won't make you happy. It'll just make you in to a traumatized monster. People who engage in mass killing and come out intact were monsters going in. And of the people who weren't monsters going in, they either come out broken in ways that can never be healed, or they come out monsters. Killing people in combat is hard enough and breaks people horribly. Slaughtering helpless captives is corrosive to your psyche in horrible, horrible, horrible ways. And if you do it in the moment, if you do it in a fugue of bloodlust and anger, you'll spend the rest of your life terrified of losing control, of unleashing that same hatred and madness on people you love in a moment of terror or dissociation.

Have you heard stories of people who come back from war and their kids know to never, ever, ever wake them up, because their parent will pull a gun or attack them without any awareness that they're not back in the war fighting their enemies? That happens to totally normal people, even when they don't commit atrocities, even when they barely see combat. War is the worst thing that can happen. It destroys people in the most horrible ways. And torture and sadism and mass murder are worse.

Seriously, go read up on PTSD among war veterans. Pick a war, any war. I've seen account of PTSD in warriors from the first world war, from the First Crusade, from the Roman Legions. I've read about knights who spent the rest of their lives waking up screaming, Muslim Faris who never recovered from the battles of the crusades, all kinds of horrible shit.

If you indulge that bloodlust, that desire to inflict pain, you're hurting yourself and achieving nothing. It's going to be hard enough to heal from a revolution. We're going to lose and entire generation to trauma and PTSD and alcohol and despair, no matter what happens. Winning, even under the best case, will be a human tragedy of enormous proportions. We don't want to make that worse than it needs to be.