History RewardedAsATraitorDeserves / RealLife

* Kings are historically known to be deadly to the assassins of other kings, in good part from self-interest: they don't want people to start thinking regicide is morally acceptable.
** UsefulNotes/AlexanderTheGreat is known to have done this upon the assassination of Darius III, the late king of [[UsefulNotes/TheAchaemenidEmpire Persia]], and Alexander's primary antagonist up until that point. Upon catching the assassin, Bessus, he was turned over for Persian-style torture and execution. Don't expect a king to favor regicide. Darius, on the other hand, was [[DueToTheDead buried in Babylon with full royal honors]].
** In Creator/SnorriSturluson's [[Literature/{{Heimskringla}} sagas of the old Norwegian kings]], King Olav has beaten one of the last great pagan leaders and said leader has gone into hiding. The King promises to place a ring around the neck of whoever brings him his enemy (likely so he can publicly baptize him, a stronger victory for the Christian king). The pagan leader's thrall, Kark, who has fled with him, hears of this and kills his master for the reward... and Olav repays him by cutting his head off, indeed giving him a ring around his neck -- of blood, rather than gold. It should be noted, however, that Kark was not actually killed for being a traitor, but for being a thrall who killed a nobleman; in fact, Jarl Håkon had already warned Kark about this: had Kark been a freeman, he would have received the promised reward (which in the saga is "wealth and great praise", not "a ring around the neck"). The original aesop of the story was basically "slaves need to know their place", but due to ValuesDissonance, modern readers have often preferred to assume that the "noble" king Olav Tryggvasson simply despised traitors; in fact, in the saga, king Olav does not ask for Jarl Håkon to be "brought to him", but says he will reward anyone who will "do him harm" and then crudely mocks the head of the dead jarl after it is brought to him.

* In 1306, Kildrummy Castle in Aberdeen was betrayed to Edward I of England by the castle blacksmith, Osborne, in exchange for gold. When the battle was won and as Osborne came to collect his gold, the English [[SarcasmMode rewarded Osborne]] by [[HoistByHisOwnPetard pouring molten gold down his throat]].
* {{Averted}} in the case of UsefulNotes/BenedictArnold. While not especially well-liked by the British, he was (despite his treasonous plot ''failing'') still paid and given a commission as a brigadier general in the British Army. He still died in debt and was despised by the few million people he had betrayed, though. It should be noted that the British perceived him as abandoning treachery, not engaging in it. He was, after all, switching sides from rebelling against the king to fighting for him. That being said, it wasn't all wine and roses for him. No one of high position trusted him enough to deal him in with the East India Company at the posting he desired. An attempt to go into mercantilism in Canada in the [=1780s=] resulted in bad business dealings and a lot of hurt feelings. And trying his hand at privateering to take advantage of the French Revolution in the [=1790s=] almost got him hanged by the French in Guadeloupe.
* In the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1842_retreat_from_Kabul 1842 retreat from Kabul]], Major General Elphinstone abandoned his army to its fate ''during battle'' and surrendered himself to the Afghan leader Akbar Khan. The Afghans, perhaps disgusted with the feeble, sickly old coward, left him to die in a dungeon. Eventually, his remains were sent to British India, where he was buried in an unmarked grave.

** In the end, the Nazis "rewarded" all Jews equally: it didn't matter how enthusiastically you collaborated with them, in the end, you would end up being shot or sent to the gas chamber. You could win a bit more time and better surroundings for yourself if you turned traitor, however. A big example would be the ''Sonderkommando'', who assisted the SS in burning the bodies of dead prisoners and ushering other prisoners into the gas chambers but was taken out and shot on a fixed basis for [[HeKnowsTooMuch knowing too much]]. (However, [[AnOfferYouCantRefuse not all]] ''[[AnOfferYouCantRefuse Sonderkommando]]'' [[AnOfferYouCantRefuse collaborated willingly]].)

** On a related note, in [[https://www.linkedin.com/posts/800poundguerrilla_full-interview-with-yuri-bezmenov-the-four-activity-6865993506284986368-k2cZ this interview]] with Yuri Bezmenov ([[DefectorFromCommieLand himself a traitor, as a former KGB agent]] who had been assigned to India), he notes that a major step in the Soviet Union's infiltration and subversion of other countries was getting politicians and other figures of major public influence to undermine people's faith in non-communist government, and setting those loyal to them against all who disagree, with the expectation that, when the Soviet Union took over, they would be rewarded for betraying their country and its original principles. As he elaborates afterwards (in his own words):

---> '''Yuri Bezmenov''': [...] When their job is completed, [[YouHaveOutlivedYourUsefulness they are not needed any more.]] They know too much. Some of them, when they get disillusioned, when they see that Marxist-Leninists come to power—obviously they get offended—they think that they will come to power. That will never happen, of course. They will be lined up against the wall and shot.

* {{Averted}} in the case of UsefulNotes/BenedictArnold. While not especially well-liked by the British, he was (despite his treasonous plot ''failing'') still paid and given a commission as a brigadier general in the British Army. He still died in debt and was despised by the few million people he had betrayed, though. It should be noted that the British perceived him as abandoning treachery, not engaging in it. He was, after all, switching sides from rebelling against the king to fighting for him.

** UsefulNotes/AlexanderTheGreat is known to have done this upon the assassination of Darius III, the late king of Persia, and Alexander's primary antagonist up until that point. Upon catching the assassin, Bessus, he was turned over for Persian-style torture and execution. Don't expect a king to favor regicide. Darius, on the other hand, was [[DueToTheDead buried in Babylon with full royal honors]].

* This was the Roman Empire's modus operandi, usually speaking:
** Pompey's nemesis Quintus Sertorius (a rebellious Roman general who essentially tried to create a second Rome in Hispania) was assassinated by one of his own generals. Said general surrendered to Pompey, who had him killed on the spot.
** When Pompey lost the CivilWar against UsefulNotes/JuliusCaesar, he fled to Egypt, where he was assassinated by the very people he thought would give him shelter. Caesar travelled to Egypt in pursuit of Pompey and he was presented with Pompey's head by Ptolemy XIII's chancellor, Pothinus. Pothinus planned to win Caesar to his side with this action, but this backfired because of ValuesDissonance: rather than grateful, Caesar was [[AntagonistInMourning enraged]] to see that a consul of Rome and [[FriendlyEnemies lifelong personal friend of his]] like Pompey had been betrayed, butchered and [[ArsonMurderAndJaywalking insulted]] by "barbarians"[[note]]It is also speculated that Caesar planned to publically forgive Pompey once he had captured him [[SlaveToPR to boost his own reputation]], something Caesar had done to other enemies in the past[[/note]], and demanded the beheading of Pothinus, which he was granted.
** Averted with Quintus Dellius, who betrayed Mark Antony during the Battle of Actium and took the battle plans with him, which led to the latter's decisive defeat. While Octavian, later Emperor Augustus, praised him, later historians gave Dellius the derogatory name "horse changer of the civil war", having earlier defected from Caesar's assassin Cassius to Mark Antony.

** Roman emperors also tended to follow this policy with their predecessors' assassins; a particularly noteworthy example of this is Emperor Claudius, who followed Emperor Gaius, commonly known as Caligula today: as the Roman biographer Suetonius notes, Claudius ordered all of Caligula's assassins executed, in part because he knew some of them had probably been planning to assassinate him as well.
** Speaking of Caligula, he rather hated the way his former co-conspirator Macro kept reminding him of everything he'd done to keep him alive during the reign of his paranoid predecessor Emperor Tiberius and assure his succession to the throne, and eventually either assassinated Macro or forced him to commit suicide (depending on which Roman historian's account one believes). Considering that, according to some accounts, Macro may well have helped Caligula "hurry" Tiberius to his death with a VorpalPillow, this could be a kind of delayed version of the trope in play here. While Macro actually basked in his young Emperor's favor in the early months of his reign, Caligula's nervous breakdown and subsequent paranoia had him killing off everybody he deemed a potential threat to his throne, a category for which Macro certainly qualified.

** During Sertorius's rebellion in Iberia, the Roman general Metellus offered anyone who would betray his foe a hundred silver talents and amnesty. One of Sertorius's subordinates, Perpenna, murdered him at a banquet. Metellus then promptly had Perpenna executed for his treachery.

* During the UsefulNotes/MacedonianSuccessionWars over Alexander's empire, rival generals Antigonus and Eumenes clashed at the Battle of Gabiene to an inconclusive result. However Antigonus had managed to capture the baggage train of Eumenes' army containing thirty-years worth of loot and families of the [[ElitesAreMoreGlamorous Argyraspides ("Silver-Shields"),]] an elite forced of experienced veterans of Alexander's campaigns. One of their commanders Teutamus went to negotiate with Antigonus and secured their return by handing over their commander Eumenes. Antigonus mistrusted their willingness to switch sides and took steps to break them up by scattering them to [[ReassignedToAntarctica Arachosia and other remote provinces]] with order that they they should be sent out on dangerous missions to quickly thin their numbers.

** In the 1280s, Dafydd ap Gruffydd conned his brother, the Prince of Wales Llewelyn ap Gruffydd, into betraying a peace agreement with King Edward I of England. He then turned on Llewelyn, got him killed, and proclaimed ''himself'' the Prince of Wales. He was ultimately captured, sentenced to death for "high treason", and became the first recorded example of someone in England being "[[ThereIsNoKillLikeOverkill hanged, drawn, and quartered]]".

* In UsefulNotes/WorldWarII, during the Allied invasion of Vichy-held North Africa, French soldiers cut vital communication lines so orders to fire on the invading American forces couldn't go through. The pro-Nazi Vichy government (which was allowed to continue in power in North Africa for political reasons) later sentenced those soldiers for treason, and General Patton [[UngratefulBastard refused to exert pressure]] to get them released because to him [[BlackAndWhiteInsanity a traitor was a traitor, no matter what the cause.]] This was averted when most other Western Allied leaders of note threatened the Vichy admin with annihilation if they went through with it, on the basis that the French soldiers were not traitors to the Vichy government (which was itself a traitorous regime of collaborators to the Nazis) but loyal to the Free French. Pretty much all of them were quietly transferred over to De Gaulle in order to avoid the resulting stink.

** A ridiculous example with Louisiana Governor [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddy_Roemer Buddy Roemer]], who switched to the Republican Party late in his term and was rewarded [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana_gubernatorial_election,_1991 in the following election]] by coming in third ''to a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.''

* In the commercial/industrial aspect, there's this [[http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/world/coke-spy-busted-by-pepsi/story-e6frev00-1111113602487 story]] about a woman who worked at and sought to sell Coca-Cola trade secrets... who was busted by Pepsi Co. She was sentenced to 8 years in jail.
** Making this even stupider is that any decent food chemist can reproduce the Coke formula. Pepsi even said that "If we wanted to be Coke, we would be Coke." The formula is actually protected by two major legal factors. One is that due to trade secret law the formula is protected as a trade secret and anyone that recreates it exactly will be sued for stealing their IP. The other major one is that only the Coca-Cola company has FDA and DEA approval to still use coca leaves in their product. No one except them in most countries can even touch the deactivated coca leaves needed to accurately produce Coke.

* A spectacularly damaging political example from Canada came in the form of Alberta politician Danielle Smith. Head of the far-right Wildrose Party, which had spun off from the governing centre-right Progressive Conservative Party over concerns it had shifted too far away from traditional conservative ideals, Smith was considered one of the rising stars of conservatism in Canada and continually held the government's feet to the fire over real and alleged misdeeds. However, when the Progressive Conservatives ditched their unpopular centrist leader, Allison Redford, in favour of the more right-wing Jim Prentice, Smith and he devised a deal that saw Smith, along with over half of the sitting Wildrose [=MLAs=], cross the floor to rejoin the [=PCs=] in what was easily the largest party-to-party defection in the history of the province (and one of the largest in the country). Smith and Prentice had hoped this would spark the reunification of the [=PCs=] and the Wildrose into a single party and there were rumours that Smith had been promised a cabinet post for the defection, but those were never confirmed because voter reaction to the defection was overwhelmingly negative and the punishment came swift and furious. Every single one of the floor-crossers that ran in the next election was soundly defeated; Smith didn't even make it that far, as her new party's voters rejected her in a nomination battle, effectively ending her once-promising political career. And, as the icing on the cake, both the [=PCs=] and the Wildrose lost the election to the left-wing NDP, ending almost five consecutive decades of Progressive Conservative rule and terminating one of the longest-standing political dynasties on the continent.
* Some of Stalin's first victims in the purges were people who abused the trust of the Tsar's government, the whites, or other anti-communist forces to aid the revolution; he made the (mostly accurate) assumption that these people had a little genuine love for communism but could simply see the writing on the wall and chose to aid who they perceived would win in the end: if these people had betrayed one government, in Stalin's mind, nothing would stop them from doing so again. Then he effectively [[YouHaveOutlivedYourUsefulness purged the bolsheviks as soon as he could get younger loyal followers to act as enforcers]]. After all, these people had proved that they had a revolutionary streak.

** Jewish collaborators were also often subject to this treatment. Both Chaim Rumkowski, head of the Lodz Ghetto, and Moshe Merin, who oversaw the execution of Jews in Upper Silesia, ended up in Auschwitz. In general, members of the Judenrat and the Jewish Ghetto Police could expect to be deported to the camps as soon as they [[YouHaveOutlivedYourUsefulness outlived their usefulness]].

* In UsefulNotes/WorldWarII, during the Allied invasion of Vichy-held North Africa, French soldiers cut vital communication lines so orders to fire on the invading American forces couldn't go through. The pro-Nazi Vichy government (which was allowed to continue in power in North Africa for political reasons) later sentenced those soldiers for treason, and General Patton [[UngratefulBastard refused to exert pressure]] to get them released because to him [[LawfulStupid a traitor was a traitor, no matter what the cause.]] This was averted when most other Western Allied leaders of note threatened the Vichy admin with annihilation if they went through with it, on the basis that the French soldiers were not traitors to the Vichy government (which was itself a traitorous regime of collaborators to the Nazis) but loyal to the Free French. Pretty much all of them were quietly transferred over to De Gaulle in order to avoid the resulting stink.

* In UsefulNotes/WorldWarII, during the Allied invasion of Vichy-held North Africa, French soldiers cut vital communication lines so orders to fire on the invading American forces couldn't go through. The pro-Nazi Vichy government (which was allowed to continue in power in North Africa for political reasons) later sentenced those soldiers for treason, and General Patton [[UngratefulBastard refused to exert pressure]] to get them released because to him [[Lawful stupid a traitor was a traitor, no matter what the cause.]] This was averted when most other Western Allied leaders of note threatened the Vichy admin with annihilation if they went through with it, on the basis that the French soldiers were not traitors to the Vichy government (which was itself a traitorous regime of collaborators to the Nazis) but loyal to the Free French. Pretty much all of them were quietly transferred over to De Gaulle in order to avoid the resulting stink.

* In UsefulNotes/WorldWarII, during the Allied invasion of Vichy-held North Africa, French soldiers cut vital communication lines so orders to fire on the invading American forces couldn't go through. The pro-Nazi Vichy government (which was allowed to continue in power in North Africa for political reasons) later sentenced those soldiers for treason, and General Patton [[UngratefulBastard refused to exert pressure]] to get them released because to him a traitor was a traitor, no matter what the cause. This was averted when most other Western Allied leaders of note threatened the Vichy admin with annihilation if they went through with it, on the basis that the French soldiers were not traitors to the Vichy government (which was itself a traitorous regime of collaborators to the Nazis) but loyal to the Free French. Pretty much all of them were quietly transferred over to De Gaulle in order to avoid the resulting stink.

** In Alabama, Representative Parker Griffith switched to the Republicans barely a year after being elected as a Democrat and was hammered in a huge defeat in the Republican primary. On the other hand, [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Shelby Richard Shelby]] (also from Alabama) jumped ship to the Republicans in 1994 (the ''day after'' the party's midterm landslide!) and has been easily reelected in every election since.

** Making this even stupider is that any decent food chemist can reproduce the Coke formula. Pepsi even said that "If we wanted to be Coke, we would be Coke." The formula is actually protected by two major legal factors. One is that due to trade secret law. The formula is protected as a trade secret and anyone that recreates it exactly will be sued for stealing their IP. The other major one is that only the Coca-Cola company has FDA and DEA approval to still use coca leaves in their product. No one except them in most countries can even touch the deactivated coca leaves needed to accurately produce Coke.

* During the UsefulNotes/MacedonianSuccessionWars over Alexander's empire, rival generals Antigonus and Eumenes clashed at the Battle of Gabiene to an inconclusive result. However Antigonus had managed to capture the baggage train of Eumenes' army containing thirty-years worth of loot and families of the [[ElitesAreMoreGlamorous Argyraspides("Silver-Shields"),]] an elite forced of experienced veterans of Alexander's campaigns. One of their commanders Teutamus went to negotiate with Antigonus and secured their return by handing over their commander Eumenes. Antigonus mistrusted their willingness to switch sides and took steps to break them up by scattering them to [[ReassignedToAntarctica Arachosia and other remote provinces]] with order that they they should be sent out on dangerous missions to quickly thin their numbers.

** On the subject of the Nazis, some were on the receiving end of this trope just after the war when many high-ranking Nazis offered to testify against their comrades in order to avoid prosecution for their own crimes. In some cases the Allies honoured the deal, but in others they didn't; for example, Josef Bühler, deputy to Governor-General of occupied Poland Hans Frank, testified against his boss at Nuremberg in the hope of escaping punishment only to be handed over to the Polish government for execution anyway. The same fate befell SS commander Jürgen Stroop, who, after being sentenced to death for murdering nine American prisoners (having given evidence in his defence that led to several of his subordinates being executed) was promised that his sentence would be commuted and he would be spared extradition if he gave a statement about his role in the Holocaust. He duly did so, and was outraged when the Americans went back on their word and handed him over to the Poles on the basis of what he had admitted to in his statement.

* Nazi Germany (the SS in particular) was even more brutal to Jewish traitors than to other traitors.

* In [[https://www.linkedin.com/posts/800poundguerrilla_full-interview-with-yuri-bezmenov-the-four-activity-6865993506284986368-k2cZ this interview]] with Yuri Bezmenov ([[DefectorFromCommieLand himself a traitor, as a former KGB agent]] who had been assigned to India), he notes that a major step in the Soviet Union's infiltration and subversion of other countries was getting politicians and other figures of major public influence to undermine people's faith in non-communist government, and setting those loyal to them against all who disagree, with the expectation that, when the Soviet Union took over, they would be rewarded for betraying their country and its original principles. As he elaborates afterwards (in his own words):
--> '''Yuri Bezmenov''': [...] When their job is completed, [[YouHaveOutlivedYourUsefulness they are not needed any more.]] They know too much. Some of them, when they get disillusioned, when they see that Marxist-Leninists come to power—obviously they get offended—they think that they will come to power. That will never happen, of course. They will be lined up against the wall and shot.