LogFAQs > #934941280

By employing a trained police force made up of multiple schools of bending who can work together to combat criminals, and by finding methods of containment that can hold a bender without hurting anyone.

The thing about bending is that it's an inherently personal trait that people are born with. I know Korra took a different approach with the lore, but as far as the original show goes it's fairly traditional. You're born with the ability to bend one of the elements, like an extra sense or an additional limb. To remove that from someone is to strip them of that additional sense. It's cruel, in the same sense that it's cruel to cut someone's hand off for stealing a loaf of bread.

The Fire Nation was the Avatar world's equivalent to WWII Germany. They wiped out an entire race of benders, conquered and enslaved their way through multiple nations and used prisoners of war as slave labor to run their war machine. When Aang took Ozai's bending away, he was razing the entire Earth Kingdom to the ground. He was exercising an extreme measure against a person who would otherwise slaughter millions of innocent people. With Ozai out of the way, there are very few opponents with the amount of physical or political power that Ozai had.

Deciding who can and can't bend is a step towards authoritarianism - it's like cutting off a finger/limb or deafening someone, or somehow taking away their ability to read, and saying it's okay because the authorities deemed it to be a just punishment. Bending is also intrinsic to the culture where someone comes from, so in effect you're taking away a deeply entrenched part of their culture at the same time. Much like how the law prohibits cruel and unusual punishment, taking away another person's additional sense would be a fucked up punishment.

Characters like Asuka who are incredibly strong benders in their own right - and in her case, responsible for committing war crimes - are contained. A character like Amon could be contained. It's been a while since I've seen the show, but mercenaries like Combustion Man can most likely be contained in the right prison. To turn something of a holy figure like the Avatar into a tool for dispensing justice, taking someone who a great majority of the world idolises as a mythical being and having them decide who should and shouldn't be allowed to bend, would be exposing that figure to corruption. It would also add an element of fear and authority to the Avatar, which invites authoritarianism.

If Aang buys into that way of thinking, he's suddenly the arbiter of who deserves to lose one of their senses, and in a sense to strip away someone's culture. I don't think Aang would find this concept to be just. Powerful benders can be contained - Ozai was the most powerful man on the planet, both physically and politically, and in the situation in which Aang removed his bending he had a massive power boost and was actively about to commit mass genocide. Aang's options were to kill him, or remove his bending, to which Aang took the least lethal option to preserve Ozai's life. Turning that last-resort power that stopped a mass genocide into a tool of justice only serves to trivialize the circumstances in which Aang used those powers, and there are incredibly far-reaching repercussions for anyone who has their bending taken away that no-one should ever be the soul executor of.

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So you don't get to be a saint, martyrs never last this long
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