Truth, Love, and Music

[Mona Lisa]

Its funny that I stumbled on this article today, because just yesterday I was watching MSNBC and the current "pirate" situation came up. My first thought was: "What did we do to them?" Because people don't just kidnap captains for no reason.
Yes, his ship was transporting food, and they wanted food. I also understand the demands were getting a little ridiculous-money, oil, etc. But what do you expect from the inhabitants of a starved, anarchist country?
Now, I'm not justifying what they did, only trying to understand what antagonized them to do it.
So here is what I found. And now I find myself secretly grieving for the three now-dead "pirates".

"Who imagined that in 2009, the world's governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy – backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the US to China – is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-​on-​the-​shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth. But behind the arrr-​me-​hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labelling as "one of the great menaces of our times" have an extraordinary story to tell – and some justice on their side.


Pirates have never been quite who we think they are. In the "golden age of piracy" – from 1650 to 1730 – the idea of the pirate as the senseless, savage Bluebeard that lingers today was created by the British government in a great propaganda heave. Many ordinary people believed it was false: pirates were often saved from the gallows by supportive crowds. Why? What did they see that we can't? In his book Villains Of All Nations, the historian Marcus Rediker pores through the evidence.


If you became a merchant or navy sailor then – plucked from the docks of London's East End, young and hungry – you ended up in a floating wooden Hell. You worked all hours on a cramped, half-starved ship, and if you slacked off, the all-powerful captain would whip you with the Cat O' Nine Tails. If you slacked often, you could be thrown overboard. And at the end of months or years of this, you were often cheated of your wages.


Pirates were the first people to rebel against this world. They mutinied – and created a different way of working on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates elected their captains, and made all their decisions collectively, without torture. They shared their bounty out in what Rediker calls "one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition of resources to be found anywhere in the eighteenth century".


They even took in escaped African slaves and lived with them as equals. The pirates showed "quite clearly – and subversively – that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal Navy." This is why they were romantic heroes, despite being unproductive thieves.


The words of one pirate from that lost age, a young British man called William Scott, should echo into this new age of piracy. Just before he was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina, he said: "What I did was to keep me from perishing. I was forced to go a-pirateing to live." In 1991, the government of Somalia collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since – and the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.


Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died.


Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: "Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury – you name it." Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to "dispose" of cheaply. When I asked Mr Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: "Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention.
"

At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia's seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish stocks by overexploitatio​n – and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m-worth of tuna, shrimp, and lobster are being stolen every year by illegal trawlers. The local fishermen are now starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: "If nothing is done, there soon won't be much fish left in our coastal waters.
"

This is the context in which the "pirates" have emerged. Somalian fishermen took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least levy a "tax" on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia – and ordinary Somalis agree. The independent Somalian news site WardheerNews found 70 per cent "strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence".


No, this doesn't make hostage-taking justifiable, and yes, some are clearly just gangsters – especially those who have held up World Food Programme supplies. But in a telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali: "We don't consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas." William Scott would understand.


Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our toxic waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We won't act on those crimes – the only sane solution to this problem – but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit-​corridor for 20 per cent of the world's oil supply, we swiftly send in the gunboats.


The story of the 2009 war on piracy was best summarised by another pirate, who lived and died in the fourth century BC. He was captured and brought to Alexander the Great, who demanded to know "what he meant by keeping possession of the sea." The pirate smiled, and responded: "What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you, who do it with a great fleet, are called emperor.
" Once again, our great imperial fleets sail – but who is the robber?

j.​hari@​independent.​co.​uk"
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"What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?" - Mahatma Ghandi

[andrew]

Wow. One more thing to think about. Is ANYthing the way it seems? Or should we just give up on the MSM once and for all?
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"The question is not, 'How far?' The question is,
'Do you possess the constitution, the depth of faith, to go as far as is needed?'"

[cHrOnIc]

This whole pirate thing reminds me of a little movie called "Wag the Dog."
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"Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself." Matt. 6:34

[andrew]

Good flick.
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"The question is not, 'How far?' The question is,
'Do you possess the constitution, the depth of faith, to go as far as is needed?'"

[Mr. Flibble]

To answer your title question: Yes.
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Let’s say the hot new fad (among idiots) was to start hitting yourself in the head with a hammer hard enough to cause a concussion. Would that mean hammers should be banned?

[Mona Lisa]

why do white people suck so muchhhhh?!?!?!?!
_________________
"What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?" - Mahatma Ghandi

[andrew]

May not be race as much as class....
_________________
"The question is not, 'How far?' The question is,
'Do you possess the constitution, the depth of faith, to go as far as is needed?'"

[jay c]

We just happen to be the ones on top in this particular chunk of history, so our excesses are more visible, especially since we're generally clueless about the rest of the world. If Africans were the dominant culture on the planet, I assure you they would be at least as bad as Europeans have been.

That's not to excuse our wrongs. Just don't accept racial propaganda uncritically. Here's a great article on the subject: In Defense of the White Man. It's a fairly long article, so I'll just post a few paragraphs.

[andrew]

Wow! That's what I call looking through the other end of the telescope! Never thought about it that way....
_________________
"The question is not, 'How far?' The question is,
'Do you possess the constitution, the depth of faith, to go as far as is needed?'"

[Mona Lisa]

Wow indeed. I never even thought of that. Huh..I guess I have a comeback to any racist blacks against me other than "my family has always been too poor for slaves, so don't blame me!"
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"What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?" - Mahatma Ghandi

[juanito]

First - thanks for having the wits to ask the question. So often we go along with what we hear because it fits with what we *want* to hear. But we should always be alert when a "new" problem suddenly appears with the only response being to bring in a huge military force.

I began to get suspicious when the Somali president was visited and "asked" for the military help to stop the pirates. It sounded way too much like a "lesson learned" from the Bush Administration who was chastised for not getting "asked" for help before taking military action.


As for "what's wrong with white folks?" It reminded me of a thought I had when considering some Deep South prejudice "logic". The idea presented was that Blacks were the poor pitiful descendants of Cain, their blackness being the "mark of Cain" spoken of in Genesis 4:15. The thought that occurred to me was that, looking at the violence of the first murder and comparing it to the violence of Western society, it seemed more likely that Whiteness was the mark, and it designated a sort of genetic tendency towards violence.

I don't put any stock in either "interpretation", of course, but it certainly shut up the few bigots who presented the justification for their prejudice to me!
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"I'm just jazzed about being on the show, man."
- Guy

[Mona Lisa]

Yes, one of my first thoughts was: "oh, great, yet another thinhg for our government to claim a "war" on to keep our taxes constitutional"..

As far as the Somali president "asking" us to "help" them, well, they are almost completely without government...so of course, assuming that actually is the case, just play the victim card and you look like the good guy again.
Although, I will admit, I know extremely little of the political situation in that area of the world..

As far as the whole concept of blacks - or any persons, for that matter - coming from the decendants of Cain, and therefore being criminal in nature...well, what happened at the tower of Babylon? That was the splitting of peoples, was it not? Being a descendant of one person or another, I really don't think, has anything to do with your race or any sterotypes. But hey, maybe I'm just being "politically correct", eh? Some of the best people I know are black, red, yellow, white. And also, some of the worst, are of all the same colors and nationalities.
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"What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?" - Mahatma Ghandi

[andrew]

Don't have time for the cut and paste, but it appears that TIME magazine is on this. Check it out here: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1892376,00.html?xid=newsletter-weekly
_________________
"The question is not, 'How far?' The question is,
'Do you possess the constitution, the depth of faith, to go as far as is needed?'"